|
|
Dearest reader,
The August 1956 edition of The London Magazine was a special one. Alongside the magazine’s usual fiction, essays and reviews – including Christopher Isherwood’s reflections on visiting London and, remarkably, an unpublished comedy by George Bernard Shaw – the issue published the work of some ‘young american poets’, selected and introduced by Thom Gunn. Among others, the list included Donald Hall, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich and James Wright, and it’s almost amusing, now, to imagine those literary greats at a time when they were ‘about to publish first books’ and were seen as the issue’s ‘up-and-comers’.
The August 1956 issue was introduced by then-editor John Lehmann, as part of his monthly foreword for the magazine. Writing during a brief détente in Cold War hostilities – but only months before the Hungarian Uprising and Suez Crisis that would see tensions rise once more – Lehmann spoke of the writer’s role in ‘our present plight’:
This is not to say that a poet or novelist should not write of love or friendship, or the inter-relation of man and nature today; but that if he writes of these things without a sense of the accelerating revolution of the conditions under which we live and of the fantastic menace of sheer obligation in the background his work cannot have that relevance to our lives which has always been expected of the greatest art, and which seems more important today than for many generations – perhaps more important than at any time since the collapse of the ancient world.
|
|
The June / July 2026 issue
Order the latest issue of The London Magazine, and read new work by Nick Laird and Lawrence Osborne, as well as the three winning poems from this year’s prize.
You can also subscribe here and receive the issue as part of your order.
|
|
|
But what most caught my eye in the issue, and what is re-published today on The London Magazine website, is a series of lyrical vignettes in the voice of Michaelangelo and his various models, pupils and lovers, written by Belgian-born French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar.
The vignettes read more as diaries than fiction. Much like her renowned novel Memoirs of Hadrian, Yourcenar embodies the mind and worldview of historical and cultural figures to the extent that it’s easy to forget the voice is imagined.
In the piece, writing from the perspective of Tommaso dei Cavalieri, the sixteenth-century Italian nobleman most famous for being Michelangelo’s muse, Yourcenar explores the listlessness of beauty:
What shall I do? Perfection is a path that leads only to loneliness; I look on all men now as rungs in a ladder that I have left behind. What am I to do? The mad emperor wished that the universe had a single head, that he might sever it. If only there were a single body, that I might embrace it, a single fruit that I might pluck it, a single enigma that I might solve it at last! Shall I conquer an empire? Shall I build a temple? Shall I write a poem that will endure longer? The fragmentary nature of action saps my inclination to act, and every victory is merely a broken mirror in which I cannot see the whole of myself. The desire for power requires too many illusions, the desire for glory too much vanity. Since I possess myself, how can the universe enrich me further – even bliss is inferior to me.
|
|
You can read more from our archive on the website, and I’ll be in touch next week with a special piece from our archive to commemorate 155 years since the birth of Proust...
Have a lovely weekend,
Zadie
|
|
|
|
Subscribe to the magazine
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
