The Egoist, April 1915

The Egoist in April, 1915:

Marianne Moore makes her Egoist debut, with her poems appearing just after those of a forgotten modernist, Richard Butler Glaenzer--who has the tragic fate of not yet having a wikipedia page. His poems are cool, though. More on that in a second, after more on Moore's two short poems.

The first is dedicated to Gordon Craig, modernist director:

I can almost see the last line as the very very first draft of her much-drafted poem "Poetry." Note the careful rhymes, the way that meaning enjambs from line to line, the very-slant rhymes of "wake" and "retrospect." It's very interesting that the dedication is part of the first line. This poem makes me think of my late teacher, Herb Blau, who I wish I could show this to--I have a feeling he would have identified with Moore's portrait of Craig.

The second poem, "To the Soul of 'Progress,'" doesn't fit neatly on to a page and would look kind of weird on the blog here, but it is certainly worth a look in the pdf of the journal. On the level of content (or discontent), the poem is about how war can emerge from the desire for progress. It fits perfectly with the Egoist's skepticism. It also has an extremely tight and unusual rhyme scheme, a prevision of "The Fish." She seems to be channeling Yeats in a certain stanza that contains clapping wings and a tumult...

Returning to Glaenzer: his poems are about his hatred of cities, contrasted Imagistically with his love of Bermuda--and then, there's also a poem about an Antoinette. His poems are powered more by raw Whitmano-Futurist energy than intricacies, but I noticed that they are attempting to fuse that kind of dynamism with imagist technique, which feels odd in the context of how imagism is understood retrospect-ively, but actually makes a lot of sense in following the journals.

Huntley Carter contributes a piece that has a few interesting points--titled "The Curve of Individualism," it contains several points that are made stridently, then hedged back, so take this summary with its own hedging. First, he claims that Futurist art predicted the war. Then he explains that their art reveals the fundamental inequality of humans, and Carter postulates that one could create a chart in which "the height of the curve above the base line will represent the varying value of human beings" (59). He jumps from this to review Theodore A. Cook's The Curves of Life, which finds that the perfect spiral is that basis for biology and art, a claim Carter appreciates but qualifies with Cook's own "nothing which is alive is ever simply mathematical." This might mitigate the brutality of charting human worth somewhat? Maybe? Because he comes to a philosophy of difference:

"Advance (progress we call it) resides in differences freely expressed. If human beings are to move significantly in any direction they must not be tied up in inseparable bundles, called groups, guilds, and communities. Each must belong wholly to himself or herself. Each must be free to feel, act and choose a path of his or her own. The social or artificial restraint of differences in human beings is slowly but inevitably making for the destruction of the human soul" (60).

Note the pointed critique of The New Age's Guild Socialism.

So much more to do, but I will stop here for today after my customary

Quick Notes:

Marsden continues "Truth and Reality," and it is amazing. Too much to review on a blog, I will hopefully be devoting a chapter of my dissertation to Marsden. For now, this nugget: "The two terms 'real' and 'Reality' are very near to being the expression of opposites: real—the sign attached to a thing whose potentialities have been proved to be like to another's, and Reality—the name of a nominal " something " which has never yet existed and which, should '"it " ever achieve existence, would become degraded into Appearance and thereby cease to be part of Reality" (51). 

Richard Aldington contributes an essay on "Decadence and Dynamism" which in turn continues his own literary researches. He finds that most new art can be considered either decadent or dynamic, and that investigating the decadent, one finds that dynamism is merely intensified decadence. He reads Huysmans' A Rebors to make most of his points, and is probably one of few people who read enough obscure Latin to pronounce judgment on Des Esseintes' classical criticism (Aldington thinks it is brilliant).

Portrait continues...

Frank Denver reviews a modernist art show, praises Epstein, and declares that there isn't much good art around in those days.

"Fighting Paris" declares that it will return to its old title, "Passing Paris," as things are back to normal in the capital. I wonder if that will stick.

That's all for now...

The Crisis, April 1915

Long overdue: a post on The Crisis. It would take much more than a blog post to do it any justice--but I think a few thoughts would be better than continuing to save it for another day. Hopefully from now on it will join the regular rotation of journals I read and report on here.

One of the first things I notice when working with The Crisis, compared to the London journals I have been reading more frequently, is that it is very beautiful. Here's an image of the cover:

Inside the journal, I searched for who the picture was--but to my eye, the only acknowledgement of it was a line about the cover designer (Richard L. Brown) and that the photograph was "from life." Realizing that one of the goals of the journal is to break the way cultural norms of beauty are laid on racial lines, I think that the anonymity of this woman might in itself be a political statement. She is beautiful, and that is the whole point.

The recurring column "Along the Color Line" is filled with news in many categories that might interest the readers of The Crisis: six pages of double-columned lists of events in music and art, politics, economics, meetings, etc. etc. While these lists hold much information, the last entry, "Courts and Crimes" resonated most strongly with current events, in a terrible way:

Note in particular the two last records. The Crisis records white lynching as well as black, and it record when policemen kill black people in the same space it records lynchings. From later in the same issue, a manifesto of self-defense: "Lynching would cease in short order if the colored people of this country resented the lawless murdering of friends, relatives and compatriots as they should —with the rifle and sword. The ballot will not settle it definitely. Neither will commercial nor intellectual achievement. But mobs do not lynch when they are assured of a come-back. Least of all, would a mob invade a colored district in chase of its victim were there any likelihood of their being received as they should be—with bullets (281)." I noted immediately that this explicitly puts political, intellectual, and economic solutions to lynchings off the table. The only way to meet force, for The Crisis here, is force. A similar doctrine was present in The Egoist with reference to the Ulster volunteers. I'll be interested to see how this develops.

Quick Notes:

The Crisis takes a strong stand for woman's suffrage, page 285. That already puts them ahead of The New Age and The Egoist on that issue, though I do think its realpolitik resonates with Dora Marsden.

William Stanley Braithwaite contributes two poems to the issue. I like "Laughing it Out" as a nugget of productive nihilism:

Meta Warrick Fuller is listed as a finalist for the first Spingarn Medal, which led me to look at some of her sculptures, which are awesome. They remind me of Rodin.

Du Bois himself contributes "The Immediate Program of the American Negro," which is another powerful manifesto, and is worth more attention than I can give it right now.

Charles W. Chestnutt contributes the first half a short story, "Mr. Taylor's Funeral."

I noticed especially the advertisements: such a wealth, compared to the bare pages of the London journals! Here's one I thought was particularly cool for its literary footwear:

The New Age, April 15, 1915

There's much to cover, and as usual, I'm a little behind. I've come to look forward to the end-of-the-month push to get all these posts out, even as it comes with its minor dread, too. Before dealing with the monthlies, though, I have to get the weekly out of the way. It is so hard not to fall behind The New Age. 

As usual, I'll start with Beatrice Hastings' "Impressions of Paris," as Alice Morning. This week's is a portrait of deep wartime depression: "I am in a horrid state of soul, right down in a rut of the war, and hanging head downwards--your perfect egoist... There's such a state as bleeding without fighting at all. The universe seems only just as far away as Paris is, and not more worth going out to behold" (653). Mixing modes, as usual, she tells a parable, an anecdote from French literary history, and stories of things she's seen and of her past. I've been thinking about how cool it would be to gather together the "Impressions of Paris" and The Egoist's "Passing Paris" and "Fighting Paris columns by Muriel Ciolkowska, perhaps as a book, or--what about an audiobook organized chronologically, and released through Librivox? Maybe someday.

Someone, probably Beatrice Hastings, is continuing the satirical columns of Anastasia Edwardes. I think it must be Hastings, because they are similar in tone to her "Impressions." In the last Edwardes column, she was a satire of the New Woman, a faux intellectual flirt. This week, the column is more about her husband, a middle-aged solicitor, who wants to go to the war and instead plays soldier very assiduously. It's slapstick-funny.

Ramiro de Maetzu writes an essay "On Art and Luxury," which goes something like this: people are worried that the war will kill off the arts because it will damage the patronage networks that art relies upon. This is incorrect, because art does not rely on patronage. This gives de Maetzu a space to critique Oscar Wilde and Theophile Gautier, who he considers to have made an error in advancing a doctrine of art for art's sake, which he sees as really being art for luxury's sake. In rating art so highly, they began to lose touch with reality: "In his essay, 'The Critic as Artist,' [Wilde] goes the length of declaring resolutely that, “'As civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised, the elect spirit of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what art has touched.' Both in life and in art his ideal was marginal,--luxury" (641). The saving grace of this error was that Wilde and company thought that luxury implied craftsmanship, and this led them to perfect their art--even though in reality, luxury is based on scarcity of materials and the amount of labor they represent, not craftsmanship, per se:

"The object of luxury resembles the object of art in that both are expressions of power; but, while the object of luxury is only the expression of property or monopoly, the work of art tells us, through the power of the means of expression, that man is the master of Nature. Craftsmanship means power. In the object of luxury the thing to be shown is the power of the proprietor. In the work of art the essential thing is the power of the artist."

This ends with Romanitic declarations of art's power to connect humanity to the infinite, etc. De Maetzu has fused Romanticism with Marxism in an attack on art as luxury.

Quick Notes:

Arthur Thorn's short story/dialog, "Discovering Drama" includes a discussion of the reasons for the cinema's popularity vs. drama.

C.E. Bechofer quotes at length from Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov.

Rebecca West appears in "Current Cant"'s crosshairs for representing Germany as a poor country.

And lastly, as my United Auto Workers chapter prepares for a strike for a new contract, a note on wartime dock worker's strikes in England, discussed in The New Age and the correspondence pages. The upshot is that in a time when shipowners are purposefully hiding their merchant vessels in neutral ports to keep them safe from being commandeered and sunk, the country is instead angry at dock workers who refuse to be exploited. The high-level traitors go unnoticed, while the low-level protesters are pilloried.

The New Age, April 8 1915

Beatrice Hastings, as Alice Morning, contributes another installment of "Impressions of Paris," and as usual, it is the most interesting piece in this particular issue of The New Age. She dips into the surrealist mode that she used in stories between 1910-13, and which appears only occasionally in "Impressions." I think she's describing the struggles of having a maidservant (remember, Hastings wrote a column on how to live without servants a while back), but she figures her servant as a "patent doll that boils your tea-kettle" (611). It's not Hastings' finest moment, but it gives her space to pivot and reflect on the war and feminism, an intriguing glimpse into the past: " Do not expect any thoughts from me. I am become simply a suffering receptacle of the horrid comedy of things. The battle of a mechanised, over-feminised world against itself leaves me without any other excuse for existence." War, mechanized and over-feminized? One, but not the other, has become a cliche. I believe that for Hastings, feminized is equivalent to emotional, and the nominal manliness of the emotion doesn't exonerate it from being feminine, as opposed to intellectual. It's an old and invalid train of thought, and I wonder what her career would have been like if she had managed to avoid it.

She then pauses to look back at the suffrage movement, seemingly nostalgically:

"Only to think how, two or three years ago, nothing had a banner to its name save the Rights of Women, and now we are thankful to be out of reach of violation and slaughter ! Just when we were on the Point of leading men to Glory, getting the vote and putting everything right- just there and then they went frantic and spoiled it all. And they may very well stay frantic for another thirty years, settling what’s what and who’s who among themselves, while the real question as to who shall decide about vaccinating little Johnnie is left without a man behind it! And here is a case of one of those curious, bungling, partial conditions of Nature: it needs a man even to decide who shall decide. If Papa decide that Mamma shall decide, Mamma will decide; but if Papa decide to decide, Papa will decide."

The men have brushed aside the struggle for women's rights, which has revealed the unshakable patriarchy controlling the system. Hastings, who has been a collaborator with the patriarchy for years now, seems yet to see the tragedy of this system.

Turning abruptly to the lighthearted (and mean-spirited), TNA satirizes The Egoist's announcement of Pound's College of the Arts from last November's Egoist. In a similar announcement, it is dubbed "The College of Tea-hearts," where one can get instruction from Mr. Pound-Cake in the Cake Atelier, among other confectionery's delights. Check it at page 619.

Similarly, intellectual woman artists get satirized in "The Confessions of a Solitary Traveler," nominally by Anastasia Edwardes. It's probably a satire of someone in particular--but who, I'm not sure. She goes to the beach with Dostoyevsky and Hume, but ends up getting seduced by a man who buys her candy. The form, content, and boots lead me to guess that the author is actually Beatrice Hastings.

Quick Notes:

The issue has several anti-American articles. Not allies yet.

"Letters to a Trade Unionist" describes how clerks have shifted their alliance from the management to the proletariat and the unions.

Sol Davis's "The Mad City" is a transparent allegory of the war in Europe, told as a brawl between neighbors. Not that great

"Readers and Writers" complains of a press boycott, accusing the London publishers, except Macmillan, of ceasing to send him books to review. He also praises The Yale Review as the best magazine America has produced.

Llewelyn Powys contributes a story set in British East Africa, titled "Rubbish," about the tragedies of Africans under British colonialism. The story doesn't escape its own racism and sentimentality, but it fits into the genre of abolitionist writing turned to the colonial situation.

Lastly, I noticed a strange letter under the pseudonym "Ignotus Quondam" on why England might be better off losing the war. This is pretty radical, for the time and place.

The Egoist, March 1915

A day late, my post on The Egoist for March: just a few quick notes for myself.

Richard Aldington writes an essay on Ernest Dowson that warms my heart because he was inspired to do so while "turning over old numbers of the Mercure de France" (41). This piece is particularly interesting because of its economic theory of art, lamenting the struggles of his contemporary young poets. I wonder if there's some oblique commentary on Pound in his account of geniuses who are unfit to make a regular living.

Marsden continues her "Truth and Reality" series, with meditations on reality as based in conventions of language. Importantly, she attacks Bergson, who was important to the magazine in 1913. This essay is really interesting, and will get more attention than I'm going to give it right now--in my dissertation.

Harold Munro, after the collapse of Poetry and Drama, has found his way to The Egoist to pen a piece on a poet who died young, James Elroy Flecker, which ends with this sentence: "Few writers have devoted such careful study to their art, and few modern poets realized so truly the necessity for devotion to the art of poetry" (39). Note how, oddly, Munro seems to say that modern poetry is already finished with the past tense of "realized." I wonder if that's a slip, or if there's an implied periodization there.

F.S. Flint contributes a few lines of translation from the Mille Nuits et Une Nuit, presumably from Antoine Galland's edition.

The Egoist prints poems in french by Paul Fort.

Three Chicago journals have taken out a full page ad at the end: Poetry, The Little Review, and Drama. The momentum of American modernism seems to be shifting from New York to Chicago in a hurry.