Chapman

Overview

Chapman was a Scottish literary magazine published from Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded in 1970, it became one of the longest-running and most influential literary magazines in Scotland, billing itself as Scotland's Quality Literary Magazine. Across more than a hundred issues it published fiction, poetry and essays by established and emerging Scottish writers, and it was known for combining literary content with direct engagement in the cultural and political debates of Scottish life, including feminism and the question of Scotland's constitutional future. For most of its life it was edited by Joy Hendry, who shaped its character over several decades.

Founding in 1970

Chapman began in 1970 as The Chapman, a tiny eight-page publication in a small format. Its founding editor was the Hamilton-based poet George Hardie, who teamed up with the poet Walter Perrie. The central impulse at the start was simply to provide publication for poets, at a moment when Scotland had much writing of quality and very few outlets for it. The Scottish literary scene of 1970 has been described by Hendry, who was seventeen at the time, as embattled and neglected: Scottish literature was largely absent from school and university curricula, and it was similarly invisible to funding bodies and public recognition. The magazine was born into scarcity and argument, and argument remained part of its identity.

Walter Perrie wanted to place the magazine in the European and international mainstream, in the tradition of Pound, Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, with a commitment to intellectualism and new ideas. From the first, the editors sought out areas and authors suffering neglect or marginalisation; it is a measure of the period that Sorley MacLean, later regarded as one of the greatest Gaelic poets of the twentieth century, fell into that category at the time, as did the poet Tom Scott.

Joy Hendry and the Editorial Character

Joy Hendry became involved in editing and producing Chapman while still a student at the University of Edinburgh, became its joint editor at nineteen alongside Perrie, and edited the magazine from 1976, continuing for very many years as its enormously hard-working sole editor. In 1979 she became the first female editor of a literary magazine in Scotland. Under her editorship the magazine was described as controversial, influential, outspoken and intelligent. Hendry, who taught English at Knox Academy in Haddington from 1977 to 1984 before leaving to write full time, made Chapman a forum in which literary quality and public argument were held together: the magazine sought writing of quality, gave airtime to new voices, including those espousing unfashionable and unpopular ideas, and spoke out about important cultural matters.

The early magazine had already acquired a combative edge. When the founding editors' application for Scottish Arts Council funding was roundly rejected, the editorial desire for controversy and for stirring things up intensified, and the rude remarks made about better-funded magazines and established literary figures in the editorial to issue number 6 were still being quoted with amusement half a century later. Hendry's own retrospective account of the magazine, written for the Scottish Magazines Network, presents Chapman's history as long, storied and combative.

Content and Special Issues

Chapman's staple content was new Scottish writing: fiction, poetry and criticism, alongside essays and discussion of Scottish culture. Around that core, Hendry built a sequence of themed and special issues that gave the magazine its public profile. One issue was entitled Woven by Women. An issue in 1983 was headlined The State of Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer, asking directly what it meant, for better or worse, to be a Scottish writer, and whether that condition was a predicament or a blessing. Contributors by then were thinking practically, and the intermediate notion of devolution had entered the discussion — evidence of how the magazine tracked, and took part in, the development of Scottish political thought in the decades before the Scottish Parliament was established.

The magazine marked the centenary of Hugh MacDiarmid, the central figure of the Scottish Renaissance, with a double issue (numbers 69/70) in 1992, published in 208 pages by Chapman Publishing. Distinguished contemporaries who remembered MacDiarmid included his son Michael and daughter-in-law Deirdre Chapman, Norman MacCaig, Hamish Henderson, Sorley MacLean, Edwin Morgan, George Mackay Brown, Roderick Watson, Pearse Hutchinson and Derick Thomson, while younger writers including James Robertson, George Gunn and W. N. Herbert considered his legacy, and Robert Alan Jamieson argued in its pages for a formal declaration of cultural independence. Issue 83, published in 1996, was devoted to Alexander Trocchi and MacDiarmid. Issue 93, Scotland and Europe, carried new work from Scotland and Europe, including writing on George Mackay Brown, mythology in contemporary poetry and the Catalan origins of World Book Day.

The Centenary Issues

Chapman reached its hundredth issue in 2002, after a third of a century in continuous publication. The centenary was celebrated across a double issue, numbers 100/101, and a further volume, numbers 102-3, subtitled A Party Between Two Covers. The hundredth issue gathered friends of the magazine old and new; Angus Calder took on the concept of Britain, Ron Butlin placed Seneca in Edinburgh's Southside, and translations of Rilke and Derrida appeared alongside a discussion of Chapman's own evolution. Illustrations came from Alasdair Gray, John Bellany and Gerry Mangan, and the artist of the issue was Jack Vettriano. The issue also reprinted classic essays first published in Chapman 16, in which Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Kathleen Raine and Tom Scott each answered three questions about why they began writing, what kept them writing, and their relationship with poetry and the muse; apart from MacLean's, these essays had never been published anywhere else.

Contributors

The list of Chapman contributors across its run amounts to a roll of modern Scottish literature. The poets and writers named in its special issues include MacDiarmid's contemporaries and successors across the generations: Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, Edwin Morgan, George Mackay Brown, Iain Crichton Smith, Hamish Henderson, Derick Thomson and Kathleen Raine, and, among the generations that followed, James Robertson, W. N. Herbert, George Gunn, Ron Butlin and Angus Calder. Just as importantly, the magazine's founding commitment to neglected and marginalised writers meant that Chapman regularly printed authors whom the Scottish literary world of the time had overlooked, and its pages gave early or sustained publication to writers at the start of their careers.

Chapman Publishing

The magazine was issued by Chapman Publishing, also rendered Chapman Publications, its own Edinburgh publishing operation. The imprint's name appears on the magazine's double issues of the 1990s and on the centenary volumes of 2002, which were substantial paperbacks of up to 304 pages, far removed in scale from the eight-page publication with which the magazine had begun in 1970. Hendry's own portrait by Alasdair Gray, reproduced in accounts of the magazine, underlines how closely the magazine was identified with its editor and with the Edinburgh literary world around her.

Reputation and Legacy

Chapman is remembered as probably the Scottish magazine that best managed the tension between literature and political issues. It was unmistakably Scottish, yet able to address feminism and other social and cultural questions very directly, and scholarly surveys of Scottish magazines place it in the sequence of little magazines — alongside titles such as Akros, Lines Review, Scottish International and Cencrastus — that provided the forum for literary innovation and debate in Scotland through the later twentieth century. Its themed issues influenced successive Scottish magazines, and its history, recounted by Hendry herself, remains a primary source for the combative, underfunded and productive world of Scottish literary magazines in which it was founded.

Availability

Chapman's issues were print publications, sold as paperback volumes, and they now circulate chiefly through the second-hand and antiquarian book trade, where individual issues — including the MacDiarmid centenary edition, the Trocchi and MacDiarmid issue, and the Scotland and Europe issue — are catalogued with their ISBNs by booksellers. Runs and individual copies are also held in the collections that document Scottish magazine culture, and Hendry's retrospective for the Scottish Magazines Network provides an accessible account of the magazine for readers who cannot handle the issues themselves.