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 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, January 21, 1915

As I've written before, The New Age is a relentless experience. Every week,

Beatrice Hastings' weekly "Impressions of Paris" continues. She opens with a portrait of a city gone "mad" with "Christianism" and "the illicit sale of cocaine and haschish," (308). This leads her into a kind of prophecy of the Lost Generation's cold modernism. After the war, the youth will be "stark awake" to the powers of the world:

"The new youth of the world will not likely be Christian. It will be instructed, undeceivable, cold to religious frenzy as to all other feminine freaks of the solar plexus. Hyperborean, perhaps, is the description for this cold youth, la jeunesse froide. The enemies in art will be the dry, cold men, arid men who have nothing to do with the hyperborean, men who arrive at the ice, who, perhaps, even surpass it, but who never see the Pole even when they find it, knowing no more than to plant the flag of their special cult, and get back." 

Note the language that presages T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men." Also, note the somewhat confusing double-use of "cold" to describe both the heroic jeunesse froide and the "enemies in art." The distinction seems to be what one does at the Pole--do you inhabit it, or merely explore it, colonize it, and depart? Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning's beloved brother was a polar explorer, surely she has him in mind here on some level. I can't quite gloss it, yet. 

Of greater general interest, she picks up her feud with Ezra Pound immediately after the passage I quoted above. "I almost was about to believe, while reading his article 'Affirmations,' that Mr. Ezra Pound was about to wake up. But he sank quietly deeper on the pillow in his final paragraph, which is only an affirmation that he is a hopeless cultist. Bless my heart, Vortices and the Quattrocento!" 

This is an interesting moment. Here's the final paragraph she's referring to (see above post for a summary of the content of last "Affirmation," and below for the next):

"Note that I am not trying to destroy anyone’s enjoyment of the Quattrocento, nor of the Victory of Samothrace, nor of any work of art which is approximately the best of its kind. I state that there is a new gamut of artistic enjoyments and satisfactions; that vorticist painting is not meaningless; and that anyone who cares to may enjoy it" (278). 

My ears prick: I think that Hastings is missing the context of this piece, which is at least partially "The Origins and Manifesto of Futurism," in which Marinetti writes that a race car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. That passage in Marinetti always struck me as a weak point anyway, considering how much Boccioni's sculpture resembles the Victory. 

(Boccioni for comparison)

Hastings is taking a response as an isolated statement. I'm quibbling with the dead at this point. More important is the fact that Hastings cites Matthew Arnold as the source of Pound's basic point about the limits that time and space place on creativity. I should probably track this down at some point and see if she's right--a quick initial survey turned up an essay in my old home Paideuma, "Matthew Arnold and Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading" by L.H. Palmer, 1973.

Last BH note for the week: she attacks Upton Sinclair pretty hard for his letter from last week. 

On to the "Affirmation" itself: this one is classic Pound-as-Promoter, titled "Jacob Epstein" and is largely about Epstein's sculpture. It has some weirdness about how people prefer caressable art, but prefer caressable people to caressable art. Real art, though, is about form--and Epstein is, according to Pound, a master of it. Characteristically, he exhorts his readers to test his writings against the actual artwork. It's hard, though, to quote a statue--and it's been a long while since TNA printed an image. 

C. E. Bechhofer has been writing about his current journey in Russia--I haven't been covering them much because they haven't piqued my interest until now: he creates an extended analogy between the young poets and writers in Russia and how a Russian would see the young poets and writers of England. Richard Aldington comes off particularly poorly as one of several poets writing "good for nothing scribblings" (314). He then complains that he can't find a Russian New Age, just a lot of Russian Aldingtons. Which is particularly funny, because...

...in the correspondence pages, the last letter is a tiny one from Aldington, which attacks Pound and his "Affirmations." I was under the impression that they were still friends at this point (need to correlate with a biography), but not anymore: he figures Pound as a modern huckster Priapus, obsessed with selling sculptures, the phallus, artistic schools, and ancient instruments. References from "Affirmations" abound. "I have abandoned my hobby of joining artistic movements," protests Aldington. 

I'm running out of time, but not out of material! Bless the Archive!

Willard Huntingdon Wright, art critic and detective novelist, contributes a history of avant-garde painting up to the present. Fascinating stuff--he finds most of the gains of the a-g already present in impressionism, and taps synchromism as the most advanced of the day. A good quick read for an orientation (starts page 317). 

Quick Notes:

The editor/Orage/R.H.C. again exhorts his readers to take The New Age as a whole, with each part weighted equally (313). Some of Pound's later all-encompassing rhetoric in that. 

 S. Verdad, the foreign policy writer, worries at the end of his weekly essay that England and the USA might go to war. 

Marmaduke Pickthall reveals the British support of pan-Islamism.

In the correspondence pages, there's a very odd situation: apparently, the London Daily News' James Douglas wrote a piece on the concept of a 1950s Englishman writing to an American about the American war with Germany. One Harvey L. Fenwick writes a hilarious rejoinder from a speculated 1950 American, calling out the Englishman's hypocrisies. I searched briefly for the original, but haven't found an archive yet... sorry, this one is probably more helpful to me than to you, dear reader.