The Little Review, May 1915

Sometimes I can feel a post devolving into either a table of contents or a diaphanous simulacrum of the issue, and I feel like a parrotfish of the archive: taking in rich, life-filled coral, and turning it to critical sand that sifts into the abyss. The nature of this project makes some of that inevitable, I guess--the real payoff isn't the blog post, after all, but the immersion itself. They are reflections of reflections of reviews. This is going to be a long one, one of the longest yet.

One thing that helps give things a shape is if I can sense the editors of a particular journal giving the whole issue a certain spin (perhaps an English, in the sense of shooting pool?). This issue of The Little Review has more of an English than the last--it is caught up in the spirit of revolution, and it sees this revolution as a distinctly American phenomenon. It is also a revolution centered on the individual (Anderson is reading The Egoist, after all).

First stop, editor Margaret C. Anderson's editorial, "What Are We Fighting For?" It opens with a response to her article preferring Scriabin to Gabrilowitsch from last issue (which alas I did not comment on in my post, not having enough knowledge of the musical context). This moves into a programmatic moment I've fetched for you here:

I am certain that other scholars of The Little Review and Anderson have commented on this passage before, because it is so perfect. Anderson places herself on the absolute cusp of the new, and a step beyond it.

Here are other important lines to consider:

"There's nothing pompous in saying that the thoughts of only a few people matter. This has always been so and always will be. Every new valuation has come about just that way—championed by a group and then endorsed by a majority long after it has ceased to matter much."

"In each of the future issues of THE LITTLE REVIEW, beginning with June if possible, we shall have a special article attacking current fallacies in the arts or in life—getting down to the foundations. Each one will be written by a person who knows thoroughly what he is talking about, and each will be 'true and memorable,' to use Will Comfort's good phrase."

Finally, if one would like to join in, Anderson solicits articles from expert readers:

"The conditions of acceptance are these : You must know English prose; you must write it as though you are talking instead of writing; you must say quite frankly and in detail the things you would not be allowed to say in the prostituted, subsidized, or uninteresting magazines; and you must be true. This begins our warfare."

While these speak for themselves, I'll make some observations. First, there's an awful lot of talk about true and false here, which makes me think Anderson likes Marsden's work quite a lot but doesn't apply its lessons on the emptiness of truth as a concept and criterion. Note that Anderson expects sweeping changes to emerge from her magazine, but embraces the condition of being an elite avant garde that creates a "new valuation" that will not be immediate accepted. The call for writing "as though you are talking instead of writing" is very cool, and resonates with both Pound's position as "village talker" and Beatrice Hastings' embraced insult when she was called a talker, not a writer (see The Old New Age pamphlet, must-read stuff for Hastings fans). It also distinguishes TLR from The Egoist in that TE doesn't use the language of speech. Also, the title and the final line carry unusual weight in a time of war.

So that's the mission--now I'll look at how this issue attempts to achieve this. As usual, editorial vision cannot (and should not) bring contributors into total coherence. This issue is full of notable, diverse writing.

Will Levington Comfort contributes "America's Ignition," an excited and exciting manifesto about the reconstruction of the world after the war, in which America and the new generation will take a leading part. Comfort believes that the secret to life is avoiding selfishness, and that the current generation will be unselfish because of the vision of the war. This will lead to a renaissance of intuitive thought. He claims that nationalism will end when people realize that the differences among nations are merely part of the great international whole--alas. He claims that the world seeks balance, and that Germany's aggression is an attempt to balance the oversized power of the British Empire. The below paragraph on intuition vs. intellect is worth taking as a whole:

We will cease to "believe in intellect," and instead intuition will provide a more valid way to know.

Anderson reviews lectures by Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and is surprised to prefer Flynn. While appreciating Jones, she writes of Flynn: "I like these I. W. W. people a lot. They are not only offering an efficient program of labor ; they are getting close to a workable philosophy of life. They are even capable of a virtue no working-class organization is supposed to be overburdened with: hardness of thought. As Miss Flynn said : 'Don't pamper yourselves. It's not a sacrifice to fight for your own freedom !'" (18).

Amy Lowell, who appears to be well on her way to capturing Imagism, writes an encomium on Harold Monro and his Poetry Bookshop. It is a little self-aggrandizing, as she relishes in describing herself as the enlightened intellectual causing a stir by being so into books. On the other hand--she models the practices of a reader of poetry and fuses that with the joy of shopping. This may be more of a throwback to the 19th century's obsession with beautiful books of poetry than something new, but it can only help the poets she mentions.

Helen Hoyt contributes a cool memento mori poem in free verse, "Words out of Waking."

Richard Aldington provides an overview of the career of Remy de Gourmont. It feels familiar: I wonder if it is a version of something that appeared in The Egoist. Possibly, or possibly just on a similar topic. I love this: "under his pen mysticism itself appears almost as exact as science" (11).

Nestled within the self conscious avant garde is--a hoax. Sade Iverson, who contributes a long poem, "Who Wants Blue Silk Roses," is really Elia W. Peattie, who is hoaxing Anderson and modern poetry in general (according to the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature). Triangulating modernism via hoaxes is pretty fun: this one seems to think a bohemian lifestyle in the context of the war, rendered in unrhymed verse, can be passable modernism.

John Gould Fletcher contributes an intense post-Whitman prose poem, "America, 1915," in his usual elaborate style.

George Lane pens an extended review of Some Imagist Poets. It's notable for being very harsh on Pound, who is  accused of "jejune maledictions," which the movement has gotten beyond (27). I'll be writing about this at length later, so I'll leave it for now.

Last, an epitaph for Rupert Brooke: