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.