The Pagan, Joseph Kling, and American Salon Socialism

Now I say to you, cher MaxTo be a true radical you'll have to be born all over againThe son of crushed disinherited poor-folkWorking in a factory, or mine, or mill¹

With these lines Joseph Kling, editor of The Pagan, disparaged Max Eastman, editor of The Masses. In spite of Woodrow Wilson's April 1917 declaration of American war participation, Eastman, a declared pacifist, had endorsed the words of the president. A fuller appreciation of the context of Kling's statement, however, can be gained first through assembling some of the available biographical details of this now little-known author and publisher, and second through an examination of some of the editorial commentary in The Pagan. Besides the publication of work by a number of notable writers and artists, some of which will be noted in the course of this article, the magazine contained a considerable amount of Kling's own writing. While The Pagan explicitly aligned itself with other little magazines, particularly in its support of The Masses, the make-up of this distinctive magazine draws a present-day scholar's attention to a number of wider issues. Although it shared some opinions with other independent magazines of the period and location, it went beyond them in that it articulated some conflict between those who lived socialism and those who merely embraced it as a fashionable adjunct to Greenwich Village bohemian life. Further, the contents of The Pagan and the declared principles of its producer are an important reminder that The Masses, though a significant magazine, was not the first, nor the widest-circulated, publication to advocate practical socialism. This article will examine this under-rated magazine which, though it was "of" the Village, offered a critique of the lifestyle for which New York radicalism of its time has come to be known.

In 1985 the journalist, author, editor, and critic Gorham Munson looked back, in The Awakening Twenties, over the years which he and others viewed as an "American Resurgence" in literature and the arts. As the editor of Secession and contributor to S4N and Broom, Munson was a well-known literary radical in his time, and his detailed "memoir" recounts his personal and involved view of the development of American literature and culture from the narrow Puritanism of the 1890s to its awareness of its own possibilities for development in the 1920s. Of The Pagan, Munson wrote, "There was another magazine that also had the village for its habitat and was as much of it as the Masses. This magazine has never received its due from the chroniclers of little-magazine history."² This still seems to be the case: Munson's two-page description of Joseph Kling, his magazine, its contributors, and his method of working, remain the most sustained description despite the fact that the work of a substantial number of known and respected American authors and poets appeared there. Among these (besides Munson) were Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley, the ubiquitous Maxwell Bodenheim, and (a fact previously unrecorded) a very young Louis Zukofsky. Work by the perhaps less well-known Paul Eldridge, Joseph Moncure March, and Edward J. O'Brien also appears, along with that of journalist Harold Stearns and anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir.³ A fact that also appears to be unrecognized is that the work of a host of excellent graphic artists also appeared in the magazine, contributing to its unique character.

Munson seems to have regarded the magazine as ephemeral, and The Pagan itself has usually been cited only in association with the early publication of Crane's work. Nevertheless it was integral to the Greenwich Village scene, and from its first issue (1916) to its demise (1922) it engaged in the inter-publication rivalry and debate spawned by the locality and the era. Perhaps because of its small circulation, it also seems to have escaped the notice of the censor: during the time approaching and during American entry into World War I, when The Masses was suppressed from newsstands and The Seven Arts was forced to cease publication due its antigovernment, pacifist position, The Pagan continued to publish anti-war and antigovernment material, not only in the form of the intermittent commentary that amounted to editorial opinion but also strongly thematized in poetry and fiction. It is Kling's work, mainly in the form of these short declarative paragraphs, that forms the primary focus of this article, but the discussion below will also draw on The Pagan's fiction, poetry, commentary, and art. The Pagan does have an odd reputation as an avant-garde publication, which seems largely to be the result of its brief listing in Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich's The Little Magazine.⁴ At the very least, neither its editor's primary allegiance to the working class nor his explicit dislike of modernity or newness for its own sake, necessarily conform to this judgement. Rather than addressing the magazine purely through the lens of literary history, I attempt rather to view it as a composite object, uniquely reflecting, and reflected by, its immediate contemporary surrounding culture.

The Pagan, subtitled "a magazine for eudaemonists," appears (partly due to its highly variable quality of paper and print) to have been produced with minimal funds, and largely to have been supported by its editor. "The Pagan," suggested Philip Horton in his 1957 biography of Crane, "like all the other little magazines, led a hand-to-mouth existence and could pay its contributors and editors in nothing but psychological coin."⁵ Besides an ongoing conversation and interaction with other publications, The Pagan consistently promoted an anti-capitalist view of the contemporary, booming, American economy and its concomitant inequalities. It is of further significance, especially in the Greenwich Village context, that its promulgation of socialist and anarchist principles are, also, often combined with its explicit support of Judaism. Despite the above, and although it expressed support for Mother Earth and The Masses, it did not exist purely as a political organ and promoted art and literature of a high standard, of which it was sometimes the original publisher. It was explicitly averse to the publication, by any medium, of low-quality intellectual material in a quest for mass sales, publishing in the first issue, for instance, a poem concerning the "sentimental imbecilities" of the American popular theatre.⁶ Before elaborating on all these points and making some comment on the position of The Pagan in relation to other contemporary magazines of the area, some information on its editor will throw further light on its idiosyncratic character.

Little seems to remain of the work or correspondence of Joseph Kling, and there are few remaining copies of his magazine in spite of over six years of publication. Kling's magazine is very much characterized by his own contributions. The Pagan has never been reprinted, and (perhaps partly for this reason) it has not yet become, unlike a number of now better-known magazines, part of any standard narrative of literary or cultural development. There is no convenient collection of papers or letters, and neither does the magazine appear to have had the advantage of wealthy patronage.⁷ Descriptions of Kling occur in various written recollections, one or two of Crane's letters, and a variety of other slightly unexpected sources. A number of his novels and poetry collections, and one semi-fictional collection of reminiscences written late in life, were donated by him to the New York Public Library. Through these recollections the character of this writer, artist, mentor, and bookseller are here reconstructed.

Munson, who worked for some time in Kling's bookshop, offers an affectionate description of his editorial procedure: "Kling would open his shop in midmorning and pounce on his mail. Unlike most editors, he read manuscripts at once, sitting at his battered desk or standing beside it. It was a performance I can see and hear now, for Kling would read aloud passages he liked and would punctuate his editorial consideration with audible comments, gruntings, and chucklings."⁸ In Munson's view, nevertheless, the eccentric Kling "was not much of an editor" and his literary technique was unremarkable in comparison to that of his various protégés.⁹ But Munson's slightly cursory opinion fails to take into account a number of facts. First, the entire magazine was produced by Kling, and although he introduced many fledgling writers, he wrote a substantial amount of the contents himself under various (and sometimes anagrammatic) pseudonyms, to which he draws attention in August 1917: "G. J. Ilenko. Pen-name used by Joseph Kling. Other pen-names under which the author has written in The Pagan are: Ben S.; J. K.; S. J. Hope; Nichel; Eug. S. Pepi; G. Link."¹⁰ Second, Munson does not tell us that the magazine began well in advance of the West 8th Street book shop and that Kling had already established book sales from an original address listed for The Pagan at 174 Centre Street. Third, Munson's judgement of Kling's editorial mediocrity fails to remark his scholarship or his linguistic ability; Kling himself translated a good proportion of the Russian, Yiddish, German, and French material which is to be found in the magazine. Fourth, one of the magazine's significant features, in the context of literary history, is the inclusion of early poetry by Louis Zukofsky, who came to critical attention in 1931 with the publication and editing of the "Objectivists" edition of Poetry.¹¹ Munson remarks that Kling had no time for the work of Williams or Pound and believes that this implies a lack of "modernity" on Kling's part. While Munson notes the early inclusion of Crane's poetry, he does not mention that of Zukofsky.

Besides Munson's recollection, there are a number of other disparate references. The Smithsonian archives contain a transcript of a 1981 interview with the American painter Joseph Solman, who died in 2008.¹² In the 1930s, Solman was a prominent member of "The Ten" (a group of artists that included Mark Rothko) and worked in Kling's shop.¹³ In an interview he recalled:

The man who ran it is dead now, Joseph Kling. He was a crotchety character, but he knew his literature, he knew his poetry. He taught us E. E. Cummings and T. S. Eliot and many of the good writers. And he also kept a lot of prints in his shop and etchings. In fact, he was the one before I ever worked in his shop when I showed in an outdoor show, I think, in '31 or '32 . . . And when the week was over . . . he gruffly told me to unpack them and show him the pictures and told me to lay aside a few (in the roughest manner possible), and then he asked me how much I wanted for each of them. . . . And he bought a bunch and he showed them and he sold them. And thereafter, I'd come in. He sold many of those little gouaches for me. Then finally, he got myself and my wife to work. Well, before we were married, we worked in his shop and that's how we got married—he encouraged us to. And that was important because I think he was the first man who, as gruff as he was, crotchety as he was, saw my work, asked me the price, decided to handle them.¹⁴

Solman, thus supported in art and life, went on to a long career as an artist ultimately at the forefront of the Abstract Expressionist movement.¹⁵ Ronald Brooks Kitaj (R. B. Kitaj), who died in 2007, also lived in New York in his formative years. In 1994, in an exhibition preface to his painting "Greenwich Village" he wrote: "I first read Hart Crane in Greenwich Village, pressed into my hands by the Eighth-Street bookseller Joe Kling, whose remembered visage appears on the old gent at the lower right with handkerchief sticking out of his pocket. Joe, who deserves a book or picture to himself, was the first to publish the teenage Crane, fresh from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, which I used to give as my birthplace when I was young because I thought it sounded more poetic than Cleveland. At Joe's last shop in Greenwich Avenue, I used to turn the pages, washing my hands first, of the Black Sun edition of Crane's masterwork The Bridge." Besides recognizing Crane's genius, if Solman's recollection is correct, Kling must also at some time have appreciated the importance of what have now come to be regarded as standard modernist texts, and was perhaps more appreciative of these authors than Munson suggests.

Between 1916 and 1918, The Pagan featured the work of many early-career artists. Included was the extraordinary William Gropper, who later illustrated a number of left-wing publications including the Liberator and The New Masses, but also, in the interest of economic survival, establishment magazines such as Vanity Fair, Pearson's, and The Nation.¹⁶ Other artists featured are Henry Glintenkamp, George Bellows, William Auerbach-Levy, and Robert Henri, then the leading artist among the American naturalists (the "Ash-Can" school or "The Eight") and chair of the committee for the first Forum art exhibition.¹⁷ Besides his appreciation of Crane and Zukofsky, Kling appears, therefore, to have been an appreciable influence as a mentor and dealer in the dissemination and canonization of American ideas on twentieth-century art. He himself could also draw, and (in Solman's words) "tried to write," which understates his output in The Pagan and its anthologies and his small body of subsequent fiction.¹⁸ It appears from the description of Betsy Trace, cousin and antiquarian book specialist, that through his family, Kling was "born into a world of books, culture, literature and art." The relevant passage from Trace's obituary reads:

Betsy, born Elizabeth Kling on either November 11 or 12, 1914 . . . was born into a world of books, culture, literature and art. Her father was a doctor in the Bronx; her mother, Bertha Kling, was a published Yiddish poet. Their home was always filled with Yiddish writers and artists. She grew up in an atmosphere that embraced and fostered a knowledge and love of books and art.

A cousin, Joe Kling, owned a bookshop in Greenwich Village. He was also a publisher and editor of little magazines. It was through this connection that Betsy became friends with Man Ray, R. B. (Ronnie) Kitaj, and so many other artists and poets.¹⁹

Another reference comes, surprisingly, from Frank McCourt in the New York Times in 1997. McCourt talks of meeting Joseph Kling's nephew in 1951, and paying a visit to his uncle: "After our beer at a new place, the Lion's Head, we made our way to Greenwich Street, where Yonk's uncle, Joe Kling, had his bookstore. Joe looked like a character out of an old newspaper movie: green eye shade, purple bands holding up his shirt-sleeves. He lived at the back of the store, where he had a metal cot, a toilet, a sink, a small refrigerator. Every Sunday, Joe traveled to Yonk's apartment on Montague Street for a bath and a Sunday dinner."²⁰ McCourt goes on to describe a meeting between Kling and the author Edward Dahlberg, implying that both were rooted in the literature of the pre-1900 era and had a wholesale dislike of modernity. Given Solman's recollection, this is likely to be a less than accurate opinion: McCourt's tale refers only to a dislike for P. G. Wodehouse. But despite his having exerted what appears to be a solid influence on certain American artists and writers, this account of Kling's later existence seems to dispel any idea that he ultimately prospered commercially. Taken together, the above short accounts indicate a figure who was himself talented and who had a gift for discerning unusual talent.

As the following will show, the last thing for which Kling would have wanted to be remembered was the role of commercial entrepreneur. His magazine positioned itself within a counterculture of small publications that were very often fueled by the idea that intellectual advancement and commercial production were, in America, of necessity opposed. Early on in the magazine Kling condemns the conventional, and also the idea of "art" as related to commercial production:

Dio Mio!What junk in the staid classic magazines;And what rubbish between gorgeous Burst-Slopolitan covers;And what pink perfumed mud in the Spicy-Story pots . . .

While the "Masses," the "Little Review," the "Pagan,"—poor devils!²¹

"Burst-Slopolitan" appears to refer to Cosmopolitan, then a magazine of popular and sanitized fiction, part of the legendary Hearst newspaper empire. The florid, chocolate box cover illustrations of the artist Harrison Fisher are typical, and exemplify the subject of Kling's objections (see Figure 1). Fisher asserted that he drew "what the market demanded," which to him appears to have meant, almost exclusively, romanticized pictures of women. He provided similar illustrations for the genteel, "staid classic magazine,"Ladies Home Journal.²² Kling's first issue, by the editorial comment above, thus aligns itself against "what the market demanded" and with the "poor devils" of The Masses and The Little Review.

Fig. 1.

Harrison Fisher, cover design, Cosmopolitan (May 1915).

Another view which The Pagan shared with most of the independent periodicals of the time was its objection to the enthusiastic enforcement of censorship still prevalent early in 1917. Kling's next comment, in the same commentary, refers to Anthony Comstock, who had recently been the chief representative of The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice:

To the Comstock-gang:Fight fair; don't always think below the belt.

Pointedly, this reference is to the wholesale censorship of anything pertaining to sex regardless of its literary content, the double meaning in "don't always think below the belt" implying of course that the censors themselves may have had an over-prurient interest in their material. Opposition to censorship was a strong feature of the radical agenda. Theodore Dreiser, who had had a long-running battle with the censors since the near-suppression of Jenny Gerhardt by its own publishers in 1901, and who wrote consistently vehemently against the idea of censorship, was then a contributor to a number of small magazines, includingThe Pagan.²³ The Little Review's publication of Ulysses in serial form, culminating in its prosecution by John Sumner (Comstock's successor), is the most well-known example. The most vociferous spokesperson against "Comstockery" (which it continued to be called), and one who made the idea his trademark, was Henry Mencken, the 1914 to 1923 editor of The Smart Set, a larger-circulation publication which, however, monitored its own output carefully enough for admissibility. Carl Dolmetsch's genial history of The Smart Set recounts Mencken and Nathan's objection to the publication of Barry Benefield's story concerning the lives of prostitutes as "too frank."²⁴

There are however a number of examples of material in The Pagan that might have actively flouted the censorship laws had they come to the notice of Sumner's organization. A poem by Kling called "Farewell" contains the following lines, for instance:

My soul cravesA nobler happinessThan passionate kissesAnd the feel of soft fleshIn my fingers . . .* *Love is a lie . . .Any man-animalWhose lipsAre at your throat,Whose hands are eagerFor your breastsWill drivel with lying tongueAbout endless love . . . ²⁵

A further indication of what might have been viewed as Kling's prurience, had any censor cared to examine it closely, is contained in the astonishing number and regularity of sketches, lithographs, and woodcuts of nude women which appear throughout the entire six years of the magazine's production. At least one appears in every issue, and could feasibly be described as a marketing attraction, the equivalent of a highbrow page-three girl. Their style, however, is in marked contrast to the sentimental illustrations of Harrison Fisher. The ones illustrated here are the work of Robert Henri, John Sloan, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ben Benn, Max Jaediker, and Horace Brodzky, and there were, besides, reproductions of sketches by Auguste Rodin and a number of other subsequently well-respected artists (see Figures 2-8). It is unlikely that the similarity of each subject through several years, and the frank sexuality of most of the pictures, is coincidental.

Other articles, fiction, and poetry in The Pagan, however, drew attention to the pacifism that was one of Kling's primary concerns. Few other magazines of the arts that publicly denounced the war policies of Woodrow Wilson's administration managed to survive very long after the American government joined the Allies in War in April 1917, when it rapidly became considered traitorous to publish anything that appeared critical of that decision. It is well-known for instance that The Masses was suspended for its pacifist views; The Seven Arts also ceased when its patron withdrew her financial support from what was now regarded (bizarrely, considering its enthusiastic support for the American intellectual renaissance) as an anti-American publication. Other magazines of the arts—The Little Review for

Fig. 2.

Robert Henri, drawing, The Pagan 1 (July 1916), frontispiece.

Fig. 3.

Unattributed, cover design, The Pagan 1 (March 1917).

Fig. 4.

John Sloan, drawing, The Pagan 1-2 (April-May 1917), 2.

Fig. 5.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, drawing, The Pagan (August-September 1918), 62.

Fig. 6.

Ben Benn, drawing, The Pagan 3 (June 1918), 34.

Fig. 7.

Max Jaediker, drawing, The Pagan 3 (December 1918), frontispiece.

Fig. 8.

Horace Brodzky, drawing, The Pagan 3 (December 1918), 33.

instance—resolutely ignored the war, which they felt was irrelevant to their artistic concerns.²⁶ In Exile's Return Malcolm Cowley remarks that the War separated bohemian and political protest, which had hitherto existed side-by-side in the general current of Greenwich Village radicalism. "People" he wrote "were suddenly forced to decide what kind of rebels they were: if they were merely rebels against puritanism they could continue to exist safely in Mr. Wilson's world. The political rebels had no place in it."²⁷ Cowley goes on to cite The Pagan, along with The Little Review, as being a magazine that expressed no interest in war, which thus became only a rebel against puritanism; in fact Kling's vigorous engagement with a reasoned pacifism continued to be expressed throughout the war. The June 1916 issue of The Pagan contains the following:

What For?

Only the rich and half-rich have anything to gain from wars of aggression. They are always on the lookout for new fields of exploitation. Their greed is insatiable.

They get the proletaire-mob to fight for them by befuddling their brains with patriotic, high-sounding, meaningless phrases, like "The nation's honor is at stake," "Our liberty is threatened," "The flag, the flag!"

At a matter of fact [sic], however, the great majority of people have nothing to lose by being invaded and conquered. . . . What can the enemy take from them? Their measly bit of furniture and rags (called home), their slavery in factories? their toil-doomed families?

The invader seeks only the wealth of the rich; let the rich defend it. Let the fat purses pay for armies, navies, ammunition and all. Why should I feed my neighbor's watchdog when I have nothing to protect? Shall I risk my life to defend one thief from another?²⁸

This is credited to G. Link, one of Kling's many pseudonyms. The theme recurs in a later issue, just before the time of Wilson's actual declaration: "A propos, I have read one of the most comically stupid, almost incredibly earnest—chaotic editorials ever written. It appeared in the 'N.Y. Evening Mail' of February 9th. In it the author argues that the people of this country ought to be forced to fight, slay, destroy, even if they don't want to, even if they see no reason why, even if they realize they have nothing to fight for, being only propertyless factory slaves, mill-workers, field-laborers, mine-burrowers, and the like . . . actually advises that they be compelled to fight like the spear-driven helots of Greece, the lashed warrior slaves of Persia . . ." [ellipses in original].²⁹ The anarchist-influenced view expressed in both these passages is not only based on the conviction that to kill under any circumstance is to murder, but significantly emphasizes the economic aspect, the uselessness of war to the poor and its advantage to the wealthy.³⁰ The June 1916 issue of The Pagan also contains satire at the expense of President Wilson's famous "preparedness" campaign, likening the idea of conflicting majorities to sheep agreeing to slaughter one another:

"My dear fellow-muttons, don't you believe in Preparedness?"Preparedness? Certainly.And they got busy.We're waiting for the slaughter.³¹

A month afterward, The Masses issued a "Preparedness Number" also containing a number of articles detailing reasoned opposition to Wilson's idea.³² Six months before, Emma Goldman had also published a fervent anti-military article in Mother Earth, also issued as a pamphlet, entitled "Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter."³³

In September 1917, however, when patriotic hysteria in America was at its height, Kling issued a Pagan containing diverse anti-war material such as "The Draft" by P. C.:

And they would have you fight, my gentle one.You, who took a kitten in, that huddled on our door-step, out of the rain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .You, who love to nurse and make things grow,To mend, and make, and build them,They would have you tear and wound and destroy. . . .Why, I would laughIf I were not keeping back my tears.³⁴

The "they" of "they would have you fight," thus depersonalized and distanced from the subject, becomes an adverse power and not a cause or a duty. This issue also contains a story called "The Coward" by Harry Adler (which might be another pseudonym for Joseph Kling) whose American protagonist, a "Tolstoyan," shoots himself rather than having to go out to shoot others. A poem by Max Endicoff in the same issue, entitled "At Twilight" describes a quiet moment between trees and a breeze shattered by

. . . this long line of men,With snarling bayonets aimed at the sky,Never heed the voice of either.StolidlyThey march, march, march—As if they were strange beingsComing from some alien landThat knows of neither church nor soul.³⁵

Endicoff's description of an "alien land" poses any army as foreign, independent of nationality or political status. The idea that alienation consists in subscribing neither to religion nor to the idea of human immortality ("neither church nor soul") and that international enmity requires depersonalization (like the "they" of the first poem) is also evident in Tolstoy, who had written of "stupefying men in order to make them fit instruments for murder."³⁶

Endicoff had recently been the business manager for The Masses. The ongoing commerce between The Masses and The Pagan was disrupted with the suggestion that The Masses had perhaps "sold out" in its last-minute support for President Wilson. In September 1917, Kling wrote:

"Leaders must be men of great faith", says Mother Eddy. This does not mean C. S. leaders only; radicals, too, must have faith. Even brilliant radicals. Otherwise they may be called pessimists, starveling-anarchists, and other unpleasant names.

Take Max Eastman, for example. He has faith. Wasn't he sure in 1916 that Wilson would keep us out of war? That's faith. He even told us all to vote for him.

But the beauty of being liberally gifted with faith is that one can recover so quickly from grievous disappointment and disillusionment.

We can imagine how Max must have been shocked when our dear President decided that the world must be made safe for democracy by condemning a million men to immediate idleness and slaughter training, and final agony in hellish trenches . . .

Now I say to you, cher MaxTo be a true radical you'll have to be born all over againThe son of crushed disinherited poor-folkWorking in a factory, or mine, or mill³⁷

Not only does this satire lampoon Mary Baker Eddy's popular cult of Christian Science, and condemn Woodrow Wilson's famous war address to congress ("the world must be made safe for democracy") but goes on to criticize Eastman, erstwhile champion of pacifism, for being disingenuous. One month afterward, in the penultimate issue of The Masses, Eastman quite hurriedly and unexpectedly endorsed President Wilson's recent letter to the Pope, which had been a justification of war that would form the basis of his later "Fourteen Points" for a "just and democratic peace."³⁸ In spite of this The Masses was suspended for anti-American activities and Eastman was soon afterward indicted under the Espionage Act. Kling's position was always that pacifism is an inevitable and logical concomitant of a left-wing political outlook, involving the capitalist economy and the wealth-related American class system. His implication was that Eastman's radicalism could not be genuinely maintained, given the relative prosperity into which he was born.³⁹

Though The Pagan cites The Masses as an example, it was not only The Masses that was singled out for this kind of criticism. The magazine offers moral, ethical, and aesthetic opinions, and exhibits overall a deep-seated concern over political and social hypocrisy. One of the forms that this concern takes is the satirical exposure of the hedonism of pseudo-radical socializing, perhaps posturing, among the well-to-do intellectuals of New York bohemia. In this The Pagan is outspoken and differs markedly from other independent magazines of its milieu. The text of this magazine therefore significantly contributes to the retrospective view of that culture and, consequently, to a broader view of the extent and character of the development of American modernism. Excellent accounts have been produced of Greenwich Village radicalism (associated with socialism) such as those nurtured in the salons of hosts and hostesses—Walter and Louise Arensberg and Mabel Dodge for instance.⁴⁰ Dodge, though she attested to socialism, was also interested in the tensions and contradictions inherent in her "evenings," which, though retrospectively influential, were as much to entertain herself as to further any one cause: "Socialists, Trade Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, 'Old Friends,' Psychoanalysts, IWWs, Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern Artists, Clubwomen, Woman's-place-is-in-the-home Women, Clergymen, and just plain men all met there and, stammering in an unaccustomed freedom a kind of speech called Free, exchanged a variousness in vocabulary called, in euphemistic optimism, Opinions!"⁴¹ The Masses has been praised for having brought a jolly kind of socialism to bohemia and further for somehow originating or disseminating the cause. Thomas Maik, for instance, has cited both Hoffman and Churchill in support of his claim that "the Masses was the conscience of the era—and a robust and cheery conscience it was," implying also thereby that the "era" consisted of the minority who read The Masses.⁴² But The Masses' socialism was a whole generation beyond the grassroots socialism which had actually originated with immigrant organizations from Eastern Europe, in particular the Jewish working population whose residential district was the lower East Side, adjacent to Greenwich Village. Though The Masses often carried worthy advertisements for utility work clothing, community holidays, and puncture-proof bicycle tyres, it was run by a group that was, as Mark Morrisson points out, uncomfortably conscious of its lack of genuine working-class credentials.⁴³ As Morrisson further points out, The Masses also resorted to "marketing" socialism, exemplified particularly in its 1917 cover girl designs.⁴⁴ One such design by Carlo Leonetti features a smiling and attractive Eastern European peasant (identified by shawl and headscarf ) with delicately poised hand and revealing décolletage. Illustrating The Pagan cover the month before, Leonetti produced a powerful drawing of a pagan (see Figure 9 ). The style is the same but there is less "marketing" attraction in The Pagan cover. The cover art of the magazine was never uniform and almost always reflected the imagination of the individual artist. And where The Pagan 's advertising was less intentionally "working-citizen" oriented than that of The Masses, it was, nevertheless, geared toward its own geographical location (local schools, cafés, bookshops) besides the inclusion of large advertisements for the other independent magazines, a group with which it identified.

Kling's criticism, nevertheless, is outspoken. In his staccato commentary he is caustic, for example, about the lavish fundraising banquets given by various Greenwich Village organizations for the benefit of a working class whom they never regarded except as the objects of charitable radical chic: "Emma Goldman lectures to millionaire's daughters on the causes of

Fig. 9.

Carlo Leonetti, cover designs, (a) The Pagan 2 (June 1917) and (b) The Masses 9 (July 1917).

poverty, its misery and degradation. They listen quite sympathetically . . . after the lecture they drive home in their limousines to dress for dinner."⁴⁵ He describes another occasion, with heavier sarcasm, in the March 1917 issue: "A daughter of one of the very wealthy R_______s, who entertains extensively, gave a party the other day. She had given so many, that she wanted to think up something very original . . . so she decided on a 'Socialist Dinner.' She invited all her young multi-millionaire friends, and sent every girl a red cloak to put on, and every man a pair of workman's overalls . . . They got drunk and ribald,—just like socialists; threw food around the room,—just like socialists."⁴⁶ In this article Kling indicates a view that not only implies that some calling themselves "socialists" are less than committed but also that general media reports of socialist activity were biased. Bearing out his position, a comparable report in the conservative New York Times reads: "Here was exemplified strikingly how closely in the zealous Socialist's mind are associated the idea of propaganda and the idea of having what is generally known as 'a good time'; in many cases the ideas seemed to be the same. To do anything that promised to advance the 'Cause' seemed to them the very frenzy of joymaking."⁴⁷ The heavy irony of the use in this context of words like "zealous," "frenzy," and "joymaking" intentionally associated with and juxtaposed against "propaganda" was not evident however in an earlier report by the same newspaper:

TEA DANCE FOR BELGIUM

Huge social event at Ritz-Carlton will clothe the needy

The greater New York Committee of the Commission for Relief in Belgium yesterday announced that details had been completed for a huge tea dance for the benefit of the destitute in Belgium and northern France. The dance will be held in the large ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Monday afternoon, Feb. 7.⁴⁸

The report is followed by a long list of the donors and officials of the Committee: presumably raising money for the destitute of Europe was to be considered more respectable than raising money for the destitute of America.

Kling consistently maintained his opinion throughout the war, in The Pagan until 1922, and from the evidence of his subsequent books, throughout his life. In the short introduction to his last work, Balance Sheet (1961), he writes: "[O]ur dislike of, and hostility to falsehood is due to our vague or vivid realization that untruth is bound to result—presently or eventually—in suffering to someone."⁴⁹ The view is also consistent perhaps with the general ethics of Judaism: "love of truth, indeed" wrote Hutchins Hapgood in 1902, in an early, slightly romanticized, account of the Jewish Lower East Side population, "is the quality which seems to a stranger in the Ghetto the great virtue of that section of the city."⁵⁰ The next item in Kling's Balance Sheet also recalls The Pagan of years before: it is a systematic dismantling of a local news sheet, showing its distortion of objective truth into subjective "lushly-sentimental reminiscences of the community's past happenings, characters, landmarks—all in the familiar style of small-town journalistic romanticization"—"pink perfumed mud," perhaps.⁵¹

Besides condemning fashionable socialism, the magazine also attacks fashionable charity. It contains a particularly damning article on Misha Appelbaum by Harry Salpeter (later a gallery owner, journalist, and art collector). For a time he worked for Appelbaum, a "humanitarian" who raised money for "charity" through sensational, almost vaudevillian performances, the kind of figure memorably satirized by Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry. Salpeter writes:

The poor and downtrodden exist for Misha Appelbaum only as objects for his professional pity. He seems to derive a strange kind of pleasure . . . from weeping over the misfortunes of the poor. But he has neither the vision, nor the imagination, nor the wish, to work for a social reorganization that would abolish poverty and its attendant evils. Like the charity organizations he affects to despise, he feels that the poor are really necessary to his existence . . . Not the poor, but the ruling classes, in society, ought to be grateful to him. He dulls the revolutionary ardor of embryo-radicals, perverts and dissipates—as much as lies in his power—their idealistic energy, and tries to delude them into believing that shallow, trivial, sporadic reforms can regenerate society.⁵²

The Pagan thus consistently highlights how much America's commercial wealth was dependent on America's working poor, and how that position was exacerbated by the war effort.

Nevertheless, Kling himself found it necessary to raise money by organizing Pagan balls: one a year is advertised. The final issue of the magazine advertises the "sixth annual Pagan ball at Tammany Hall" though the ball, like those held by The Masses and by other socialist organizations, was in the administrative offices of the New York Democratic Party and not at the Ritz. His first fundraising event, a performance evening in the Aeolian Hall, was a slightly lower-key affair, which he reported in the November-December 1916 issue.⁵³ He had invited both Frank Harris and Max Eastman to contribute. "What a time they had breaking into the literary world,—Frank Harris, Shaw, Masefield. . . . Hackwork, rejected manuscripts. . . . Magazines started and given up . . . debts, disappointments, heart-aches. . . . No helping hand to keep them from falling," he remarks.⁵⁴ He then reports that Harris, well-known by then for his gritty novels concerning the rigours and necessities of economic hardship, refused to attend while the extremely elegant socialist Eastman would attend only on payment of one hundred dollars. It is worth noting here, however, that in any case, whatever Kling's opinion, the fund-raising ball in New York was initiated not by either The Masses or The Pagan but largely by socialist organizations and newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s, and notably the Jewish newspapers.⁵⁵

Eastman's decline of this invitation was in spite of Kling's very consistent support of The Masses, so frequently mentioned, as we have seen, in his editorials or commentary. There are regular advertisements for The Pagan in The Masses up to its cessation in 1917 and regular advertisements for The Masses in The Pagan; one can readily surmise the possibility that a reciprocal arrangement was in place. Publicly, Eastman's solidarity was clearly a different matter.⁵⁶ It is feasible to suggest that its lack of contemporary acknowledgement by the more fashionable end of the Greenwich Village intelligentsia is one of the reasons for the near disappearance of The Pagan from critical works on American early modernism, since Kling and his connections do not neatly fit any of the standard narratives. He is not recorded or remembered as a member of any of the salon circles of well-to-do, influential backers of American bohemia of that time, many of whose members, as noted above, have since become established as important promoters of modernist work. It is clear from his magazine that Kling was uninterested in salon socialism. The rather sad little recollection quoted earlier, in which McCourt remembers that Joe Kling went to the house of his nephew for a bath and a lunch every Sunday morning, points to a fairly obscure and poverty-stricken old age.

One other possible reason for its lack of subsequent critical appraisal is the misrepresentation of The Pagan in the (relatively few) reasonably comprehensive "little magazine" bibliographies, particularly Hoffman, which makes the following statement: "Joseph Kling's Greenwich Village magazine is important for two reasons: 1) it illustrates admirably the fortunes and manners of the truly avant-garde publication; 2) in its pages appear the early writings of many important modern poets."⁵⁷ The second point in this account is true of so many of the magazines of the time that, though clearly always important for literary history, it is less important as a mark of distinction of one magazine from another. The "early writings of many important modern poets" also appeared in more well-known publications in the same period such as Others, The Little Review, Blast, The Egoist, the more conservative Poetry Review of America, and the carefully edited Poetry. Clearly also a number of mainstream organs—The Smart Set, Collier's Weekly, and Harper's for instance—can also boast this distinction. But the first reason Hoffman puts forward is also misleading. Though intensely left-wing, The Pagan is not linguistically or formally avant-garde or "advance guard" in any commonly conceived sense. And though there is a sense, which the Hoffman bibliography suggests, that it does "provide a program or platform; and . . . the expression of some school of political or aesthetic thought," there is nothing in the bibliographic entry to suggest that it was the political aspect of The Pagan that provided this "expression."⁵⁸ Regarding the experimentalism commonly understood to be within the definition of the term avant-garde in America, as evidenced perhaps by other independent magazines such as 291 or The Blind Man or American Da-Da, Kling condemns the idea of artists who embraced the new or the experimental for their own sake. Of Abraham Walkowitz, for example, he says, "Wolkowitz [sic] was a good painter once. Little by little however, he lost his sanity, or honesty (or both), and began to draw linear abortions and other meaningless monstrosities. But then he has the satisfaction of being a leader among new-movementists, and inspiring anemic old maids to clasp their hands ecstatically."⁵⁹

A similar view was expressed in The Soil by editor Robert Coady who declared the artist Metzinger to be "hindered by a struggle to be new."⁶⁰ The Pagan, like The Masses, was not above parody: where The Masses lampooned Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, The Pagan imitates, with Goldsmith Kittle's phallic representation of a maple syrup dispenser, the caligrammes of Apollinaire (which in New York were first featured in 291, the organ of Alfred Stieglitz's radical art group, in 1915; see Figure 10).⁶¹ So while The Pagan was not alone in its criticism of the "isms" of its time, it cannot stand as a definitive example of the American avant-garde, the extent and nature of which is, in any case, always contentious.

Another advantage of a retrospective examination of The Pagan is that it highlights the unusual variety of the forms of intellectual radicalism of the period, particularly in the geographical area of New York. In another variety of the anti-war theme detailed above, the cover of The Pagan for December 1917 is from a book transliterated "Yizkar" (now more usually Yizkor), the name of a Jewish prayer commemorating the deceased (see Figure 11). The design is intertwined menorahs (Hanukkah candles) that form a pattern but also resemble Hebrew script. The resemblance carries through to the title text where the typeface for the word "Pagan," with its slants and serifs, is also reminiscent of Hebrew. The cover art is credited as being the copyright of the Poale Zion publishing company. Poale Zion was a Marxist Zionist organisation founded in Russia, which in 1903 set up a branch in New York, the Socialist Jewish Labour Party. This particular cover offers a bold example of The Pagan's inherent support of Jewishness and the local socialist Jewish community. This marked characteristic, unusual in

Fig. 10.

Goldsmith Kittle [Joseph Kling], "Waffles," The Pagan 3 (July 1918), 35.

Fig. 11.

Cover design, The Pagan (December 1917).

the Greenwich Village setting, has been underplayed in most, if not all, subsequent references to the literary and artistic modernity of the period.

Despite Kling's having recognized Crane's talent and publishing his earliest work—giving him a job in the bookshop and on the magazine, listing him as assistant editor—Crane refers to him in a letter merely as "the old hebrew."⁶² Crane was perhaps unconscious of, or indifferent to, his casual anti-Semitism, but his remark warrants the recall of a New York demographic between 1916 and 1919. In 1916, the year that The Pagan was first issued, the population of Manhattan's Lower East Side, two blocks away, was home to 350,000 first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. These were additional to, and separate from, a previously established community of "acculturate" American Jews that was predominantly of German extraction living mainly in north Manhattan.⁶³ The more recent immigrant population of the Lower East side lived in cramped and insanitary conditions, and worked long hours in garment industry sweatshops, contributing significantly to the wealth of the United States but scantily to their own. By 1917, however, a large number of these workers had become members and leaders of labour unions. The Marxist doctrines imported from Eastern Europe informed the socialist movement that grew up around the educational public culture created by such leaders as the charismatic Abraham Cahan, editor of Vorwaerts ( the Jewish daily Forward ) who also delivered public lectures, and Philip Krants, founder of the leading Yiddish newspaper Di arbeter tsaytung (Workers' News). The original founder of the Socialist Party of America, Morris Hillquit, came from the same background.⁶⁴ Tony Michels details the inextricable relationship between the Jewish community and the rise of the socialist movement in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York.⁶⁵

In April 1917, Kling prints the following anecdote:

I was sitting in a car. A motorman (off duty) put on a pair of shell-rimmed glasses, opened out a Jewish newspaper, and began to read leisurely.

"Well?". . . . you ask?

Well nothing. That's all that happened.⁶⁶

The point of this very brief, but significant, aphorism is that for many readers of Yiddish (Jewish) papers, this was the first time they had been able to see their own (spoken) language in print. Those who did not understand the Hebrew language could nevertheless often read the Hebrew alphabet, but the Yiddish language (albeit spoken in a number of different dialects) was common to all Jewish people of this later surge of immigration, albeit spoken in a number of regional varieties. Some had been illiterate, and the perusal of the newspapers therefore combined a learning experience, a challenge, and a social education. The papers were important enough, as Michels recounts, for whole families to have their photographs taken with their favourite newspaper placed in a prominent position.⁶⁷ Kling's reader is an off duty cab driver and thus representative of the working class. The short statement pinpoints the interrelationship between Jewishness, socialism, and modern commercial America, represented by the "shell-rimmed" spectacles, which had only recently become cheaply available. The rise of the (predominantly socialist) Yiddish press began in 1885 with the Yiddishes Tageblatt (Jewish Daily News), then the weeklies Arbeterzeitung (Workers' Times), the voice of the Hebrew Labor Federation, and the anarchist Freie Arbeter Shtimme (Voice of the Free Worker), both in 1890, through to the Vorwaerts, founded in 1897, with its circulation, in 1915, of almost 200,000.⁶⁸ Michels describes the fervour with which educational lectures were attended by the Yiddish-speaking population of New York: "Public lectures provided the cheapest, most direct way for socialists to get out their message. Every week, several times a week, the movement's intellectuals volunteered to speak on myriad topics: 'Socialism and Religion,' 'The Development of Private Property,' 'The Necessity of Education,' 'Socialism from A to Z,' 'The Origin of Rights,' 'History as Science,' 'What Is Trade Unionism?' and many others. Education in Yiddish was generally unheard of in the late nineteenth century. . . . Yiddish lectures were highly popular pastimes, particularly among the young [who] flocked to hear intellectuals address some political, historical, cultural, or scientific topic."⁶⁹ Kling was clearly well acquainted with this extraordinarily fertile environment of self-education by the immigrant Jewish population, a betterment which had only become possible in America, not in the Europe which they had left behind. Placed within the context of the very high-circulation Yiddish dailies and weeklies, which began twenty or thirty years before, The Masses seems less significant as a socialist organ. It is not suggested, here, that The Masses propounded merely what was fashionable—on the contrary certain of its contributors were tried and imprisoned for their views—but what is in question is why a number of standard accounts of The Masses discount the previous thirty years of socialist activity and publicity, not by a group of privileged intellectuals but by the workers and organizers themselves.⁷⁰

In Munson's view The Pagan only "prepared the way" for Hart Crane and other poets of the 1920s, before they moved on to more grown-up publications.⁷¹ In spite of Munson's acknowledgement that the magazine has never been given its critical due, his own account is mainly a preamble to his association with Crane, whom he met through Kling; he does not elaborate on the fact that he himself was also more than a casual contributor to The Pagan.⁷² Neither Hoffmann nor Munson mention that an appreciable proportion of significant writing published in the magazine is represented by the spare and European-influenced fiction of Yiddish writers such as Mani Leib, Moishe Nadir, and Joseph Opatoshu.⁷³ A number of the Yiddish writers whom Kling chose to represent in The Pagan had already achieved some eminence within their own community, though they remain, today, largely untranslated into English. Doroshkin gives the following list of American Yiddish writers: "A large group of gifted writers emerged on the American scene, creating a substantial folk-literature. The works of many are now considered classics. We will mention only a few. Some poets were: Morris Rosenfeld, David Edelstadt, Morris Winchevsky, Yehoesh, H. Leivick, Abraham Reisen, M. L. Halperin, and Mani Leib. Novelists, playwrights, and short-story writers included Sholem Asch, David Pinski, Ossip Dymov, Peterz Hirshbein, Moishe Nadir, Isaac Raboy, and Joseph Opatashu. Important critics and commentators: Abraham Liessin, Moissaye Olgin, Abraham Cahan, Chaim Zhitlovsky, Abraham Coralnick, and S. Niger."⁷⁴ From this list, Leib, Opatoshu, Reisen, Asch, and Nadir are consistently represented through the six years of The Pagan's publication. The dedication, by Nadir, to Kling in Peh-el-Peh, published by Kling in 1921, also implies that they were personal friends.⁷⁵ Nadir's work contains a gently philosophical refutation of a New York Evening Mail editorial that had suggested that the Jews were an "egotistic, exotic, incomprehensible people." The piece, one of about twenty that make up the body of Peh-el-Peh, also suggests that the Jews might on the whole be pacifists:

Worst crime of all, we sometimes urge our fellow-Christians to be human. Thus when we see you brother-Christians clutching at each other's throats, we plead with you, "Stop! stop . . . don't slaughter each other, brothers."

An exotic, incomprehensible people, we Jews.⁷⁶

Most of the items in this short collection by Nadir had already appeared in The Pagan, and apart from pointing out the hypocrisy of anti-Semitism ("The Chosen," "Martyrdom") the items also point out the futility of war ("Valour," "Loyalty"). Nadir associates pacifism with Judaism, but he, and Kling, were eventually in a minority. Louis Ruchames indicates that most Jewish socialists, after America's entry into World War I in April 1917, became pro-war, and the pro-war Jewish Socialist League of America was formed, lending a further poignancy to the December Poale Zion cover discussed above.⁷⁷ Here one might also mention a number of Jewish artists whose work also appeared: Louis Lozowick (who also translated some of the material), Horace Brodzky (who notably contributes a minimalist portrait of Ezra Pound), and William Auerbach-Levy.⁷⁸ Abraham Walkowitz, whose drawings appeared despite Kling's reservations, was also born in a Jewish community in Siberia.

While there is, then, every reason to examine The Pagan for its wider cultural relevance, it is notable also that, as far as this author can ascertain, no scholarship concerning Louis Zukofsky refers to the existence of his poems in The Pagan. Neither of two recent accounts of the poet's formative years mention the magazine, placing the first publication of his poems in Morningside, the magazine of a Columbia University poetry club.⁷⁹ Given Zukofsky's residency in the Lower East Side and the fact that his later poetry (particularly the dense, complex, and brilliant "'A'") is interlaced with Yiddish and Hebrew transliteration as well as references to his own life and background, this is perhaps an appropriate point to look briefly at one of the poems Joseph Kling chose to publish. Zukofsky's poem is remarkable, in fact, not for its references to Judaism but for its complete lack of them. In a recent biography, Mark Scroggins notes this feature of Zukofsky's Morningside poems ("the utter absence of this city boy's actual surroundings") and also their "air of Paterian aestheticism," and the indebtedness to various recently-published poets—H.D., Wallace Stevens, and Rabindranath Tagore.⁸⁰ "Dawn After Storm" appeared in the June-July 1921 issue:

All night the scowling gods have cast huge boulders down the mountains,And have hewn the skies with thundering sledges,Hiding the stars in secret places.Now there are dank green silences of forest,And the gashed cedars and the riven cypressesStand motionless before the dawn.. . . . . . . . . .Even now, I thought I heard a flurry as of a shroud.Was it the last frightened ghost,Seeking the shelter of a hollow tree,Rustling through the barkOf some knotted, rueful cypress?⁸¹

We can read the poem as a straightforward representation of an Olympian dawn, as the long first line becomes the long night, and the harder consonants the boulders. The use of classical allegory indeed echoes that of Imagists H.D. and Richard Aldington. The sibillance of skies, sledges, stars, and secret paints the commotion of the fierce night while the forest, gashed cedars, and cypresses, linked by the same sibilance, become the result of the commotion. The apprehension expressed in the final stanza, the "frightened ghost," might be the poet's own, the faint hint of another storm to come, or difficulty to overcome. The poem demonstrates considerable mastery of the use of line, and that elusive rhythm that Pound advocated early for Imagists ("in sequence of the musical phrase") and a touch of self-conscious academicism in its stylistic achievement.⁸² It is also perhaps a poem of tentative hope, perhaps that of a boy at the beginning of his career (an "ernster mensch" at Columbia).⁸³ Though it is known that Zukofsky reacted early against the orthodoxy of his background, there was at the time perhaps also a need, in the form of the "unwritten code of anti-Semitism that reigned in the English department," for him to assert himself at college in spite of his culture.⁸⁴ Scroggins also attributes to Zukofsky what he generalizes as a Jewish trait: "the perennial economic desire to pull themselves out of their parents' working-class milieu."⁸⁵

The cheap labour of Jewish immigrants was indeed indispensable to the prosperity of the United States, a prosperity formed by the very commercial values that were set against those of "true" art by the Young Intellectuals and other American Moderns, and by Kling himself. That the producer of The Pagan was very much aware of the way that socialist and anarchist principles are compromised by economic circumstances is indicated at various points throughout the life of The Pagan. These processes are clearly embodied in a short story called "'Young Man, You're Raving'" by Emmanuel Julius. The story concerns a young ambitious reporter, Jordan, who works for an unnamed newspaper:

"Young man," blurted Clark Harding as he threw Jordan's copy into the receptacle for all that proves unsatisfactory to newspaper editors;

"young man, you're raving."

Jordan snapped:

"That's a big story."

"Maybe it is, but I'm not paying you for what you consider big stories. I want the stuff that I want—and I don't want anything else. That's clear, eh?"

"Maybe so," Harding returned, "but this is my paper, and I'm not interested in knocking the gas company."⁸⁶

To combat this kind of partisan censorship, Jordan and his friend Nelson obtain an old linotype machine and produce "The People's Paper," an organ for the working classes aiming to "fight the people's battles" (31) and expose corporate exploitation. In the first issue, "The seven-column headline, 'Gas Company Exposed!' could be read a block away" (32). The paper becomes wildly successful; it supports, and helps to win, a street car strike, resulting in better pay and conditions for the car workers. Its success enables its owners to move into bigger quarters and also attracts a demand for advertising space from a department store, The Hub, which caters primarily to working people. The advertising space gradually grows to sixteen pages. Jordan becomes friendly with the general manager and owner of the department store, Mr. Brill. One of Jordan's reporters produces a story:

A few days later Spencer brought in his first story. It told, in a manner that amazed, of wages in the department stores. It exposed the unjust fines system, the long hours, the foul working conditions—and above all, the miserable wages. And, The Hub was the worst of all. "This is great stuff," said Jordan.

Spencer was delighted, but when he read his story that afternoon he noticed that all references to The Hub had been stricken out.

(35)

Meanwhile, Jordan "learned to love" (35) Mr. Brill's daughter, and they marry. He joins the Masons and other corporate organizations and finances a theatre. In "The People's Paper" he writes fearlessly of international injustice but "he gradually grew to feel that it was impracticable to reform too close to home" (35). Inevitably, the story turns full circle:

And when another car strike broke forth, Spencer, who covered the story in a masterful manner, brought in copy that championed the side of the strikers. But Jordan was a director in the car company, so he wasn't enthusiastic.

"Young man," blurted Jordan, as he threw Spencer's copy into the waste basket; "young man, you're raving."

(35)

This story is not necessarily included here for comment on its literary value but for its function as a comment on the capitalist erosion of socialist idealism, which theme is also related to Kling's criticism of Max Eastman and The Masses' brand of socialism. Julius's story shows how the successful dissemination of political ideals might necessitate commercial backing, but the nature of that success compromises the ideals that it promotes.

An incidental reason for the inclusion of this story is its extraordinary parallel to the actual future life of its author. Emmanuel Julius was born in Philadelphia, the son of a Jewish-Russian immigrant bookbinder. He worked for a time on Henry Mencken's Baltimore Herald and, while in New York, for the New York Call and subsequently for other socialist newspapers. In 1916 (only six months before the piece appeared in The Pagan) he married Marcet Haldeman, the daughter of a wealthy physician. Marcet managed a profitable bank that had been left to her by her mother. Together the Haldeman-Juliuses bought a flourishing radical newspaper in Kansas, The Appeal To Reason, in 1919, which they made into a considerable commercial success. Julius began the Appeal 's pocket series with Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, which sold in large quantities very successfully. This series became the Little Blue Books, among the earliest American paperbacks, and was aimed specifically at those of the working population who would buy "good" books if they were small enough and affordable enough. The publications list includes over fifteen hundred titles, ranging from the works of such authors as Wilde, Nietszche, Balzac, Shaw, Dickens, Wells, Shakespeare, and Whitman, to socialist lectures and pamphlets on sex, birth control, atheism, and the principles of electricity. The Haldeman-Juliuses became rich, paradoxically, while providing for the American working population something it had, until then, been unable to afford, as an alternative to dime novels.⁸⁷ Julius's story therefore appears to have been eerily prophetic; his own history, beginning as keen reporter and progressing to multi-millionaire publisher, closely parallels that of his hero, although at the time it was written he could not have known that this would happen.⁸⁸

Julius had, as recalled by his biographer, a well-developed epistemology, which he expounded in his autobiographical work The First Hundred Million.⁸⁹ Dale Herder summarizes this as follows: "According to the epistemology of Haldeman-Julius, knowledge was not to be valued for its own sake, as a sterile adornment. Like Aristotle, he perceived the summum bonum—the highest good—of mankind to be happiness. And happiness, the paperback king saw it, was to be achieved primarily through self-betterment, through knowledge of one's weaknesses and potential. Knowledge, therefore, was of extrinsic rather than intrinsic value. It was a means to an end. It was to be used in the role of civilizer, as 'the foe of all the stupid and evil forces that mar and threaten life.'"⁹⁰ This recalls the eudaemonism of The Pagan's subtitle, and of The Pagan's function as the foe of the life-threatening evil of the War, and the general stupidity perhaps of the "rubbish between burst-Slopolitan covers." The presence of Julius's work in The Pagan thus emerges as a factor that contributes to the ethical and political unity of the magazine's graphics, features, editorials, and literature. It would be wrong to describe The Pagan as a "Jewish" magazine despite its many references to Judaism and Jewish authors. But the pagan of the title turns out to be quite a powerful semantic; it refers to the non-Christianity of its producer, to the pagan knight, magnanimous in victory, to the sensual "man-animal" who craves a "nobler happiness" than the "insanity of man's flesh."⁹¹ It refers ironically, too, to the fact that the "role of civilizer" is in the magazine's pages, taken on by one who may himself have been viewed as a pagan, a Fagin, and an "old Hebrew," whose socialism comes directly from his, and his ancestors', life experiences and not from any radical chic posturing. Kling quotes from The Masses: "A pagan . . . is someone who knows something about life and still enjoys it. . . . To be intelligent, to be sensitive, to realize the cruelty and ugliness of life, and yet to love it—that is a rare gift, and it involves a quality of healthy ironic humor which is not one of our most conspicuous American traits."⁹² The definition well recalls the "healthy ironic humor" of his own magazine.

Kling's own inconspicuous beginnings and ending also point to a significant paradox. The contents and the circumstances of The Pagan make a statement against duplicity, hypocrisy, and compromise in a way that other magazines do not. To make "no compromise with the public taste," a principle regularly announced on the front cover of The Little Review, its editor Margaret Anderson employed, among other means, that apogee of intellectual public taste, Vanity Fair: "It has always pleased me to remember that Vanity Fair paid our way to New York" she writes at one point in her autobiography.⁹³ Always described as charming, articulate, and beautifully tailored ("I disapprove of snobbery in matters of thought as intensely as I approve of it in matters of dress") she used the accepted social and sartorial taste of her class to finance a vehicle that subverted and questioned the artistic and literary taste of that class but not the conditions of its existence.⁹⁴ The seriousness of The Masses' political message is at odds with its jolly tone; the radicals of The Seven Arts, without the financial cushion provided by their backer, terminated their magazine and dispersed into less politically active (and hence more conservative) areas. The cultural and artistic capital of 291, for instance (though it is an extraordinary product), was increased through Stieglitz's recognition of long-term collectors' values; its editor began by being vociferously anti-commercial, yet went on to make money through purchase and sale of pictures. The Soil celebrated the products of commerce, including the machines that, as Zurier points out, threatened the livelihood of the working classes by functionally replacing them.⁹⁵ Magazines like Rogue and Bruno's Bohemia can be read as organs of gossip for a coterie. Readers were (at least according to the advertisements placed) assumed to dabble in shares, invest in art works, and take skiing holidays. And at the back of all these, and many other publications, were people of position, wealth, and power: Louise Arensberg, Mabel Dodge, Annette Rankine, Agnes de Meyer, Katherine Dreier. Joe Kling died as he lived; The Pagan's consistent stance against institutionalized capitalism and salon socialism seems for years to have died with him. While broadly remaining in support of the New York counterculture, the magazine also offered a critical view of that culture. For this in particular it deserves a more notable position in the increasing body of scholarship concerning modernist and proto-modernist periodicals, which tends retrospectively to homogenize the bohemian nature of this background. Despite The Pagan's lack of conventional material quality, the consistent convergence of its art work, its contents, and its political ethos throughout almost six years of its publication evince a considerable achievement that was, essentially, a labour of love.