After centuries of service to poetry, the London Magazine folds

AFTER a whole year of changing its mind, Arts Council England has finally withdrawn the £30,000 that London Magazine’s chameleon editor, the poet Sebastian Barker needed to bring out this wonderful hotchpotch bi-monthly. He has been its editor for the past six years.
The London Magazine’s history dates back to the 18th century, and its recent editors include the poets John Lehmann and Alan Ross.This act of literary vandalism happened despite 23 well-known signatories – including north London authors Alan Brownjohn, Melvyn Bragg, Elaine Feinstein, and Poet ­Laureate Andrew Motion – protesting in a damning letter published in The Times Literary ­Supplement last March at the Arts Council’s “shortsighted and unwise decision” to stop all funding in April 2008.
According to poet and novelist Robert Nye, who rang me aghast with the news from his home in Cork, the decision was made in conditions of extreme secrecy back in December. Barker immediately resigned, and retreated with his wife to a refuge in Wales to lick his wounds. It has been his specific purpose to encourage many hundreds of young novelists and poets from all over the world during his six-year reign as editor.
These include Gregory Norminton, whose fourth novel, Serious Things, about the nature of deceit, is published by Sceptre on January 24, and the ­equally gifted Alan ­Morrison, whose poem “Where Banshees Brought Me” appeared in the very last issue dated October/ November 2007. There are many others.
This work which ­Barker took on upon himself so selflessly has cut no ice with the Arts Council. There is much else to thank him for in the wonderful treasure-trove he has left future generations, not least the exchange by Sylvia Plath and Dorothea Krook on “The Pupil/Tutor ­Relationship”.
Plath’s over-idealisation of “dear shining Doctor Krook”, her philosophy ­supervisor in her short time at Newnham ­College, Cambridge, will provide the basic raw material for a two-hander for an innovative fringe theatre when it is ­rediscovered by two ­brilliant actors and a woman to direct them.One of the magazine’s first editors, John Scott, was a great champion of Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, John Clare, Keats and Carlyle, among ­others.
Scott died after being shot in a duel in February 1821 which took place at a farm between Hampstead and Camden Town. His opponent was an agent for the rival Blackwood’s Magazine. The two publications had been engaged in a bitter dispute.
In the 1950s, TS Eliot endorsed the London Magazine as a non-­university-based ­periodical that would “boldly assume the ­existence of a public interested in serious ­literature”.
Sadly, that is an assumption that the Arts Council is no longer bold enough to make.

JOHN HORDER