The New Age, January 21, 1915

As I've written before, The New Age is a relentless experience. Every week,

Beatrice Hastings' weekly "Impressions of Paris" continues. She opens with a portrait of a city gone "mad" with "Christianism" and "the illicit sale of cocaine and haschish," (308). This leads her into a kind of prophecy of the Lost Generation's cold modernism. After the war, the youth will be "stark awake" to the powers of the world:

"The new youth of the world will not likely be Christian. It will be instructed, undeceivable, cold to religious frenzy as to all other feminine freaks of the solar plexus. Hyperborean, perhaps, is the description for this cold youth, la jeunesse froide. The enemies in art will be the dry, cold men, arid men who have nothing to do with the hyperborean, men who arrive at the ice, who, perhaps, even surpass it, but who never see the Pole even when they find it, knowing no more than to plant the flag of their special cult, and get back." 

Note the language that presages T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men." Also, note the somewhat confusing double-use of "cold" to describe both the heroic jeunesse froide and the "enemies in art." The distinction seems to be what one does at the Pole--do you inhabit it, or merely explore it, colonize it, and depart? Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning's beloved brother was a polar explorer, surely she has him in mind here on some level. I can't quite gloss it, yet. 

Of greater general interest, she picks up her feud with Ezra Pound immediately after the passage I quoted above. "I almost was about to believe, while reading his article 'Affirmations,' that Mr. Ezra Pound was about to wake up. But he sank quietly deeper on the pillow in his final paragraph, which is only an affirmation that he is a hopeless cultist. Bless my heart, Vortices and the Quattrocento!" 

This is an interesting moment. Here's the final paragraph she's referring to (see above post for a summary of the content of last "Affirmation," and below for the next):

"Note that I am not trying to destroy anyone’s enjoyment of the Quattrocento, nor of the Victory of Samothrace, nor of any work of art which is approximately the best of its kind. I state that there is a new gamut of artistic enjoyments and satisfactions; that vorticist painting is not meaningless; and that anyone who cares to may enjoy it" (278). 

My ears prick: I think that Hastings is missing the context of this piece, which is at least partially "The Origins and Manifesto of Futurism," in which Marinetti writes that a race car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. That passage in Marinetti always struck me as a weak point anyway, considering how much Boccioni's sculpture resembles the Victory. 

(Boccioni for comparison)

Hastings is taking a response as an isolated statement. I'm quibbling with the dead at this point. More important is the fact that Hastings cites Matthew Arnold as the source of Pound's basic point about the limits that time and space place on creativity. I should probably track this down at some point and see if she's right--a quick initial survey turned up an essay in my old home Paideuma, "Matthew Arnold and Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading" by L.H. Palmer, 1973.

Last BH note for the week: she attacks Upton Sinclair pretty hard for his letter from last week. 

On to the "Affirmation" itself: this one is classic Pound-as-Promoter, titled "Jacob Epstein" and is largely about Epstein's sculpture. It has some weirdness about how people prefer caressable art, but prefer caressable people to caressable art. Real art, though, is about form--and Epstein is, according to Pound, a master of it. Characteristically, he exhorts his readers to test his writings against the actual artwork. It's hard, though, to quote a statue--and it's been a long while since TNA printed an image. 

C. E. Bechhofer has been writing about his current journey in Russia--I haven't been covering them much because they haven't piqued my interest until now: he creates an extended analogy between the young poets and writers in Russia and how a Russian would see the young poets and writers of England. Richard Aldington comes off particularly poorly as one of several poets writing "good for nothing scribblings" (314). He then complains that he can't find a Russian New Age, just a lot of Russian Aldingtons. Which is particularly funny, because...

...in the correspondence pages, the last letter is a tiny one from Aldington, which attacks Pound and his "Affirmations." I was under the impression that they were still friends at this point (need to correlate with a biography), but not anymore: he figures Pound as a modern huckster Priapus, obsessed with selling sculptures, the phallus, artistic schools, and ancient instruments. References from "Affirmations" abound. "I have abandoned my hobby of joining artistic movements," protests Aldington. 

I'm running out of time, but not out of material! Bless the Archive!

Willard Huntingdon Wright, art critic and detective novelist, contributes a history of avant-garde painting up to the present. Fascinating stuff--he finds most of the gains of the a-g already present in impressionism, and taps synchromism as the most advanced of the day. A good quick read for an orientation (starts page 317). 

Quick Notes:

The editor/Orage/R.H.C. again exhorts his readers to take The New Age as a whole, with each part weighted equally (313). Some of Pound's later all-encompassing rhetoric in that. 

 S. Verdad, the foreign policy writer, worries at the end of his weekly essay that England and the USA might go to war. 

Marmaduke Pickthall reveals the British support of pan-Islamism.

In the correspondence pages, there's a very odd situation: apparently, the London Daily News' James Douglas wrote a piece on the concept of a 1950s Englishman writing to an American about the American war with Germany. One Harvey L. Fenwick writes a hilarious rejoinder from a speculated 1950 American, calling out the Englishman's hypocrisies. I searched briefly for the original, but haven't found an archive yet... sorry, this one is probably more helpful to me than to you, dear reader. 

The New Age, Jan 14 1915

At this point in 1915, The New Age's primary preoccupation seems to be establishing a hierarchy of cultural achievement--article after article about the relative placement of world cultures appear, often to the end of placing Germany at the bottom (or at least among the other barbarians). I tend to glaze over this rot.

Ezra Pound, by contrast, seems subdued and rational in his second installment of "Affirmations," this one on vorticism. He begins his piece by thanking TNA for its open editorial policies, as opposed to those journals that threaten a writer's income if they disagree. This has been noted elsewhere (it escapes me at the moment): Pound was one of the few authors that TNA paid regularly, because Orage knew that Pound had little other income.

Turning to the essay itself: it is so very different from BLAST. Pound lays out the vorticist philosophy "quietly, lucidly, and with precision," or so he claims (277). Main points: vorticism takes the best from each artistic medium: "We go to a particular art for something we cannot get in any other art." This is a plea for purity, and also applies to philosophy. Content doesn't matter--only arrangement--"When a man begins to be more interested in the 'arrangement' than in the dead matter arranged, then he begins 'to have an eye for' the difference between the good, the bad and the mediocre" in international and avant-garde art.

The most revealing part, though, is when he describes the psychotropic effect of art on life. First, Pound explains that impressionism taught him to see the world in terms of color: that shadows have color, that the side of a face turned away from the light has entirely different colors than the other side. Vorticism, he explains, is like this, but for forms and motifs of forms: you can engage with what was previously ugly in life in terms of form, as in the way the sky interacts with rows of buildings or (prophetic to the Pisan Cantos) wires. The vorticist can then extract motifs from these forms and place them in art. This is vorticism: not mere energy, but energy derived from found formal motifs, extracted from life and re-represented in art.


Quick Notes:

Beatrice Hastings (as Alice Morning) continues her "Impressions of Paris," this time including a review of, and translation of, a few Breton poems by Max Jacob, whose work "would not abide an impressionist translation. He is one of the few classical critics in the world." I always hear of Jacob as a member of the Picasso circle, so this was an interesting tack. BH also responds to criticism from earlier correspondence pages.

There's a translated passage from Uomo Finito, autobiography of sometimes-futurist Giovanni Papini. I've had a fondness for Papini as a wayward satirist since working on Matthew Hofer's essay on Papini and Mina Loy when I was an editorial assistant at Paideuma. Papini's piece is about his impoverished childhood and his endless thirst for books.

Oscar Levy The New Age has published Levy for a long time, but lives up to its reputation as a place that published multiple views on the same topics when it allowed John Butler Burke to attack Germany via Nietzsche in "Russian vs. German Culture" in the same issue.

The "Hyphenated States of America" series continues to incite fear against the German-American and Irish ("Gaelic")-American populations.

Marmaduke Pickthall continues his long-running coverage of the Middle East by explaining his opposition to the English revival of the Egyptian Sultanate. 

The New Republic, November 7, 1914

This one's a backtrack to the first issue of The New Republic, a new journal that's been attracting a lot of buzz around the modernist journal scene. I have access to a scan of a bound volume (much like my big bound volume of Poetry and Drama), so I'm missing out on all the cool paper-grain, coffee-stain, bibliographic code that one gets at the Modernist Journals Project, and I only have access through my school library. Not ideal. I'm guessing that this is because The New Republic still exists, and might defend its archives?

I'm going back this far in time to greet the new journal, but particularly because Rebecca West an essay, "The Duty of Harsh Criticism," for it. Despite my claims to horizontal reading, I'm still a sucker for my favorite names, and I've missed West since she dropped out of The New Freewoman. 

West attacks complacent, congratulatory, and academic criticism, claiming the need to "rebel against the formidable army of Englishmen who have achieved the difficult task of becoming men of letters without having written anything" (19). A common feeling, but more unusually, she claims that criticism matters more now because literature has expanded its scope from the representation of emotional life to the representation of all life, which has the concomitant effect that they must be constantly representing life in order to capture its changes. The result is a sort of blurry photograph: "often it happens that because of their haste they receive a blurred impression or transmit it to theri readers roughly and without precision." Criticism exists to slow them down. She follows this with criticism of Shaw and Wells. Her critique of Shaw seems to be, actually, less harsh--his problem is that his critics don't see him as a poet, a "spiritual teacher," so that his best work gets lost to bad criticism. Wells is raked over hotter coals. I'm more interested in her approval of Shaw because West takes a load of buckshot from The New Age over it in the current January issues (stay tuned).

Following this is an essay by "L.S.," "Panic in Art." This is nice because of how closely it shadows some more-recent theories of the avant-garde: "One conviction, however, [radical painters] hold in common: art, which has been the courtesan of princes and the holiday playmate of republics, is dead. Painting, which began with Giotto, has completed its cycle, and a new art made possible by a new freedom is to begin" (20). L.S. follows this with a summary of the new painting, contrasting its ravenous search for inspiration in other times and cultures with its radical rethinking of objects as unstable illusions.

That's all for this back-issue, but I'll be checking in on TNR from time to time in the future...

The New Age, January 7 1914

I've been down hard with the flu this last week, so this post is a little out of date. I'm going to do back-to-back New Age posts to catch up. This post will be a bit dashed-off, I apologize in advance...

Starting with eerie coincidence: Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings continues her "Impressions of Paris" by recounting a dream in which a dead friend returns to her. She then reports that a friend, the Spanish author Mesa, has been killed at the front...

...but (spoiler alert) in the January 14th issue she'll find him alive! But wounded. So the dream of a friend who died coming back was immediately followed by a different dead friend, Mesa, returning.

Back to January 7th's "Impressions": she reports meeting a pair of wounded soldiers, each supporting the other:  "Two fractures in the leg one, and the other--you couldn't say what he had; he  laughed it off" (245). Premonitions of The Sun Also Rises. She goes on to write about rumors of German women fighting at the front, with characteristic disgust at women who take on men's roles. This contrasts to a description of a wild New Year's party, and a short digression on the ugly architecture of Paris.

Immediately following BH's piece is the first of Pound's series of "Affirmations," an essay on the ancient musical instruments of Arnold Dolmestch. He praises this early music for its elegant and intellectual patterns, framing it as a vortex:

"That is the whole flaw of impressionist  or "emotional” music, as opposed to pattern music. It is like a drug; you must have more drug, and more noise  each time, or this effect, this impression which works from the outside, in from the nerves and sensorium upon the self--is no use, its effect is constantly weaker and weaker. I do not mean that Bach is not emotional, but the early music starts with the mystery of pattern; if you like, with the vortex of pattern; with something which is, first of all, music, and which is  capable  of  being,  after  that, many things. What I call emotional, or impressionist music, starts with being emotion or  impression  and  then  becomes only approximately music. It is, that is to say, something in the  terms of something else. If it  produces  an effect, if from sounding as music it moves at all, it can only recede into the original emotion or impression. Programme  music is merely a  weaker, more flabby and descriptive sort of impressionist  music,  needing,  perhaps, a guide  and  explanation." (247).

Quick Notes:

E.A.B., the American correspondent, writes a racist piece about the failure of American immigrants to naturalize, in "The Hyphenated States of America" (as in German-American, Irish-American, etc.). Prophecies doom.

E. A. B. also writes "American Notes," takes time to savage Rebecca West's contributions to "The New Republic," which is only a few issues old and is causing some stir. See also the strongly negative reviews of Harriet Monroe's new book, and Amy Lowell's Sword Blade and Poppy Seed. 

Upton Sinclair writes in, holding up George Sterling's poetry as the exemplar of American art (261-2).

Though The New Age has been against conspiratorial anti-Semitism, they print Oscar Levy and responses to him, so much remains--in the correspondence pages of this issue, for instance.

Poetry, January 1915

This issue of Poetry isn't as well stocked as some from late last year that I haven't gotten around to posting on, but I'm trying to get back on track before backtracking, so, here goes:

My favorite piece is Frances Gregg's poem to H.D.:

Gregg and H.D. were lovers a few years (+100) ago, and I find this poem very sweet in its description of the effect that H.D. poems can have on people.

Quick Notes:

Remy de Gourmont writes about French authors and the war, translated by Richard Aldington.

Alice Corbin Henderson writes scathing criticism of university professors who do not read modern poetry. This is very delightful. She discusses a reading by Vachel Lindsay held at Princeton as a very unusual phenomenon. Page 175, if you are interested in how poetry was institutionalized circa 1915.

There's a kind of measured assassination of German modern poetry, too. I won't go into it here.

Harriet Monroe's own book is reviewed and advertised. The review wonders why she isn't more modern in her own work. See also Richard Aldington's review of the same book in one of last month's Egoists

Lastly, Madison Cawein's death is mourned. You may remember him for his semi-prophetic "Waste Land," covered in a post above.

The Little Review, January 1915

I've been back to visit The Little Review after missing a few issues, sent in particular because The Egoist's last issue referred to TLR as its "firstborn." Rare praise for another journal! Perhaps possible because transatlantic distance diffuses competition, though note that TLR advertises The Egoist in its back pages.

Before beginning, Albert Spalding's performance of Mendelssohn in New York is reviewed on page 43, so why not put a little on in the background? The intro to this Youtube video is funny, too (recorded 1936). This recording emphasizes his established reputation, The Little Review, his growth into maturity.

I found several pieces to mention here. One is a poem by Nicolas Beauduin, and its accompanying introduction by Edward J. O'Brian, "The New Beauty" and "A Note on Paroxysm in Poetry," respectively. In a classic modernist little magazine power play, O'Brian positions paroxysm between a retrospective romanticism and prospective futurism, "paroxysm is deep-rooted in today" (15). Note that paroxysm is a word that ends in -ism naturally. Very clever. This introduction includes a short manifesto that does confirm O'Brian's analysis, containing elements of neo-romanticism ("we are not afraid to be cosmic"), and technological futurism ("It will sing the new man, the man-machine, the multiplied man, the Man-Bird"). It risks appearing like a watered-down futurism, though, and by so effortlessly connecting the romantic and the futurist reveals (to me) the inherent romanticism in futurism. The poem is an excellent example of work that attempts to absorb high-tech terms and effects. Here's the last stanza:

Cool, right? But not too cool. Like when people use quantum mechanics in poems nowadays.

Moving on, there's a review of Frank Lloyd Wright and Japanese art (18-19). Wright's philosophy meshes well with the revolutionary tendency of The Little Review, one that is concerned about the state of the world and of the United States and highly critical of established society, but one that has no revolutionary program as of yet. Wright's thesis, reflected in the essay, is that great artists create a "right conventionalization of life," and he himself admits that it takes an artist to understand what he means.

Several points in the issue refer to lectures by "Mrs. Havelock Ellis," Edith Ellis. She wants to reform sex and marriage. Here's her takedown of eugenics: "But later she cleared herself of the charge of cultism by her laughing remark to some one who discussed eugenics with her: "Eugenics? A mere spoke in the wheel, and a very dogmatic spoke at that. Heaven knows we don't want a race of averages" (32). This editorial comment also mentions that Margaret Sanger is currently on the run from the authorities.

A word on Eugenics: like I mentioned above, The Little Review is omnivorous, devouring theories from many sources, from Emma Goldman, to eugenics. I'll track it when I can.

Quick notes:

Amy Lowell opens the issue with a prose poem about the war. It seems so silly that I wonder if the added note that it was written in August is intended to satirize it lightly? Probably not, but one can hope.

Marguerite Swawate contributes a poem, "I Am Woman," a good example of 1915 feminist poetry. The poetic speaker is learning to sing her own songs, "my own way, without kiss, without child." This allows the male side of things to figure out how to sing in counterpoint to her, rather than alone, and ends up with a more perfect marriage. A somewhat disappointing ending.

The Egoist, January 1, 1915

Hello readers! I am going to make a concerted effort to return to my journal-reading blog-posting ways this new year. I just got some institutional support for this from UW-Seattle's Simpson Humanities Center, and while that support doesn't kick in until summer, I'm feeling re-energized to write more about what I'm reading in the MJP.

So, it's appropriate that this issue of The Egoist begins with an essay by Dora Marsden that boldly claims the journal's supremacy, their position in the history of art, and that they will one day be studied by foolish scholars (I take a bow). 

"When [brilliant minds] do appear they find their own work, and that work accomplished establishes a new era. After they are gone—these directing minds—minds of a different order—stuffed minds, scholarly minds, begin to disburse their heavy stores upon the lines they have laid down. The stored rubbish then becomes invaluably useful treasure: what was purposeless will become vibrant with purpose. So it will be, long after " THE EGOIST " has become a thing of the past." (1). 

An appropriate epigraph to this project. Intriguingly, this is couched as a response to calls for the journal to die (see later in the above paragraph), but I haven't seen those calls yet. Hopefully I'll be able to dig around for them. It's worth mentioning that the last issue of The Egoist praised The Little Review, Poetry, and Poetry and Drama, to various degrees. 

Marsden then declares war against words--not because they are exploited, but because they have taken on a life of their own. Gradually, accumulating energy a little at a time, words have gone rogue: "By the very virtue of their lost meanings they have attained to the heights and prestige and command... Only by laughter—that gurgle of impishness: by the incorrigibly untutored selfassertiveness of the uninoculated have men saved their souls, half alive, from the complete domination of words" (2). 

Marsden continues relentlessly, moving to a thesis that all philosophical problems are rooted in flawed language, which psychology can dispel. This will occur at the level of grammar. This is a prophecy that would bear more attention. Marsden uses the Imagist dislike of adjectives and Marinetti's Futurist love of infinitives to claim that neither is the real problem: the problem is the substantive, both verb and noun, anything abstract at all: "Every form of the verb indeed save that which is hitched up to the first person singular is a danger to accuracy and expression" (3). 

DM then blasts the separation of "heart and head, intuition and intellect, feeling and knowing," claiming that all knowledge is just a special case of feeling. While applied very differently, much of this reminds me of Pound and Fenollosa and their Chinese Character. There's even a posthumanist moment, presaging Jakob von Uexkull somewhat: The "I" includes the one looking out on a "World " and the entire "World " it looks out on—and this whether "I " be a tree, or a worm, or a reader of

"THE EGOIST." The "I" creates its own world. The world is of it" (3). 

Fascinating, teachable summary of egoism!

Quick notes:

Marsden's "Views and Comments" criticize the cant of the war. They also respond to correspondence from the last issue, including Stephen Byington's response about great men. 

Aldington on the lack of quality in books circa 1914: "IT is somewhat chilling to remember that during the year or more in which I have been writing in this paper, reviewing most often carefully selected books, I have had occasion to notice none which were not ephemeral and merely relatively excellent" (6). This opens a eulogistic praise of John Synge, which (so far) has turned out incorrect in placing him as the central Irish writer of his time. More revealing of Aldington's train of thought than the encomium is, perhaps, the moment when he explains that English readers tend to think of all English literature as great literature, when a lot of it is merely local literature.

Which brings us to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: it continues in this issue.

Ezra Pound praises Spoon River Anthology, published under pseudonym "Webster Ford" (11-12).

In a letter, Huntley Carter calls out those who use evolution as a justification for violence. See last issue's discussion of impersonality in Japanese theater: hopefully I'll circle 'round back to that one sometime.

He also continues his feud with John Cournos.