X (magazine)

Among the authors and artists included in X are: Dannie Abse, Craigie Aitchison, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, George Barker, Samuel Beckett, David Bomberg, Yves Bonnefoy, Anthony Cronin, René Daumal, Lucian Freud, David Gascoyne, Ghika, Alberto Giacometti, Robert Graves, John Heath-Stubbs, Aidan Higgins, Geoffrey Hill, Philippe Jaccottet, Patrick Kavanagh, Oskar Kokoschka, Malcolm Lowry, Hugh MacDiarmid, Charles Marowitz, Phillip Martin artist, André Masson, John McGahern, O. V. de L. Milosz, Dom Moraes, Robert Nye, Boris Pasternak, Robert Pinget, Ezra Pound, Malcolm Quantrill, Michel Saint-Denis, Martin Seymour-Smith, C. H. Sisson, Stevie Smith, Jules Supervielle, Nathaniel Tarn, and Vernon Watkins.

And so it is that throughout all the critical articles published in this journal will be found a questioning and sceptical curiosity about the prevailing and fashionable conceptions which now dominate the scene... the real enemy now is probably confusion-general; complete intellectual confusion with a prevalent readiness to pounce on anything that looks like a moral issue provided it be simple, accessible, and public enough- in short, safe.

This was before the days when literary magazines could get financial backing from the Arts Council...However, Mrs Hutchinson and he were confident that she would be able to find a backer for the venture...Our benefactor was Michael Berry [1911–2001], now Lord Hartwell, the owner of the Daily Telegraph.

Much of its impact was due to the layout that Patrick Swift designed, and to its unusual format, which was in fact determined by the dimensions of a menu card in a caff off Victoria Station where we happened to be having a cup of coffee.

"[3] David Wright in an interview with Poetry Nation: "I received a letter from the Irish painter Patrick Swift [they had first met in Soho in 1953] inviting me to come in with him to edit a new quarterly.

Other artists that were involved, to a greater or lesser extent, with Wright and Swift in the production of X included Dom Moraes ("co-opted as an unofficial assistant"[4]), David Gascoyne (translator and reviewer of foreign books[5]), Elizabeth Smart and Anthony Cronin (who also wrote under the pseudonym Martin Gerard); in several numbers George Barker, Cronin, Pierre Leyris and Gascoyne are included as correspondents.

PN Review: "Apart from providing a platform for such then-neglected poets as Patrick Kavanagh, George Barker, Stevie Smith and Hugh MacDiarmid, its editors hoped—though not too confidently—to uncover some of the 'unknown quantities' that they knew might be finding it difficult to get into print, either because their ideas and attitudes were not among those currently received, or their verse and prose not cut to the fashion of the day.

In this respect the magazine did pretty well, considering its short life... Two novelists—John McGahern and Aidan Higgins—and several now well-known painters, including Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, and Craigie Aitchison, were first featured in its pages...But the best justification of the magazine, and of its editors' ambitions, was the discovery, or rather the recognition, of two or three authentic but unpublished—and at that time apparently unpublishable—poets..."[6] CJ Fox (Canadian journalist and critic): "The contents of the seven issues of X that preceded its demise in 1962 vividly reflect the rebellious spirit that animated Swift's commentaries.

From the older generation, Graves was enlisted to flay what he called the official 'trades union' of literature... From Barker came fighting verse excoriating the 'rigor leavis' of the academies while Cronin rounded on 'commitment' in poetry.

The voice of the authentic ‘Painting Animal’ was heard from Swift's working colleague Michael Andrews and (out of the ‘dangerous European stew’) from Giacometti and Mason, while Bomberg (still an unfashionable ghost) made a disarming case for drawing as ‘Democracy’s visual sign’.

X gave Sisson his first real exposure and Kavanagh, among other mavericks, his full head... Malcolm Lowry, scarcely known in Britain as a poet, sang hauntingly of the drunk man's bathos... Stevie Smith performed at her most unnerving.

David Wright: I met Swift in (to quote his words) "the bohemian jungle of Soho, where practitioners of arts and letters were thick on the ground, though not professors of these activities".

Volume Two, Number Two, August 1961 Volume Two, Number Three, July 1962 Selected by David Wright (Oxford University Press, 1988) Articles and writings: Frank Auerbach (Fragments from a Conversation [with Patrick Swift]), Samuel Beckett (L'Image), Alberto Giacometti (The Dream, the Sphinx and the Death of T.), André Masson (Dissonances), Michael Andrews (Notes and Preoccupations), Robert Graves (November 5 Address), George Barker (Circular from America; How to Refuse a Heavenly House), Craigie Atchison (Fragments from a Conversation [with Patrick Swift]), Anthony Cronin (The Notion of Commitment; Goodbye to All That; A Question of Modernity; Getting Wurred In; It Means What It Says), David Bomberg (The Bomberg Papers [Posthumously: Swift unearthed and edited Bomberg's posthumous papers]), Hugh MacDiarmid (Reflections in a Slum), David Gascoyne (Remembering the Dead), Patrick Kavanagh (The Flying Moment; The Cattle Fair), C. H. Sisson (The Professor of Letters; Natural History), John McGahern (The End of the Beginning of Love), Martin Seymour-Smith (C.H.

Poems by Stevie Smith, Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Higgins, David Wright, Ezra Pound, C. H. Sisson, George Barker, Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Vernon Watkins, Malcolm Lowry, John Heath-Stubbs, Anthony Cronin, Cliff Ashby, Martin Seymour-Smith, William Clarke and Thomas Blackburn.