The New Age, January 15th 1914

This issue contains the continuation of two squabbles between (relatively) famousmodernists, and as rereporting of said spats are the house specialitie of this blog, I will go back before I go forward so that my kind reader can get the whole picture of both of these duellos (whether they are finished or not, I'll be able to say soon).

First, Richard Aldington vs. Beatrice Hastings, in a proxy fight between The New Freewoman and The New Age. Especially if BH is behind TNA's "Current Cant," which I quite suspect given her delight in malice. "Current Cant" quotes the most ridiculous things anyone has said over the last week, always out of any context but the context of "Current Cant" and its iterations. In the 1 December issue of TNF Aldington wrote an article about medieval confusions over the identity of Homer, with a satirical moral attached that "we should always believe what we read in books." Clearly, in the context of the piece, intended ironically. 

A New Age or two ago (12/18/13) Aldington's moral was quoted in "Current Cant." At the time (+100 years) I was kind of surprised, since it showed that TNA's compiler of "Current Cant" missed the joke. Of course RA and TNA should be on good terms, as they printed a long series of articles of his about a year ago, about his travels in Italy. Perhaps the shots that TNF was taking at TNA inspired some comeuppance? Aldington was quick to defend himself in the correspondence section of TNA, I'll quote his letter in its entirety because it might be among his greatest work:

"Sir--That extra threepence is proving your ruin. Where is that vaunted sense of irony? Is it likely that I--I who have seen you face to face--would ever write seriously such a phrase as “we should always believe everything we read in books”? I will not ask you to reprint the whole of the article to which I appended that phrase as an ironic moral ; it was obvious to the dullest mind that after the utterly incredible statements contained in the work I translated my remark could only have been in irony. Perhaps, though, your compiler’s knowledge of Homer was such that the irony was not apparent?" 

Note the gender inflection of "Sir" and the insistence on physical proximity, which is either another subtlety or lets some of the air out of my "Cant" is by Hastings theory. More importantly, the smear on whoever-it-was's knowledge of Homer is pretty much as close to a glove smack as you get in a modernist periodical. 

Which brings us to to Jan 14, where T.K.L. (who is definitely Hastings) responds to Aldington in an epigram in the weekly "Pastiche" segment. I won't quote it all, but it's mean, starting by calling him "O sub. for a Freewoman," cutting both his face and TNF's with that gender ambiguity (double ambiguous considering the author of the epigram). She goes on, accusing him of slipping back into his "natural flowerish and roccoco sentimentality" in his work for TNF. Then there's a slap at Pound and him as a unit, good enough to quote: "If, like a more celebrated, but also departed, contributor, you have habituated men to expect folly from your pen, you can only appear twice ridiculous when you come protesting ’twas irony you were Intending." 

That's a pretty deft defense, but as a third party fond of both parties involved, I have to say that the right is with Aldington here. He was misread and misquoted by TNA. They whack him again in the correspondence section, when the author of "Cant" plays on Aldington's not taking a "moral" seriously (hence, he is immoral). Pretty dumb. I hope RA comes back at them.

Second spat: Wyndham Lewis vs. Anthony Ludovici. This one's not nearly as fun. In fact I might not cover it after all. Ludovici said something about Epstein that wasn't particularly nice, Lewis responded last TNA with two quarts of raw venom defending his friend, now in Ludovici claims that Lewis misunderstood him. We'll see if Lewis comes back on that score. Do note, though, that Lewis writes for "The Egoist" now. 

Turning from Ludovici scrappin' to his art criticism (even if Lewis thinks it is dreck):  I just finished Lawrence Rainey's "Institutions of Modernism," and while I don't agree with much of his final chapter on H.D., I learned a lot from the book. One thing to consider: in Rainey's explanation of fascist philosophy, Rainey assembles various sources and paints a picture of a philosophy without a theory, based on results rather than ideas. Terrifying in retrospect. Compare, though, with Ludovici on art: "If the history of the last hundred years of European Culture ever comes to be written, it will be found to consist chiefly in the record of a general reduction in the power of ideas over facts." He then claims that facts, empirical data, are piling up too fast for people to filter them (familiar complaint), which leads to a problem because "it is impossible to interpret or even to “place” 

facts properly without true ideas, and you cannot distinguish false from true ideas without deep intellectual culture." Guess what the solution is? A "superior man" to do the thinking for the people. Fascism in England, 1914. 

T.E. Hulme reviews archaism in modern art in a column titled "The Grafton Group." Interesting in part because of his rejection of "new" as a measure of quality, and his careful distinction between different movements in art. 

Beatrice Hastings includes an edition of "Tesserae," this time a pro-spirit anti-mechanistic plea against the liberation of women. A parrot was on my shoulder while I read this, and by changing every instance of the word "woman" to "parrot" I found that, as I am very fond of said parrot but do keep her caged for her own benefit, I found much of the article reflected my approach to parrot-care. If women were parrots it would make perfect sense. Ridiculous.

The Egoist, 1 Jan 1914

The first issue of The Egoist, and it is an exciting prospect in multiple senses: prospect as a sight, as a verb for extracting ore, as something to behold while it grows. Of course it's not really any of those with hindsight.

There's a lot to cover in the issue.

The first thing to catch my interest is the very New-Agey "Views and Comments" (a title that could be plagiarized from TNA, or pastiche'd together from several regular columns). It's applied political philosophy, and a spat with a former contributor. Stephen Byington started writing about "Interference with the Environment" some months ago (see earlier post), and lately has gotten swept up into controversy with the editors (who continue to print his stuff, their rebuttals, and his rebuttals to their rebuttals, a strategy that could also be lifted from TNA). The attack itself is not that interesting and seems more like a sophisticated dodge of the issue by claiming the terminology of the debate is wrong, and that the scope of the debate is too narrow and misfocused. That's pure New Freewoman there.

Anyway, my favorite part of this isn't about Byington at all but about a book on economics they review (shred) by one Henry George. George claims that taking interest on loans is moral because it rewards prior labor. Unfortunately, his example is taking care of a cow in return for milk, etc. The Egoist points out that this is the exact relationship management has to labor, a "trick played on a slow-tempered beast" that steals from its offspring and kills its offspring for veal. A very deft volte-face.

Edgar Mowrer's review of thinkers from France is a bit over-the-top but good to read as it seems that translated French philosophy acted as a kind of shibboleth in the early 20th as it does now. Notes on Bergson especially.

Wyndham Lewis continues his streak of appearances in the periodicals I've been reviewing with "The Cubist Room," an account of an English avant-garde exhibition of paintings. It is especially interesting to me because it begins a trend of nationalization of futurism. That's glib--what I mean is that Anglo-modernists attempt to steal the term "futurism" from the Italians and make it general. Here's what I mean: "Futurism, one of the alternate terms for modern painting, was patented in Milan," opens the article (8). Note the snide edge to "patented." Lewis goes on to claim that Italian Futurism in painting is just "five or six Italian painters" rather than a more powerful "movement" (Marinetti's term for it). Lewis points out that Gino Severini tends to paint contemporary scenes in futurist style, style which cannot change the subject matter into something futuristic. He then explains the competing term "cubism" by similarly rendering it specific to Cezanne and his followers (though it still extends to the artists in question). Then, suddenly, he seizes "futurism" and makes it general: "To be done with terms and tags, post impressionism is an insipid and pointless name invented by a journalist, which has been naturally ousted by the better word " Futurism " in public debate on modern art" (9). It hadn't, as far as I can tell. "Naturally" ousted indeed. The exhibit of artists Etchells, Hamilton, Wadsworth and Levinson [sic, he meant Nevinson]  appears like a volcanic island, described thus: It is very closely-knit and admirably adapted to withstand the imperturbable Britannic breakers which roll pleasantly against its sides." An  image of the crowd at the show, but also of the essential Britishness of these artists.

Porrex and Ferrex, two pseudonyms that seem vaguely familiar (Pound and Aldington perhaps), will have occasional debates in the journal. I'm going to capture a quick moment from this one for my own purposes (comparison to Lawrence Rainey's Institutions of Modernism): "We have gone our own gait—and they call that "neglecting life," and "devitalising one's writing." There is some excuse, even for Monsieur Marinetti, not much—but a little" (10). The accusation of neglecting life or bringing art back into a relationship with life, prefigurations of Burger's theory?

F.S. Flint publishes some very fine Imagist poems in this issue (is there any other kind?). 

Richard Aldington pens an appreciative but sexist and patronizing review of Violet Hunt.

Correspondence is silly, including a fake letter in Cockney written to satirize Huntley Carter.

All for now.

The New Age, Dec. 18 1913

A quick rewind to pick up a dropped stitch: I skipped posting about some issues of The New Age last December.

This issue, though, has just been mentioned in the book I'm currently reading, Wallace Martin's 1967 The New Age Under Orage. Martin notices a significant moment in the issue during his discussion of Orage's editorial methods. Here's what Martin says:

"Occasionally he commented on the proportion of the magazine devoted to each aspect of culture and indicated the balance that he hoped to achieve. In 1913, to cite one instance, he editorially sought contributors who could keep the magazine informed of recent developments in science, an Italian literary correspondent (there were regular contributors responsible for nearly all of the other languages of Europe), and someone with "a talent for expository philosophy" (42).

That seemed significant enough to track down, especially as it fell within my time-space.

I'll focus this post on Orage's "Readers and Writers" column and correlating it to Martin.

First, the part of the column quoted by Martin comes as the final section of a very large "Readers and Writers" that covers everything from futurist formal poetics to Yeats' relationship to Tagore (I'll summarize both in a moment). At the end, Orage's appeal to his readers is more complicated than editorially seeking contributors. He first buffs TNA by pointing out that its financial situation (being supported by patronage) has allowed it to give its contributors the freedom to select what they publish, augmenting that by tantalizingly mentioning that several recent columns have grown out of correspondence. I look somewhat askance at this because the magazine thrives off of printing controversial correspondence, often written by wingnuts.

After that, check out his advice on how a contributor should choose their contribution. After saying that the magazine has needs for contributors, he writes:

"To enumerate these needs it would be necesary in our own case to number the lacunae in THE NEW AGE as a journal of universal ideas; in short, to attempt the impossible. Contributors, however, have a good criterion in the specific contrast between what the journal would be if they were conducting it and what it is. Surely such a comparison should stimulate creative suggestion" (210).

He invites his contributors to create fantasy-New Ages, to put themselves in an imaginary editorship, and then invites them to try to make it happen. That's pretty cool. It also strikes a likeness between the reader, the correspondent, the contributor, and the editor, a coinage that allows for easier transactions between each group (an alternative economy).

Martin doesn't note that Orage is asking, but I don't think he gets what he asks for. The proportions are set, some lacunae identified, but they remain unfilled (as of early Jan 1914).

Ok: Tagore and Yeats, according to Orage: Yeats promoted Tagore as a kind of self-flattery, knowing that any glory accrued by Tagore would find its way back to him. But both are just passing fads: "The indecent debauch is now over or nearly over, and one by one the victims of Mr. Yeats’ frenzy will awake to discover that their discovery was illusory" (209).

Futurist form: Orage reports on a lecture by Henry Newbolt entitled "Futurism and Form in Poetry." The relevant chunk: They imagine that the old forms are incapable of expressing the modern ideas and should be broken up and replaced by new forms... [which] is wrong; for form and ideas are not separable in art but only in logic... Mr. Newbolt attacked the Futurists on the ground that they regard form as an ornament, a decorative superfluity to be expunged, a worse heresy... Thankfully, the result of heresy is ugliness" (209).

The Masses, Jan 1 1914

The biggest news in this issue of The Masses is that Max Eastman and Arthur Young, two of the editors, are being sued by the Associated Press for criminal libel. Apparently AP doesn't take kindly to the accusation that ME and FD made in an earlier issue: that the media was skewing coverage of the Paterson strike in favor of the employers. They are calling on their readers to support them in their case, particularly by drumming up public opinion in their favor. I'm worried about them... we'll see how this pans out. Criminal libel for claiming that the media is biased? That law must have come off the books at some point, no?

Floyd Dell offers a review of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles A. Beard, which he compares to Vebelen's The Theory of the Leisure Class. The thesis of Beard's book is that all the men behind the U.S. Constitution were wealthy property owners, many were speculators--and that their purpose was to enshrine private property inviolably in law. They quote (and I do too) the following damning bit from Madison: "Madison even foresaw the rise of a landless proletariat, and explained how the Constitution would 'secure private rights against the danger of such a faction and at the same time preserve the spirit and form of a popular government.'" Socialists should be skeptical of the constitution.

"Homer and the Soap-Box" is another socialist retelling of the Theristes story from the Illiad. The classics find their way into everything circa 1914.

Kshama Sawant has brought overt socialism back to Seattle after a long hiatus, but there's a brief note about my current city's somewhat disappointing socialist convention: the hard left seems to be capitulating to the more moderate unionizers. However, the article ends with this, which I shall take to heart: "There is hope, even in Seattle."

There are other pieces--but I think those are the ones that most caught my interest. Robert Carlton Brown includes a satirical Christmas story, but I liked "My Margonary" a lot more...

The New Age, Jan 1 1914

Happy new year of New Ages.

I'm going to hit a few high points rather than give an exhaustive summary of this one.

First, there's an article by painter Charles Ginner  about the state of art (state of the art?). He claims that post-Impressionism is an academic wrong-turn, merely making impressionism into a formula. Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin--these were brilliant because they transmuted nature through their individuality. Matisse and the cubists--fools for thinking they could rip off the formulas of the former. Ginner's just as upset by naturalism, though: "Naturalism  is a kind of poor relation of Realism. It is the production of a Realist with a poor mind. A mind that  goes to search out and  reveal  the  secrets of Life and  Nature,  but  has  not  the power to find. Naturalism is the photography of Nature" (271). Reminds me of passages in Benjamin's Arcades Project where photography is a derogatory term.

Related to this, a letter to the editors from "An Actor" on page 280: "The majority of playgoers will not agree with me when I state  that  the performance of a bad play  by bad actors is. a more important  contribution to life than a great  play presented photographically upon the screen by a   company of excellent actors. But I am justified in making this statement because personality cannot be photographed. The living organism is more vital than its reproduction by mechanical means. Personal magnetism is inseparable from the  man himself and  cannot  radiate from a photograph."

These two passages curl back into an earlier piece about the crisis of mechanization and industrialization, "The Machine Problem" by Arthur Penty. It's about alienated labor, mechanical production, the relationship between proletariat and product: machine production requires no imagination, either for the worker or for the factory owner, and therefore neither profession attracts imaginative people. Workers who would have been craft-artists are crushed in the monotony of their labor, while managers who can stand to manage boring factories end up patronizing boring art, damaging the imaginative professions indirectly.

These three articles triangulate a point of view, an aesthetic, a politics. More on this someday.

The New Freewoman, December 15 1913

The New Freewoman turned into The Egoist this time 100 years ago. I'm going to jump back into the last issue before moving on. 

Allen Upward opens the issue with a short story about a runaway slave who becomes a human sacrifice--very Golden Bough, Waste Land. Eliot didn't pretend that WL emerged from a vacuum (au contraire), but I haven't seen anything connecting him with Upward yet. 

More generally significant, the editors present a detailed account of their decision to change the name of the journal. Upward, Pound, Aldington, Huntley Carter, and Reginald Kauffman sent a letter asking them to change the name of the journal because the journal name of The New Freewoman "causes it to be confounded with organs devoted solely to the advocacy of an unimportant reform to an obsolete political institution." The magazine's individualism positions it against democracy and against feminism. Marsden and Shaw (presumably, though they usually write these editorials in the plural) respond by agreeing. I'll quote the relevant chunk:

"In adopting the neutral title THE EGOIST and thereby obliterating the 'woman' character from the journal, we do not feel that we are abandoning anything there would be wisdom in retaining. The emphasis laid on women and their ways and works was, as was pointed out in the early days of the first FREEWOMAN, more in the nature of retort than of argument. "Feminism" was the natural reply to "Hominism," and the intent of both these was more to tighten the strings of the controversy than to reveal anything vital in the minds of the controversialists. What women could, should, might, would do if they were allowed was the retort to those who said that such things they could, should, might, would not do and therefore should not be allowed."

They follow this up with an odd philosophical statement: people are not confined to their bodies, but neither are they infinite. The metaphorical language could be from one of John Gould Fletcher's Irradiations, published in Poetry's December issue:

"With a million tentacles they invade the world of appearance; pierce, scour, scan, scoop up as with a mighty arm the panorama of the world: but they return an army laden with spoil always to their own. They have lost nothing of their individualised uniqueness in their excursions. They have scooped impressions from that with which they have had contact all they were capable of assimilating: but they have in no way merged their identity in what they have fed on: rather they have intensified it: made the distinctness from all that was not of itself more definite."

The reason this is important to point out: the Eastern philosophy that encourages humans to try to return to the One is completely and specifically rejected. 

Check out the article itself, though: that's just a very quick summary. 

Perhaps appropriately, they follow that with a selection from Herni Bergson's Creative Evolution. It's a difficult text, perhaps because it is an excerpt, but my quick inadequate summary: he looks back to Zeno's paradoxes in order to critique traditional western logic. While we are accustomed to think of states of being (like adulthood) as identifiable, actually they are ongoing processes. By thinking of processes instead of states, we come closer to reality (though farther from intuitive logic). 

A columnist identified only as "R. S." contributes a skewering of the British Academy, huzzah. I'm getting sick of meanspirited satire, though this one actually did make me laugh. 

Pound reviews Heuffer, mostly positively, singling out his rhythms for special praise. 

Huntley Carter, despite shared billing on the letter to change the title, lashes out against Pound and Imagism (though they remain unnamed) in an article titled "My Hypothesis." I'm curious whether Pound went after Carter somewhere--I'll look around the MJP to see, because this feels more like vigorous self defense than an attack.