Thursday, March 5, 2015

The New Age, February 25 1915

The silliest, but most interesting, part of this issue of The New Age is Ezra Pound's next "Affirmation," "The Non-Existence of Ireland." In this one, he satirically describes how he can't find any evidence of an actual Ireland as a way to criticize the stall-out of the Celtic Revival. Naturally, James Joyce is an exile, so he doesn't count and is the exception that proves the rule. Pound praises Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, "so far as I know [they are the] only two writers of prose fiction of my decade whom anyone takes in earnest." Intriguing footnote after that: "A critic, whom I respect, frequently quotes a pseudonymous romance--'The Maid's Comedy'[sic]--which I have unfortunately never read." So without reading Hastings, he's willing to give her boosters in TNA the benefit of the doubt that she (pseudonymously) might be on the par of Lawrence and Joyce. And now, forgotten!

 BH as Morning notes that she's laid up with influenza and won't be able to contribute anything new for the next few weeks.

"Readers and Writers" this week contains transcribed tidbits of conversations Orage has had recently. Some are very insightful, some not so much, some are revealing outside of their own terms. My favorite of these last: "The modern movement is likely to land us in a series of marital disasters. On the one side, men are aiming at the synthetic man typical of the Renaissance: on the other, women are specializing in fragments. Very soon it will take seven women to balance a man, and polygamy will be talked of. But even a fragment of a woman will insist on the rights of a whole" (457). So, skipping the New Age misogyny at the end of that for now, consider what he's saying: male modernists are synthesizing, while female modernists are fragmenting. That this thesis is even possible shows the stature of women in modernism, but I wish he'd provided examples.

Quick Notes:

The last of Morgan Tud's Three Tales runs today. I still don't know who he is--but I'm feeling more sure that these are satires of Joyce. I will write about them someday, I think...

"An Open Letter to Mr. Stephen Graham" by one Percy Cohen is a nice response to antisemitic tripe about moving all the Jews out of Russia and Poland. Really cool. The New Age is taking on The English Review's implicit bias. The effect is somewhat dulled by C.E. Bechhofer's [sic, but I think this was spelled differently before?] account of anti-foreign and antisemitic bias in Kiev.

"Reviews" covers many recent books. December's Poetry comes in for a drubbing, as does Huntley Carter's book on Max Reinhardt, and new poems Rabindranath Tagore.

Pound responds to the satire of the prisoners from last issue: "His parable of the two prisoners is full of marrow," he says, but as a way to swipe back. Also, a direct reply to BH as AM, in a series of rhetorical questions. Most important are the last two, "Does she find no difference between the direction of my propaganda and that of the destructionists? Who most respects the masterwork of the past, one who battens upon it, cheapening or deadening its effect by a multitude of bad imitations, or one who strives toward a new interpretation of life?" He's calling her out for her bad classical poetry, I think, which is delightful to me.

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