The Masses, December 1913

Well, I've done a crappy job keeping up with this over the month, so I'll inaugurate the new year with the traditional flurry of blogging.

I think part of the reason I've been so slow is because the journals have been so offensive (The New Age in particular). I've been unplugging early. I decided to go back to The Masses for a pick-me-up.

This issue is largely devoted to what has come to be called the war on Christmas--it's an unabashed attack on organized Christianity, complete with Jesus-is-a-Socialist cover image and multiple stories. The first article follows this pattern: they call out the church for not taking a strong stand against child labor. They call out St. Cyprian for perverting the radicalism of Jesus into a monopoly on salvation. The call out Martin Luther for convincing people to remain in subjugation.

Apparently an Episcopal Bishop made the same points, which is pretty interesting (6), calling out "My friends, we're doped!"

But even The Masses cannot escape the pall of associative racism that infects the thought of the time, as one attack on the Catholic Church compares a priest to an African medicine man (like in October when Eisenstein pulls the same move).

The Masses is taking a page from The New Age, adding a section for ridiculous claims in the press a la TNA's "Current Cant." The winner this week is a journalist who reports, approvingly, that France is instituting a medal for exemplary domestic service. Ha.

In further empty-ha-has, there's a piece titled "An Economical Christmas Dinner" which is pure bitter satire of such helpful hints. Resonantly, the dessert section of the article is largely a protest against corn syrup.

John Reed, my favorite writer in The Masses, contributes a short story titled "Seeing is Believing" about a free-spirited young woman who is exploring New York City on the generosity of strangers. The story, though, is told from the perspective of a man who tries to pick her up as a prostitute, and is largely filtered through his prejudices. Oblique writing, well done.

The leaders of the Paterson strike are being sent to jail for six months, and Reed and The Masses protest the unfairness of the charges. It makes me think about this story: when William Carlos Williams wrote Paterson, a London review thought he had invented the town--but it was big news in the teens. I wonder how much the celebrity of Paterson city contributes to Paterson...

Further talk about a possible war with Mexico on page 7.

Lastly, a short piece that deserves to be read in its entirety, "Prescription for a Modern Drama" by Max Endicoff (page 19):

FIVE paragraphs from an authoritative work on the Technique of the Drama.
Two paragraphs from the latest report of the Federal Vice Investigation Commission.
Two paragraphs from the current report of the State Commissioner of Labor.
One paragraph from the report of the Municipal Bureau of Charities.
Sprinkle over with a dose of statistics to make the concoction palatable.
Season well with gunpowder.
After mixing thoroughly and bottling, send sample
to an ethical laboratory for stamp of approval.

The New Age, Dec. 4 1913

Quick hits from TNA (so I can get back up to date).

Marmaduke Pickthall writes an intense article about an assassination in Turkey, including a nasty characterization of Armenians as bloodthirsty.

An odd column includes the Orange argument for Home Rule: that Northern Ireland will be able to rationally represent its interests in the Irish parliament.

Otakar Brezina writes in appreciation for TNA's coverage of his work.

Well, that's a pathetic post. Someday I'll go back and fill in the gaps...

The New Freewoman, December 1 1913

Dynamite issue for modernist names, the penultimate New Freewoman.

F.S. Flint may win the Pre-WWI-Tragic-Opening-Lines Competition" with the first sentence of this issue: "The River Marne will be associated with two of the most interesting artistic statements made of late years in France." The two statements are:

One: the mansion of the "Abbayist" poets (who I'll confess I don't know about). Two: Jaques Copeau's theater company. Praising Copeau for not being distracted by famous actors, he writes "the whole aim of his training has been to produce a homogeneous company; wherein each actor's part and action on the stage would be subordinated to the total effect to be produced, so that the pleasure of the audience would be in the interpretation of the play, and not in some one actor's business." Very Flinty modernism, that. 

"Views and Comments," the regular editorial, takes a crack at our colleagues at The New Age: "who of a certainty were never startlingly original." Check out TNF's analysis of the source of economic revolution, a direct critique of TNA: "The thing is that "industrial unrest" is not in the main an affair turning about material necessities. If it were, state-socialism or guild-socialism could cure it. As it is, their attempted application rouses more temper than the goad of poverty itself, and it is precisely this temper which vitalizes the agitation." All this in the context of Larkin and the Dublin strikers (see earlier posts). The upshot comes back to TNF's philosophical materialism. They distrust labels, and advise the oppressed to gather physical power rather than rely on Justice, etc. 

One Clarence Lee Swarts contributes and entertaining piece about Tennessee's new prohibition laws: he makes fun of the fact that TN has to pass laws requiring the enforcement of laws. Ha. More chillingly, he speculates that the legal profession will balloon and prisons will fill up.

Richard Aldington contributes a gem of a review of Marinetti's futurist declamations: I've read that he and Ezra Pound made futurist costumes and crashed one of these, but RA doesn't mention it here. Anyway, he makes a few solid points. First, he claims that Futurism is a natural evolution of impressionism: "M. Marinetti and his poems grow out of Mallarme, Whitman, Laforgue and Romains". Well and good. Then double-edged put-downs: "It would be humorous if M. Marinetti were not so serious, and really an artist in his fashion." Then a pastiche: RA shows his dexterity at imitation by creating his own version of Marinetti's "Battle" (I think this is the same as "Bombardment"). RA's own response is characteristically Hellenistic and self-deprecating: "And there is an ignorant fellow in the room here who asserts that he prefers Sappho any day. After all it is not for us to criticize our contemporaries. It is nonsense to condemn a man and his work because you do not agree with him or because you did not invent his particular way of writing yourself." Here we also see a tipped hand: who, exactly, are you defending, Aldington? Ultimately the problem with Marinetti is his "unrestrained rhetoric... use of abstractions... vagueness." Imagism fights back, but also admits a kind of kinship: "One must do M. Marinetti the justice to admit that he is a fearless experimenter. He is a great deal better than the bourgeois and women who grin at him when he reads. And he must be very good for Italy." We'll see. 

Ezra Pound reviews William Carlos Williams' "The Tempers." Here's a sampler: "He makes a bold effort to express himself directly and convinces one that the emotions expressed are veritably his own, wherever he shows traces of reading, it would seem to be a snare against which he struggles, rather than a support to lean on." And: "At times he seems in danger of drifting into imaginative reason, but the vigor of his illogicalness is nearly always present to save him." 

He then contributes his own poems-about-poems (and other things), the same as were in Poetry in November (I should probably make a detailed cross-reference at some point, seems like a thesis is hiding here). 

Edgar A. Mowrer complains that it is impossible to make a living at writing, as was possible only recently. Familiar? Too bad he dabbles in antisemitism, which curdles it quickly. No shortage of nastiness these days. 

For the H.D. fans among you: some pieces by Frances Gregg! I know her only as H.D.'s lover. Anyway, her stories are dark and gothic and (her own word) macabre, neo-Poe. Very disturbing, kind of fun.

RA translates a piece by a medieval scholar of Homer claiming that there were eight Homers, doing so to prove that the speculations of classicists at once have precedent and shouldn't be taken seriously (and, incidentally, establishing his own cred).

Finally, the cosmic Huntley Carter goes off about how awful the Futurists really are.

What a cool thing to read. 

Poetry, Novemeber 1913

I'm a bit behind, so I'm going to make this one quick.

As usual, Poetry has a mixture of hip and un-hip poems in it. This time hip's represented by omnipresent Ezra Pound's clutch of poems and Lustra. There's not much imagism-istic about them, 'cepting moments (pale carnage).

Joseph Campbell, and Irish ethnomusicologist, has a few poems in here. Unclear whether the poems are folk-found lyrics or originals, but one is about a puca (see Jimmy Stewart and Harvey).

Harriet Monroe writes a cool editorial about meter--citing Sidney Lanier, she claims that English verse is quantitative. She uses musical notation to scan Shakespeare quantitatively, which could have been picked up more broadly as the stress-unstress system is just as clunky now as then.

Yeats and Vachel Lindsay won the inaugural poetry prize--though the editors do mention that they weren't eligible.

Sorry for the dash'ed dashedness of this--

The New Freewoman, November 15 1913

This issue of The New Freewoman has some excellent moments, especially stemming from a small feud between Dora Marsden and a correspondent, Benjamin R. Tucker. Marsden happily quotes a letter from a bewildered Midwestern American woman, who delightfuly calls TNF "so post-everything." Throw that into the debate about what is postmodern! In responding to Tucker's criticism that TNF is "pure nonsense, unanswerable because intangible," Marsden makes a pretty nice point about the emptiness of linguistic signs, and refers back to the correspondant:

 "We are not post-anything by intention," a lovely ambiguity. She goes on to explain: "The use of ideas should be strongly discouraged... In thinking, they have no true place. Their use corresponds to that of incantations in science. They are made up of misty thought-waste, confusions too entangled to be disentangled; bound together and made to look tidy by attaching an appellation-label, i.e. a sign. It is the tidiness of the sign which misleads. It is like a marmalade label carefully attached to an empty jar. Remove the label, and confusion vanishes: we see the empty jar, we see the printed label, and we know there is no marmalade. And so with abstract terms and ideas. Consider liberty--we have already considered it." Tucker's arguments are about the definition of anarchy or communism or private property, and it will be interesting to see how he responds to this meta-argument: that the terms he uses are empty.  

Allen Upward's translations from Confucius continue, including this gem that must have attracted the once-and-future Pound:

"The subjects on which the Master did not talk were,

—marvels, feats of strength, treasons, and spirits."

Pound contributes a very positive  review of Upward's book The Divine Mystery, which seems like a sort of Golden Bough style anthropology of religion. Pound also continues "The Serious Artist," interestingly rejecting the term "connoisseur" to instead "restore the foppish term dilettante," because a dilettante "has no axe to grind." Intriguingly, he explains that the definition of great art is inherently subjective, that "One knows fairly well what one means" by the term great art, and that "One means something quite different at different times in one's life." This is followed up with admission of the place of personality in criticism: "It is for some such reason that all criticism should be professionally personal criticism." The professionally personal, what a great phrase to describe EP's persona in the magazines circa 1913. This personality is a liberation, and a sign of respect for the "heritage." Lots of stuff about "race heritage" floating around the magazines these days, I wonder what it's about.

John Cournos, who I remember from reading about H.D.'s life (love quadrangle, I think I recall? Lopsided love quadrangle?), contributes an interesting essay about cubism and mannerism/impressionism, in which he goes first to the Dore show of cubist art and then the Grafton of historical art. When he gets to the Grafton gallery, he agrees with a personal bias of my own for El Greco by claiming that El Greco is a "modern." More to the point, he's skeptical of cubism.

Henry Meulen, a Fabian, explains that the government should allow banks to issue transferrable notes because the govt. monopoly on currency leads to a lack of trust. Because everyone trusts their bankers.

All for now...

The New Age, November 20 1913

The New Age's myriad pseudonyms always begs the question: why bother? Why write under so many names without revealing one's identity? To this point I've thought that it's probably because there are only a few writers who wish to give the impression of being a group with a consensus: pseudonyms as rhetoric. I still think that is true, but a brief note in "Readers and Writers" (on page 82) makes me wonder if there are also legal reasons. I've assumed that when an article appears without attribution, or attributed to The New Age, it's written by the editors (Orage and Hastings). This small column, though, is by the editor on getting sued for libel by "Mr. Thomas, the Assistant Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen." In it, the editor disowns the "Open Letter to Railwaymen" published on Oct. 30 under the name The New Age. The editor also explains that the journal has no money to pay damages, and suggests that Mr. Thomas publish his grievances in the journal itself instead. There's a whiff of fear in this: "Equally invariably--including the latest--the Editor of The New Age has never written a word of the offending passages himself!" This despite admitting earlier that the open letter was an editorial.

Other interesting bits:

Maud Allan the famous dancer is going to tour India, which has offended English propriety (even more than her Salome already had) because they think it's shameful to have an Englishwoman dance in front of Indians. The New Age, via Lional de Fonseka, calls bullshit on this, pointing out that India has more refined attitudes toward dance than England (oddly, arguing from the point that Indian culture looks down on dancers. True? Not to my knowledge).

Beatrice Hastings' occasional column "Tesserae" appears in this issue, this time on war and feminism. She accuses militant feminists of encouraging war in order to get more power at home, calling them "blackleg industrialists." I've always heard the narrative that women were liberated in part because their labor was needed as men left to fight the world wars. Hastings implies that people saw this coming, and that feminists encouraged it. Intense thought.

AER contributes a pleasant rant against germ theory and for homeopathic medicine, including that we should "treat the patient, not the disease," a catchphrase that's still being tossed around.

Anthony Ludovici is really happy about the opening of an exhibit of Blake's artwork at the Tate. Nice to see him happy, for once.

Happy 1st Birthday, Little Review Reviews!

It's been a year since my first post on this blog, so I'll take a moment to reflect. I think the blessing/curse of an immersion project like this is that it has no clear boundaries determining what should be included or excluded, and this means that whatever I do is still unsatisfying. There's always more to read, more or less available.

My new-year resolution is to begin using the physical archives of journals at U. Washington, and provide occasional posts on other journals that I can access there. Wish me luck.

Thanks again to everyone--.

The New Age, November 13 1913

My readings of The New Age have reached a point where I'm more interested in how the journal conceives of itself and its contents than in its contents themselves. You may recall how Pound was savagely satirized by Beatrice Hastings (as T.K.L.) while he printed his essays on French avant garde poetry. This week's New Age includes a gem of an explanation, one that is further confirming my developing thesis about the magazine (more on that soon). I will quote the relevant passage at some length:

"Was it right, I have been asked, for The New Age to allow "T.K.L." to "mimick" Mr. Pound's articles on Parisian writers while these were still being published? My own answer is, Yes, and with more reasons than I can set down." Here Orage (as R.H.C.) explains that they publish Belloc's criticism of Guild Socialism, and nobody thinks it is odd, so "Why, then, should it be thought strange to publish Mr. Pound's articles and to subject them to criticisms while they were still before our readers? But Mr. Pound, it may be said, was not attacking The New Age, he was only defending certain tendencies in French poetry. This view assumes too readily the eclecticism of The New Age which is much more apparent than real." [Note: this is an incredible admission, as it lifts the veil between the lamination of articles and opinions and the reader, and perhaps the quotation marks around "T.K.L." are a significant admission of pseudonimity] "We have, as discerning readers know, as serious and well-considered a 'propaganda' in literature as in economics or politics. Why should it be supposed that the economic writers are jealous to maintain their views and to discredit their perversions or antitheses; and the critics of literature be indifferent? It will be found, if we all live long enough, that every part of The New Age hangs together; and that the literature we despise is associated with the economics we hate as the literature we love is associated with the form of society we would assist in creating. Mr. Pound--I say it with all respect--is an enemy of The New Age. His criticisms may not be, like Mr. Belloc's, direct and personal, but by the oblique or the tacit, it is even more, in my view, inimical. For such as read the duel between Mr. Pound and "T.K.L." was a debate of extraordinary intensity. The weapons on neither side were arguments, for the debate was on the plane of imagination, not reason..." (51).

I have a feeling that this passage will form the kernel of an article, or something, that I've been considering for a while now. I'll take a page from Orage and say that I've referenced my idea before, and for such as read my blog, it should be pretty obvious...

To return to content:

There's a characteristic conflation of aesthetic and moral development in the first article, the political "Notes of the Week" by the editors. In it t(he)y blame the philistine upper classes, that instead of offering charity should "let it be by devoting themselves to the spreading of ideas, good taste, and good manners by example." Hardly a call to revolution, but the stakes rise later in the article, which claims that the organization of labor is "more important nationally than the German Navy to-day or the Napoleonic armies of the day before yesterday." While the Labour Party doesn't collapse the way The New Age predicts, and trade unions don't abandon the political process, I wonder how this statement will look at 200 years hence, rather than the 100 we've got.

Harold Lister contributes a piece fusing the nature-vs-nurture argument with socialism, in that he believes the environment is more important than heredity (against eugenics), and goes on to use that as proof that everyone's general ugliness proves that the environment is awful. He blames coal, hopes that the guild system will set things right so we can be beautiful again.

There's an odd speculative column about miners demanding a living wage in 1917, which of course is four years away... by "Recorder."

Hastings contributes a kafakesque short story about being hauled before a morality court. Published under pseudonym Alice Morning.

All for now, there's a lot more in there, but I have to do some other work!

The New Age, November 6 1913

This issue has a lot of the usual stuff, all the crises are continuing, etc. etc. I'm going to note a couple interesting tidbits, but not do a very thorough review.

As always, I have to mention what Beatrice Hastings is up to. This time, she's explaining why "equal pay for equal work" is ridiculous because menstruation means women can never really do "equal work." More on that line from pages 12-14, if you want to see 1913 antifeminism up close (and have a strong stomach for outdated arguments). It makes me feel badly for BH, though, to constantly run herself down. There's something deeply wrong here, and I have my suspicions about their roots, but I'm no biographer.

"Views and Reviews" this week is a lengthy discussion of Malthusianism. Strange sometimes what people debated so recently: the author explains that a new study proves that large families do not inherently cause disease because rich people with large families are healthy. Perhaps more interestingly, the article confronts the issue of the lowering birthrate in the context of longer life expectancy, explaining that the one will largely balance the other. This, naturally, leads to a discussion of sexual practice and whether masturbation and contraception can make you sick. Answer? "Whatever may be the truth of the matter, I cannot pretend to decide; but it seems wise, when doctors differ, to perform functions naturally" (16).

Lastly, that scoundrel-y Oscar Levy contributes a parable about how removing danger from life allows the lower classes to breed more quickly, which in turn crowds out the aristocrats (and even the more effective working men). Oscar's parable of the fishes (which he derives from art critic C. J. Holmes): if you take the pike out of a pond to help the trout grow, the perch will swarm the trout and smaller perch will drive out bigger perch until you have a pond that's just useless. I wonder what he'll say about the war, when it starts?

That's all for now...

The New Freewoman, November 1 1913

The first article in this issue is an absolute gem. Editor(s? Marsden?) explains that the arts are approaching the condition of science, but are still stuck "in the position of the alchemists and astrologers." She goes on to reference the latest issue of Poetry and Drama which is apparently devoted to Futurism. I went over to beloved magmods.wordpress.com to dig up the issue, and there 'twas, so I'm going to do a special report on it--stay tuned.

But back to TNF. The upshot of the first article is (and this is still true?) that artists who fall too far on either extreme of the traditional-experimental continuum tend to fall into errors. There's a nice defense of poesie: "In poetry self-consciousness culminates: in it alone emotion rounds on itself, articulate, and says 'I know you'" (183).

In Ireland, the workers have been cheated into an unfair settlement and James Larkin has been thrown in jail. TNF's characteristic response is that the workers of Dublin should have armed themselves. They link the crisis to the mining disaster (see above post) in Wales. The journal is really hard on miners, claiming that they "slither" into their occupation because they aren't able to find decent work. There's a resonant anti-coal screed: "Coal is not wanted, certainly it was not needed. Its advent has done an inordinate amount of harm and only made possible a highly speculative good. Its filth and grime has been splotched form one end of the earth to the other--its progress has had squalor and misery as chosen attendants" (184). This moves into, oddly, a ridicule of the Pankhursts and their hunger strike, as further examples of self-proclaimed victims (the others being the miners and the unarmed Irish).

Pound contributes a short essay continuing his critical relationship with Rabindranath Tagore. He's not backing down from his wholehearted support of Tagore despite the attacks on both of them in The New Age. I noticed how much he emphasizes that Tagore should be read as an artist and not as a religious figure--which may be in part a counterargument to The New Age's labeling him as a quack mystic. Also important is Pound's further establishment of his critical method, which is firmly based in quotation: "It is always better to quote Mr. Tagore than review him. It is always much more convincing. Even when I tried to lecture about him I had to give it up and read from the then proofs of Gitanjali" (187). Pound's penchant for using the text as the only sufficient evidence makes the split in his critical personality even more clear: the prescriptiveness of "A Few Don'ts" is seeming more and more an outlier. At the end, he quotes Dante to illustrate his love of Tagore, a difficult move for me to follow and perhaps a premonition of cantos to come.

Allen Upward (Upwards in the contents of the issue, whoops) contributes an essay on Confucius, aka Kung the Master. It is very proto-Pound, and makes me wonder when Pound starts getting real traction in his study of Chinese. This could be a foundational text, as Upward's Confucius seems a lot like later-Pound's.

Speaking of EP, he continues his series on "A Serious Artist" in this issue, including previsions of Hugh Selwyn Mauberly in its quotations of Villon and general preoccupation with aging and poetic vitalitiy, and also elaborations on his ideas of poetic dynamism. Good interesting insight.

That's all well and Poundian, but the unexpected piece is Bolton Hall's short story "Graveyard Fruit," about a vegetarian who has a vision of every creature and human being he has ever wronged, including incidentally. Intense, a strong comment on the hidden horror of existence and the difficulty of doing right in the world. Teachable for modernist anxiety?

Edgar Mowrer has a fun piece heralding the important invention of a phonograph that can play records backwards, which leads him to criticize futurism and explain why post impressionism is a dead end. Naturally all this happens because playing records backwards will require composers to become more disciplined, as they will be held responsible for both directions.

Finally, and ending a remarkable issue, Huntley Carter contributes a piece on Vision and the environment, pretty much explaining that vision comes from within, and is destroyed by contact with the environment. He bases this on the strengths and shortcomings of Gordon Craig's Towards a New Theatre, especially on its illustrative plates. On a quick skim, it looks terrifically cool. Carter, though, is a little out-there for me (he'd agree, I think), and it just goes further to show how the visionary/mystical/occult side of modernism can exist comfortably next to the aesthetic/scientific/materialist side, even when the discussion is about the inherent contradiction between them. Or something.

The New Age, October 30 1913

Highlights from this issue include:

Romney claims that the thing about modern armies is that they are good at having conclusive battles: "Almost as soon  it becomes apparent that one side or the other is about to win, and Fortune, no longer fickle, seldom gives the under dog a chance to recover himself" (781). Hindsight makes his constant bloody-mindedness ridiculous. See also his descriptions of how airship combat might change all this. Very steampunk.

M. B. Oxon. contributes an interesting review of Jessie Weston's book The Quest of the Holy Grail, which from his description seems to be a version of the Waste Land-inspiring (or was it?) From Ritual to Romance (on page 790). Oxon's mystical critique of the book claims that Weston doesn't go back far enough, as the source for the grail legends is probably older than vegetation rituals. He's wink-wink nudge-nudging toward the fantastic. Anyway, I think Eliot would have been intrigued by the general goal of the review, which is to claim that materialism hasn't taken over at all.

There are, of course, lots of other things in the issue, but I'm going to finish this post with a few letters to the editor.

First, there's a clutch of the sort that praise The New Age and make it sound powerful, always written in the same New Age-y tone, almost as if Orage wrote all of them. The letter from repetition of his suggestion that the "National Guild" articles be bound as a book (made by Orage, who I think wrote the articles, while under pseudonym) by one "W.L." is suspect, especially as the letter does not refer to the earlier article at all. Hmm.

J.M. Kennedy and TNA continue their feud, with Kennedy asking for an apology before he will respond (and getting one, albeit a backhanded one).

Anti-feminism galore in the letter by Pallister Barkas, another pseudonym, naturally. Sorry I'm in conspiracy theory mode.

All for now...

Poetry, October 1913

The headlining Yeats poem is the most interesting part of a more-tepid Poetry. Yeats' The Two Kings is the sort of magical Irish mythology that he's so famous for in 1913. The story hinges on the husband-king forgiving the queen-wife for magically-induced infidelity, and has some really great lines in it.

Harriet Monroe's essay about the Panama Canal is very excited, but not particularly exciting to me.

Alice Corbin Henderson reviews Child of the Amazons by Max Eastman of The Masses, her verdict: meh.

Ezra Pound has the guts to summarize his essays on Paris and mention the originals in The New Age, which of course has been panning each one as it appears. His apparent lack of concern over the combined efforts of the editors of TNA is striking.

Boring post, sorry.

The New Age, October 23 1913

First, politics:

I've been reading George Bornstein's Material Modernism for my PhD exams, and it is really the perfect companion text to my work on this blog. In it, Bornstein examines (for example) Yeats' poems in their original contexts (as much as accessible) and in other editions that have emerged since. His readings of Yeats' "September 1913" have been reminding me to keep an eye on things Irish (like A.E./George Russell's letter last issue) and on labor disputes.

This issue of The New Age begins with a discussion of the Senghenytdd mining disaster. It moves to a more usual topic, the railroad strikes. There's revolution in the air--threats of a massive strike to take place in 1914. Remember that worker's movements have been urged to arm themselves in TNA and The New Freewoman.

The link between armed resistance in Ireland and the possibility for it in England is actually explicit: "The trade unions... though their grievance is of a parallel nature to that of the colonies of Ireland, are even today unaware of its true nature. For them as for these the remedy is Home Rule" (746). See also the poem by Susan Mitchell, "To the Dublin Masters" on page 760, which ends with an unveiled threat of the guillotine. The focus moves back to South Africa, and the editors of TNA wonder whether the armed strikes there will emerge in England. Then more on the lockout in Dublin, which is starving1/3 of the city's population. The desire for a more comprehensive revolution informs The New Age's rejection of a legal minimum wage.

Second, feminism:

Beatrice Hastings reviews a housekeeping guide by Mrs. J. G. Frazer, "First Aid for the Servantless," a book that attempts to show how women don't need house servants. The review is fascinating, though, not for that--but because it stands in as a sort of autobiography of Hastings. She explains her position in the literary world by contrast to her domestic life, continuing her generally anti-feminist approach: "I am a minor poet of the first class. I have never created anything" (759). Hastings' literary ability boils down to the fact that (in her own account) she knows her limitations, many of which are dictated by her gender. Frustrating, revealing.

"Readers and Writers," by Orage presumably, is a take-down of Pound. It hits him right where he's most sensitive when it questions his credentials: "What qualification, may I ask, has Mr. Pound revealed for making a fair estimate of English writing as compared with French?" He also gloats somewhat over having baited EP into an over-emotional response, which I don't think actually happened: Pound has been very reserved about the awful situation he's in (being pilloried in the very journal that is releasing you serially). Pound showed a definite lack of tact (or tactic) but strategic foresight when he slighted the writers of TNA, and of course he ultimately wins the fight (or has for the foreseeable future).

As for pseudonyms and identities, this issue has two delightful plot-thickenings:

J.M. Kennedy replies to "The Writers of the National Guilds Articles" that he hasn't written for TNA for six months and that they have misrepresented his theories. "The Writers" immediately reply, a privilege usually reserved for the editors or the inner-circle of TNA. I imagine that The New Freewoman must be wrong in identifying "Romney" with Kennedy (see earlier discussion). Or it's really getting conspiratorial: could the editors be the "writers?" Orage singled out the "writers" for praise in one of his self-righteous reviews earlier, which he also uses to boost Hastings. Evidence mounts.

Hastings goes after Rebecca West's analysis of Hall Caine's roman a clef that supposedly stars Hastings (see above TNF), saying that her Pages from an Unpublished Novel are NOT autobiographical. Judging by the Stephen Gray biography of Hastings, Hastings is lying (or perhaps Gray repeated West's error? I doubt it). The public image management of Hastings is really fantastic, sort of like Fox News' fake bloggers.

All for now...

The New Freewoman, October 15 1913

This issue of The New Freewoman has the first rumblings of the transition to The Egoist: the first article, before this issue reserved for the editorial, is Ezra Pound's The Serious Artist.

I love it when authors reference their time--and Ezra Pound's concern with the modern usually means he'll feed my desire. He opens with: "It is curious that one should be asked to rewrite Sidney's 'Defense of Poesie" in the year of grace 1913." He uses the comparison with Sidney to set up his purpose, which is to examine the ethics of art. First he determines that art is necessary because ethics are based on the "nature of man" and "the arts give us a great percentage of the lasting an unassailable data regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature." Well and good, but this progresses to the evolutionary elitism so characteristic of the year of grace 1913: "From the arts... we learn that certain men are often more akin to certain especial animals than they are to other men of different composition." Ok.

EP goes on to explain that bad art comes when the artist lies, because it ends up spreading a contagion of misapplied knowledge of the nature of man and people end up confused. Expressed in the converse: "Purely and simply... good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise. You can be wholly precise in representing a vagueness."

How's this: "Now art never asks anybody to do anything, or to think anything, or to be anything. It exists as trees exist, you can admire, you can sit in the shade, you can pick bananas, you can cut firewood, you can do as you jolly well please."

Art provides data about how men (people?) are different. That's part one of the essay, anyway. Welcome to the front seat of TNF, EP.

Other notes:

Richard Aldington contributes a sort of nasty portrait of English women on a train. I wonder what H.D. makes of his hatred of Englishwomankind.

There's an article entitled "The Conversion of a Specialist" about a doctor who has moved to treat tuberculosis with "vegetables, cereals, and fruits without eggs, milk, cheese, or butter"

Ezra Pound responds to that weird Angel Club thing from last time (the people who were going to found their own country of superior people) by asking him to support artists once the new country is set up. I really wonder what he's make of the MFA.

Elsewhere in the letters-to-the-editor there's plenty of White Slave debunking, always double-edged and uncomfortable...

Ads include one for  EP's Canzoni.

All for now...

The New Age, October 16 1913

Here's what's in this issue:

My favorite piece is (I think) a one-off by one Guglielmo Ferraro, entitled "Quantity and Quality." It is about the current tensions rising between Germany and France over France's decision to require "made in X" labels on all imported goods. Here's a sample: "Modern industry has succeeded in multiplying the production of commodities... From the point of view of quantity... we have performed prodigies. But from the point of view of quality, modern industry threatens to make the world one colossal mystery. It so mingles and confuses models with imitations that very soon nobody will be able to tell one from the other." Globalization of commodity production has overwhelmed quality to the point that people have confidence in empty labels: "The blind confidence in certain labels, with which people are reproached, only shows their need of a standard of value by which to judge the quality of things" (721). "Hence it comes that quality is judged by price instead of price by quality. In American journals one already finds advertisements which recommend their goods because they are the most costly." I can vouch for that--look at the car advertisements in a 1913 Scribner's and there are some that use their extra-high cost as a selling point. Ferraro's main point is that quality counts, even if it is invisible, even if it doesn't appear in balance-of-trade calculations. Still true?

Pound wraps up "An Approach to Paris" in this issue, welcome if only so that Beatrice Hastings can stop her mean-spirited lampoons of them (I hope) and get to writing mean-spirited things about something else. EP ends writing about Rimbaud, Paul Fort, and Henri-Martin Barzun, who apparently wrote poems for simultaneous voices (Velvet Underground "Murder Mystery" style). Paul Fort I've encountered in a strange series of translations in a later issue of Poetry, worth a look. I think he's going to come up a lot, judging by the number of hits I got when searching for the poems I'd already read. Weird thing: the translator is John Strong Newberry, but apparently not the paleontologist. A son?

Further notes:

There's been an angry writer named Grant Hervey occasionally contributing about a "young Australia" movement that he represents. He's threatened England with Australian diplomatic independence, not contributing to the Navy, etc. In the "Foreign Affairs" column, S. Verdad replies with this prophetic tidbit (after much hemming and hawing in many directions): "How would they [Hervey and co.] deal with a German-Japanese alliance? That event is at least as likely as the Young Australia movement coming to power" (718). Likely indeed, though not for a while yet...

Romney explains that a grassroots guerilla campaign could paralyze a modern state, and advocates everyone arming themselves if they want to be taken seriously (emulating the Ulster militias).

There's an article about the tyranny of time-clocks at places of employment, including horror at "clock" becoming a verb (clock in, clock out).

A.E.'s "Open Letter to Dublin Employers" is a masterpiece of the genre, calling out the bastards for locking out the workers and threatening them with general rebellion. Phew.

A letter to the editor under "The Plaugue of Advertisements" goes after billboards. "The Dog in Civilization" has a man protesting the population (I swear I accidentally typed "pupulation" just a second ago) density of barking dogs in the city.

That's all for now...

The New Freewoman, October 1 1913

The New Freewoman is really hitting its stride. It is full of interesting articles and well-written literature (though the poetry is still hit-or-miss). This issue includes progressive views on environmentalism and what-will-be queer politics, as well as hilarious comments on contemporary literature. Here's a digest of what you'll find:

If you're into modernist literature and want a good belly laugh, turn to page 149 for a hilarious table of reviews. All sorts of famous reviewers are summed up in one sentence, and the reader is supposed to cobble together a book's reception by selecting each review from the database. Featured: Henry James, Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, Beatrice Hastings, Alfred Noyes, and others who have fallen into more or less obscurity. A sample: 7. "Mr. Ezra Pound says that someone else has praised the book and therefore it must be bad."

The "Chancellor" of the "Angel Club" explains his/her plan to found an intellectual nation somewhere, populated by exceptional people--a Utopia for overmen.  The plan is to seize an island and run it like a giant university/publisher/order of knights (yep). I can't find anything about the ultimate fate of the Angel Club online because too many strip joints are named that for Google to power through them... but I'm curious.

Other quick notes:

Rebecca West reviews books by H.G. Wells and Hall Caine. I will definitely need to Caine's roman-a-clef about Beatrice Hastings, The Woman Thou Gavest Me: West says it is overly sentimental, but fascinating.

"R.A." (Richard Aldington) contributes a letter from an "imaginary poet" in which he defends himself from an American reviewer who claims that he should include more personal experiences in his poetry.

Havelock Ellis is making a splash. Classics as revolutionary--invoking a sexual emancipation. E.B. Lloyd is eloquent in his plea for understanding of sexuality as a spectrum, cites Whitman.

I need to look up Horace Traubel, an American poet who keeps turning up these days.

The advertisements at the end of the issue announce that Pound's Canzoni by Arnaut Daniel has been published! Bon anniversaire.

The New Age, October 9 1913

This issue is very similar to the last one. Mostly it is continuations of earlier columns. I’ll probably make this one quick.

Pound quote-of-the-month: “Irritation with the general asininity is a passion common enough in great minds, and sufficiently pardonable to the intelligent, but it is not, after all, the highest of human emotions. And scorn, which is a very fine thing indeed, is not the one thing essential."

That’s from his review of the French poet Jammes—who I must look up and read, if only for the ticklish vertigo of Pound’s declaration that “a man reading Jammes about A.D. 2500 might get a fair idea of our life, the life of A.D. 1913.” Ghostly prospective archive!

Pound made me think of Walter Benjamin again with this one: “Jammes’ work resembles the Musee du Louvre more than the Acropolis; but after all, the highest symbols of national desire and of our present civilization are our great picture galleries.” Reminds me of Henry James’ Adam Verver stocking a museum in “The Golden Bowl.""

In “Readers and Writers” Orage explains that The New Age is being boycotted by the other journals because it is too critical. Paranoia? Truth? “I find it necessary to state that I am not complaining on behalf of this journal.”

The best thing in the whole issue? The caricature of Ezra Pound on the last page.

The Masses, October 1913

I’ve finally made it back to The Masses. This issue is fun and refreshing, a breath of red air after much New Age-ing.

One thing that’s important to them as a periodical: they are much, much better at self-presentation than any of the other (the English) journals. Their attitude is much more playful, even as their non-guild socialism has much more of a connection to actual labor crises. Instead of a huffy elitism, they foster an inclusive but intellectual atmosphere. It makes me wish that The New Age was a monthly, or a bimonthly like The New Freewoman. They seem to work themselves bitter.

The first page of each issue is always great—including their editorial statement (I think I covered that in the first post on The Masses) and a few fun micro-advertisements for the periodical itself. This month includes micro-columns labeled “One Less” and “One More.” “One More” is a boost to The Masses from Harper’s. “One Less” is an angry piece from someone who is getting the magazine by accident (or malice): “I do not want it… I am not in favor of Socialism at all… I stand for God and Country, Christianity and Patriotism, and for Law and Order.” This inclusion comes across as cute and tolerant—The Masses inoculates its audience to opposition by making it small and legible.

My 1913 self lives under a rock: I hadn’t heard about the Thaw murder case! Read more here, and in The Masses, who use Thaw’s escape from prison to undermine the biased justice system more generally.

Perhaps the best extended argument in the issue is under the headings “Towards Plutocracy” and “Toward Feudalism.” Here the editor (Eastman, I believe) attacks labor reform by pointing out that business interests overtly call their philanthropic reforms “a good investment.” It takes a small logical leap to see that the investment only makes sense if it is a more pernicious sort of repression—The Masses is on the case.

Quick notes:

There’s a short essay/story titled “Soap and Water” by Leroy Scott, in which he describes an encounter with a homeless and alcoholic working class woman, and how the encounter surprised him. It’s nice because it seems mostly evenhanded, neither romanticizing nor instrumentalizing (as much as possible) the woman in the story. Well, at least its sentimentality is covert.

There’s a dark Poe’s-“Raven”-esque story about a melancholy young man who talks to Death… punchline in the story.

Louis Untermeyer, the great anthologist and minor poet, contributes a positive review of a play, “The Quandary” by J. Rosett.

“What’s-His-Name” by Eugene Wood is the sort of pointed criticism of the Old Testament God that would go viral on high school liberal facebook these days.

The world according to The Masses is one where socialism is in trouble—“The Worldwide Battle-line” recounts some successes, but the general feeling is one of unease. The biggest threat to international socialism seems to be politics—they get sucked into the system and start compromising. Familiar?

The New Age Oct 2 1913

There's a luxury to posting on an issue of The New Age before the next issue has come out.

This issue, though, makes me feel like I'm seeing double (or triple). The last few issues have been remarkably similar. Each is headlined, for me, by a Pound article about a French poet; followed by Beatrice Hastings attacking him in brutal satire. It happens again here, with Pound turning his attention to Laurent Tailhade, Henri de Regnier, and Tristan Corbiere. Really these mini-essays seem quite nice to me, introductions suitable for a literate but not necessarily fluent audience. I kept thinking about how nice it would be to get an update like this about French poetry today. And Orage does the same durn thing in his essays on German poetry in this issue's incarnation of "Readers and Writers." Hastings lets him off the hook, though.

A telling addition to my growing thesis that their attack on Pound comes from their feeling of being threatened by him: the first article in this issue is about how England has already lost the trade war with America in terms of quantity, but can still retain an edge in quality. Hence the asymmetrical attacks on Pound.

TNA also prints a conciliatory essay by Hilaire Belloc, who they usually are happy to maul. He's quite into guild socialism, but manages to put forth a version that protects private property. I sense a swift and stormy response brewing in the next issue...

Romney seems to think that England and France are about to go to war.

Sometimes TNA does make an accurate prophesy. Check out this one about whether or not corporations are people: "The dehumanizing of industry processed pari passu with its development; the joint stock companies, for example, have produced an employer that has no body, but only a corporation, and that abstraction is closely akin to the economic man... the laws of economics tend to become more imperative, to assume the qualities of inevitability and necessity..."

The New Age September 25 1913

A New Age behind, so my report on this one will be a little quick.

Ezra Pound's latest article on French poetry is on Charles Vildrac, and Beatrice Hastings (under pseudonym T.K.L.) continues to parody him ridiculously. EP seems slow to anger, haughtily ignoring BH's lampoons with only slight references to their existence. BH, or rather TKL, is dazzlingly mean. My favorite is this parody of Pound/F.S. Flint/Imagism in general:

A man sat on the kitchen stove;
it burned him severely.
Good-bye! This is where I live
with
my wife and her domestic... (636)

Even though the content is ridiculous, BH shows that she "gets" imagist rhythms, especially in the shifts between pentameter to free verse--she also manages to make it look as bad as possible, with the "with."

Anthony Ludovici attacks artists for "over-production," comparing them to fast-reproducing but primitive bacteria. Alas, his replacement is more mysticism about how a true artist pours so much of themself into a piece that they'd just die if they made more than a couple, etc. etc. Futurists and Pointillistes and their ilk are just showing off new techniques, not genuine novelty.

Well--I'm going to move on to the current week's issue (1913).

Poetry, September 1913

A quick post on Sept's Poetry.

This one wasn't quite as rich as some have been--the real standout is the essay from Ford Madox Heuffer on impressionism and on poetry in general, which provides a window onto his aesthetics. These in turn help to make sense of the incredible range of style and taste in Poetry and in the other periodicals. Expect hilarious qualified compliments to Pound. Heuffer was able to equate Yeats with Walter de la Mare as poets who he used to think silly, but who he now respects. This makes high-school Tyler Babbie happy because de la Mare was one of the first poets I read on my own, and I'm usually embarrassed to like him these days. Also of note--FMH claims to like futurist poetry, pointing to his own circle's work. I wonder when the term dissociates from the English avant-garde and sticks to the Italians.

Other observations:

The paraphrases from Chinese by Allen Upward are pretty great.

The rest of the crop of poems is the exquisitely rhythmic stuff that Heuffer denigrates in his essay... but I'm starting to think that their age was as much an age of poetry-as-craft as ours. I respect the attention to metrical detail, and see how a lot of people could get really into what seems to me like platitudes in dactyls.

The New Freewoman, September 15 1913

This issue of The New Freewoman begins with a remarkable essay on ecological responsibility, Stephen T. Byington's "On Interference with the Environment." The thesis: "If one person injures another by making the material environment unfit for that other's use, the injury should be regarded on the same level with a direct assault on another's person or on the products of his labour. I say 'material environment,' meaning such things as the air, the water, the hosts of birds and beetles and bacteria, not the social environment."

Rebecca West's review of Granville Barker has the characteristic mix of fin-de-siècle pessimism and double-edged compliments that make it seem like there is no good art being made in 1913. She makes me want to read his play "The Marrying of Anne Leete " because she likes it: "There never was written anything quite like it except Tchekov's Cherry Orchard, which it resembled both in the fastidious hands it laid on the sterile and sentimental governing classes and in its Futurist technique" (128). It's interesting to think of Chekov as a Futurist...
 Pound's review of John Gould Fletcher is classic Pound--while not really boosting his friend (who was always frustrated by Pound's self-declared superiority), he manages to make Fletcher come across as a leading poet of English (if not to be compared with the French).

There are a set of poems by Richard Aldington, in the Greco-Imagist fashion. I really do like them for their soft tones--an understated version of what H.D. does so well. Again, that pessimism creeps in at the end of a long prose translation from Moschus: "O Anax Hyperion, golden Apollo, cease thy task of sending mortals light/ and teach this generation not to write" (133). That is also very Poundian, of course--I like Aldington's place in the triad, though. He seems more aware of the repetitiveness of artistic cycles, turning to the Greeks not because they are classic but because they remind him of himself. That's strictly a blog statement, though--I'd have to do some thinking before defending it.

Perhaps most interesting for the purposes of getting a feel for the fractures that exist between my two main journals is the paragraph in Huntley Carter's essay "The Stone Citizen," which takes on The New Age directly. It has given me a few names to research that I hadn't run across before: Samuel Hobson, who Carter says founded Guild Socialism, which he calls "balderdash" (135); Field Marshal Bruce Williams, who sounds VERY familiar (Pound related?), and a "Geddes" who may be this Geddes, but may not. He blames Geddes for the idea that people should be citizens, rather than individuals, "civics" and not "cosmics." That's all very Huntley Carter. He also makes an idenfitication: Romney of TNA is J. M. Kennedy, though the Modernist Journals Project pseudonym database doesn't agree. The similarities in tone between Romney and S. Verdad leads me to agree with Carter, and the MJP admits that it isn't sure who Romney really is. Here's the text: "it has set its handy man J. M. (Julius McCabbage) Kennedy disguised as Romney to reconstruct the British Army with Williams' pale system for pink persons."

Well, we'll see what happens next.




  

The New Age, September 18 1913

The most entertaining part of this issue is:

HASTINGS attacking Pound, in a big way. I hope this is just an opening salvo, and knowing BH and EP and The New Age there'll be some more scuffling before it's over.  Hastings goes after Pound's recent series of articles on French poetry ("The Approach to Paris") and French avant gardes (covered in earlier posts and continuing in this one) in an article titled "The Way Back to America."

Did I mention that I figured out the penname "Hastings?" Her non-pseudonymous name is"Haigh," so it's "Haigh-stings." And how! In this piece, "The Way Back to America," she goes after Pound, hitting him in every chink of his armor: his elitism, his tendency to declare himself writing for small audiences, his habit of quoting a line of poetry and acting as if its virtues are self-evident, etc. Really he gets raked every time he publishes a piece in TNA. His response to the criticism-thus-far is measured: "I have no inclination to argue about these affairs" (607).

His essay on Romains is very fascinating--I feel like reading Romains, now. The end is gracious and heartfelt: "Whatever we may think of his theories, in whatever paths we may find it useless to follow him, we have here at last the poet, and our best critique is quotation." 'Nuff said.

Carl Bechhofer is displaying his classic cheerio pip pip British Imperial racism in his piece on traveling India. If you're into that sort of vomit, read his piece. I don't know why he lacks the imagination to see that it isn't fun to carry someone else's things over mountains, and that if one can negotiate early payment and go home to one's real work, one might just think that makes sense. Not that I am claiming to understand the motivations of the workers who strand him--just that I understand that they have motivations.

Hastings' translations continue to build her persona, as again she and Orage practice subtle laminations of articles to advance their points. Again she uses translations of the Mahabrata to illustrate current rhetoric: this time she casually retells a legend about a rich but enlightened man who avoided a vicious robbery by explaining to the thief that he understood said thief's superiority over the common herd. Punchline? That the thief was the enlightened man's ego all along.

Hastings' contribution to "Pastiche" is, as usual, quite excellent. She's much better at prose than poetry, especially when she adopts a surrealist mode. I believe that "Valerie" is Katherine Mansfield, and "Alice" is BH.

Some notes from Orage's "Readers and Writers"

"Students intent on mastery prefer the original sources; and the general reader is of no account" (601). This makes a researcher's heart warm.

Orage then goes after H.G. Wells. My favorite part is when he says that Wells should stick to "scientific romances" but perhaps not, because "the field is exhausted."

Usually I skip John Francis Hope's "Drama" column, but this bears repeating: "Yet we are inundated with plays of the "Who Shall Win Her?" type, as though it mattered to anybody but the poor devil who succeeded... It is true that one can set men and women on the stage, lying, murdering, seducing, and committing suicide all for the sake of sex; but to those who think that this is drama I have nothing to say." Ha!

This issue was particularly rich and I haven't begun to do it justice, but I must skedaddle on because I'm already two days into the next week and I haven't done this month's Poetry or The Masses or the second monthly installment of The New Freewoman. And I feel like I should be broadening to more journals... these first, though.

The New Age, September 11 1913

It's been a few weeks since I read The New Age, always a risky decision. Apparently I've missed out on the first half of an article by Ezra Pound about how English poetry has been nothing but stealing from the French all along. 

Naturally, this being TNA, they print his article and then make a frontal attack on it:

"But the best thing that Mr. Pound has yet been able to say of Paris is that it contains a little group of café habitués who imagine themselves to be the only Israelites in a world of Philistines" (573).

Alright--fair enough. But the plot thickens very quickly. TNA has taken on an even more desperate air than it had in the past. Orage, the editor and writer of this particular article, moves directly from putting Pound in his place to chastising his readership for not writing praise for the caricatures by Tomt:

"...there was silence.  You cannot imagine, unless you have tried it, what public production under these circumstances means to an artist, be he literary or draughtsman. It is like lecturing to the dumb in a hall of pitch darkness. Riot, I frankly say, would be a better tribute" (574).

The 1913 equivalent of trolling for likes on a friend's Facebook gallery? Note particularly the slipping-in of the literary artist, especially in the context of what comes next. Orage attempts to diagnose the general crappiness of English literature by blaming the authors, reviewers, publishers, and readers in turn--but reserves his most powerful anger for the publishers:

"I have known many obscure writers; c'est mon métier. I know obscure writers to-day who, properly encouraged, could do honour to English literature. I have never known one who, without preliminary jobbery, was approached by a publisher to submit a work for publication. You think, doubtless, that publishers--as it is often said of editors--are "on the look-out" for fresh minds and promising writers. Myth, pure myth! It required a personal 'pull' to procure the publication of the work I referred to the other day as the purest work of genius our brief age has produced."

The rhetorical circuit closes. The crafty craftsmanship of Orage layers obliquely until the real stakes emerge: Pound is wrong because he's too into France to notice English genius, also ignored by publishers, reviewers, and (like the caricatures) readers. This layering of smaller pieces to establish larger positions is extremely characteristic of TNA--it even happens again in this very issue, when Beatrice Hastings launches a multi-pronged response to The New Freewoman and others who disagree with guild socialism--her defense boils down to TNF not understanding them and having silly ideas. I love how the dueling-banjos feel of these two helps them each cast a proper shadow. 

Can't dwell on that right now though--I've gotten work as a copyeditor and my assignment has arrived. Not that I ever edit these posts (forgive any errors, plz).

The New Freewoman, September 1 1913

September is the cruelest month for graduate students--but we've come out of our annual move mostly intact in Bellingham, WA.  After a bit of a stressful beginning, I hope to get back to writing these posts in a more timely fashion. 

I've been reading Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project again--straight through for the first time.  I finished convolute "N" a few days ago, which has given me a new impulse for this project.  I think I'll try to make it more Arcadian--more presentation, perhaps, less commentary, certainly less retrospect.  Naturally there will still be a lot of both because the blog's primary function is still as a scholar's notebook... but I'll give it a try.

"Method of this project: literary montage.  I needn't say anything.  Merely show... the rags, the refuse--these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them" (Benjamin 460).  I'm hardly playing with refuse--but at least rags? 

With that, I'll turn to Sept 1 1913.

1. "Concerning the Beautiful" By Dora Marsden?  Unsigned.

"To read the history of the "Idea of the Beautiful" is the best known way of destroying respect for philosophy.... The reason is clear... [a]n effect is put up as a cause; from the supposed cause, a quality is supposedly abstracted; the supposed abstraction is given a sturdy name and then set free to roam the thin atmosphere of thoughts" ("Concerning the Beautiful, 101). 

This in the context of The New Freewoman's general skepticism toward concepts and "thoughts" as opposed to realities.  Calling Marsden and co. materialists may have angered them: it would domesticate them.  It's worth noting that the essay moves on to figure beauty as an elusive bird, building up an extended metaphor.  It also claims that beauty is "repose," a peaceful state of the soul.  Like Burke and his sublime/beautiful split, I think. [I was right--see below]

After arguing that beauty is food for the soul, which becomes larger and better integrated through beauty, this gem: "As the intrinsic feature of a food is merely that it feeds, ie. that is can be used up in satisfaction of a need, so in the case of what we call the "beautiful," it is everything which overcomes disparateness in the soul, now being one thing, now another.  Sometimes the same thing will fairly regularly answer to the purpose.  Sometimes not.  All depends on the specific character of the need. 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever,' sang Keats.  Not at all." (101-102).  This manages to at once dissipate the power of tastemakers on both sides--the traditionalists and avant-gardists are revealed as part of the same overall experience of soul-feeding.  The twist is the NFW's characteristic hint that not all souls are equal, nor do they require the same food--which of course reestablishes their own claim to elite taste.  A delicate operation with/of power and confidence. 

Beauty must be "sensed, not thought," therefore "effects which primarily belong to a thought-process must be eliminated from the category" (103).  The editor lists three "brands" of this ersatz "associative" beautiful: the sublime, the picturesque, and the seductive.  The sublime is an "intellect-tainted substitute."  The picturesque "intellectualized beauty-fake."  The seductive "is merely the evidence of a suitability in the objective means to a definite objective end" (103). 

The end of the article, with its catalog of fakes, never really establishes what beauty actually is.  Here it seems to contradict the principle established at the start: "The intellectual malaise connected with the sublime the sentimental melancholy of the picturesque, the quickened desires... of the seductive, tend to dispersal rather than to cohesion.  They may have their contribution to make to the soul's need.  The casting forth of seed is as necessary as the reaping of the grain; but for the 'beautiful,' its function lies in the reaping" (104).  So dispersal is admitted as a potential need.  This hedging of the beautiful with the shrubbery of the picturesque (and allies) shows that the fear of dissolution is tempered by acknowledgment of its necessity.  I wish Marsden(?) had followed up on that--perhaps in future essays?

[I'm afraid that the rest of the issue didn't lend itself as well to sampling with commentary--or I just fell back into my old cataloging habits.  Consider the following notes as bookmarks, not finished comments.]

2. "Views and Comments."

Interesting attack on The New Age's guild-socialism, including a takedown of the concept of a "monopoly of labor-power."  Followed by half-humorous linking of NA with Pankhursts, and truly Hastings isn't far off. 

3. "The Poet's Eye," Ford Madox Heuffer.  This is a slightly-changed reprint of the essay from August's Poetry.  Transatlantic timeshifts?  I'm seeing more and more reprints and arguments across my journals--looking across and inwards already ready for canonization?

4. "In Metre," Ezra Pound.  Same review as from Poetry. 

5. "The New School" by Imagistes.  A nice selection of single poems from Aldington, H.D., Lowell, Cannell, Flint, and Williams.  Flint's poem is my favorite.  Williams's the best in retrospect, he's very much playing H.D. here, I wonder if the poem is for her. 

6. "Domestic Studies in the Year 2000": another science fiction anecdote, this one by E. S. P. Haynes.  It's about an old man about to be compulsorily euthanized and his reminisces of the 1913-present. 







  

 

The New Freewoman, August 15th 1913 (placeholder)

I hope to get back to this one someday--but I don't want to fall too far behind.  I read this issue a few weeks ago and it's faint in my memory now.  Notably: Rebecca West throws her support behind Imagism by reprinting Pound's Contemporania.  Remy de Gourmont beings a longer prose project, "The Horses of Diomedes."  Their feminism continues to be relevant: "Views and Comments" discusses the fundamental flaws in arguing that men are motivated by biological lust that they can't be held responsible for having. 

Sorry folks.  I'll write more about de Gourmont as it continues. 

Poetry, August 1913

Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" appears here--and I'll admit that I think it is softly delightful.  You know the one.    Maybe I'm more into it than I thought I'd be because I'm sort of on the same path in some of my poetic work: trying to come to grips with the limits of poetry when confronted with the real, natural, phusi-cal world.  See if this holds water: read it not as a collection of metaphors that are intended to describe a tree, but as a series of failed attempts to poeticize something that can't be versed.  I think that I will never see a poem lovely as a tree, including all the following attempts to put a tree into poetry.  The godly sublime is the only greater factor. 

Skipwith Cannell has his Poetry debut, perhaps his global debut, in "Poems in Prose and Verse."  I am drawn to him because my friend Sarah Higginbotham is a fan.  I'll admit that most of these poems don't work for me--like John Gould Fletcher's work, they seem to be trying to be revolutionary by brute force, by escalation of intensity.  That said, the poem "Nocturne Triste" is pretty awesome in its scale-shifting.  The first line: "The iridescence of sunrise over the ocean gleams on the wings of a fly" ends up being just the first link in what becomes a webbed metaphor with no clear center.  The sunrise is in the fly, the peach is like a girl, but the fly is hovering over trash etc. It's really classically Pound-essay-enacting Imagism, following more of the rules than many more famous poems. 

Ford Madox Hueffer contributes an incredibly timely essay entitled "Impressionism: Some Speculations."  It is a lucid call for poets to write poetry that reflects their own time.  It's the pre-Eliot call for a prospective poetry, or even just a poetry of the present: "Modern life is so extraordinary, so hazy, so tenuous, with still so definite and concrete spots in it, that I am forever on the lookout for some poet who will render it with all its values" (181).  This essay is like a prophecy--the kind of poetry it asks for becomes the standard.  I will teach it next fall because it is so readably rich an articulation of the problem of experimental English poetry in the early 20th.  Modern poetry will be poetry of the "Crowd." 

And of course, I have to comment on Ezra Pound's review of Jules Romains and the Unanimistes.  His criticism is the classic Imagist put-down: Romains, for all his energy, is rhetorical: "very fine and intoxicating rhetoric, no doubt, but as poetry it harks back to the pre-Victorian era, when Shelley set out to propagandize the world" (188).  Excellent, right? 

I just moved, so I'll be catching up on a bit of a backlog over the coming weeks.

The New Age, August 14 1913

This issue of The New Age contains the first protest against anti-Semitism that I have come across in my explorations, "The Folly of Anti-Semitism" by one of the editors (Orage, presumably?), starting on page 449.  It's very disturbing, and very revealing, how much the author has to hedge their position.  The main thrust of the piece is to discredit the Jewish international finance conspiracy theory, and further to discredit the idea that Jews have more money than is proportionate to their population.  So far, so good.  The author also defends Jewish intellectual culture, particularly their left-wing, to which The New Age is (at the moment) claiming alliance. 

But then the bad: there's a lot of very-vintage backpedaling about "intermixture" and "purity of blood and spirit."  This isn't shocking.  I almost wrote about it in my piece on Rebecca West's "At Valladolid," (The New Freewoman, August 1)--but there's a throw-away aside in that story that has the narrator casually say, "We hate the Jews because of their habit of evaluation," going on to explain that Englishfolks are just as bad (67).  Stuck in my craw.  West has the fictioneer's excuse that she's writing characters and not her own views, but it says something about the audience.  I remember  a professor of mine during my undergraduate schooling telling the class that Pound was somewhat of a scapegoat--he was attacked by people who felt guilty for his public airing of their private thoughts.  That seems likely, definitely possible, if not grounds for excuse. 

At any rate, I'm glad The New Age has at least taken steps to combat the more-obviously-bullshit conspiracy theories then current. 


Other moments:

I love it when the journals I read give me a shout-out.  This time, Orage published the financials of The New Age "published, not as an appeal, but as a record for posterity, how soon to arrive I do not know" (458).  They're losing one thousand pounds a year, pretty tough. 

They also review John Gould Fletcher's Fool's Gold.  Remember last New Age, when I was surprised to see him outright panned?  They're just as surprised to really like his second book, going so far as to accuse the publisher of delaying the first one too long.  So he's redeemed.  

Satirical poet P. Selver makes fun of the vogue for villanelles, by writing a crappy one about villanelles.  Ha. 

There's a great surrealist urban short story by Arthur Thorne, "A Modern Metamorphosis," on page 466.  I won't give away what the "organism" is--maybe I should have figured it out sooner, but I was happy when the moment of recognition came. 

Beatrice Hastings, alas, continues "Feminism and Common Sense."  This week's concern: how the decay of English hospitality has made it difficult to marry off daughters.  Complete with totally square anger over dance parties. 

The New Age, August 7 1913

This issue of The New Age has some cool stuff in it.  The anger over the attack on the South African miners continues.  The colonies are on everyone's mind these days: India, the St. Gilbert Islands, Australia, but most of all South Africa. 

That said, I'm not going to dwell on colonial issues--instead I want to examine the strong strain of ecological apocalyptic thinking in this issue, in two science fiction short stories.  Then I'm going to move to cover a few less important things that are notable for the purposes of my research.

First, "The Wild Rabbit" by Mouche, on page 427 (a pseudonym, French for fly) : it is set in the not-to-distant future, as two young women go on holiday from London.  They take the trains out to the country, notable for houses with yards and sparrows (the other birds are all gone, and all birds are gone from the city core).  They are overcome with the desire to see the last living wild rabbit in England, and go to the national park to do so--I won't ruin the punch line here, but it's a pretty amazing ecological story for 1913.  I think the war will squash ecological concerns when it turns up.  "The Wild Rabbit" is in part a scathing satire of the "touristization" of nature, calling out Yellowstone by name as a sort of fraud.

Second, "Speculative Philosophy" by E. H. Davenport, who I cannot trace.  It's much more heavy-handed than "The Wild Rabbit:" through eugenics, humanity has finally perfected itself, and determines to commit mass suicide.  The protagonist reveals that it was all just an attempt to beat God.  At the end, the world breathes a sigh of relief to be through with humanity.  That ecological note again!  Also: the speculative philosophy could refer to the young man's, or the story itself.  Speculative fiction, almost by name, 1913. 

Third, "Two Memories" by Beatrice Hastings.  This is an autobiographical diptych, one which makes me suspect BH may be Mouche.  The first is about finding a hidden and perfectly beautiful glen in Sussex.  The second is about climbing Table Mountain over Cape Town, South Africa.  It fits with the other stories because it ends by describing how the same spot is now being developed into crappy suburbs and a prison. 

To more mundane issue-tracking:

"Journals Insurgent" is useful as showing "The New Age"'s self-image as a guerilla journal that refuses to be assimilated. 

"Readers and Writers" contains a relatively mean review of John Gould Fletcher's latest book, Fire and Wine.  As Fletcher was in outer orbit of the Imagists, I was surprised to read that he's still publishing heavy rhyming love poems. 

Of course, my sympathy for Beatrice Hastings is always strained when she get to feminism.  Last issue contained a letter that called her out for inconsistency in her series of editorials, "Feminism and Common Sense."  This week's edition claims to respond to Morley' criticism, but instead explains that women should be happy with power in the domestic sphere and being pretty etc. I do not understand how she can write so much so well, while also declaring that she wouldn't study with a man, "no not for his immortality." 

Last, there's a nice caricature of Madame Pavlova.

The New Freewoman, August 1 1913

This issue of The New Freewoman is particularly interesting.  The best part is their long and detailed response to the suffragism crisis, including a direct response to Orage and Hastings of The New Age.  With typical hardheaded materialism, Marsden frames everything as a problem of an inequality of power, based in an unequal distribution of property.  The argument runs thus: individuals seek power over their own lives, which is only possible if they have property.  The only way to acquire property is to get if from someone who has it.  Because women have no property, their only option is to sell themselves (echoing an earlier argument) into marriage for security and property (ultimately power).  Because most men are poor, they must sell their labor for the same reasons.  The trouble with liberating women in an unequal society is, that women will not command the high price they used to command (this is Hastings's argument, see last New Age).  The market will tank, so to speak.  If women enter the labor force, they will in turn hurt the labor market and drive down the cost of labor, which will make it harder for working men to support families.  That's the diagnosis from The New Freewoman.  The solution is for people to become aware of their value in the market: "When power becomes more self-conscious, it will make it clear that while dignity and freedom are myths, power is a reality and that it comes from within" (64). I also came across this line, which I know I've heard quoted partially before, perhaps in de Beauvoir?:

"Men had the hunger : the womanly woman was the loaf. So that whereas men had a sex, women were the sex, which regarded as a "commodity," she sold in the best market."

Rebecca West outdoes herself with an excellent short story, "At Valladolid."  It has many disturbing moments, but I am beginning to believe that her contributions to The New Freewoman aren't as autobiographical as I had thought.  Angsty, dark stuff. 

Author "F.R.A.I.," a regular contributor, writes a feminist interpretation of Frazer's Golden Bough, which means that I've encountered both texts that inspired The Waste Land within a month of each other. 

Ananda Coomarswami has been appearing occasionally in many publications: here Huntley Carter gives him a thrashing for introducing sexist Indian holy texts to the misunderstanding West.  Good for contrast, because everyone else seems to like him: he worked on a special supplement to The New Age.  I'll be on the lookout for more about him. 

Plenty of food for thought.  I'm excited to see what the response is...

  

The New Age, July 31 1913

Not a whole lot that caught my eye in this one.  S. Verdad predicts that America is about to annex Mexico.  The always deeply nasty Sevota has a piece about how sad it is that what-we-now-call Apartheid is probably going to get voted down in South Africa.  The house philologist explains that similarities in transatlantic vocabulary prove the existence of Atlantis.  Beatrice Hastings skewers all the also-rans after Robert Bridges wins the poet laureateship. 

The most interesting thing is a letter to Beatrice Hastings about her recent screeds against feminism, in which the reasonable author (one Bertha C. Morely) asks her "tu quoque?"  Props to Bertha Morely, who is brave enough to confront the sharpest pen in England so directly: "I do not seem to have made as clear as I could wish the point that Mrs. Hastings appears to have mistaken the false for the true, and so judges the true by the false." 

Hastings' long response to all her critics, though not specifically Morely, is that she isn't a puritan but is scared that the men will rise up and smash all of womankind by force if they continue agitating for freedom.  It sounds like more outlandish New Age nonsense, but I wonder if this sounded more plausible pre-WWI.  Reminds me of Matt Hofer's Paideuma article on Giovanni Papini's "The Massacre of the Women," in which Papini attempts in Swiftian Satire to suggest that men should just kill all women.  So it's on other people's minds, too--even if less seriously. 

Poetry Magazine, July 1913

This issue has a pair of debuts: Amy Lowell and F.S. Flint.  Compared to the usual Poetry fare, they come out pretty well. 

I'm especially a fan of the second of Flint's "Four Poems in Unrhymed Cadence."  It's of a genre that happens again and again in poetry--the "connection with the beautiful person on the train" poem.  I've read lots, though I'll admit I'm having trouble locating an example--I'll keep an eye out and add when I do.  The best part is the last line, "This is my station,"  where a lovely ambiguity that is tender and tense emerges between the station he's arriving at and the station of his soul, the stations of the cross, duty and the banal blend together.

There's a positive review of Max Eastman's poetry anthology--I'm still waiting for it to show up at the library, but it's cool to have a connection to The Masses. 

There's a less positive review of Jessie Weston's translations of Middle English, notable for me because of Weston's connection with The Waste Land. 

Lastly, a hilarious review of D.H. Lawrence's Love Poems and Others, where he manages to move from "The Love Poems, if by that Mr. Lawrence means the middling-sensual erotic verses in this collection, are a sort of pre-raphaelitish slush, disgusting or very nearly so," to calling him the best English poet under 40 at the time. 
 

The New Freewoman, July 15 1913

The mid-July issue of The New Freewoman is wild.  Here are the headlines from my notes, which I'm including because they should give an idea of just how wild things have gotten--followed by explanations,  etc.  I'm looking forward to reviewing The Masses, where the politics are radical but reasonable. 

1. Democracy is a delusion, tyranny is preferable. Editors.

The libertarian argument here is that someone living under a tyranny knows that they are under an arbitrary system and can therefore act more freely than under a democracy--because in a democracy you cede your moral authority to the majority.  Not sure about that, but in general this article resonated with lots of fringey stuff still going around. 

2. Feminism is a bunch of rotten rhetoric, buy a gun. 

In June 1913 a strike of white South African miners was brutally crushed: see The New Age for an angry and horrified response.  The New Freewoman scorns the mainline suffragettes for writing a letter of protest, instead advocating arming oneself in case it happens in England.  Again, resonance. 

3. The "Cat and Mouse Act" is "exceedingly good government."

Because it keeps people from subverting the rule of law.  I do NOT understand the jump from the libertarian pleas for individual action to the defense of law and order. 

4. Anti-Semitic (but lighthearted) rant about how the Jewsrun England. 

Apparently someone wrote an article titled "What shall we do with our Jews?" in a contemporary publication, with the suggestion that they be given Angola for a homeland.  The New Freewoman laughs at this, calling it the tail asking "What shall we do with our dogs?" and suggesting that the Jews will take over England whenever they want to.  Ugh. 

5. There is an immortal soul, it's ecstasy, and sometimes it makes you kill yourself. 

Rebecca West's third contribution is more of a philosophical essay than her earlier travel writings--she reviews one book that says there is no such thing as a soul, and then another (by Francis Grierson, who keeps popping up) that says there is.  Her opinion is that their is something kind of soul-like, present in the ecstasy of dynamism.  Sort of reminded me of the Futurism+religion. 

6. White Slavery = Marriage

After all, that's what marriage is, right?  In its historical roots?  An entertaining but not at all useful contribution to the discussion of the white slave panic (see earlier posts).

7. The only thing paintable is the realm of the imagination

Huntley Carter describes a modern abstract painting as linked to photography: painting isn't distracted by realism anymore (photos beat them every time), so now it's about art (rather, about Art).  Cool connection to photography. 

The New Age, July 17, 1913

I'm only going to report on Beatrice Hastings's editorial, "Feminism and Common-Sense."  This is a recurring series of letters, and though it is good to have Hastings back, it's always depressing when she writes about feminism.  Her thesis: the establishment feminists are attacking prostitutes because of the decline in the marriage rate, not for moral reasons (remember the White Slave stuff?).  But it's not the prostitutes that are lowering the marriage rate--it's loose women who sleep around and try to be "pals" with men instead of getting married.  Note how Hastings rails against herself.  The fundamental flaw in her argument is that she takes it for granted that men will only marry virgins, though she acknowledges this as a disaster: "the unchangeable little tragedy is that the average man considers a temporarily loose woman a confirmed loose woman... wheras she is liable to prove an immaculate monogamist" (343).  The solution?  A capitulation before nature, a return to "virtue" by which she means sexy feminine mystique: "Mrs. Humphrey Ward was lately jeered at in 'Votes for Women' as suggesting a return to the poke bonnets and flounces, but a woman in a poke bonnet and flounces was a charming mystery... I should say that the craft of wearing clothes is pretty well lost to-day: we are all too busy putting them on!"

Of course, Beatrice Hastings was a fiercely independent woman who was "loose" enough to cut notches in her bed for every man who slept in it.  The contrast is intense, almost too much.  I am fascinated by Hastings--her rough start in life may be leading her to warn women away from her own path, a path that I tend to read as liberated?  More on this as it develops.