On a damp November afternoon in 1923, the editors of two rival literary magazines squared off against each other in a sodden field in Woodstock, New York. The ‘parley’ instigated by the co-editor of Broom, Matthew Josephson, was ostensibly to resolve long-standing tensions with Gorham Munson, founding editor of Secession. The quarrel had emerged during their time in Paris editing ‘exile journals’, Broom co-editor Malcolm Cowley’s term for Anglophone magazines founded and edited by Americans in Europe. In the autumn of 1921 Munson had moved to Paris, where, furnished with a letter of introduction from Hart Crane, he was introduced to Josephson and Cowley. The three whiled away the hours at La Rotonde, eating, drinking and playing dominoes with a fellow ‘exile’, the photographer Man Ray, and the Parisian Dadaists Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon and André Breton. In those Parisian years they sat at Gertrude Stein’s feet in her salon on the rue de Fleurus, met James Joyce – emaciated in his mouldy hotel room in the septième – and discussed publishing with little magazine ‘schoolmaster’ Ezra Pound – occasionally flanked by Ernest Hemingway, then working for the International News Service, but already deemed to be ‘something new in American literature’ by his mentor. The aesthetic theories of both Munson and Josephson were formed in the crucible of the theatrically fractious circles of Paris Dada, an arena of conflict that had a deep bearing on the emergence of Hart Crane’s distinctive poetic voice.

Like Hemingway, Cowley had returned to Paris after serving as an ambulance driver in the First World War. In its aftermath, publishing in Greenwich Village had grown increasingly difficult as a result of wartime censorship laws; ‘salvation’ was to be found only ‘by exile’ via the French Line Pier. Such was the ubiquity of Village exiles in Paris that they frequently sent themselves up in their own magazines: ‘bored, drinking too much, they analyse their use of adjectives in casual conversation, blithely moving from city to city and purchasing objets d’arts and other curios’. Secession, founded in Paris, and Broom in Rome, were forged in the complex literary dynamics of post-war Europe, shifting business headquarters from Paris, to Rome, Berlin, Vienna and the Tyrol as editors followed the exchange rate, keeping printing costs low.