Harvard man Russell Seitz has sent me an extraordinary present as an object lesson in ‘what a magazine should be in case you start another one’. The paper has yellowed and is dog-eared, pages are falling out and the print is faint. But the Transatlantic Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, dated January 1924, is a joy to behold. Mind you, we were already almost 100 years old when Ford Madox Ford first edited TTR in Paris. And that’s what I told my friend Russell.
Anyone who writes for or reads The Spectator is not likely to be impressed by other publications, but this does not include a posturing peacock from the BBC who recently spouted gibberish learned at university diversity courses at a Speccie reader. I bring up those dreaded three letters because Jeremy Clarkson has just written in his Sunday Times column about how he was prevented from entering a studio at the BBC – while employed by the corporation – because he was carrying a copy of The Spectator under his arm. The onanist-Marxist who barred him called the world’s number one weekly ‘extremist’. Clarkson should have warned him that excessive masturbation leads to Marxism and causes one to become hard of hearing. But because he is a gentleman, he did and said nothing.
Spectator or no Spectator, the Transatlantic Review was an impressive monthly. There were four poems by e.e. cummings, and two Cantos by Ezra Pound. It cost 50 cents and there were pieces by T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells. Best of all, TTR announced the debut of a young man who would edit the next issue, an American expatriate by the name of Ernest Hemingway. (Boy, oh boy! Don’t get me started.)
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