Let’s Start a Magazine

lousy with pure reeking with stark and fearlessly obscene

—e. e. cummings, “‘let’s start a magazine”

The reason we began the magazine in Rome was, first of all, that we were there and also that we had found an Italian doctor who loved English and its literature and who, as it happened, was the owner of a small printing business. This outfit was located outside of Rome, on the high ground, in the hill town of Frascati, looking out over the wide sunny sprawl of Rome in the distance. The doctor offered us a pretty good deal, and his shop printed the first couple of issues.

I would go out to Frascati hanging on to the back of a motorcycle owned and operated by the tall Irish poet and translator, trombonist, and runner John Patrick Creagh. We would go directly to the printer to pick up proof and then settle down at a café table with that splendid panoramic view of Rome to proofread, armed with pencils and a carafe of the white wine for which Frascati is justly famous. The first two issues are, needless to say, riddled with proofing errors of all kinds. Somehow we even managed to misspell two of the authors’ names.

I need to pause briefly here to say that I can also picture in memory several of us (Robert Bagg, Creagh, Desmond O’Grady, Hugh Akerman, and maybe Ned O’Gorman, too) poring over manuscripts and proof at the large elliptical dining table of my rented apartment on Viale de Villa Pamphili, a few blocks away from the American Academy where I held a fellowship and worked most days in a studio. I can still see us grouped around that big table, sunlight and cheerful Italian street noises coming to us through the tall windows. We were fueled by wine and beer and espresso, hurrying to finish the proof and return it by Creagh, our courier, to Frascati. But I will drop that quiet little scene from this story. The whizzing broken-field running to Frascati, weaving in and out of Roman traffic, is not just more exciting, but it’s also more fun to remember.

I don’t know now what must have possessed us then, and can only imagine what our purpose—our long-term or short-term goal or goals—may have been. And, of course, I can’t completely trust my own memory, just as I no longer fully trust the young man that I was then, more than fifty years ago. But there you go. There is no denying the fact that, on the spur of one moment or another, we suddenly decided to start up an international literary magazine.

I say we because there were always several of us involved from the beginning. And first to last, beginning to end, the founder and chief editor of the magazine was Joseph McCrindle (who was born in 1923). He tells us a little of the story, from his point of view, in a brief introduction to a collection of some thirty-four stories from the Transatlantic Review—TR: Stories from The Transatlantic Review (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970): “The first issue of our new Transatlantic Review was printed in the summer of 1959 in an edition of only 500 copies by an amateur printer near Rome. The contents consisted largely of work which I, then a literary agent in New York, had been unable to sell. George Garrett, who was at the time at the American Academy in Rome, provided the remainder and saw to the printing.” Though some others (including my own mother) contributed, modestly and within their means, to the start-up costs of bringing out that first number and a second issue as well, also published in Rome, it was the audacious and unfailing generosity of McCrindle that made the magazine possible and kept it alive and well, for a total of sixty issues, until June of 1977. In a real sense the story of the magazine is a tribute to McCrindle, who well deserves a significant place in post–World War II literary history...