The Little Review, September 1916

So, real work has come between me and my blog project lately--even though it was the beginning of much of that real work. But I have to hop on for a quick post on this month's issue of The Little Review. It's the famous blank issue, where the arts pages have been left entirely empty as a statement of the magazine's high standards--there was nothing good enough to print this month, so they print nothing. Awesome.

But... they didn't print nothing, strictly defined. They also printed little comics of what Margaret Anderson, the editor, was doing instead of editing. They are delightful. Here she is, depressed and eating a ziggurat of fudge for breakfast, for instance:

She also plays piano for 18 hours a day (and brings it to bed at night), converts the sheriff to "anarchism and vers libre," etc.

Also, the issue has no art, but it wasn't empty save for the comics. Its political coverage (of bomb attacks in San Francisco!), reviews, and correspondence are intact. There's even a letter from Frank Lloyd Wright, encouraging the journal.

A legendary moment in a legendary journal. That's all for now, though...

The Egoist, July 1916

Still working through The Egoist backlog, things are exciting:

Marsden begins the next phase of her philosophy by broadening her scope and heightening her ambitions, now aiming to change all philosophy forever. I'll try to explain what I think she's trying to do: philosophy is about to have a revolution like the scientific revolution, and Marsden is placing herself at the epicenter. The revolution will be a linguistic turn, one that reads, creates, and investigates symbols from other realms. It will be scientific, analytical, and based in facts--but because of the strong vitalist strain in Marsden, it will be full of life, fully acknowledging that the observer changes the observed, and is changed by it in turn. Here are some tastes:

"The symbols adequate to express the part are inadequate for the expression of the whole. But it is quite otherwise with the powers of the symbols which have grown up for the expression of the whole." (100)

That kind of optimism about the power of language feels very modernist to me, though I often think of it more in the context of poetry than symbols as such (though the gap is small). Echoes of Imagism. Which brings us to this, the climax of the essay:

"For while its agency is the living energy of mind which impregnates with change and growth everything it touches, its manner of activity (which is its distinction) is mind in concentration. The notion that its activity means just a disintegration of a composite whole into its constituent parts and that by analysing a subject we arrive at a predicate which contains merely the sum-total of the parts of the object with which we started fails to appreciate the true features of the observing process, and it is indeed utterly refuted by the growth in the world's multiplicity and richness. Exactly as the tree is not in the seed but— given devotion and care—is capable of being developed out of it, so in analysis: at the outset the subject does not contain the predicate but, given the fertilizing energy of mind, above all in the concentrated strength in which it appears in analysis, then out of the subject can be grown such a wealth of predicates as might beggar the imagination of a magician." (102)

Mind and matter, co-creating.

Marsden's piece, in a fantastic coincidence, is followed by one of my favorite H.D. poems, "Cities." I've written about "Cities" several times, but this is the first time I've seen it in its Egoist form--in the Collected Poems, it contains a different final stanza, one that redeems the horrors of industrial society. This poem doesn't.

And, as if that's not enough, Muriel Ciolkowska contributes a review of Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu! It's one of her best pieces yet, containing large tracts translated from the novel, and ending with a reflection on the difficulty and limits of book reviewing. I feel like the book has rubbed off on Ciolkowska's style, at least for the review, as her descriptions seem to mirror what they describe as they meander from metaphor to precision.

In other news from Ciolkowska, she writes an obituary of the incredible Jane Dieulafoy.

Quick Notes:

Aldington contributes a dialog on conscientious objection.

Edward Storer writes in defense of Ireland after last month's editorial, and Marsden writes a very squirrely response, classic Marsden. She fends off Storer's criticism by explaining that he misread her and misunderstood her vocabulary.

Leigh Henry, more commonly in The Egoist for his articles on music, contributes a trio of Imagist-esque poems.

And of course, Tarr continues, with Kriesler and Bertha's convoluted walk to the party.

The Egoist, June 1916

I have a backlog of posts, but good reasons: I spent the last month or so working on a project on The Crisis, which I'll post about soon. These backlog posts will be quick sketches of interesting moments. Some might be more than that. I've been trying to keep up with my reading even as I'm not writing much here, and there were some interesting moments in the June 1916 Egoist. 

Primarily, Marsden's long editorial on the Easter Rising. Marsden illustrates the continuing development of her philosophy of political linguistics by explaining the relative successes and failures of England and Ireland during the rising, finding the roots of the crisis in rhetoric rather than reality. It's a problem of difference:

"Ability to distinguish "cheese from chalk " is the people's criterion of intelligence, and no doubt a scale of intelligence could be drawn up on the basis of the number of distinctions which people can bear in mind at a given moment; and if by some strange fluke a great empire can ignore this fact with impunity and read uniformity where actually there exists difference, lesser powers—rebels and the like—cannot." (82)

Marsden explains that the republicans failed to distinguish between their own situation and that of Ulster. She builds a philosophy of hate, and explains how hate emerges from rhetoric: inflammatory statements are made because, precisely, they are not actions. But they inevitably lead to actions.

"The chrysalis develops into the moth. Beginning in words just because these do not mean action, it ends in the use of words just in order that they shall mean action. The words which in the beginning were excrescences: appendages to men's more serious selves, in the sequel become the main body to which men are the insignificant appendages." (84)

A thought that resonates today. Plain speech is the remedy, according to Marsden, along with ever-finer distinctions and observations. Ironically, many of her more specific arguments seem wrong to me, shaded over by her wartime faith in England's omnipotence. When she generalizes, though, she often hits the mark.

Quick notes:

H.D.'s poem "Sea Gods" immediately follows this notice.

Aldington contributes a prose poem, "The Middle Ages."

Moore contributes "Pedantic Literalist."

Tarr continues, with the spiritually grimy Kriesler meeting Anastasya at a restaurant. The description of the Restaurant Jejune, on page 91, is brilliant.

The Crisis, July 1916

I'm just starting a fellowship to work on The Crisis this summer, and I'm excited to get to work on that. After a sparse June, I hope to get more posts up, and more promptly--but I bet the fellowship will distract me somewhat. I'll be setting up a component of UW's "Mapping Social Movements" website in its NAACP section, using information from The Crisis.

Transposing text from a magazine into a map poses some challenges--the magazine is at once a series of discrete events and a continuously evolving, living thing. Its life is more the life of the fossil now, perhaps, but I can catch much of the enthusiasm of the journal as it evolves. I want to keep my maps consistent, while also representing its evolution. This is just some prewriting here. I'll get more done soon.

On to the post on the issue:

The defining event of this issue is The Crisis' coverage of the lynching of Jesse Washington, "The Waco Horror," in a supplemental section. This is unusual, as there are only two of these supplements, to my knowledge. The Crisis uses its conventional tactics: graphic photography paired with a spare account of the facts, with moments of bitter irony and editorial comment that yet grant much ethical impetus to the story. This supplement is fascinating--it sets ups its accusation first by a long description of Waco itself, the kind of description that often precedes praise of a community in other sections of The Crisis, setting up the fact that Waco is a thriving, educated, typical town. The fact that the crowd was not drunk or rowdy is emphasized by subtle comments and captions. The Crisis also dwells on the fact that the murder was covered as a "news item" rather than as something more than that, that the media was not living up to its responsibilities. These careful rhetorical settings force the reader to confront that this is not an isolated event, or hysteria, or even mere news.

I'm curious about the development of this piece from the account of a lynching in Temple, Texas in the January issue. The Waco Horror supplement has its own wikipedia page, while the Temple lynching has comparatively little presence online. The Crisis' tactics in the two cases make the coverage of Temple seem like a precursor, and this might be worth a deeper look soon. 

Which brings me back into The Crisis itself. This issue is a deft counterpoint to the supplement, celebrating educational and artistic achievements. The text of the magazine itself reflects on this intellectual heritage in little details--using "yclept" rather than "named" just once, such a small detail, so full of meaning (130).

A couple details I noticed: the "Crime" section was folded into the "Ghetto" section this month. I am curious to see if that continues and if it signals a shift in the coverage of lynching in The Crisis. 

Of particular interest to me is the description of the NAACP's formation of what is essentially a PR department in order to counter the racism of the Associated Press (141-142). 

I was glad to see a graduate of UW-Seattle celebrated in the issue:

The Egoist, May 1916

End of the month means a flurry of short posts:

The oddest thing, perhaps, about this issue of The Egoist, is that it doesn't have an editorial at all. Harriet Shaw Weaver had been filling in for Marsden in the role, but this one opens with an essay by Aldington. He also contributes an elegy for Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, "A Life." It's a beautiful, subdued tribute.

The best things, perhaps, are the two poems by Marianne Moore, including one with this amazing title: "You are Like the Realistic Product of an Idealistic Search for Gold at the Foot of the Rainbow."

Quick notes: 

Pound contributes a translation of one of the dialogs of Fontanelle, 

There's a story about the trauma of a young girl who listens to her father beat her mother every night--signed B. Durak, a pseudonym I can't track a the moment.

Tarr continues--this time through, I'm noticing how thoroughly narrated the narrative is. Even the slippages between narrator and character are part of the narration, it seems. Incredibly rich prose, peppered with the occasional false note--or is it salted? 

The Masses, May 1917

The end of the school year rush is upon me, so this note will be brief.

This issue of The Masses stands out as particularly full of fiction. Short stories dominate the pages, crowding out the usual essays--seven short stories balance three or four essays, depending on how you categorize things. I wonder if this is a blip, or if it signifies a change in the magazine's policy.

John Reed's "Broadway Nights" was, of the seven stories, the outlier. The other stories are representations of injustice, of militarism, of poverty, or some combination of the above--they are ideological tools as well as stories, and tend toward the sentimental. Lots of dead children. In fact, every short story other than Reed's has a child or a young man die, except the one where the child is abandoned. It is strange to have such a persistent pall of untimely death over the magazine, especially considering the many ways it appears.

Reed's story, though, is a modernist tour de force, a short story about the shimmering lights of Broadway, depicting New York as a surrealist prose poem, or fever dream:

The final sentence: "Why do you insist that there must be a reason for life?" seems almost a response and rebuke to Richard Aldington's "The Tube," which ended asking "What right have you to live?" Instead, Reed celebrates the murky underbelly of the city at night, and its strange paradoxes. 

That's all for now.

The Little Review, April 1916

Now for The Little Review.

Charles Zwaska, the young office boy who joined the magazine at seventeen (he insisted on being called office boy), contributes a scathing take-down of Vachel Lindsay. As someone who is often irritated by Lindsay, I disagree with the faint penciled-in criticism in the scan of the magazine, which says "rather silly." The best part of this article comes when Zwaska writes about Lindsay's book of film criticism, The Art of the Moving Picture. To counter the theories there, Zwaska cites the disdain of the audience for the films Lindsay praises--he sketches a vivid portrait of their collective expertise, as they live in the theater, and sleep there all night. A golden age of audience engagement, cut short by the police now patrolling there. This is reminding me of Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," a little. I'll look it up.

Quick Notes:

Like The Egoist's praise of Jane Poupelet, this issue mentions a few women who were highly regarded artists and performers at the time--here, a cabaret singer and a playwright--Yvette Guilbert and Alice Gerstenberg.

Allan Ross MacDougal writes about Guilbert, a French cabaret singer: "But whatever she sang—and I didn't know a word of what she sang—carried me away completely. Not a mood did I miss—not a suggestion of a mood. Perfect is her art. She has my adoration" (30). Hear for yourself on Youtube!

Gerstenberg appears in a blurb about her play Overtones. That link connects to a website that has the full text available, and at a glance, it seems pretty cool. Characters are followed by actors playing their "real selves," so the two characters are in dialog with their internal selves and each other, simultaneously. 

Ezra Pound, of course, appears in this issue--here he rails against the import duties leveled on books imported to America, and his complaints seem justified. Sometimes they are.

Lastly, The Little Review courageously announces a set of lectures by Margaret Sanger:

The Egoist, April 1916

So, I had to get that belated March post up in order to get one ready for April. It's a heck of an issue.

Before turning to the canonical coolness of several of these pieces, a moment from Muriel Ciolkowska's "Passing Paris" that turned into a half hour's exploration of the internet: Ciolkowska informed us about "Mme Poupelet," Jane Poupelet. The wikipedia article's in French--she doesn't have an English page, not yet. This passage caught my attention:

The idea of "our leading woman-sculptor" making dolls of "remarkable qualities" caught Kate's and my imagination. We have yet to locate any of these dolls online, either mentioned or in images. We did find some of her sculptures, like this whimsically chubby cat, apparently sold a couple years back in Rockland, Maine--a town where K used to sell farmer's market produce. Such a small world. Too bad we weren't living in the area and aware of this at the time!

So cute! We probably couldn't have afforded it. Further searches turned up this blog post by Alain Verstichel about her work sculpting prosthetic masks for wounded soldiers. It's also in French, but you should follow the link even if you can't read it to look at the images. From here, I learned that Poupelet worked with American Anna Coleman Ladd building these masks.

Katelyn also turned up this article in Harper's, titled "A Great French Sculpturess," written by Janet Scudder in the April 8, 1916 issue--coincidentally coinciding with the century immersion project of this blog. Scudder's extremely excited about Poupelet--here's a prophecy she makes, though, that might be true, at least most of the time: "Poupelet's name will be forgotten just as the name of the sculptor of the Narcissi is forgotten--that is unimportant."

Then we noticed that April 19th is Poupelet's birthday, which means I have to post this post today instead of worrying it over overnight, the way I often do. Happy 142nd, Mme Poupelet!

In other, more canonical news:

Tarr begins. I read it for my PhD exams, but reading it in this immersion project changes it considerably. Tarr, the character, talks like The New Age, and like The Egoist itself. Tarr's criticism of the world indicts the reader as well as his companions in the artistic Knackfus Quarter. The misogyny reverberates through the women's movements I've seen, and the anti-German sentiment gathers force next to the coverage of the war. Even H.D.'s recent poems of turmoil and initiation seem to be of a piece with Tarr as a piece of The Egoist--the dream of being alone, together, holds these things in an uneasy conversation. Or something like that. Is it a coincidence that it is followed immediately by a letter titled "Second-Rate Supermen" about the German misapplication of Nietzsche? Probably not.

Quick Notes:

Harriet Shaw Weaver's editorial criticizes the worship of wonder, the feeling of wonder, in itself: wonder properly appreciated ends with an inspiration to destroy it through learning. Knowledge is the proper end of wonder, not wonder itself. 

H.D. contributes "The Helmsman," a poem I know from Sea Garden. 

Richard Aldington contributes an understated prose poem about an English town, one about "the perfect book" which resonates with the first chapter of Tarr, and a lineated poem about Italy.

The Egoist, March 1916

A belated post on The Egoist for March! I thought I'd written one, but when working on April I noticed that I hadn't.

The big news here is that Tarr is beginning. Wyndham Lewis' novel opens with a few forerunners here--Ezra Pound's "Meditatio" excoriating the stupidity of the literary public for not liking Lewis and Joyce is one of these. The others are short stories by Lewis himself, "The French Poodle"  and "A Young Soldier." Both are war stories, as is Tarr, at least in that it appeared in The Egoist during the war and will certainly resonate with it. They are themselves a matched pair: "The French Poodle" is about a young soldier attempting to sort through his trauma, and mostly failing. "A Young Soldier" is much shorter, a sketch more than a plotted story, about seeing a soldier who looked like he was born to kill.

Quick Notes:

Harriet Shaw Weaver continues to write the editorials, though Marsden is still on the paper, apparently.

Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, and H.D. all contribute poems, as does Alice Groff. Leigh Henry writes on Ravel, Huntly Carter on American photography and French cubism. 

The Crisis, April 1916

I'm just jotting down a few thoughts on this issue here, there's so much more to say.

The editorial section contains an account of a lynching in Lee County, Georgia, including a graphic photograph. Here's the take: "What was the real cause back of this wholesale lynching and back of the lynching of six Negroes in Early County, December 30th? The answer is clear: Peonage. Slavery under another name..." (302). A man named C. D. Rivers from Somerville, VA is then quoted, as apparently he wrote a letter to some newspaper to explain why things are so bad in Georgia. Du Bois catches him in his own rhetoric, showing that Rivers' justification of lynching is based on profits, not morals. 

I grew up southeast of Somerville, a town so small it almost doesn't exist now. Just a store on a corner.

This is immediately followed by a supportive letter from Helen Keller, who also sent one hundred dollars along for the NAACP along with it.

I noticed these things, there are many more, with a lean toward coverage of religious affairs due to this being the Easter special issue. There's a new section titled "The Looking Glass," which seems to be halfway between "Along the Color Line" with its news snippets and the long-form essays and articles that appear from time to time. It's an extended digest of news and events.

Last, here's an image of the "automobile phalanx" against segregation in St. Louis.

The New Age, April 6, 1916

"Man and Manners" continues. I'm more and more certain that Hastings is behind it--this week, it includes a characteristic castigation of women's writing in general. At first, I'm all set to groan, as the passage opens "If it were not for the feminine label on the cover it would usually be difficult to decide whether the writer of a book is a woman or a second-rate man" (542). However, the anonymous author works her way around to making a feminist argument, one that first appeared in D. Triformis, way back in 1910 or so (not going to look it up right at the moment): that women need to stop writing like second rate men, and start writing like women. Check it out:

"Why? Is it to draw men’s approval and praise? I appeal for a new race of women-writers to right the wrong, and to portray people and things as women see them. Men have written themselves up to such an uncorrected extent that we (and they) have got into the habit of taking them at their own value, as though their standards were rules for the Day of Judgment. Again, I say, there are no women-writers. If there had been--hear me while I whisper--this diary of mine would never have been made--public!" (543)

That's amazing! And heading right into the dissertation. 

One quick note: Bechofer seems to be pastiching the master of pastiche this week in "Impressions of Russia," mocking Hastings' "Impressions of Paris" and other contemporaries. At least that's my first impression. 

That's all for now...

The Masses, April 1916

The Masses has been one of my favorites among the periodicals that I've been reading for some time now--I appreciated its blend of serious politics and humor. Students like it for the same reasons, and it is a good text for discussions on American politics in the nineteen teens.

So, it's terrible when it is racist.

The author of the poem is one Jane Burr, a pseudonym of Rosalind Guggenheim Winslow. The poem is an utterly demeaning account of her African American nurse. Often when I see racism in The Masses it's possible to figure out why it's there--a political cartoon that tries to use racial stereotypes to undermine the rhetoric of racism, but that instead ends up repeating the stereotypes. That sort of thing. That's bad enough. This poem is worse. I'm not going to quote it here because I don't have the stomach for it.

Max Eastman knows better--how could this poem appear in the same issue as this image, for instance:

The poem is a different kind of slumming, rural slumming, perhaps. It's the sort of thing The Masses should deplore. After all, this is the same journal that campaigned against lynching, enough to get accolades from The Crisis and to infuriate the southern white press. The Masses promotes books by Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, and appeared with Du Bois in The New Review, which was advertised in The Masses, in an ad that set them side by side in a list of contributors (January 1913, page 19, for instance):

The New Review included an essay by Du Bois criticizing the socialist tendency to exclude people of color from the socialist program in February 1913 (here's a link that should open a pdf of that issue of The New Review).

So what gives? The New York Times ran a story on Burr on August 3, 1913. It's the best source about her I've found so far. Here's the lede:

The New York Times holds up this feminist from a privileged background as a curiosity. The article makes much of the fact that she works in an office, because otherwise she'd bake cakes instead of writing poems (Burr/Winslow says this herself). NYT is also somewhat bewildered by the fact that she's married but believes in divorce. They also mention that her husband, Horatio Gates Winslow, was the original editor of The Masses (Eastman took over in December 1912), and that she gives them poems for free (while the NYT has to pay).

So maybe the picture comes into focus a bit. Burr/Winslow is a friend of the magazine. I don't know if the fact that she supports herself via poetry means she has no independent means, but I'm curious if she's also a benefactor of The Masses. So they print her poem. Still doesn't make much sense to me, and I'll see if I can learn more about it. This post isn't really enough of an analysis--as many of these, it's more of an annotation than an argument. I hope I can come back to this some day. And in the meantime, I'll think about what I'm reading and writing, and why I talk about certain texts and not others. I may be belatedly grouchy with The Masses, which at first struck me as misplaced in history--but I think this particular failure feels very recent. 

The New Age, March 23 1916

I'm currently wrapping up a dissertation chapter on The New Age which is why I'm posting so exclusively about it lately. That, and I know Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings, the main subject of my chapter, is going to take April off from writing for TNA, at least judging by my MJP search results for Alice Morning as author. There may yet be some things hidden in there, and I'll look for them, but I want to write about Morning while I can.

That said, there's only a few small things I'll note right now about this issue. Morning/Hastings continues "Men and Manners," and this week she comments on the scandal over D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow. The puritans are condemned as hypocrites for privately enjoying the novel, while publicly reviling it. In some ways that's rich, coming from Hastings--but it's also been her position for a long time that puritanism ruins fiction.

R.H.C. continues his reboot of his novel, now titled "Seventh Tale for Men Only," which I'm beginning to suspect is a fictionalized account of his relationship with Hastings--the main character, Doran, has been led by philosophy to fall in love with a mysterious dark liberated moon-woman. I'll keep reading it and see what happens.

Imagine  my disappointment: the Pastiche art column of the week says it has a poem by H.D. in it! But it's some other H.D.

More on The New Age and others soon! I should be dissertating more than blogging, though.

The New Age, March 16, 1916

 S. Verdad summarizes the battle of Verdun on page 460. Most of my post will be about literature, but it's a reminder that The New Age is appearing against the backdrop of history. Verdad correctly predicts that Verdun will hold.

R.H.C.'s "Readers and Writers" is the most exciting piece in this issue--he moves from speculating on whether Shakespeare was a particular individual or a collaboration to considering literary collaboration more generally, dropping some big hints to the collaborative nature of The New Age: 

"Still more to the point and the date, I know (and so do you) a weekly journal of some reputation

for smart writing in the country, of which all the articles received and accepted for publication undergo an editorship the effect of which is to make them indistinguishable from one another in style. Nay, I have seen one such article before and after this collaboration had been practised upon it; and, upon my life, you could not tell the second from a good translation of the first" (470). 

He follows Shakespeare with Milton, criticizing Milton's logic while applauding his energy. I'm thinking the discussion of rhetoric could possibly be useful for student papers, as R.H.C. accuses Milton of many freshman mistakes that persist to this day. Might be fun? 

Elsewhere, Orage/R.H.C. resume the novel "Tales for Men Only" as "Seventh Tale for Men Only," a blending of fiction and criticism of Ibsen. I'll follow along as it continues. 

Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning continue the anonymous "Men and Manners," including a funny parody of Pound's "Don'ts" titled "Don'ts in Polite Conversation." Many are still relevant. She/they also continue their fantasy novella, now seemingly titled "As It Fell Out," but I'm less and less interested in it. 

More on The New Age soon...

The Masses, February 1916

I haven't done a post on the Masses in a while, but I've been reading along. Here's one on the February, 1916 issue. I had my class read this issue last week, so it's particularly vivid in my mind, as the students here at UW really liked it, and we learned a ton together by digging through articles,  ads, and art.

Three featured articles caught our collective eye.

The first is John Reed's report from the Serbian front of the war, titled, "The World Well Lost." Reed opens with a beautiful and horrible parody of travel writing:

"THE Serbian town of Obrenovatz is a cluster of red tile roofs and white bulbous towers, hidden in green trees on a belt of land, around which sweeps the river Sava in a wide curve. Behind rise the green hills of Serbia, toppling up to blue ranges of mountains upon whose summit heaps of dead bodies lie still unburied, among the stumps of trees riddled down by machine-gun fire; and half-starved dogs battle there ghoulishly with vultures" (5).

Reed's embedded in the Serbian army, a staunchly nationalist force. When the soldiers hear that he is a socialist, they send him to the artillery to meet a former Serbian socialist officer there. Reed's interview with this man, Takits, shows the damage that the war can do to both a country and to a left-wing individual. Takits often refers to the fact that he can barely remember his activism, despite it being hugely important to him. He explains that socialism was a natural fit in Serbia, as a nation of freeholding peasants, "we were naturally communists." His original goal was to develop a sense of class loyalty among the lower classes to match that of the upper classes, because the lower classes already owned the means of production. The war has pushed all that into the background: "Well, I have forgotten my arguments, and I have lost my faith!" Takit's tragedy is that an intellectual, committed leftist lawyer could be so completely subsumed by the war as to lose his individuality. It's a cautionary tale for American socialists who are reading The Masses. 

The second text that we discussed was "The A.F. of L. Convention: An Impression" by Inez Haynes Gillmore. As my class has spent a lot of time discussing impressionism and post-impressionism, we were impressed by Gillmore's invocation of "impression" in the title, and discussed how framing it as an impression changes the reader's expectations of the piece. The account itself is joyous about the power of the labor delegates, who are sketched as super strong huge hunky brilliant men arguing intelligently over issues that will change the world. Students hypothesized that the female feminist readership of The Masses would have appreciated the woman's vision of male beauty here, so unusual after our many encounters with male representations of women in the course. Gillmore's writing is poetic and powerful: "The voice of labor is a roar, deep as though it came from a throat of iron, penetrating as though it came through lips of silver. One day that voice will silence all the great guns of the world."


Third piece: "About Schools" by Max Eastman. Eastman comments on the plan to adopt the Gary educational system in New York. He's writing to convince his left-wing audience that the plan is a good one, despite its concessions to religion. The Gary plan involves adding workshops to schools, intense shop class, essentially. Eastman writes that his own education was largely useless, and that he learned versatility and self-reliance at his first factory jobs, not in high school. We got the sense that Eastman sees the potential for worker's solidarity here--if everyone works in a factory as part of their schooling, they will have more sympathy with people who work in factories for life. That's implicit, though, a theory. Students appreciated this cartoon that accompanies the piece:

The caption reads: "Let's go out to Central Park and look at the animals." "I can't, I've got to study my zoology." We discussed how this is funny, a critique of current educational systems, and simultaneously a validation of women's ability to be serious students of sciences. Pretty good, for a single image.

There's more, but that's all for now...

The New Age, February 17, 1916

A quick post on the seventeenth--I'm going to push through a flurry in the closing days of this month, so there may well be a few more posts in the next couple days.

Hastings continues both "Men and Manners" and the story that began as "Feminine Fables," with the current iteration titled "Ropes of Sand."

"Men and Manners" is more interesting to me this week: the strange brew of Hastings-style feminism/anti-feminism is on full display (page 374). I'll walk through it here. Joan and Harry are having a fight. Harry is mad because Joan won't speak, and Joan won't speak because she's convinced that Harry won't understand. Here we go:

"Here, snapshot as it was, I saw one of the perennial complaints of men and women against each other-on woman’s side, man’s inability to see from the woman’s point of view; on man’s woman’s silence."

When the author of "Men and Manners" gets Joan to explain herself, here's Joan's point of view:

"DO you think Harry would waste his time trying to explain a joke to a man without a sense of humour? Then, what’s the use of my putting the woman’s case to a man without a sense of woman?"

That's cool, feminism of the gap. But the author answers Joan:

"S’pose so, said I ; but doesn’t that partly come about because women are so unfair to each other?" She goes on: "That’s where I blame women. If they were sex-loyal enough to found an institution similar to the Trade Union that exists among men for the protection of man against the wiles of woman, things would be very different. As it is, thanks (for nothing) to the spirit of rivalry among them, women are like a city divided against itself, and they fall at each other’s hands."

Again, cool: women need to build solidarity to counter the power of the patriarchy, or something like that. Next stop:

"Well personally, I blame both men and women for it. In the interest of general justice men should try to acquire this sense of woman (which Joan analogised with a sense of humour), and it is only by talking to women that they will learn it. Women again, should do their best to help men to acquire it, by at least trying to put the woman’s point of view before them. Necessity gives power, and if women would only begin to talk I wouldn’t be a bit surprised should they discover, after a trial or two (patience, please, men!) that they could ! Indeed, they might find that all the time they had been playing- rabbit to his weasel. Had they but known it, they could have outstripped the brute any day!"

We end up roughly here at the end of the article: women fall back on silence as their primary weapon, because men have no "sense of woman" that will allow them to understand women. The solution is not more silence, but more communication. Women will attain eloquence through engagement and building relationships with men, not by remaining in isolation. Note, though, the sexism that is like the sugar on the pill in phrases like "patience, please, men!" All this also has to be taken in the context of the opening of the piece, which made much fun of presumptuous women that hang around cafes.

Quick notes:

Max Nordau appears in translation, defending Germans from the snide comments of the French press, and appealing to moderation of racial profiling between nations.

Another Max: Max Jacob writes an article on French literature, ending by declaring himself "a champion of Art for Art's sake" if that is understood to mean art that represents, rather than declares.

This from Orage/R.H.C. on modernism and Dostoevsky: "Dostoievsky was a remarkable thinker even above the remarkable writer. The Pushkin address, in particular, appears to me to be decisive of his rank; for in it-and thirty years ago now-he diagnosed the sickness of intellectualism as pride. More, even, he anticipated in several other respects the judgments elsewhere being passed in these pages (by my respected colleagues Mr. de Maeztu and “T. E. H.”) on modernism, even before it was modern" (372)

The New Age, February 10, 1916

Alright, I lied about doing a post on a different magazine before returning to The New Age. The weekly pace is too quick!

These notes will be too quick too:

Hastings/Morning/Anonymous's "Men and Manners" continues, commenting on the rudeness of swearing. She satirizes the crowd at the Cafe Republique, which rang a dim bell in my mind. Googling, I found that part of the recent Paris attacks took place outside the Cafe Republique. So strange.

Then, she continues her story about the rogue peri, this time titled "A Yarn for Marines." The peri ends up on a dreadnought, where she seduces an officer. Rollicking, if a bit silly. No sign yet of the alleged backlash in the correspondence pages. I just noticed that "Peri" and "Paris" are pronounced similarly.

T.E. Hulme continues his notes on abstraction, making an interesting argument about the frameworks that undergird thought. Our logic eventually must rest on self-evident truths, but the problem is that we find our self-evident truths largely through culture, which means they aren't true at all. But he doesn't stop there--things get a little weird first. He argues that there are in fact objective self-evident truths, and that they are often found at the heart of religious dogmas. His belief in original sin, that a human "is a wretched creature that can yet apprehend perfection," is valid, while the humanist optimism about humanity is not (354). It's the large, underlying category of original sin that can change the way we perceive the world. He's going to shift to discussion of literature soon, and I look forward to that. Maybe if Hulme hadn't died, he'd have been T.S. Eliot.

Off to the dissertation.

The New Age, February 3, 1916

So many New Age posts in a row! Sorry if they are a little boring for my regular readers--I'm following Beatrice Hastings very closely these days because, at some point, she's going to stop appearing here. Posts on other journals soon!

Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings continue their short story about the supernatural Peri.

Someone is contributing stories from the Ambulance Corps as "War Notes." I believe this is the poet "Andre B." who used to publish here, and who I know went to war. I don't know who Andre B. is, and "War Notes" are signed simply "B.," but they are the first vivid descriptions of World War One that I've seen. The Western Front's mud and misery have found The New Age. 

Quick Notes:

Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings continue their short story about the supernatural Peri. This week's installment has her bamboozling upper crust people. 

 "Men and Manners" continues with a piece on why one should not call the waitress "Miss."

Feminist Alice Smith has been debating the position of women in industry and in guild socialism for some time now--this issue has a long and eloquent letter from her.

One R.M. Fox fills the week's Pastiche column with "Factory Echoes: Sketches from Life," which are what they sound like.

The New Age, January 27, 1916

Two big things to discuss in this issue: more fiction from Hastings, and T. E. Hulme, elaborating his philosophy.

First, Hastings:

The story from the last post continues in this issue of TNA: Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning has dropped the "Feminine Fables" header from the tale, which appears here as "In Between Whiles." Many Hastings themes in the next installment, as the Peri wanders the sea until forced to land at a nearly deserted island, where one fisherman lives. The encounter devolves into an armed standoff fairly quickly as they have a battle of the sexes for dominance.

In other Hastings news, "Men and Manners" is an anonymous column that is probably hers. This week's argues that men are mostly just ignorant of how to treat women. Distastefully, it seems to say that men are inherently better than women, but that's not a good reason to strut about acting superior.

Last thought, mostly for myself: there's a letter praising "Men and Manners" in this issue. If the author of "Men and Manners" is Hastings, as I suspect, then this would somewhat undercut the narrative that she's alienating the readers from The Old New Age.

Second, Hulme:

He's been contributing philosophical articles, but this is the first I'm going to write about. It's part of a series titled "A Note-Book," and I'm sure it's been covered by Hulme scholarship before I got to it, but here's my take, anyway. Hulme says that there are grand, large-scale beliefs that are so prevalent and powerful in both individual minds and collective cultures that they become invisible, despite the fact that they are assumptions. The focus of the essay is on two of these beliefs, religion and humanism. In a moment of modernist gnosticism, Hulme explains that the religious attitude believes in a version of original sin, that man is bad, and can partake in perfection without ever being perfect. Understanding this leads one to discipline and order.

Humanism doesn't believe in the inherent badness of people. The goal of humanism, then, is to help people unleash their inherent goodness. Hulme hates this, because "It distorts the real nature of ethical values by deriving them out of essentially subjective things, like human desires and feelings." According to Hulme, this is now breaking up, and society will return to something more philosophically aligned with medieval Europe than renascence Europe. The solution? Here:

"A complete reaction from the subjectivism and relativism of humanist ethics should contain two elements : (1) the establishment of the objective character of ethical values, (2) a satisfactory ethic not only looks on values as objective, but establishes an order or hierarchy among such values, which it also regards as absolute and objective."

Prefiguring Eliot? We'll see. Hulme's complaint about subjectivism and relativism that permeate his society is very familiar to me, as I see such complaints around all the time. The strange thing is that the complaints often point to a different moment or era as the source of subjectivism or relativism, the 1960s, for example. Hulme sees it everywhere, all the way back to the renaissance.

The New Age, Jan 6, 13, 20: Feminine Fables

Breaking the usual procedure of this blog, I'm going to cover three related moments in the first three New Ages of the year: the jumbled, confusing publication of the beginning of "Feminine Fables," a serial story by Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning that began in the Jan 6 issue, and continues in the Jan 13 and further issues. This is the text that Hastings later blames for breaking her relationship with The New Age.

The jumble: Orage and company accidentally printed the second chapter on the sixth, and the first on the 13th. This is sort of a shame, because I thought the first story was a cool stand-alone satirical tale about a witch transforming an evil spirit into a contemporary woman. The hilarious central trope is the spirit asking the witch for various kinds of beauty that would involve physical transformation her her part, and the witch's squirming that these kinds of transformations are beyond her power. Unfortunately for the witch, the spirit has clippings from the newspapers advertising cosmetics able to effect each of the transformations she desires. This leads the witch to cave in, and she actually pulls it off.

Because of the mixup, we get the reasons for the spirit's presence in the witch's hut on the 13th. The spirit is a Peri, one who has accidentally been locked out of paradise, and who decides to go live among humans instead of dealing with the shame of the situation.

Here's how the story is reported in Hastings' memoir, The Old New Age: 

 "Towards the end of 1915, I had profoundly sensed the war-weariness that might have induced the people to accept any honourable offer of peace. I ceased my weekly "Impressions of Paris", and led away from the pall of inertia; (that soon was converted into ignoble rage by powerful schemers) all around us in a series of lightly satirical tales about an independent Peri, making her deal with various situations where prejudice chains us down when we want to get up. The unstated moral was to "cut through". According to Orage, these tales infuriated people. People were suffering, and there was I writing witty nonsense... Letter after letter complained of my indifference to the public misery... I was seriously damaging the paper... I now regarded the readers as a kind of treacherous, ungrateful, idiotic herd of swine."  (24-25)

By January 20th, there are already signs of the problem: Hastings/Morning writes incredulously, "why do you harbour serpents of readers who write and ask me where is the moral of the fable?"
She continues with a self-destructive self-defense (characteristically!), writing that the stories are more a way to keep herself from pining away, that they should be labeled "for women only" (a reference to Orage's own "Tales for Men Only."

What fascinates me is this: In The Old New Age Hastings writes that the whole fury of the readers is "according to Orage." There's doubt. I also doubt: Orage hasn't printed any of these alleged angry letters yet, and there simply is not enough in the stories themselves to justify outrage. Also, Hastings has done this before both in Impressions of Paris and in the stories about/by Anastasia Edwardes (which I tentatively attribute to Hastings). I'll continue to monitor the situation.

One Quick Note:

Jan 13 has an article by TNA's soldier correspondent North Staffs, advocating that literary men should enlist, and explicitly calling out Clive Bell (Virginia Woolf's pacifist brother in law) as someone who ought to enlist, calling him "a contemptible ass." It gets even more intense.

Poetry, January 1916

Just a few quick observations on Poetry:

Alice Corbin, here without her married surname "Henderson" that usually appears (if memory serves), contributes a set of poems in dialog with London imagism. She indicates the dialog in a poem, "Music," through an epigraph from Richard Aldington's "Chorikos" from November 1912's Poetry (the second issue, and in the first month of my blog project). Corbin follows Aldington's ode to Persephone with a poem about visiting the grave of Pablo de Sarasate. For H.D., "The Pool" responds to "The Pool," with Corbin's following the pattern established in "Music" by doing a more specific, real-world poem than H.D.'s. This one is an account of Corbin's visit to Nimes, France, and perhaps the ancient Garden of the Fountain there. In the poem, Corbin's younger sister dives into the forbidden pool. This is a metaphor of H.D.'s fearless, innovative poetry. Poetry loves H.D. so much. Here's part of the tribute, sorry for the low image quality (mine, not Corbin's! And for the jokes).

The next poem is a two-part sequence labeled "Apparitions," this one likely going to Ezra Pound, with his "apparitions in the crowd" from "In a Station of the Metro." I might pair "Color Note" with either John Gould Fletcher or Amy Lowell.

I noticed that, according to her Wikipedia bio, Alice Corbin is going to move to Santa Fe this year (1916) to treat her tuberculosis.

Quick Notes:

Pound contributes an obituary for Remy de Gourmont. It contains the germs of Poundian intellectual elitism, already spotted elsewhere in this blog project, but perhaps never so clearly. Translating de Gourmont, he continues:

"Yet the phrase is so plain and simple: 'to permit those who are worth it to write frankly what they think.' That is the end of all rhetoric and of all journalism. By end I do not mean goal, or ambition. I mean that when a nation, or a group of men, or an editor, arrives at the state of mind where he really understands that phrase, rhetoric and journalism are done with. The true aristocracy is founded, permanent and indestructible."

The aristocracy can be incarnated in a single editor, if necessary. This will not end well. A revealing moment, though.

And this note, joyous in its moment, tragic in the light of Seeger's eventual death in July of this year:

This does close a loop for me, though. Alan Seeger's brother, Charles, collected songs that helped fuel the 60s folk revival, and was Pete Seeger's father. That now links back to Poetry, if in a roundabout way.