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.