What It Takes

In 1904, University of Virginia President Edwin A. Alderman cooked up the idea of starting a magazine whose mission would be guided by new books and the inquiries they provoked about the world of literature and the world at large. Though rooted in the South and committed to elevating the region’s writers to a broader platform, the magazine took pains to avoid a regional identity. It was instead “broadly national in spirit and aims,” covering topics ranging from the arts to the sciences to public affairs by bringing together writers who reflected a certain “fellowship of uncongenial minds.”

Like most big plans, this one simmered for a while. Two decades later, Alderman was able to rally enough financial support from friends and colleagues to launch the inaugural issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review in April 1925 with James Southall Wilson as its first editor. They set up shop in the basement of a campus pavilion and got to work, using a simple editorial blueprint: eight articles, three groups of poetry, ten book reviews. A single copy cost seventy-five cents; three dollars got you a year’s subscription. They delivered the goods in a meaty, antlered typeface called Scotch Roman, front to back.

Wilson’s first editor’s letter describes a publication that embraced certain dualities, namely that double-helix identity of looking far beyond the South that shaped it. Herein would be published stories and articles “of beauty and strength” by authors new and well known. VQR was, in essence, both a journal and a magazine, both literary and general interest. The first issue reflects this melding of wildly varied interests as clearly as any that would follow, with William Cabell Bruce’s resonant political autopsy of the Democratic Party following Calvin Coolidge’s landslide victory in the 1924 presidential election; a review of John Harrington Cox’s Folk-Songs of the South; and one of the earliest English translations of ancient Chinese poetry—including works by Tu Fu—well before the midcentury popularity of the genre among such American greats as Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder.

In the decades that followed its debut, VQR held fast to being a literary experiment that reached beyond prescription. Its execution has always exceeded what many expect at first glance: a publication that blends in among the literary journals of its time, but with an editorial vision that aims for something more imaginative and ambitious. This dynamic of a small magazine with outsized ambition achieved a certain apex in the early 2000s, when, as a regular contender for the National Magazine Awards under the editorship of Ted Genoways, it became known as a magazine that “punches above its weight.” No other literary quarterly has invested as much in the pursuit of longform investigative journalism or documentary photography; none has dedicated as many pages to covering the news with the tools of art and literature, be it the American wars in the Middle East or more recently the phenomenon of global migration. It is a magazine whose themed issues include a gathering of seminal American poets on the anniversary of Jamestown, Virginia; one built around Woodrow Wilson’s legacy; as well as an issue dedicated to the art of bedtime stories. This ability to transcend its category, this instinct for finding nimble ways to surprise readers, to lean into the idea that delight and intellectual rigor go hand in hand, was baked into the magazine from the beginning.

One of the bookish rewards of being part of the University of Virginia is the wealth of material related to VQR’s history—from galleys to woodcut prints to correspondence—housed at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. One can easily get lost in the boxes there among the telegrams and letters typed on Coronas or drafted with florid penmanship. And for anyone who doesn’t mind the scholarly fragrance of ancient papers, the Special Collections Library is a vault of treasures. To wit: the translucent manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe and H. L. Mencken; Ezra Pound’s brittle, quasi-hieroglyphic letters from confinement; a humble cover letter signed, with an almost mousy neatness, “Sylvia Plath.” Here, too, is Alderman’s first fundraising letter, wherein he promises a publication “whose breadth should make it more able than any other to reach the whole nation” to Williamson Whitehead Fuller, a UVA alumnus and celebrated trial attorney who was, presumably, one of the magazine’s first supporters. And any magazine nerd will go wide-eyed at the Depression-era galleys: 6.25-by-24-inch faded pages decorated with penciled marginalia—a paragraph break here, an em dash there, the occasional mark for transpose—by the hands of fastidious editors. Notes paperclipped to galleys as each issue was sent piecemeal to the printer.

In these stacks, it’s easy to forget to come up for air. And yet I haven’t spent nearly the number of hours as others on the editorial team have—among them, Allison Wright, VQR’s publisher and executive editor, whose profile of Charlotte Kohler, VQR’s longest-serving editor, will appear in the Fall issue; and especially Julia Mathas, our editorial assistant, who for the last year and a half has become the magazine’s de facto historian.

Julia recently earned her bachelor’s degree in history and will be attending law school at UVA in the fall, all of which is to say that she was in her element sifting through VQR’s dense understory of papers and documents. When I asked her what she found most satisfying about the task, she mentioned coming across a letter from Robert Frost, whose poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” was the first she’d ever memorized. But it wasn’t just the sentimental resonance that struck her.

“There’s something to be said about the weight of these names, having drafts of their words behind the scenes, pulling the curtain back,” she told me. “But finding that letter also speaks to consistency. I delight in the proofreader’s marks being the same across time. I like the fact that there’s always been some degree of fact-checking and proofreading. For a hundred years there’s correspondence from people who are pissed off because they got rejected, and there’s correspondence in which someone saw a rose, wrote a poem about it, and sent it in. I love the consistency of that impulse and of the process. I like the fact that I can look at all these authors I’m in awe of, who I think are incredible, and they’re as much a part of the matrix of this endeavor as the individuals I read on Submittable.”

That opportunity for consistency in making a magazine of great ambition could be seen as a gift. In each of VQR’s anniversary issues, the editor’s letter recognizes, in one way or another, the magazine’s ability to stay true to the mission, acknowledging the fact that, as Staige D. Blackford put it, the magazine “has held steadily to its purpose as a journal of independent thought” for all the years leading up to each hallmark.

This letter is written with that same reverence for the achievements of this small but mighty institution, and in the same spirit of celebration. But it would be a mistake to ignore the political reality at the time of this writing, when we find ourselves holding steadily to this purpose under such alarming circumstances, in such a venomous political atmosphere. VQR marks a century as an organ of independent thought when such projects are more vulnerable than ever, when American democracy is being chop-sawed by the autocratic ambitions of its current president, aided and abetted by members of Congress who crave a taste of that power. 

On an occasion when we would normally be focusing on past achievements, the future seems more pressing—at least, the question of what role this or any other literary magazine might play in it. Namely because the future of free expression in America is more tenuous than it has been at any point in our history. Journalism has long been at the vanguard of holding power accountable—in particular, holding a government accountable to the people it governs. But that has always relied on a basic social contract. What good is shining a light on corruption or injustice if the perpetrator is shameless enough to ignore the effects of being exposed? We find ourselves at a crossroads where the protective power of journalism is under incredible stress.

Our centenary arrives in one of the most fraught times for the practice of open inquiry and free speech in this country. Anyone committed to those ideals would be justified in their dread and pessimism. And yet our editors have borne witness to extraordinary tests of the American experiment. In the last century, they’ve published through wars, impeachments, economic crises in one form or another. Considering how far we’ve come, it’s natural to look to the work that they did for some encouragement.

As Julia and I spoke there among the memorabilia and hallowed documents (down the hall from a room dedicated entirely to the country’s founding), she offered perhaps the best perspective. “Everyone today feels like the sky is falling,” she said. “And it might sound young or naïve of me to think of it this way, but one of the reasons I’ve loved being in the archive is that it shows you that the sky has been falling for a hundred years. It just falls in different ways. And I like the idea of knowing this magazine emerged from the ashes of World War I and survived World War II. It survived the Great Depression and the collapse of half a dozen empires. And every facet of this magazine, every bit that went into it, every letter and correspondence and manuscript and everything else that we did was never a given. And it took so much work to get here. I like seeing the work that it took then, because it’s the same as the work we do now, which is overwhelming and exhausting and unbelievably fun.”

Put another way, all the work it took inspires all the work it takes.

This anniversary, then, should also be an occasion to rally support—in the same spirit as Alderman’s yellowed daydreaming paper plane—for a magazine that embodies the Jeffersonian principle of nurturing well-rounded citizens through a holistic curiosity about the world. We’re all afraid, as one brave Congresswoman said not so long ago. But in our case, we keep punching. We owe it to the editors who came before us, and to those who’ll follow.