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.
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