J. C. Squire

Template:For Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox person/Wikidata Sir John Collings Squire (2 April 1884 – 20 December 1958) was an English writer, most notable as editor of the London Mercury, a major literary magazine in the interwar period. He antagonised several eminent authors, but attracted a coterie that was dubbed the Squirearchy. He was also a poet and historian, who captained a famous literary cricket-team called the Invalids.

BiographyEdit

Born in Plymouth, he was educated at Blundell's School and St. John's College, Cambridge. He was one of those published in the Georgian poetry collections of Edward Marsh. His own Selections from Modern Poets anthology series, launched in 1921, became definitive of the conservative style of Georgian poetry.

He began reviewing for The New Age;<ref>Eric Homberger, Ezra Pound (1997), p. 83.</ref> through his wife he had met Alfred Orage.<ref>Adrian Smith, The New Statesman: Portrait of a Political Weekly, 1913–1931 (1996), p. 23.</ref> His literary reputation was first made by a flair for parody, in a column Imaginary Speeches in The New Age from 1909.

His poetry from World War I was satirical; at the time he was reviewing for the New Statesman, using the name Solomon Eagle (taken from a Quaker of the seventeenth century) – one of his reviews from 1915 was of The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence. Squire had been appointed literary editor when the New Statesman was set up in 1912;<ref>Edward Hyams, The New Statesman: The History of the First Fifty Years 1913–1953 (1963), p. 17.</ref> he was noted as an adept and quick journalist, at ease with contributing to all parts of the journal.<ref>Hyams, p. 158.</ref> He was acting editor of the New Statesman in 1917–18, when Clifford Sharp was in the British Army,<ref>Leeds Library PDF</ref> and more than competently sustained the periodical.<ref>Hyams, p. 61.</ref> When the war ended he found himself with a network of friends and backers, controlling a substantial part of London's literary press.<ref>Alec Waugh, My Brother Evelyn and Other Profiles (1967), pp. 143–147.</ref>

From 1919 to 1934, Squire was the editor of the monthly periodical, the London Mercury. It showcased the work of the Georgian poets and was an important outlet for new writers. Alec Waugh described the elements of Squire's 'hegemony' as acquired largely by accident, consequent on his rejection for military service for bad sight. Squire's natural persona was of a beer-drinking, cricketing West Countryman; his literary cricket XI, the Invalids (originally made up of men who had been wounded in the First World War),<ref>"Obituary", The Cricketer, Spring Annual 1959, p. 95.</ref> were immortalised in A. G. Macdonell's England, Their England,<ref>Alec Waugh, The Early Years (1962), p. 172.</ref> with Squire as Mr. William Hodge, editor of the London Weekly.<ref>A G Macdonell's England Their England The Characters Template:Webarchive</ref> In July 1927 he became an early radio commentator on Wimbledon.<ref>Asa Briggs, History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (1995), p. 76.</ref>

In his book If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931) he collected a series of essays, many of which could be considered alternative histories, from some of the leading historians of the period (including Hilaire Belloc and Winston Churchill<ref>If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg – The Churchill Centre Template:Webarchive</ref>); in America it was published that same year in somewhat different form under the title If: or, History Rewritten.

Squire was knighted in 1933, and after leaving the London Mercury in 1934, he became a reader for Macmillans, the publishers; in 1937, he became a reviewer for the Illustrated London News.

His eldest son was Raglan Squire, an architect known for his work at Rangoon University in the 1950s, as the architect for the conversion of the houses in Eaton Sq, London into flats thus ensuring the preservation of that great London Square, and many buildings including offices and hotels in the Middle East and elsewhere. His second son was Anthony Squire, a pilot film director (The Sound Barrier). His third son Maurice was killed in the Second War while his youngest daughter Julia Baker (née Squire) was a costume designer for theatre and cinema. She married the actor George Baker.<ref>Obituary</ref>

Squire was an expert on Stilton cheese.<ref>The First Cuckoo: Letters to THE TIMES 1900-1975; Template:ISBN</ref> He also loathed Jazz music, having filed a complaint with BBC radio to demand it stop playing Benny Goodman's music, which he called "an awful series of jungle noises which can hearten no man."<ref>Firestone, Ross (1993). Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman (1st ed.). New York: Norton. pp. 18–24. ISBN 0-393-03371-6.</ref>

PoliticsEdit

Squire had joined the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, as a young man. During his time at the New Statesman he wrote as a "Fabian liberal".<ref>Hyams, p. 159.</ref> In the 1918 general election he was the Labour candidate for the Cambridge University seat. His views then moved steadily rightwards.<ref>Charles Hobday, Edgell Rickword: A Poet at War (1989), p. 156.</ref>

Squire met Benito Mussolini in 1933, and was one of the founders of the January Club, set up on 1 January 1934.<ref>Claudia Baldoli, Exporting Fascism: Italian Fascists and Britain's Italians in the 1930s (2003), p. 103.</ref> He held in it the position of chairman or Secretary, and claimed that it was not a Fascist organisation.<ref>Martin Pugh, 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts!' (2005), p. 146.</ref> It was a dining club with invited speakers, and was closely connected to Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, which nominated members.<ref>Alfred William Brian Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain (1992), p. 57.</ref> According to the historian Sir Charles Petrie<ref>A Historian Looks at His World (1972), p. 115.</ref> (who, like Squire, wrote regularly for the Illustrated London News), Squire "found the atmosphere uncongenial before long".

ReputationEdit

The Bloomsbury group named the coterie of writers that surrounded Squire as the Squirearchy. Alan Pryce-Jones was Squire's assistant on the Mercury and wrote<ref>The Bonus of Laughter (1987) 55.</ref>

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In a fairly recent study, the academic Leonard Diepeveen explored the particularly strained relationship between Squire and literary Modernists: Template:Quote

Squire is generally credited with the one-liner "I am not so think as you drunk I am", which appeared as the refrain of his Ballade of Soporific Absorption.<ref name= "CohenCCV">J. M. Cohen (Ed.); The Penguin book of comic and curious verse”; Penguin Books (1952)</ref>

T. S. Eliot accused Squire of using the London Mercury to saturate literary London with journalistic and popular criticism. According to Robert H. Ross<ref>The Georgian Revolt (1967), p. 206.</ref>

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John Middleton Murry took an adversarial line towards Squire, seeing his London Mercury as in direct competition with his own The Athenaeum.<ref>Michael H. Whitworth, Modernism (2007), p. 22.</ref> Roy Campbell sometimes mocked Squire in verse.

Since his death the reputation of Squire has declined; scholarship has absorbed the strictures of his contemporaries, such as F. S. Flint, openly critical of Squire in 1920.<ref>Presentation: Notes on the Art of Writing; on the Artfulness of Some Writers and the Artlessness of Others, The Chapbook 2 (9), March 1920, in Tim Middleton, Modernism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2003) from p. 116.</ref> Squire is now considered to be on the "blimpish" wing of the reaction to modernist work.<ref>poetrymagazines.org.uk – Positive Refusal</ref>

A reappraisal of the periodical network of early twentieth-century literary London, and problems with the term modernism, have encouraged scholars to cast their nets beyond the traditional venue of modernism – the little magazine – to seek to better understand the role mass-market periodicals such as the London Mercury played in promoting new and progressive writers.Template:Cn

ArchivesEdit

Papers of Sir John Collings Squire are held at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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Sir John Collings Squire Collection, Harry Ransom Center Collections, University of Texas, Austin. https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=01014