Vive la Print! The Ford F150 of Literary Journals

When The White Review No. 2 arrived it might as well have landed—thud!—with the postman shouting “Vive la print!” as he wheeled his canvas handcart down the sidewalk. The paper itself, made by Fenner “The Paper People” Paper, of Kent, England, is nice. I’m no paper expert, but the Starfine Ivory 100 GSM and Natural White 115 GSM? Keep that going. Simply said, it’s pleasing to turn the pages.

The magazine’s attention to typography and bookmaking is, in fact, its most impressive feature. (The table of contents comes out of the journal as a decorative card, to show you one detail.) Editors Benjamin Eastham and Jacques Testard convincingly declare their project as a “renewal of the print tradition, and particularly the journal form.”

This White Review happens to be more than six-and-a-half inches wide and nine-and-a-half inches tall, making it the Ford F150 of literary journals: it can handle anything you’d want to publish. And at 204 pages, it’s a book.

A rare book. The ‘u’ in ‘endeavour’ gives it away. The White Review is a London creature. A subscription in the U.S. costs £55.99 (£18.99 for a single issue), making it a precious commodity on this side of the pond. Unless you’re in New York, where, according to the magazine’s website, you can pick it up at McNally Jackson or New Museum Bookshop.

The White Review publishes quarterly, although it has a thriving website for which they accept short submissions for online-only content. The journal seeks work that is “seriously minded and accessible to a non-specialised readership. We are an arts, literature and politics magazine but we are interested in all the various fields of human endeavour: law, medicine, finance, architecture, music, science, crime, etc.”

I started with the fiction. This issue contains four stories, all written by males between 24 and 34 years old. Brooklyn author Joshua Cohen writes two of those stories as homages to poets Allen Ginsberg and Hart Crane: “The beard was of a million fingers of vermillion, ten thousand threads of rust and purple prose sunrays, flecks of recitative spittle and a dusting of light sporelife, the yellowed ermine fuzz that forms around immemorial potatoes.” I kind of expected language like this after reading the part of the Editorial where the editors say that, while the issue doesn’t have a theme, it “has poetry at its heart.” The other two stories are short, voice-centric pieces written in the first person. About 15 percent of the journal is fiction, and the stories share a certain hyper-literary quality.

The interview with Scottish-African writer William Boyd is one of the best writer interviews I’ve read recently. The interviewers, Tristan Summerscale, of Notes from the Underground, and Testard, ask direct questions (Q—Why did you decide to become a writer?). Boyd’s answers open the discussion on fiction in a refreshing way. For example, talking about the novel he’s currently polishing, Boyd says: “It covers a lot of ground but I now realise, two weeks before I hand it in to my editor, that it’s actually about lying and uncertainty which seems to me to be a very modern state of mind.” Boyd, author of 17 novels, goes into depth on the “rigid” system by which he researches, thinks through, and composes his books. He has lots to say about the art world that is interesting, too. It’s an inspiring and refreshing conversation and worth seeking out.

The White Review calls its nonfiction “reportage”, of which there are two pieces, both by female writers about continental Europe. Annabel Howard’s “Gay Madonnas in Montevergine: The Feast of Mamma Schiavona” takes the reader to Naples, where Catholic propriety meets ancient goddess worship and the femminielli—gay male prostitutes dressed as women who have occupied the city since the 16th century. I caught a whiff of scooter smoke reading it.

I enjoyed Swedish photographer JH Engström’s black-and-white landscapes because the photographs, with their grainy, ubiquitous fir trees shot from an aircraft, imprinted a visual texture onto the paper while they filled the page. The book is able to do justice to art.

Editor Benjamin Eastham interviews Richard Wentworth, a British sculptor and artist. Unfortunately, photos of the subject and his work are not included. The interview excels nonetheless, and I think it excels partly because it’s an English artist addressing a mostly English audience in an English journal. “Everything can be read,” Wentworth says. “Floorboards can be ‘read’. The fact that you’re sitting comfortably in this room suggests that you’ve ‘read’ from the surroundings that the ceiling is unlikely to cave in.” It’s a quirky, bouncy conversation. The reader becomes a fly on the wall in London’s Royal College of Art, where Wentworth teaches, and it’s pleasurable to be allowed into that rarified space.

The issue’s heavy interest in the art world continues with an 11-page exhibit of small black and white photos of mostly ordinary objects, sculpted in pure white material, called “I Cling to Virtue”. A narrative paragraph accompanies each image. A solid black background dominates the photographs, which means each page in the sequence has a black bar of solid ink—incongruous with the rest of the issue.

The most impressive line in the issue comes in Patrick McGuinness’s poem, “The Book of Afternoon Sleeps”: “While we—two boats cresting the same slow wave, or, to put it more prosaically, two bodies carried by the same long fuck”. The White Review made the decision to group all standalone poetry in one section, where it might have been better to space them apart.

The essay on political philosophy with Michael Hardt lands on a different register than the other two interviews, one which I had trouble mustering the reading energy to reach, but I appreciate what The White Review is doing here. Anchoring the journal around three interviews with renowned thinkers and workers in three different fields—fiction, sculpture, and philosophy—works, and I hope the editors continue with it. It lends breadth and depth, and more importantly, personality, to the journal.

The issue is male-dominated to an astonishing degree: All three interview subjects, all three short story authors, all six featured poets, and two of the three featured visual artists are males. But that’s an easy fix. I’m more curious about how The White Review goes from here in dealing with visual art. Because the exhibits are so abstract, and because, aside from Engström’s aerial photographs, they are limited to such small portions of the page, they make a softer impact than, say, the Laurel Nakadate and Mika Rottenberg series in The Paris Review 197 (Summer 2011), which blooms with color and inherently compelling images that fill the entire page.

The missteps of a young journal aside, you can feel in Issue 2 of The White Review the pride the journal staff feels toward the art of book-making, and the honor it lavishes on its contributors. The future is white.