Eliot himself had donated part of his Nobel Prize money to the magazine and for a while it was supported

Eliot himself had donated part of his Nobel Prize money to the magazine, and for a while, it was supported by the University of Rochester (New York) and by the Curwen Press. In the 1960s, Grindea was persuaded to sell ADAM to the publisher Frank Cass. It is the essence of a literary magazine’s life to be always uncertain of tomorrow… to run the gamut of monthly printers’ bills and yet to be determined never to give up the fight.”Fortunately, individuals and institutions came to the rescue. “There is no true editorship,” he declared, “when everything is prosperous. For much of the time, the household was sustained by Carola’s earnings as a concert pianist and music teacher. In 1951, even T S Eliot (“a very good friend to ADAM”) thought the outlook so bleak that he wrote to Grindea suggesting he find alternative employment.But Grindea relished the struggle.

Unable to afford paid staff, Grindea was assisted by his family and a succession of volunteers. Dip into them at random and you will be sure to come up with some penetrating insight, infuriatingly wayward pronouncement, or deliciously gossipy reminiscence.Fascinated not just by the work but also by the lives of writers and artists, Grindea was a great collector of people. He tracked down almost everyone still alive who had known Marcel Proust, discovering the novelist’s favourite waiter from the Paris Ritz in an old people’s home in Brighton.A visit to Samuel Beckett (“the man who has been punished with hundreds of dissertations and monographs over the years”) in Paris in 1954 dispels the myth of the reclusive misanthrope, as the two men spend a happy afternoon comparing the merits of various pianists’ interpretations of Chopin.In a 1975 edition commemorating Cyril Connolly, Grindea wonders why his old friend was held in disdain by many in the literary world, and cannot resist a sally at Henry Miller: “When, in 1970, I visited Miller at his luxurious villa on the hills of Los Angeles overlooking the Pacific, one of the questions the over-fatigued sage fired at me (while at the same time enjoying the luscious choreography of his latest Japanese naiad) was, ‘And how is dear old Cyril?’”Despite its distinguished contributors, ADAM survived on a shoestring. When Thomas died in 1953, a memorial issue of ADAM featured two unpublished chapters of the poet’s Adventures in the Skin Trade, and contributions from Stravinsky, Augustus John, Edith Sitwell and Hugh MacDiarmid.As Grindea’s English became more fluent and his vocabulary more recondite, his editorials grew longer and more discursive. In this respect I remain an outsider.”This did not prevent him from befriending Dylan Thomas, who plied the abstemious editor with beer in a Hammersmith pub while perversely sticking to orangeade himself.

“He came from a culture where the intellectual was important,” his grand-daughter recalls, “to these prosaic shores where people’s pets were more important than their library.” The lack of any cultural haunt comparable with the Viennese caf?as a constant source of frustration “I can’t conduct literary commerce in a pub,” he complained “I can’t drink pint after pint. These were high-minded occasions; disapproving of heavy drinking, Grindea was sparing in the provision of alcoholic refreshment.While he regarded the literature of his adopted country as second to none, Grindea did not always find its literary culture congenial. And a 1971 edition devoted to the literature of Israel was unique in its day in setting Jewish and Arab writings side by side.The flat at Emperor’s Gate remained an outpost of Mitteleuropa, where Grindea held salons at which literary lions such as Robert Graves would rub shoulders with unknown writers. Cocteau, Mir?hagall and Picasso all contributed original drawings.French literature remained a cornerstone of the magazine – Grindea returned to the subject of Proust time and time again – but it also championed other, less well-known national literatures, including those of Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, India, Sri Lanka, and the Caribbean, and introduced a British readership to the work of major Latin American writers such as Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. There were monographs on composers such as Mozart, Chopin, Berlioz and Stravinsky.

Its contributors, all unpaid, included G B Shaw, W H Auden, Spender, E M Forster, Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, Lawrence Durrell and even Winston Churchill.Grindea hunted out and published two undiscovered short stories by Chekhov, unpublished manuscripts by Gorky and Dickens, as well as letters from Katherine Mansfield to Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell. While other literary magazines – Eliot’s Criterion, Connolly’s Horizon, Stephen Spender’s Encounter – fell by the wayside, ADAM continued to flourish against all the odds. Cyril Connolly and J B Priestley joined the editorial board, but allowed Grindea a free hand to pursue his enthusiams. And when the relaxation of paper rationing finally allowed issue 154 of ADAM to appear in 1946, T S Eliot contributed an article, “Reflections on the Unity of European Culture”.ADAM then began to appear with greater frequency, with as many as 10 editions appearing in some years. He was a complete outsider.”Grindea himself described his magazine as an “act of provocation and impertinence”, but the literary establishment flocked to his cause.