The New Age July 23 1914

I turn to this issue first (before going back to catch up with The Egoist) because I want to see what my window into July 1914 will reveal. The 23rd would have been almost exactly a week before the war began. England will declare war on August 4.

So, of course, "Current Cant" is simply a bunch of quotations from BLAST (a nice selection of the most embarrassing moments,  see the beginning in the image below). Joyce Kilmer is also quoted when he takes a shot at The New Age. 

There's an early English-language responses to Freud's On the Interpretation of Dreams by "M.B. Oxon," who is intrigued but a bit scandalized--"to the dirty everything is dirty."

Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning continues her "Impressions de Paris," intriguingly offering a critique of The New Statesman's response to Blast and Italian Futurism...

The "Press-Cutter" takes a brief shot at The Egoist in correspondence: And, lest
we forget, the other lady’s paper, the ‘Egoist,' prints a letter in which you are ranked with it as ‘ advanced.'
Are you so far behind as that?"

The New Age, July 9 1914, and a note from the blogger

You'll notice that I've fallen down on the job of keeping the blog updated this month. I'll try to fill in some of the gaps--and flag interesting things to return to later.

Naturally the biggest news is BLAST, discussed across many of the journals that I read. Reading BLAST again, this time in context, was a great deal of fun--but contemplating a post that could encompass it has been intimidating. So I haven't. Quick notes would cite Rebecca West and Wyndham Lewis' contributions as ones that I think I haven't paid enough attention. Usually the manifesto hogs it all.

The war starts in two days. The first phase of this project may well be over--my dissertation will be about the avant guerre. I will hopefully be able to continue work on this, though--I am sure that the contrasts of before and during the war will be fascinating, especially as it tends to be discussed before and after, which doesn't take the length of the war into account.

And with this brief note, I will proceed to try a post or two.

The July 9 issue of The New Age has just a couple things I want to point out as important. One is the long discussion of the importance of Archduke Ferdinand in S. Verdad's "Foreign Affairs." He paints an Archduke who was compelled to expand by Germany--one who was not at fault.

England, it is often forgotten, was on the brink of a possible civil war over how to deal with Ireland. "The Religion of Home Rule" by one L. G. Redmond Howard is far more prominent than the discussion of continental affairs. 

R.H.C. (Orage) discusses BLAST on page 229. For further discussion, see the next issue of The New Age (which I may well get around to posting about)

T.E. Hulme writes a nice piece on David Bomberg. My favorite part wasn't about Bomberg, but when Hulme ruminates on the inadequacy of artists to describe their art, an inadequacy that degenerates into hand-waving. He would invent a mechanical device that could be used to make adequate gestures where hands cannot (231). 

All for now...

The New Age, July 2 1914

Edit: I somehow posted this under the wrong date. Remedied.

For once, I have little to report. This issue of The New Age seems mostly unremarkable. Maybe because Blast just came out (they do joke about it in "Current Cant," but even the London Times noticed Blast).

So, quick notes:

"Foreign Affairs" is about the government of India, and not about an immanent world war.

Alice Morning continues her "Impressions de Paris," which continue to be quite well done.

Really, though, very little stood out as worth blogging. Onward.

The New Age, June 25, 1914

So, in real life -100, the Archduke is dead but England hasn't really noticed the oncoming war yet. I need to rewind a little to catch the last issue of The New Age before the assassination:

This issue is significant because of its aggression against the avant-garde artists associated with other periodicals (though many have appeared in its pages). The always-vicious context-free essence of scissor-clipped bile that is "Current Cant" opens with salvos against Pound, Lewis, and Marinetti. I also noticed that they stab at Max Nordau and Holbrook Jackson. Nordau just because he's been cropping up lately. Jackson's more interesting: he was the co-founder of The New Age as a socialist paper, along with Orage, back in 1908. I'll try to dig up the reason for such a breakdown in relations.

I'm going to skim over the other stuff and focus on the issue-wide attack against non-representational avant-garde art.

"Readers and Writers" opens with a discussion of Richard Curle's new book on Conrad (a travelogue of his trip to Greece also occurs in this issue). My suspicion is that this was strategic, because clearly Orage wants to discuss Nevinson and the Futurists more, but doesn't want to dignify them with pride of place. Here's how he opens his analysis of Futurism:

"One of my colleagues  observed the other day that the defect of Futurism  is  that it  is a reaction against Art not against Life. It is a fine critical observation and  I wish  I had made it first. Hearing Messrs. Marinetti and Nevinson the other evening I was  struck by their fury against  their  predecessors  remote  and of yesterday. It was to distinguish themselves from  these  that  it  appeared their  campaign  was  being  undertaken.  This will never  do, for  to  be moved by art  is  just  not  to be moved by life" (181).

Here we see his problem, and it sounds familiar: the avant-garde is a reaction against institutionalized art, and can have no existence outside of this binary. Orage goes on to note that they also claim to have no thoughts about the immortality of their work, which makes it "vulgar." For Orage, the present is not an isolable temporal condition--art must contain the past and the future. Pound agrees in parallel publications in The Egoist, not mentioning Orage by name.

Orage continues: "What perhaps is of value  in  Futurism  is its affirmation of the claim of the age upon art. Use, its exponents say, the material of your own time for your art, for every other is more or less alien. There is something in this; but, once  more,  it  is  a question of insight. To see deeply into one’s contemporary life is to  see life much as it  has  always been and  always will be. Plato writing to-day would write much the same as  Plato  writing  two  thousand five hundred  years  ago. The dialect of truth does  not  alter much."

This is the fundamental difference: the Futurist vision is founded on the uniqueness of the times and the development of individual powers. Orage believes in a stasis of human nature, even across time and culture. 

Moving from Orage's relatively even-handed treatment to Hasting's satire, she takes down Nevinson's address in a segment of Pastiche titled "Wake Up England!" In it, she adopts Nevinson's bombastic voice and moves point by point through his speech, revealing how wrong Nevinson is by contrast. She uses Turner's "Steam Train" as a counterexample to their claims that their art is the only art that represents speed, and yes, "Steam Train" is very prescient of Giacomo Balla, at least. Even cooler, she draws cinema and photography into the discussion, anticipating parts of Benjamin's argument in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" here:

"People should constantly buy new pictures. A picture should never be lived with. Who could live with any picture ever painted ? Live, eating, drinking, sleeping, sitting, smoking, staring every instant at one picture? I, for  instance,  wouldn’t  have the Monna Lisa as a gift! Simply because I have seen her smile reproduced all round Europe. Of course, there is no difference between the smile as painted  by Da Vinci and  that reproduced by the camera ! As an  artist, I stake  my  reputation on this." (185).

She's talking about aura and the destruction of aura through mass production of representations of art, but pseudo-Nevinson's distaste for the real thing because of its proliferation is exactly what's being satirized here.

Last stop, The Egoist. C. E. Bechofer has been writing a mostly-irritating series on "Contemporaries," short sketches of people around London, and in this week's issue he lampoons The Egoist. Alas, the Modernist Journals Project doesn't seem to have gotten the joke, as their catalog lists Richard Aldington as the actual author when this is clearly (signed) satire (even Homer nods?).

(See page 186, or this brief digest):

Marsden for her incomprehensible a-morality
Aldington for his buddy-buddy relationship with people like F.S. Flint and the speed at which he swaps movements
Huntly Carter, for being Huntly Carter: " What is art ?” my Carter-hoarse  critics ask.  Let  me try  to explain to  their feeble intelligences. Art is Soul ! Soul is Art ! Soul is everything! Soul is pine-apples ! Art IS ! Pine-apples ARE !
Lastly, and brilliantly, they satirize The Egoist's correspondents: pinging at Joyce, Havelock Ellis, and The Egoist's tendency to self-celebrate in the correspondence columns.