ABSTRACT
Nostalgia fashions the past in order to suture individual and collective identities in the disordered, contradictory present. It is an ideological production of pleasures that makes the incommensurable tolerable. But what happens when the pleasures of memory cannot compensate for the most intractable of disappointments? What happens when nostalgia fails to make the past-and thus the present-more palatable? In this chapter, I will suggest that when Scofield Thayer and J. S. Watson, Jr. purchased and began editing The Dial, they inherited certain aesthetic and political contradictions concerning Russia that their magazine, as a collective entity, tried but failed to resolve through nostalgic reconstructions of pre¬ Revolutionary Russia. I will proceed first by describing both Russia and “localism” as imperatives in The Dial, and then I will discuss how nostalgia functions in conjunction with these imperatives. My argument will be, ultimately, that The Dial’s nostalgia for a pre-Revolutionary Russian past becomes impossible to realize and that this impossibility expresses itself imaginatively through the death or displacement of a female body. The Dial became identifiably modernist through a double process; as it disengaged from the political exigencies represented in its pages by the Russian Revolution, it also transformed the national space of the Revolution into a reified, aestheticized memory of an impossible past. A place of actual revolution became a space of “pure” representation in The Dial,
The production of an autonomous realm of art in the development of American high modernism has deep roots in The Dial, which was one of the most influential little magazines of the 1920s and is at the very core of the modernist canon. While politically radical little magazines such as The Liberator and The Messenger have required recovery efforts in order to demonstrate their relevance to modernism. The Dial has enjoyed critical attention throughout the course of modernist literary studies. According to Gilbert Seldes, The Dial “directly affected the artistic life of a generation,
and indirectly the life of our whole time” (qtd. in Munson 107). Because its editors were independently wealthy and philanthropic, The Dial enjoyed greater financial security than similar publications; it was also considerably more staid and serene than other little magazines of the era. What The Dial might have lacked in a spontaneity prompted by necessity, however, was compensated for by the magazine’s consistency and stability. Unlike other little magazines. The Dial always paid its contributors, and it even awarded an annual prize of two thousand dollars to a writer deemed significant by the magazine’s editors. The eight recipients of The Dial Awards would be included in any history of American modernism; Sherwood Anderson, T. S. Eliot, Van Wyck Brooks, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Kenneth Burke each received an Award between 1921 and 1928. In addition to these frequently published writers. The Dial printed work by a dizzying assortment of US and European contributors, including Aiken, Bodenheim, Cowley, Crane, Barnes, Deutsch, Doestoevsky, Frank, Lawrence, Le Seuer, Sandburg, Toomer, Valery, Yeats, and Zukofsky. The magazine also published artwork by Lachaise, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, and others. These lists are in no way complete; indeed. The Dial is very nearly a self-standing library of canonical high modernism. According to Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich, “The Dial was one of the most important of the American experimental reviews. It represented more material than any other magazine, and to a greater number of readers; therefore, its leavening influence was far greater than that of its nearest competitor. . . . [The Dial was] one of the best advance guard critical magazines that ever existed in America (205-206).” Thayer and Watson’s Dial is one of the great taste makers of the twentieth century. Its choices are still with us, and its decisions-which continue to influence literary histories, critical positions, and pedagogical practicesinvite sustained interrogation and analysis. An examination of the magazine’s relationship to the Russian Revolution provides a new entry point for this critical pursuit.
