Dynamite issue for modernist names, the penultimate New Freewoman.
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.
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