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.