A
Magazin~e
and Some Peopl,ein Paris
Allanah Harper
I
CANNOT REMEMBER
when I fi"t thought of •tarting a lit•my mi•w.
All I know now is that one must be careful not to make concrete images
in the mind. For if one visualizes something one wishes to be or do, in
such a way that one sees oneself being or doing it, it is practically certain
to happen. I did not know about this trick when, at the age of twenty, I
visualized myself sitting at a large desk covered with manuscripts of
which I was the sole judge and arbiter, yet without any definite idea of
what I was going to do with them. (I cannot conceive of wishing such a
thing now.) Two years later, I did find myself sitting at a large desk in
my office in the publishing house of Fourcade in the rue de Conde in
Paris. But instead of feeling full of smug satisfaction and importance as
I had imagined, I was miserable, lonely and inadequate. Old Frenchmen
in hitched-up black suits and wobbling pince-nez, looking like caricatures
of Leon Blum, came to see me with manuscripts written in a fine French
hand, on such subjects as the origin of the French and English races, how
they both were of Celtic blood and should therefore be united; others
brought long and academic translations of Byron. When I remonstrated
and told them that the function of
Echanges
was to introduce living Eng–
lish writers to France, and French writers to England, they went away
hurt and disgruntled. I felt stifled in these musty surroundings and soon
gave up the office.
My reason for starting
Echanges
was to make known certain English
writers to France. No one seemed to have heard of Virginia Woolf,
E.
M.
Forster, Norman Douglas, Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence.
The French were obsessed with Rosamond Lehman's
Dusty Answer
and
Maurice Baring's
Daphne Adeane.
I do not think many quarterlies have
been launched on so little money as
Echanges.
Two friends, one Persian,
one Hindu, gave me the money to start the review. The Aga Khan con–
tributed three hundred, Pauline Duleep Singh Torry two hundred pounds;
later Princesse Edmond de Polignac gave me five thousand francs, with
a promise of another five thousand francs for the next number. And that
- about two thousand two hundred dollars- is all the money ever con–
tributed to the review, with the exception of the six hundred yearly sub–
scribers who did not help much. Each number cost about ten to twelve
thousand francs to produce. Writers were paid twenty-five francs a page.
I hate the word I, and I should like to say
We,
but there was not enough
money to employ a secretary; I had to do everything myself. The pub–
lisher ·was hopeless and went bankrupt. I was glad to be rid of him, and
311
