CIRCLE
Magazine
A landmark Bay Area magazine
of art and literature with ties to surrealism
Simultaneously
with the arrival of Henry Miller in Big Sur (1940s),
a new intellectual tendency had emerged in Berkeley,
in a little magazine called Circle. Edited by George
Leite, who became one of Miller's associates, Circle
produced ten issues beginning in 1944, with what
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy Peters described
as 11 antiwar, anarchist, or antiauthoritarian,
civil libertarian attitudes, coupled with a new
experimentation in the arts. (1)
Contributors
include: Carrington, Patchen, Crews, Henry Miller,
Anais Nin, Porter, Fowlie, Kees, E.E. Cummings,
G. Ungaretti, Rexroth, R. Duncan, Durrell, Everson,
Norse, Yvan Goll, and many others. Interesting typography
and lots of llustrations and covers by Bern Porter,
George Barrows (creative photography), Rexroth,
Jean Varda (in a feature written by Henry Miller
called Varda, The Master Builder), Schatz,
Edwin Ver Becke (four line prints), John & James
Whitney (Audio-visual music), Jim Fitzsimons (Solarized
Photography) et al.
The
first two issues were mimeographed (the first in
an edition of only 500 copies) and are exceedingly
scarce. By the third issue George Leite secured
a letterpress contract with Jack Werner Stauffacher,
a printer then in his early twenties.
Stauffacher
had founded The Greenwood Press on his family
property in San Mateo in 1934 at age 13. He
was on his way to becoming a leading figure
in West Coast fine printing, but with the coming
of the war he, like the rest of his peers, found
his assumptions about the world profoundly shaken.
He served in the Army Corps of Engineers, but
contracted pleurisy and was discharged. He later
recalled, "my age of innocence was somehow
broken.… We were trying to find some answers.…
Somehow I met George Leite, maybe through Henry
Miller." (3)
Circle's
second mimeographed issue had included work by a
San Franciscan, Philip Lamantia, then only 16. Lamantia
was a Surrealist, an authentic one, rather than
an imitator who had been published in 1943 in VVV,
an annual printed in New York under the sponsorship
of the war exiled French Surrealist poet and theoretician
Andre Breton. (Breton himself came as far west as
Reno, but seems never to have visited San Francisco.)
The son of a Sicilian-American businessman, Lamantia
grew up in the Outer Mission district of San Francisco,
an early refuge of gentility for successful Italian-Americans
fleeing their traditional quarter of North Beach.
Lamantia's verse was brilliant, romantic, and erotic;
one of his most important poems begins,
I am following her to the wavering moon
to a bridge by the long waterfront …
Rexroth
was the first individual granted conscientious-objector
status on appeal in San Francisco and Lamantia was
the second. Lamantia, Duncan, who had been discharged
from the Army as a homosexual, and other new voices
associated with Circle had something else in common
beside their opposition to war: according to Rexroth,
"one of the characteristics of all these new
people was, to put it bluntly, mysticism. (4)
The
appearance of Circle marked the beginning of the
overt phase of the California literary revolution.
As Rexroth recalled, "the ideological foundations
of the San Francisco Renaissance had been laid poetry
of direct speech of I to Thou, personalism, anarchism."
(5)
Soon
an antistatist Libertarian Circle, led by Rexroth,
Lamantia, Duncan, Everson (after he left Waldport),
and friends, was holding meetings, literary seminars,
and dances with the support of a few surviving Italian
and Spanish anarchists, and furnishing a challenge,
however minor at first, to Communist domination
over California radicals. (6)
A landmark Bay Area magazine of art and literature
with ties to surrealism.
Editor:George Leite.
Contributors include Carrington, Patchen,
Crews, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Porter, Fowlie,
Kees, E.E. Cummings, G. Ungaretti, Rexroth, R.
Duncan, Durrell, Everson, Norse, Yvan Goll, and
many others.
Interesting typography and lots of llustrations
and covers by Bern Porter, George Barrows (creative
photography), Rexroth, Jean Varda (in a
feature written by Henry Miller), Schatz, Edwin
Ver Becke (four line prints), John & James
Whitney (Audio-visual music), Jim Fitzsimons (Solarized
Photography) et al.
Issue No. 9 is present in three of the four cover
variants featuring original silk-screens by Bezalel
Schatz.
The first two issues were mimeographed (the first
in an edition of only 500 copies) and are exceedingly
scarce.
Several issues come from the library of poet Thomas
Parkinson who has written his name in pencil on
the covers of two issues that he contributed to.
This periodical that was the precursor to the
Ark and the many other small mags that appeared
over the next two decades.
John
Benjamins Back-Issues Department & Antiquarian
Booksellers, 68 CIRCLE. Nos. 1-10, ten numbers in
nine issues (all publ.). Berkeley, 1944-1948. No.
3 with minor damage to front-wrappers, otherwise
fine. NLG 3.500,- unfortunately no longer available.
