Thursday, June 27, 2013

The New Freewoman, June 15 1913

This post is on the first issue of The New Freewoman, edited by Dora Marsden.

The New Freewoman, The New Age, and The Masses all share socialist philosophies, but interpret socialism very differently (so far).  The Masses seems most familiar, as it is about actual communist strikes, organization, and activism.  The New Age, as I've discussed before, is a really odd duck, perhaps too diverse to be defined politically--but it wants labor to organize into guilds.  The New Freewoman, on the other hand, is a reaction against (yes, against!) the Pankhurst-ian struggle for votes.  The thesis: that women need to free their minds first, and attend to political power later:

"The few individual women before mentioned maintain that their only fitting description is that of Individual: Ends-in-themselves.  They are Egoists.  They are Autocrats, and government in their autocracy is vested in the Self which holds the reins in the kingdom of various arts and desires, and which defines the resultant of these different forces as the Satisfaction of Itself.  The intensive satisfaction of Self is for the individual the one goal in life" (5).

That's still provocative--for me it refigures the connotations of "self-satisfied."  It has the radical appeal of self-reliance, while it runs the obvious risk of complacency. 

Emily Davison got run over by the king's horse earlier in June, 100 years ago.  She was killed, perhaps an intentional martyr, perhaps in an act protest gone wrong (see Wikipedia, it's pretty fascinating).  There's some discussion of her in The New Freewoman. 

The coolest thing in this issue, though, is the essay "Trees of Gold," by Rebecca West.  Check out this passage on the beauty of the Alps: "Rage shivered the mountains into peaks and deep distortions so beautiful that it strained the consciousness to perceive them: one could not fully grasp its beauty because of the limitations of this humanity.  To enter into it one would need to be a mountain.  It was exactly what I had always expected life to be like.  Until now I had always been a little disappointed with things."  I was especially glad to read Rebecca West because a good friend had recommended her to me a long time ago, but I hadn't followed up on the recommendation.  Her writing is beautiful, and at least West admits that she wants to be able to vote. 

Other things worth noting:

"Woman's New Era," by Francis Greirson, fuses individualist feminism with psychic research. 

There are two articles about marriage, including a lengthy and commonsense-based argument for "free love," which actually sounds a lot like American middle class dating conventions these days. 

That's all for now--more soon. 

 
 

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

The Masses, June 1913

I stumbled across The Masses recently while scrolling through the MJP--and I'm so glad.  It's another socialist rag, like The New Age, with a few important differences: it's American, feminist, more recognizably communist, and generally equalitarian. Not so much about guilds, more about strikes. 

This issue begins with an inspiring declaration that it is not intended to make money, that it has "no respect for the respectable," that it will conciliate "nobody, not even its readers."

Topics are covered in short blurbs and longer stories--there are blurbs about strikes, about hunger striking feminists (the Pankhursts), white slavery (of course, but hilariously paired with "Nude Descending a Staircase"), the death of J.P. Morgan, etc. etc.

Longer pieces include a weird surrealist short story by Robert Carlton Brown about a "margonary," part marigold, part goldfish, part canary.

The gem of this magazine is the longest feature, "War in Paterson" by John Reed (beginning on page 14).  Reed went to report on the striking workers in Paterson, only to be unfairly arrested and thrown in jail for 20 days.  I don't think I've read first-person journalism like this--ever?  It's so inspiring, too--the whole magazine makes one want to wave a red-starred American flag (see page 5).  Max Eastman is the editor: I'm going to try to find out more about him. 

Last, a small mystery: the list of stockholders of the magazine includes Hayden Carruth, but he (the poet) shouldn't be born yet (1921).  His father?  Uncle?  Relative?

 

Friday, June 21, 2013

The New Age, June 19, 1913

I miss Beatrice Hastings.  She hasn't written an article in the last few issues of The New Age (unless, of course, I miss Hastings because I miss her pseudonymous publications)The other writers seem largely concerned with cultivating the cold hauteur of English masculine intellect--and their writing suffers for it.  The post on this issue, then, will be primarily historical rather than critical.

It's refreshing when The New Age is intelligently socialist.  I liked the opening article on why poor people shouldn't have to put skin in the game through taxes--it could have been reprinted during the last election.  The thesis: if you take money away from wage earners who are living at a subsistence level, you will have to provide services to make up the gap, which defeats the purpose of taxation.  Of course, it's wages that are the problem--The New Age wants to abolish them altogether.

While S. Verdad and Romney, the international and military correspondents, are often very very wrong, sometimes they really nail it.  This is from S. Verdad: "Everybody knows that Russia is supporting Servia, and that Bulgaria is counting upon the assistance of Austria.  What will happen in the event of a dispute?  May there not be another crisis?  And, if so, war is inevitable" (197). Inevitable because Germany is losing its allies and needs to put up a show of strength. 

On eugenics, The New Age has a common-sense response to Edgar Schuster's book about how England is degenerating etc. etc (209).  The response: nobody knows how heredity really works, or what can be passed down, or how--so why make assumptions?  I wonder how this piece resonates in 2013.  I'll ask my friend and subject-matter-expert Adam Turner next time I see him. 

Remember how Poetry was in ecstasies over Tagore?  Not The New Age.  Awful skewering satirical piece on page 213. 

Henri Bergson seems to haunt everything modern/ist: he gets attacked in a letter to The New Age for being mystical (214-215). 

There's a great caricature of G.K. Chesterton on the back cover.

Last, a quick thought: The New Age  is always quick to run down poets and authors, but the poetry they publish is awful.  I hope someday they explain what they like. 




Saturday, June 15, 2013

The New Age, June 12, 1913

My favorite part of this issue was the unsigned list of instructions for writing modern poetry, which I can't resist copying here:


MODERN POETRY.

HINTS FOR THOSE WHO WOULD WRITE IT.

1. The theme should be as sordid and revolting as can be conjured up in the imagination of the writer.

2. Poetic expression need not be sought. Lines of poetry here and there may be lashed together by masses of commonplace language, Vulgar and slangy expressions. Realism will thus be “ attained.”

3. The writer should never miss an opportunity of inserting an oath or profanity, thereby avoiding a fatal insipidity; especially for the sake of rhyme or of botching up a halting metre. It is well to bear in mind that the writer need not hold himself responsible for the utterances of his creations.

4. The rules of metrical composition need not be observed. Whatever the metre chosen, the verses may lack or be in excess of the prescribed number of feet for such metre, according to the pleasure of the author. Any tag will do for a rhyme. Prepositions and conjunctions are now allowed to be quite perfect rhymes, and, for the sake of rhythm, the back of a sentence may be broken in whatever place the poet chooses.

5. In the old term “ poetic licence,” the significance of the latter word may be extended to include all phases of its meaning.


This issue has several frontal attacks on modern poetry--there's another attack on Yeats, with Pater and Wilde thrown in for special scrutiny.  Frost's "A Boy's Will" is called "idle rubbish" in the reviews section.  They even print a letter attacking their correspondent, Richard Aldington--accusing him of rudeness.  The New Age thrives on controversy, and it's always fun to find things like this. 

Is there any chance Eliot read the instructions for modern poetry and decided to attempt to follow all of them?  I'm being facetious, but I like reading The Waste Land through these rules.  I'll make a lesson out of it someday: it's good to emphasize that modernism emerged against massive resistance, and even sometimes-allies could be enemies.  This is close to Ann Ardis' thesis in Modernism and Cultural Conflict.  Which is more a note for me than for you.  Oh public notebook. 

Thursday, June 13, 2013

The New Age June 5 1913

A quick report from this issue:

The New Age is covering catastrophes and atrocities these days: the Balkan wars, the Irish famine (a retrospective piece), wage slavery in England, a scandal in the Gilbert Islands, and of course faint rumblings of the impending WWI.  Oh, and graduate school reform. 

Turning to that topic, Ezra Pound concludes his three-part series with a few delightful observations.  First, I love this one: "Some triple-X idiot of an editor has boomed a bad poem and called it worthy of Shelley.  As if Shelley the revolutionist Republican, propagandist, writer of canzoni, would, were he alive in 1913, be content with the same mannerisms of expression that suited him in the year of grace 1813."  Readers should notice why this particularly delights me.  At least, it inspires me to work.  Other parts of his article aren't so great, but I thought it would be worth recording that artist-hipsters have been around for at least the last century--Pound complains about how artists are vegetarians and simple-lifers, rather than master craftsmen (emphasis, perhaps, on craftsMEN). 

This, though, is most precious: "Not only must the artist be able 'to look any damn man in the face and tell him to go to hell,' but he must be able to do this quietly, seriously, without needless bravura or bombast."  That goes out to my old bandmates at the University of Maine.

My favorite part of this issue, though, was the short satirical piece "Futurism in Food" by Lionel de Fonseka.  You may notice that his Wikipedia page has been updated by some other MJP-head, judging by the links attached.  It's the account of a visit to the Post-Impressionist Restaurant and then Moderno, the Futurist restaurant.  It's especially hilarious because many of the goofiest things about Moderno have come to pass in the foodie movement: "We believe that every emotion can be rendered gastronomically, and there are immense possibilities in food as a medium of expression.  What is art, after all, but conscious expression?"  My favorite part was at the end, though, when they are feeling cynical, and so are fed caramel.  I'll leave the punchline to the story itself, and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a laugh at the Futurists (as all good Futurists do). 

Because the perfect connection between the two pieces above is too perfect to resist: the advertisement on the last page of this issue is for a restaurant offering "a simple-life, pure-food, non-flesh luncheon."  Enjoy. 




 

Saturday, June 1, 2013

The New Age, May 29 1913

The gem of this issue is Ezra Pound's continuing piece on the state of the American system of higher education.  He calls for what sounds a lot like an MFA program to be established in New York City, and it sounds really great.  The biggest difference being that one's tenure in the program would be based on artistic performance--I haven't heard of anyone being expelled from an MFA for writing bad poetry.  But then, what is bad poetry?  E.P. calls (predictably) for originality and knowledge of contemporary art to be the primary qualifications for entrance into the "super college" of 100 multimedia artists.  Also intriguing is the idea of having great artists brought in to "abuse the bad work of the fellows of the college, or to commend it on such rare occasions that any of it seemed worthy of commendation."  So, the art college isn't just about quality, after all.  There's a paradox between wanting artists to feel more comfortable (with a salary) and wanting them to be under pressure to produce good work.  At the end, he writes that this is not "a passing fancy of the hour."  The Ezuversity in embryo? 

Also in Pound-related news (circa 1913): Orage reviews a translation of Japanese NO (sic) plays, by Dr. Marie Stopes, a badass writer, translator, poet, women's rights activist, and paleobotanist.  The book is available here.   Pound's translations of the Noh plays (from Ernst Fenollosa's notebooks) are favorites of mine--I'm going to try to find a play he translated in Stopes and compare it to his version.  A quick hop to JSTOR led to this tantalizing tidbit in an article by Roy E. Teele in Contemporary Literature: "Stopes wrote to friends of [Pound's] delight in the materials he had found in Ernst Fenollosa's manuscripts" (346).  I'm going to do some follow-up work, will report anything cool I find.  The New Age's thesis about the plays would have piqued Pound's interest: that the reason the plays seem odd is because they have a subtle, aristocratic morality: "unless you're on the level of the author, you miss everything--as you deserve to do."  Sound familiar? 

Of a more personal interest, right next to the NO plays is a review of a Maeterlinck play about Mary Magdalene.  A negative review.  It points readers to the source: Mead's translation of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.  This intrigues me, because Mead's translation was mostly off the radar until the Nag Hammadi codex sparked interest in all things Gnostic.  I've been curious for a long time about H.D.'s sources for the gnostic elements in Trilogy, especially the ways her poem seems to quote lines that were only dug out of the desert years after the poem was finished.  Maybe Mead has the answers--and the close proximity to Pound gives a logical path-of-influence.

I love reading this way, but I worry that a Poundian proper would be able to point to all my little discoveries having been made before...

The New Age complains about all the other little magazines that are coming out... ha.  They run down The New Freewoman before it has even printed its first issue!  I'll look forward to that issue, coming out in two weeks 100 years ago.  I'm also really glad it's starting during the summer-of-exam-reading, and thankful for my advisors who have allowed me to make this project part of my PhD exam list. 

Lastly, at least The New Age has the decency to print the feminist counter-attacks to their misogyny.  Very reasonable, very angry letters to the editor--and they seem more on the right side of history.  This actually ties back to Stopes a little, because there was a whiff of misogyny in the review of her book.  J. M. Kennedy writes a passionate rebuttal of the idea that women-intellectuals are somehow subpar.