The Egoist Jan 15, 1914

This is one of my favorite issues of The Egoist, but because I am so many issues behind in so many periodicals I will make this response quick, with the hope that someday I'll have the chance to explain all the things that are great about it.

There's a series of letters by James Joyce explaining the trouble he's had in getting a publisher for Dubliners. The upshot is that the publishers are too worried that it will be censored for its immoral content to take it to press. Pound sponsors the letter: he would.

Really though the great and best and wonderful thing about this issue is Richard Aldington. Perhaps in no other time or place does he so display his Aldingtonicity, that wonderful paradox of being the youngest one in the room who therefore has to act like the oldest-fashionedest fuddyduddy: his essay, "Anti-Hellenism," was recently described by me in an essay in the following way:

Richard Aldington demonstrates both sides of this in a recent-minus-a-century issue of The Egoist. Aldington  is representative of the Imagist moment. Among the core-three of Aldington, H.D., and Pound, Aldington appears to have least exceeded Imagism. H.D. quickly grows out of it, even by Sea Garden (a wonderful book) in poems like “Cities” and Pound’s very un-Imagist envoi-poetics in Contemporania already strain at the boundaries of Imagist doctrinal “Don’ts.” Aldington’s poetry is intensely Greek-influenced, and he is a kind of a 1900s Nova Poeta. In the January 15, 1914 issue, he contributes an essay to the journal titled “Anti-Hellenism: A Note on Some Modern Art,” followed by a series of satires of Ezra Pound’s Contemporania, titled Xenophilometropolitiania. In “Anti-Hellenism,” writes a manifesto against being contemporary:

But there are two main kinds of art ; there is the art which is in sympathy with its time, which seeks to express the whole life of its time—that of Shakespeare, for example—and there is the art of Ben Jonson or of Theocritus, the art of men who run counter to the spirit of their time, or rather to the accepted artistic notions of their time. (I have nothing but praise and admiration for the artists and poets who are striving "to render their times in the terms of their times." But I would have them recollect the other kind of art which seeks to create those things which the time has not.) (35).

Considering that his examples of artists who “render their times” is Picasso, Lewis, Epstein, Barzun and Pound, it is an odd point to make because they are usually considered the artists who are adding something to the age. Aldington strategically lays claim to a kind of anti-contemporaneity, founded in simple “Hellenic” wisdom, which incidentally places him in the vanguard and disposes of the avant-garde artists he cites into a sort of vulgar “holding a mirror up to the events of their day.” That he follows this with a series of parodies of Pound creates a kind of poet-critic whiplash in the reader. Satire of recent, uncanonized avant-garde poetics, after all, contains a date-stamp: it is as contemporary as possible while being fully conditioned by the past (recent though it is). Xenophilometropolitania also hardly illustrates the simple virtues that he praises in “Anti-Hellenism.” Aldington, then, is an example of a poet-critic who officially opted out of the anxiety of modernity, but who continued to participate in the modern in his satire. Genre allowed a way in. Rod Rosenquist describes similar situations in Modernism, the Market, and the Institution of the New. He describes “modernist latecomers” as authors who had to reckon with an already-entrenched modernism. Aldington may have been, as the youngest imagist, the first latecomer, and his solution was to ground himself outside of his own time. Ironically, he ended up being characteristic of a moment of modernism. His lumping-together of Pound and Picasso etc. as his antitheses in their contemporaneity shows how he performed the “easy” division of the contemporary and the past, but placed value on the side of obsolescence. 

The best, though, is yet to come: Xenophilometropolitania is his satire of Ezra Pound's Contemporania. I am not such an EP fanatic to know whether he took this very much to heart: I think that Pound was able to take a joke at this point. Look upon his works, ye mighty, and chuckle heartily:

ANCORA.
Rest me with mushrooms,
For I think the steak is evil.

Compare to the EP version from Lustra:

"A Song of the Degrees"

Rest me with Chinese colors

For I think the glass is evil.

Much more where that came from at the MJP. 

I will get this blog caught up, I will!


Edited: I forgot to include this gem:

"Do educated women marry in Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, Tacoma, or San Francisco? They certainly do not. If any man wants to see the most beautiful and vigorous collection of old maids that the sun ever shone upon, I advise him to go and stand on the main street of one of the cities I have named. In an hour's observation, he will see many of the finest-looking women of thirty and thirty-five that any man ever saw; and he will find on inquiry that a surprisingly large proportion of these women have lived most of their lives on the Pacific coast, and have never even been engaged, not to speak of married. He will find that some of the most beautiful have never even been mentioned in connection with a man." R.B. Kerr, The Egoist, January 15 1914