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 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, 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. 

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. 

Blast War Number, July 1915

The second and final issue of Blast was published this month in 1915--and it is amazing. I'd read Blast in facsimile and on the MJP before, but hadn't looked at the second issue before. First, I should mention that the MJP reminds visitors that this issue is still under copyright in the UK, so I feel a little weird about posting images even though I'm in the USA. You'd best check it out at the MJP anyway.

My thoughts:

First, the thing is mostly Wyndham Lewis, with a sprinkling of others. But what others! T.S. Eliot makes his first appearance, as far as I've noticed, at least, publishing "Preludes" and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." As Eliot was one of my first favorite poets, it's very surreal to see him appearing in my parallel existence, especially in this venue--Eliot breaking on to the scene as a Vorticist!? The poems take on the texture of the context of the Lewisian vortex. Even that vortex doesn't look like the one in Blast. Gone are the long catalogs of blessings and blasts (each gets one page in this issue). In their place are darkly humorous essays on the war and aesthetics by Lewis, with Pound and Jessie Dismorr making sizable contributions, too. Here, Eliot's poems fit the general air of wry social comment. They are also themselves, and excellent.

Here are some nuggets from Lewis on the war:

"No wise aristocratic politician would ever encourage the people f his country to be conservative, in the sense of "old-fashioned” and over-sentimental about the things of the Past. The only real crime, on the contrary, would be to dream or harbour memories. To be active and unconscious, to live in the moment, would be the ideal set before the average man." (10).

"Super-Krupp is the best hope for the glorious future of War. Could Krupp only combine business ability with a Napoleonic competence in the field, the problem would be solved! We might eventually arrive at such a point of excellence that two-thirds of the population of the world could be exterminated with mathematical precision in a fortnight. War might be treated on the same basis as agriculture." (14)

Beyond these political prognostications, I found Lewis' "A Review of Contemporary Art" revealing, useful, probably teachable. The contrast of realism and naturalism, on page 39, will find its way into my dissertation...

There is far too much in this issue for me to address it comprehensively here, so, Quick Notes:

Gaudier-Brzeska contributes a short poem-essay, which appears with the news of his death. 

SO MUCH awesome Vorticist visual art!

Jessie Dismorr is fantastic. Someone should make more of a stink about her work--it deserves a look, and seems pretty unheralded (google says someone is writing her biography, so maybe soon?). 

The New Age, July 22, 1915

First, I want to welcome Katelyn Kenderish, who has written the first guest post for Poetry of July, 1915. She'll be covering Poetry for Little Review Reviews, giving us a poet's perspective of that journal.

Turning to The New Age: it's been a while since I last posted on this journal. For those of my readers who have been following my progress since the beginning (probably only Katelyn!), you know how interested I've been in Beatrice Hastings' career at The New Age. This career is drawing to a close: Hastings, as Alice Morning, is caught in her own sexism, as her traditionalist and old-fashioned view of femininity is not compatible with the demands of World War One in The New Age. Asked whether she supports the war, she retreats into her gender role: "War is a man’s affair, and I don’t come in at all in the matter of believing in it or not. My part is to nurse or sew or cheer or shut up. If I break out into an opinion it must be blamed on to a false education, or the double-edged licence of the modern woman, or, at its best, the contact with men on service" (276). That's just a sampling. Hastings/Morning's tone is another fault: her emotional and light style can appear flighty and flippant, and incompatible with the demands of the moment (in the eyes of the moment). Her staunch opposition to war-as-such, which she sees as essentially feminine, is an offensive defense, labeling her female critics as unwomanly. But it's not going to work.

While I think Hastings is a brilliant stylist, it is difficult to read these arguments, and they are difficult to categorize. The relationship of femininity to war changes, in an ebb and flow--last night Katelyn wondered if the that women should oppose war categorically would seem so sexist during the Vietnam era. We decided that it was an interesting lens, but also the wrong perspective. Reading Hastings as ahead of or behind her times decontexualizes her in a way that might be worth a moment's provocative thought, but it is more important to try to understand the context in the ways it is available to us now.

After discussing the war, Hastings cites a review of her "Impressions of Paris" that appeared in The Atheneaum. This passage caught  my eye as prophetic: "I like the “Athenaeum,” which will not mind a bit about my bypaths fifty years hence, will even, perhaps, raise an eyebrow at the indiscretion of some publisher’s editor who may suppress them. Not that I would bother to go down all of them twice myself! But then, one doesn’t write Impressions with an eye on Immortality" (277). This is a foreshadowing of the occlusion of Hastings from the literary record, remarkably presciently, unless she was already suspecting that Orage was going to throw her out and keep her down. In fifty years it won't be a publisher's editor who suppresses Hastings, but a scholar: Wallace Martin rarely mentions her in his histories of The New Age. 

Quick Notes:

Paul Selver contributes a poem satirizing, I think, how Rupert Brooke and perhaps Gaudier-Brzeska have been eulogized and praised as heroes for dying in the war, which will ensure their lasting fame. He's right of course. The satire calls out Aldington and Pound by name. Page 268.

R.H.C./Orage reviews some interesting texts in "Readers and Writers": Pound's Noh has appeared in The Drama, a periodical that should probably (with Poetry and Drama) be added to The Modernist Journals Project some day. Orage praises Noh for all but the translations themselves, and theorizes that they are remnants of an ancient mystery cult. He accuses Pound of "eating peas with his knife," which is a funny way to say that he is too slangy. Then, he turns to review an essay in The Yale Review by J.C. Ransom, who I wasn't expecting to see in the MJP. I usually associate him with later modernisms.

Poetry, July 1915

A line of trees runs through the July 1915 issue of Poetry, kind of like a windbreak in a pasture.  This might be true of every Poetry a century ago, and perhaps the current ones as well. But since this is my first review of an issue, it’s enough of a motif to organize around.

In “Polonius and the Ballad Singers,” Padraic Colum gives us one folk ballad and a few folkish songs he made up (he acknowledges this in a postscript).  It’s a little confusing what Polonius is doing in Connacht.  Perhaps a knock at treacherous counselors depriving Ireland of independence even as they consume the island’s old culture?  Or just a whim written because Colum really likes Hamlet?  

One of the balladeers explains his song:

‘Tis nearly native; something blown here

And since made racy—like yon tree, I might say,

Native by influence if not by species,

Shaped by our winds. You understand, I think?

Maybe. But a racy tree? A little OEDing reveals that racy once had a meaning more like terroir, a wine that revealed its origins by the strong, characteristic taste of the soil it was grown in.  By the early twentieth century, racy as mildly scandalous was gaining ground, giving Colum a double meaning here, referring both to the transmutation of a song by its Irish context and the ballad’s piquant content.

Frances Shaw has a series of poems in this issue.  She doesn’t appear anywhere else in the MJP except in Poetry before 1918, but her poem “Who Loves the Rain” is pretty widely anthologized.  Her poems in this issue seem to me careful and pretty, affection-inspiring.  They remind me so much of the poetry I attempted to write as a young teenager.  To keep with the theme, and redoubling my affection, there’s this stanza in the voice of a tree from “Three Voices” (the others of which are the wind and some lovelorn feminine soul):

The Tree:

A wind of pain and longing

Strips my boughs of their spring-time.

I bow, and rock, and sweep the ground ;

Then, in the silence, hold me listening.

Is this the after-calm in life,

Or is it death ?

Max Michelson’s “O Brother Tree” very ardently wonders about what it’s like to be a tree, which is a very necessary and good thing to do.  But that’s certainly the most interesting aspect of the poem.  

Leyland Huckfield’s gothic poems follow and are gruesomely concerned with demon women in church and a son’s temptation to kill his father with a sickle, presumably because he’s been hauled out of bed to reap for hours before sunrise.  Not a forest in sight of those.

The gothic continues with the “The Old South” by John Gould Fletcher.  It is dedicated to H.D. and it’s unredeemably stuffed with contradictory descriptions and stereotypes.  See the trees that are “dumb-stricken ghosts in flight.” However, there is a paragraph in which every sentence begins with “let us go.”  Given the presence of Polonius and also Harriet Monroe’s review of Visions and Revisions by John Cowper Powys, concerned with the Grand Style, I’m having a really good time imagining Eliot reading this issue of poetry and conjuring Prufrock’s voice.

There follows an article about how kids write great poetry until adults ruin it.  Alice Oliver Henderson’s poems seem to bear it out relatively well.  “And how pretty the trees are growing” she observes.

Shortly afterwards, Monroe takes a similar tack, decrying dramatists more interested in wearing ribbons and imparting tones than in pushing at the edges of art’s capabilities.  In a review of Earth Deities and Other Rhythmic Masques by Bliss Carman and Mary Perry King, after complaining about having to judge amateur plays intended to be staged by genteel urban outdoors clubs in the summer while members traipse through wooded parks, H.M. implores, “Is there no one who can put some life into this kind of thing? Can we not have a vital and beautiful response to a vital and beautiful demand?” One wonders how vital and if anyone leaps to action who hears Monroe’s call for something more substantial than a reworking of vegetable myths in archaic diction.  (In a review concerned largely with William Cullen Bryant, H.M. writes, “Let us be careful whom we honor with monuments. Build one to Poe, who was true to his art whether drunk or sober ; to Whitman, who never sold out even to pay his debts; to Whistler, whom neither wrath nor ridicule could swerve from his purpose ; to any starveling who keeps faith with the muse and scorns a respectable old age : but not to the deserter, the wearer of ribbons, the tone-imparter." I keep wondering what she would think of the blog named after her.)

The issue ends with correspondence that makes no mention of trees.  Two letters respond with dignified indignity to anti-German culture propaganda run in the previous issue of Poetry.  Perhaps those two letters, both adamant that “the dreadnoughts of England, and the howitzers of Germany have nothing to do with poetry,” indicate some chagrin on the part of the editorial staff for including Wilenski’s article in the first place.

Finally, there are notable backpage adverts for Ezra Pound’s Cathay, Sonnets and Ballate, and two volumes of his own poems, the “War Number” of BLAST, and a note in The Drama’s advertisement that its current issue includes Fenollosa’s (and Pound’s) “Noh”, which happily enough includes a discussion of the Noh’s emblematic pine tree.

The Egoist, May 1915

In May, The Egoist hosted a special issue on Imagism, now without the terminal -e of Imagisme. It is epic. It contains articles on F.S. Flint, Ezra Pound, H.D., John Gould Fletcher, D.H. Lawrence, and Amy Lowell. It has an essay on the history of Imagism by F.S. Flint, and criticism of Imagism by Harold Monro. As an act of canon formation, it is notable for how it downplays Pound's position in the movement. Critics went a long time before rediscovering that Pound was not as single-handedly responsible for the movement as he can sometimes appear.

I wanted to write a post on this issue, but it is too much. Check out the table of contents:

This is must-read material for scholars, fans, and enemies of Imagism. Apologies for not being quite up to the task of posting on eight or so essays, and a set of poems. I'll be teaching this in the fall and into the future, no doubt. 

Before realizing that there was just too much to cover in a blog post, I finished my section on F.S. Flint's first essay, "The History of Imagism." I'll post it because I managed to ferret out one of his obscure epigraphs. 

It upends completely the standard narrative of imagism, and clearly sets out this intent with an epigraph from Tacitus' Agricola, which translates to:

"And so matters, which as being still not accurately known my predecessors embellished with their eloquence, shall now be related on the evidence of facts."

The second epigraph is harder to track: "Chi compra Manfredi?" or, "Who will buy Manfred?" John Addington Symonds wrote about this in Renaissance in Italy, which I take as Flint's source. Here's an excerpt:

"Our knowledge of the earliest Italo-Provencal poetry is vague, owing to the lack of genuine Sicilian monuments. We can only trace faint indications of a progress toward greater freedom and more spontaneous inspiration, as the 'courtly makers' yielded to the singers of the people. The battle of Benevento extinguished at one blow both the hopes of the Suabian dynasty and the development of Sicilian poetry. When Manfred's body had been borne naked on a donkey form the battle-field to his nameless grave, amid the cries of "Chi compra Manfredi? a foreign troubador, Amerigo di Peguilhan, composed his lament..." (27)

The context in Symonds explains why Flint places this here: the death of Manfred ended a developing poetic that was transplanted to northern Italy, which became famous for its innovations, while the true innovators were forgotten. Clever, Flint.

Flint gives the credit to Hulme, who is currently "in the trenches of Ypres," claiming that they founded a "Poet's Club" in 1908, to impress women. Pound didn't show up until 1909 (by a printer's error, it is 7909 in the text!). Flint is clearly upset by Pound's conquest of the term. I wonder how the poetic justice of Amy Lowell's theft of the movement felt for Flint. Intriguingly, Flint implies that he did not write the contribution to the March 1913 Poetry text published under his name and which contained the three rules of Imagism. After a few more barbs at Pound, Flint stops.

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:

The New Age, April 8 1915

Beatrice Hastings, as Alice Morning, contributes another installment of "Impressions of Paris," and as usual, it is the most interesting piece in this particular issue of The New Age. She dips into the surrealist mode that she used in stories between 1910-13, and which appears only occasionally in "Impressions." I think she's describing the struggles of having a maidservant (remember, Hastings wrote a column on how to live without servants a while back), but she figures her servant as a "patent doll that boils your tea-kettle" (611). It's not Hastings' finest moment, but it gives her space to pivot and reflect on the war and feminism, an intriguing glimpse into the past: " Do not expect any thoughts from me. I am become simply a suffering receptacle of the horrid comedy of things. The battle of a mechanised, over-feminised world against itself leaves me without any other excuse for existence." War, mechanized and over-feminized? One, but not the other, has become a cliche. I believe that for Hastings, feminized is equivalent to emotional, and the nominal manliness of the emotion doesn't exonerate it from being feminine, as opposed to intellectual. It's an old and invalid train of thought, and I wonder what her career would have been like if she had managed to avoid it.

She then pauses to look back at the suffrage movement, seemingly nostalgically:

"Only to think how, two or three years ago, nothing had a banner to its name save the Rights of Women, and now we are thankful to be out of reach of violation and slaughter ! Just when we were on the Point of leading men to Glory, getting the vote and putting everything right- just there and then they went frantic and spoiled it all. And they may very well stay frantic for another thirty years, settling what’s what and who’s who among themselves, while the real question as to who shall decide about vaccinating little Johnnie is left without a man behind it! And here is a case of one of those curious, bungling, partial conditions of Nature: it needs a man even to decide who shall decide. If Papa decide that Mamma shall decide, Mamma will decide; but if Papa decide to decide, Papa will decide."

The men have brushed aside the struggle for women's rights, which has revealed the unshakable patriarchy controlling the system. Hastings, who has been a collaborator with the patriarchy for years now, seems yet to see the tragedy of this system.

Turning abruptly to the lighthearted (and mean-spirited), TNA satirizes The Egoist's announcement of Pound's College of the Arts from last November's Egoist. In a similar announcement, it is dubbed "The College of Tea-hearts," where one can get instruction from Mr. Pound-Cake in the Cake Atelier, among other confectionery's delights. Check it at page 619.

Similarly, intellectual woman artists get satirized in "The Confessions of a Solitary Traveler," nominally by Anastasia Edwardes. It's probably a satire of someone in particular--but who, I'm not sure. She goes to the beach with Dostoyevsky and Hume, but ends up getting seduced by a man who buys her candy. The form, content, and boots lead me to guess that the author is actually Beatrice Hastings.

Quick Notes:

The issue has several anti-American articles. Not allies yet.

"Letters to a Trade Unionist" describes how clerks have shifted their alliance from the management to the proletariat and the unions.

Sol Davis's "The Mad City" is a transparent allegory of the war in Europe, told as a brawl between neighbors. Not that great

"Readers and Writers" complains of a press boycott, accusing the London publishers, except Macmillan, of ceasing to send him books to review. He also praises The Yale Review as the best magazine America has produced.

Llewelyn Powys contributes a story set in British East Africa, titled "Rubbish," about the tragedies of Africans under British colonialism. The story doesn't escape its own racism and sentimentality, but it fits into the genre of abolitionist writing turned to the colonial situation.

Lastly, I noticed a strange letter under the pseudonym "Ignotus Quondam" on why England might be better off losing the war. This is pretty radical, for the time and place.

Poetry, March 1915

Somehow this month is slipping away, and I have so many posts to catch up on before the end of it! So this will be a very, very cursory glance over the contents of the months' Poetry. 

The best part for this H.D. fan is her set of five poems. They end up split between Sea Garden and The God in the collected poems--something I'd like to investigate sometime. I am not sure I've read an account of her own editorial practices.

Pound's poetry gets an obligatory mention: "Provincia Deserta" is a poem about his trip to Provence, and is a poem containing history, including personal history--as does "The Gypsy." The most interesting is the openly vorticist "Dogmatic Statement Concerning the Game of Chess: Theme for a Series of Pictures," which isn't included (at least I don't remember seeing it) in the Sieburth/Library of America Pound, Poems and Translations that is usually my go-to collected works. Pound also translates Rihaku/Li Po's "Exile's Letter."

EP also contributes part two of his "Renaissance," this time focusing on what is necessary for an American renaissance: patronage, centralization.

Harriet Monroe has a short piece on a meeting of Chicago literary magazines. It's pretty good as a barometric reading of modernism in Chicago--there's an account of The Little Review, Poetry, Drama and The Dial as being condescended to as "uplift magazines," and a rebellion against this label.

Ellen FitzGerald reviews Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts, and Alice Corbin Henderson reviews Vachel Lindsay's The Congo and Other Poems. This review is interesting because Henderson follows up on the Linday-Marinetti connection that Pound made earlier.

A column labeled "Our Contemporaries" declares that "Boston is discovering Imagism!" It explains that Amy Lowell's new anthology is coming out, and that the Flint and Pound founding essays have been reprinted by The New Statesman. It also has a gesture toward the fact that Pound won't be appearing in this anthology--Amygism has begun.

The New Age, February 25 1915

The silliest, but most interesting, part of this issue of The New Age is Ezra Pound's next "Affirmation," "The Non-Existence of Ireland." In this one, he satirically describes how he can't find any evidence of an actual Ireland as a way to criticize the stall-out of the Celtic Revival. Naturally, James Joyce is an exile, so he doesn't count and is the exception that proves the rule. Pound praises Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, "so far as I know [they are the] only two writers of prose fiction of my decade whom anyone takes in earnest." Intriguing footnote after that: "A critic, whom I respect, frequently quotes a pseudonymous romance--'The Maid's Comedy'[sic]--which I have unfortunately never read." So without reading Hastings, he's willing to give her boosters in TNA the benefit of the doubt that she (pseudonymously) might be on the par of Lawrence and Joyce. And now, forgotten!

 BH as Morning notes that she's laid up with influenza and won't be able to contribute anything new for the next few weeks.

"Readers and Writers" this week contains transcribed tidbits of conversations Orage has had recently. Some are very insightful, some not so much, some are revealing outside of their own terms. My favorite of these last: "The modern movement is likely to land us in a series of marital disasters. On the one side, men are aiming at the synthetic man typical of the Renaissance: on the other, women are specializing in fragments. Very soon it will take seven women to balance a man, and polygamy will be talked of. But even a fragment of a woman will insist on the rights of a whole" (457). So, skipping the New Age misogyny at the end of that for now, consider what he's saying: male modernists are synthesizing, while female modernists are fragmenting. That this thesis is even possible shows the stature of women in modernism, but I wish he'd provided examples.

Quick Notes:

The last of Morgan Tud's Three Tales runs today. I still don't know who he is--but I'm feeling more sure that these are satires of Joyce. I will write about them someday, I think...

"An Open Letter to Mr. Stephen Graham" by one Percy Cohen is a nice response to antisemitic tripe about moving all the Jews out of Russia and Poland. Really cool. The New Age is taking on The English Review's implicit bias. The effect is somewhat dulled by C.E. Bechhofer's [sic, but I think this was spelled differently before?] account of anti-foreign and antisemitic bias in Kiev.

"Reviews" covers many recent books. December's Poetry comes in for a drubbing, as does Huntley Carter's book on Max Reinhardt, and new poems Rabindranath Tagore.

Pound responds to the satire of the prisoners from last issue: "His parable of the two prisoners is full of marrow," he says, but as a way to swipe back. Also, a direct reply to BH as AM, in a series of rhetorical questions. Most important are the last two, "Does she find no difference between the direction of my propaganda and that of the destructionists? Who most respects the masterwork of the past, one who battens upon it, cheapening or deadening its effect by a multitude of bad imitations, or one who strives toward a new interpretation of life?" He's calling her out for her bad classical poetry, I think, which is delightful to me.

Poetry, February 1915

Just quick notes for now, because, dissertation, but I will return to this issue when Pound completes the essay on the Renaissance that he begins in it, and compare that to his recent "Affirmation" on the same topic. Exciting! Well, perhaps not.

Quick Notes:

Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Richard Aldington all get printed in this one. Lindsay's poem is kind of painful Chinoiserie, but note how it dovetails with Pound's essay's Chinese thesis.  Aldington's poem to Nijinsky, "Dancers," is notable for the quotation that is its last line: "Mon sembable, mon frere!" So, is the line in The Waste Land an extended quotation of a quotation? I'm having fun picturing Aldington reading The Waste Land for the first time. His A Fool i' the Forest is clearly his attempt at a Waste Land...

Pathetic post! All for now, because I need to do my post on The Egoist before the end of the month. And work on the dissertation!

The New Age, February 18 1915

This post will be brief because I'm making good progress on my dissertation. Hopefully I'll be able to return to this one sometime, because there's a lot of good stuff.

Histoire D'Enfant by Augustus John, pg 429:

This issue contains two unwitting prophecies. Sorry if this is overly mystical, but again, I'm going to rush this one for the sake of my diss.

Ezra Pound is the subject of one prophecy: in a satire of Vorticism by one John Triboulet, this pre-vision of his incarceration in Pisa. The context is that Obadiah has become a "euphemiste," and is a fool compared to his interlocutor. But look, page 434, bottom right, Pisa! Or Pisa, interpreted by Obadiah, who is a fool, after all.

The second prophecy: the Lusitania is the subject of a false flag controversy. When worried about encountering Germans, the Lusitania flew an American flag, which was a legal move--but it made the Germans state that in the future they will target ships that they suspect are British, even when under neutral flags. The Lusitania creeps closer to its doom (420-21).

Max Jacob contributes aphorisms as "Extracts from Unpublished Volumes."

de Maeztu contributes an essay on "Marx and Wealth and Power."

Beatrice Hastings' "Impressions" continue her discussion of sculpture, reacting against Pound. Of particular interest is her critique of Pound's prose style.

There's a hilarious and comprehensive response to Austin Harrison's scurrilous anti-Semetic rant from last week's correspondence pages.

Correspondence in general is really good, but Austin Hertslet's letter about Pound, Lewis, and representation in painting might be useful for my work.

"Notes of the Week" is on British speculation against British interests--English capital is cornering the grain market in America, according to the editor, which is putting strain on the lower classes. Pretty nasty, if true.

All for now--apologies for the rush.

The New Age, Feb 11 1915

This will be a very Hastings-heavy post.

In her "Impressions of Paris" this week, Alice Morning/BH tells about a fire breaking out in her flat--she grabbed a sculpture of a head by Modigliani to some ridicule: the artist thought she was foolish for rating the sculpture above all of her other possessions. That makes this part of her "Impression" a double retort: she's responding to Modigliani, "the value of works of plastic art has to be settled by the critics because, of course, artists seldom know their good work from their bad" (401). She claims that artists revile writers out of vanity, but that they should see critics/writers as their "best friends" because they teach the public how to appreciate their works. It's worth reading.

The other side of the retort is to Pound, who has been boosting Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture in his "Affirmations" (more on that below). By stating her reading of Modigliani's sculpture, she acts as a counterweight to Pound's opinions: "The whole head smiles in contemplation of knowledge, of madness, of grace and sensibility, of stupidity, of sensuality, of illusions and disillusions--all locked away as matter of perpetual meditation. It is as readable as Ecclesiastes and more consoling, for there is no lugubrious looking-back in this effulgent, unforbidding smile of intelligent equilibrium." She also overtly half-replies to Pound: "I could point out millions of muddles in his articles--but he knows I am handicapped by not being on the spot [London]. He would only patronise my Parisian explorations and warn me, on the pain of his ingratitude, to leave him alone. I will leave him alone, then, the Clusterist." I recently got my hands on a copy of Hastings' The Old New Age, her 1930s exposee of The New Age, in which she claims complete responsibility for getting Pound published there, and even says that the money he was paid came out of her own pocket sometimes. This gets some corroboration in the "ingratitude" referenced above.

For the record, Hastings was probably right about the head being her most valuable possession. The image below is of a Modigliani head that sold for 50+ million dollars. I am not sure if it is the same one referenced in the story (photo from the Wall Street Journal, here's a link).

Interestingly, BH quotes Shaw as a riposte to Pound: "'With the technique of Michael Angelo, they set themselves to produce primitives!' The falsity of modern art is defined there." I wonder how much  this points back to Modigliani, too?

She also includes a beautiful war poem by a soldier, titled "The Hours," originally published in Figaro:

I can't identify the author or find anything else about the poem online.

I think I will hold off on writing about Pound's "Affirmation" of the week because it dovetails very nicely with his essay in Poetry: I'll do a combined post on Pound and the Renaissance, Feb 1915. He has, though, also been writing in to the correspondence pages. In this one, he responds to the critics of his column on imagism with a few examples:

He goes on to say that telling the difference between rhetoric and ornamentation and an authentic image is a matter of intelligence. He can feel/see/know the difference, and we should be able to, too.

Quick Notes:

The issue opens with a declaration that the war is a "war of idea," and won't be won by battles or machines. This leads into an argument that the compulsory health insurance act has undermined the spirit of the English common folk...

"Romney"'s weekly "Military Notes" explain that English common folk can't rule, and need proper upper-class officers to boss them around. I don't see this as very New Age-y, so we'll see what next week's correspondence brings in response.

Marmaduke Pickthall's "National Honor and Personal Honor" predict much of what happens to (the legend of, at least) Lawrence of Arabia, explaining that individual Englishmen are trusted in the middle east, but the government isn't, and that's because the government will betray anyone for its own ends.

Morgan Tud continues his "Three Tales" in this issue, and again I'm struck by how modernist they are. This one is a shaggy dog joke, combining Old West imagery with trying to buy pills from a pharmacist. I want to know more about the author! Nothing in the MJP pseudonym database. I suspect Hastings, but the texture is Joyce, and the last was so Irish?

The correspondence section contains an absolutely venomous response to J.M. Kennedy's articles accusing Austin Harrison of selling out Oscar Levy (I think I mentioned this last post?). Harrison replies: "Jew M. Kennedy is a liar and had better go to Germany" (415). Yikes. Kennedy responds calmly, pointing out Harrison is the editor of the English Review, which is owned by Alfred Mond, who would later be a prominent Zionist. Awkward.

Last, a prophecy: "The ridiculous threat of the German Government to blockade England-and an ineffective blockade, which is the only kind Germany can attempt, is contrary to The Hague Convention-is not likely to affect our shipping, but it may likely jeopardise the lives of American travellers on the big liners. Even the American papers have begun to point out facts like this. The best argument we can use in the United States-and we can prove it-is that it will “pay” the Americans to support us," S. Verdad, 396.

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. 

The New Age, Jan 14 1915

At this point in 1915, The New Age's primary preoccupation seems to be establishing a hierarchy of cultural achievement--article after article about the relative placement of world cultures appear, often to the end of placing Germany at the bottom (or at least among the other barbarians). I tend to glaze over this rot.

Ezra Pound, by contrast, seems subdued and rational in his second installment of "Affirmations," this one on vorticism. He begins his piece by thanking TNA for its open editorial policies, as opposed to those journals that threaten a writer's income if they disagree. This has been noted elsewhere (it escapes me at the moment): Pound was one of the few authors that TNA paid regularly, because Orage knew that Pound had little other income.

Turning to the essay itself: it is so very different from BLAST. Pound lays out the vorticist philosophy "quietly, lucidly, and with precision," or so he claims (277). Main points: vorticism takes the best from each artistic medium: "We go to a particular art for something we cannot get in any other art." This is a plea for purity, and also applies to philosophy. Content doesn't matter--only arrangement--"When a man begins to be more interested in the 'arrangement' than in the dead matter arranged, then he begins 'to have an eye for' the difference between the good, the bad and the mediocre" in international and avant-garde art.

The most revealing part, though, is when he describes the psychotropic effect of art on life. First, Pound explains that impressionism taught him to see the world in terms of color: that shadows have color, that the side of a face turned away from the light has entirely different colors than the other side. Vorticism, he explains, is like this, but for forms and motifs of forms: you can engage with what was previously ugly in life in terms of form, as in the way the sky interacts with rows of buildings or (prophetic to the Pisan Cantos) wires. The vorticist can then extract motifs from these forms and place them in art. This is vorticism: not mere energy, but energy derived from found formal motifs, extracted from life and re-represented in art.


Quick Notes:

Beatrice Hastings (as Alice Morning) continues her "Impressions of Paris," this time including a review of, and translation of, a few Breton poems by Max Jacob, whose work "would not abide an impressionist translation. He is one of the few classical critics in the world." I always hear of Jacob as a member of the Picasso circle, so this was an interesting tack. BH also responds to criticism from earlier correspondence pages.

There's a translated passage from Uomo Finito, autobiography of sometimes-futurist Giovanni Papini. I've had a fondness for Papini as a wayward satirist since working on Matthew Hofer's essay on Papini and Mina Loy when I was an editorial assistant at Paideuma. Papini's piece is about his impoverished childhood and his endless thirst for books.

Oscar Levy The New Age has published Levy for a long time, but lives up to its reputation as a place that published multiple views on the same topics when it allowed John Butler Burke to attack Germany via Nietzsche in "Russian vs. German Culture" in the same issue.

The "Hyphenated States of America" series continues to incite fear against the German-American and Irish ("Gaelic")-American populations.

Marmaduke Pickthall continues his long-running coverage of the Middle East by explaining his opposition to the English revival of the Egyptian Sultanate. 

The New Age, January 7 1914

I've been down hard with the flu this last week, so this post is a little out of date. I'm going to do back-to-back New Age posts to catch up. This post will be a bit dashed-off, I apologize in advance...

Starting with eerie coincidence: Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings continues her "Impressions of Paris" by recounting a dream in which a dead friend returns to her. She then reports that a friend, the Spanish author Mesa, has been killed at the front...

...but (spoiler alert) in the January 14th issue she'll find him alive! But wounded. So the dream of a friend who died coming back was immediately followed by a different dead friend, Mesa, returning.

Back to January 7th's "Impressions": she reports meeting a pair of wounded soldiers, each supporting the other:  "Two fractures in the leg one, and the other--you couldn't say what he had; he  laughed it off" (245). Premonitions of The Sun Also Rises. She goes on to write about rumors of German women fighting at the front, with characteristic disgust at women who take on men's roles. This contrasts to a description of a wild New Year's party, and a short digression on the ugly architecture of Paris.

Immediately following BH's piece is the first of Pound's series of "Affirmations," an essay on the ancient musical instruments of Arnold Dolmestch. He praises this early music for its elegant and intellectual patterns, framing it as a vortex:

"That is the whole flaw of impressionist  or "emotional” music, as opposed to pattern music. It is like a drug; you must have more drug, and more noise  each time, or this effect, this impression which works from the outside, in from the nerves and sensorium upon the self--is no use, its effect is constantly weaker and weaker. I do not mean that Bach is not emotional, but the early music starts with the mystery of pattern; if you like, with the vortex of pattern; with something which is, first of all, music, and which is  capable  of  being,  after  that, many things. What I call emotional, or impressionist music, starts with being emotion or  impression  and  then  becomes only approximately music. It is, that is to say, something in the  terms of something else. If it  produces  an effect, if from sounding as music it moves at all, it can only recede into the original emotion or impression. Programme  music is merely a  weaker, more flabby and descriptive sort of impressionist  music,  needing,  perhaps, a guide  and  explanation." (247).

Quick Notes:

E.A.B., the American correspondent, writes a racist piece about the failure of American immigrants to naturalize, in "The Hyphenated States of America" (as in German-American, Irish-American, etc.). Prophecies doom.

E. A. B. also writes "American Notes," takes time to savage Rebecca West's contributions to "The New Republic," which is only a few issues old and is causing some stir. See also the strongly negative reviews of Harriet Monroe's new book, and Amy Lowell's Sword Blade and Poppy Seed. 

Upton Sinclair writes in, holding up George Sterling's poetry as the exemplar of American art (261-2).

Though The New Age has been against conspiratorial anti-Semitism, they print Oscar Levy and responses to him, so much remains--in the correspondence pages of this issue, for instance.

Poetry, October 1913

The headlining Yeats poem is the most interesting part of a more-tepid Poetry. Yeats' The Two Kings is the sort of magical Irish mythology that he's so famous for in 1913. The story hinges on the husband-king forgiving the queen-wife for magically-induced infidelity, and has some really great lines in it.

Harriet Monroe's essay about the Panama Canal is very excited, but not particularly exciting to me.

Alice Corbin Henderson reviews Child of the Amazons by Max Eastman of The Masses, her verdict: meh.

Ezra Pound has the guts to summarize his essays on Paris and mention the originals in The New Age, which of course has been panning each one as it appears. His apparent lack of concern over the combined efforts of the editors of TNA is striking.

Boring post, sorry.

The New Age, October 23 1913

First, politics:

I've been reading George Bornstein's Material Modernism for my PhD exams, and it is really the perfect companion text to my work on this blog. In it, Bornstein examines (for example) Yeats' poems in their original contexts (as much as accessible) and in other editions that have emerged since. His readings of Yeats' "September 1913" have been reminding me to keep an eye on things Irish (like A.E./George Russell's letter last issue) and on labor disputes.

This issue of The New Age begins with a discussion of the Senghenytdd mining disaster. It moves to a more usual topic, the railroad strikes. There's revolution in the air--threats of a massive strike to take place in 1914. Remember that worker's movements have been urged to arm themselves in TNA and The New Freewoman.

The link between armed resistance in Ireland and the possibility for it in England is actually explicit: "The trade unions... though their grievance is of a parallel nature to that of the colonies of Ireland, are even today unaware of its true nature. For them as for these the remedy is Home Rule" (746). See also the poem by Susan Mitchell, "To the Dublin Masters" on page 760, which ends with an unveiled threat of the guillotine. The focus moves back to South Africa, and the editors of TNA wonder whether the armed strikes there will emerge in England. Then more on the lockout in Dublin, which is starving1/3 of the city's population. The desire for a more comprehensive revolution informs The New Age's rejection of a legal minimum wage.

Second, feminism:

Beatrice Hastings reviews a housekeeping guide by Mrs. J. G. Frazer, "First Aid for the Servantless," a book that attempts to show how women don't need house servants. The review is fascinating, though, not for that--but because it stands in as a sort of autobiography of Hastings. She explains her position in the literary world by contrast to her domestic life, continuing her generally anti-feminist approach: "I am a minor poet of the first class. I have never created anything" (759). Hastings' literary ability boils down to the fact that (in her own account) she knows her limitations, many of which are dictated by her gender. Frustrating, revealing.

"Readers and Writers," by Orage presumably, is a take-down of Pound. It hits him right where he's most sensitive when it questions his credentials: "What qualification, may I ask, has Mr. Pound revealed for making a fair estimate of English writing as compared with French?" He also gloats somewhat over having baited EP into an over-emotional response, which I don't think actually happened: Pound has been very reserved about the awful situation he's in (being pilloried in the very journal that is releasing you serially). Pound showed a definite lack of tact (or tactic) but strategic foresight when he slighted the writers of TNA, and of course he ultimately wins the fight (or has for the foreseeable future).

As for pseudonyms and identities, this issue has two delightful plot-thickenings:

J.M. Kennedy replies to "The Writers of the National Guilds Articles" that he hasn't written for TNA for six months and that they have misrepresented his theories. "The Writers" immediately reply, a privilege usually reserved for the editors or the inner-circle of TNA. I imagine that The New Freewoman must be wrong in identifying "Romney" with Kennedy (see earlier discussion). Or it's really getting conspiratorial: could the editors be the "writers?" Orage singled out the "writers" for praise in one of his self-righteous reviews earlier, which he also uses to boost Hastings. Evidence mounts.

Hastings goes after Rebecca West's analysis of Hall Caine's roman a clef that supposedly stars Hastings (see above TNF), saying that her Pages from an Unpublished Novel are NOT autobiographical. Judging by the Stephen Gray biography of Hastings, Hastings is lying (or perhaps Gray repeated West's error? I doubt it). The public image management of Hastings is really fantastic, sort of like Fox News' fake bloggers.

All for now...