Two Issues of the Imagist journal "Pagany" 1931-32

Pagany: A Native Quarterly. Ed. Richard Johns. Vol. III, No. 1, Winter 1931. New York. Softcover octavo, 66 pp.

Pagany was a generally imagist-oriented journal that was part of a network of self-identified "advance-garde" and "experimental" literature small-magazines (as vividly communicated in the numerous adverts for allied journals) attempting to make some progress in perennially culturally conservative America. Though the work is much, much more conventional than that in European avant-garde journals twenty years earlier, it does represent work that is much more adventurous than the vast majority of anglophone writing at the time, alongside a fair number of tiresome pastiches of Hemmingway (stew on that for a minute...).
  
This issue brings together a very interesting confluence of marginal forces from the European avant-garde, the Harlem Renaissance, and (incipient) genre Horror: we find a long piece of experimental criticism by Jean Cocteau that spirals around motifs and reflections on de Chirico, a great poem by the African-American writer Jean Toomer, and a naturalist story by August Derleth, who would go on to become an influential Weird Fiction writer, the founder of Arkham House press, and the primary champion and publisher of Lovecraft when his work was in danger of falling into oblivion. There are some then-or-now-big names such as W.C. Williams and Robert Fitzgerald and Robert McAlmon, but some of the most interesting work is by now-unknown poets such as Dudley Fitts, Tess Slesinger, Edwin Rolfe, Etta Blum, and C.A. Millspaugh.

  

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Pagany A Native Quarterly. Ed. Richard Johns. Vol. III, No. 3, Summer 1932. New York. Softcover octavo, 66 pp. Signed by Weird Fiction writer & publisher August Derleth.
 

 

Below: August Derleth's signature added beside the beginning of his contribution.

  See the previous entry for an over of Pagany. This issue was signed by August Derleth, who would soon shift his energies away from the naturalism of his stories in this journal to become one of the influential figures in the development of the Weird Fiction genre, on the page on which his contribution "Five Alone" to the issue begins. He also noted the page number on the cover, suggesting that it was sent by him in the mail as a presentation copy to a friend and/or collaborator – who, however, remains unidentified. It also includes the First Movement of Zukofky's classic "A" and a poem by Conrad Aiken.