The Masses, February 1915

After giving The Masses short shrift in January, I'm going to do my post on it early this month.

This image stands for one of the main meditations of The Masses this month: how impoverished women relate to sex, especially as prostitutes, or otherwise exploited. January's issue had the story "Nobody's Sister" on the same subject--but this month's Masses is anchored by a story by John Reed, Daughter of the Revolution. He tells about meeting a prostitute from a third-generation Socialist family--she is impoverished because her father rejected her desire for freedom. That's the irony of it. As a story, the writing is good, if a little prone to over-exposition. Marcelle, the prostitute, tells the story of her grandfather dying at the fall of the commune, her father's activities as a strike leader, and all the rest of the family history. She herself hates socialism for the way her family has been crushed by the system--and yet, she herself feels free. The story comes off as part inspiring, part sordid--another glimpse into wartime Paris, and one more polished than the others I've covered. It's worth reading. Contrast this vision to that of "The Bachelor Girl" drawing above, and with the poem "You Turned" by Robert Carlton Brown below (page 9):

Robert Carlton Brown is one of my favorites--and a forgotten modernist I want to spend more time studying, someday. He doesn't even have a wikipedia page yet, as I think I've noted before--I keep meaning to write one, but finding sources on him is difficult. See also his drunken Whitmanic prose poem rollick, "A Nickel at Night" on page 20. 

Quick gossipy note: when Reed is establishing the scene at the beginning of the story, and for no readily apparent reason, he writes that "Beatrice and Alice were farther down along under the glare of the yellow lights" (5). Could this be not two women, but Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning of The New Age?! Conspiratorial of me to think it, but the coincidence--BH/AM would have been in Paris at the time the story was set.

Quick notes:

This issue of The Masses contains some interesting poems beyond Brown's above. Carl Sandburg publishes "Buttons," about the horror of abstracting the war. 

I may have made a minor discovery in another one of the poems... but I'll keep some secrets for myself, until they are ready. 

Karl Liebknecht, covered in my last post, has his tragic insurrection prophesied by The Masses on page 14. 

Floyd Dell contributes an essay on Gilbert Murray's comparing the era to the Greece of Pericles. It's interesting for the connections with the Hellenism of so much of the art of the day. 

The Masses has set up shop as a mail-order bookstore, a prototype of Amazon: you let them be your middleman, and the profits support the journal. We'll see how the scheme plays out. 

I'm going to take off now, but there's plenty more to say about this issue--the best way to experience The Masses, its worldview, its black humor, its art, is not this blog post. Here's to the thing itself.