By Richard Carreño
[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]
As its editor, patron, and publisher, Scofield Thayer revamped the Dial, an early 20th century literary monthly based in New York, into what today's readers might recognise as a late 20th century version of The New Yorker -- on steroids. Not for the little old lady from Dubuque, nor, really, for the patrician salons of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.
Thayer (1889-1982) himself was a wealthy, blue-blood (Scofield, PUL-lezze), born in the central Massachusetts mill town of Worcester. In the course six short years from 1920, Thayer harnessed bursts of inspiration and exasperation to interpret a then-burgeoning 'modernist' creativity (in poetry, literature, and art) to a growing urban, upper middle-brow readership. The Dial was a savvy, avant-garde periodical. But Thayer never walked on the wild side, inviting legal censorship.
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| James Dempsey |
In one typical issue alone, his contributors included T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, George Santayana, D.H. Lawrence, Gilbert Seldes, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. There was never a culture magazine quite like it before, nor arguably one since that could match Thayer's Dial for literary star-power and influence.
Thayer published then-controversial writers (including Ezra Pound); thought enough of James Joyce that he gifted him several thousand dollars in today's money; and regularly gave E.E. Cummings a literary platform. (And his blessing to bed is wife. Elaine Orr Thayer was an angelic-looking knock-out, who also liked to screw around).