The New Republic, November 7, 1914

This one's a backtrack to the first issue of The New Republic, a new journal that's been attracting a lot of buzz around the modernist journal scene. I have access to a scan of a bound volume (much like my big bound volume of Poetry and Drama), so I'm missing out on all the cool paper-grain, coffee-stain, bibliographic code that one gets at the Modernist Journals Project, and I only have access through my school library. Not ideal. I'm guessing that this is because The New Republic still exists, and might defend its archives?

I'm going back this far in time to greet the new journal, but particularly because Rebecca West an essay, "The Duty of Harsh Criticism," for it. Despite my claims to horizontal reading, I'm still a sucker for my favorite names, and I've missed West since she dropped out of The New Freewoman. 

West attacks complacent, congratulatory, and academic criticism, claiming the need to "rebel against the formidable army of Englishmen who have achieved the difficult task of becoming men of letters without having written anything" (19). A common feeling, but more unusually, she claims that criticism matters more now because literature has expanded its scope from the representation of emotional life to the representation of all life, which has the concomitant effect that they must be constantly representing life in order to capture its changes. The result is a sort of blurry photograph: "often it happens that because of their haste they receive a blurred impression or transmit it to theri readers roughly and without precision." Criticism exists to slow them down. She follows this with criticism of Shaw and Wells. Her critique of Shaw seems to be, actually, less harsh--his problem is that his critics don't see him as a poet, a "spiritual teacher," so that his best work gets lost to bad criticism. Wells is raked over hotter coals. I'm more interested in her approval of Shaw because West takes a load of buckshot from The New Age over it in the current January issues (stay tuned).

Following this is an essay by "L.S.," "Panic in Art." This is nice because of how closely it shadows some more-recent theories of the avant-garde: "One conviction, however, [radical painters] hold in common: art, which has been the courtesan of princes and the holiday playmate of republics, is dead. Painting, which began with Giotto, has completed its cycle, and a new art made possible by a new freedom is to begin" (20). L.S. follows this with a summary of the new painting, contrasting its ravenous search for inspiration in other times and cultures with its radical rethinking of objects as unstable illusions.

That's all for this back-issue, but I'll be checking in on TNR from time to time in the future...

The New Freewoman, October 1 1913

The New Freewoman is really hitting its stride. It is full of interesting articles and well-written literature (though the poetry is still hit-or-miss). This issue includes progressive views on environmentalism and what-will-be queer politics, as well as hilarious comments on contemporary literature. Here's a digest of what you'll find:

If you're into modernist literature and want a good belly laugh, turn to page 149 for a hilarious table of reviews. All sorts of famous reviewers are summed up in one sentence, and the reader is supposed to cobble together a book's reception by selecting each review from the database. Featured: Henry James, Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, Beatrice Hastings, Alfred Noyes, and others who have fallen into more or less obscurity. A sample: 7. "Mr. Ezra Pound says that someone else has praised the book and therefore it must be bad."

The "Chancellor" of the "Angel Club" explains his/her plan to found an intellectual nation somewhere, populated by exceptional people--a Utopia for overmen.  The plan is to seize an island and run it like a giant university/publisher/order of knights (yep). I can't find anything about the ultimate fate of the Angel Club online because too many strip joints are named that for Google to power through them... but I'm curious.

Other quick notes:

Rebecca West reviews books by H.G. Wells and Hall Caine. I will definitely need to Caine's roman-a-clef about Beatrice Hastings, The Woman Thou Gavest Me: West says it is overly sentimental, but fascinating.

"R.A." (Richard Aldington) contributes a letter from an "imaginary poet" in which he defends himself from an American reviewer who claims that he should include more personal experiences in his poetry.

Havelock Ellis is making a splash. Classics as revolutionary--invoking a sexual emancipation. E.B. Lloyd is eloquent in his plea for understanding of sexuality as a spectrum, cites Whitman.

I need to look up Horace Traubel, an American poet who keeps turning up these days.

The advertisements at the end of the issue announce that Pound's Canzoni by Arnaut Daniel has been published! Bon anniversaire.

The New Age, September 18 1913

The most entertaining part of this issue is:

HASTINGS attacking Pound, in a big way. I hope this is just an opening salvo, and knowing BH and EP and The New Age there'll be some more scuffling before it's over.  Hastings goes after Pound's recent series of articles on French poetry ("The Approach to Paris") and French avant gardes (covered in earlier posts and continuing in this one) in an article titled "The Way Back to America."

Did I mention that I figured out the penname "Hastings?" Her non-pseudonymous name is"Haigh," so it's "Haigh-stings." And how! In this piece, "The Way Back to America," she goes after Pound, hitting him in every chink of his armor: his elitism, his tendency to declare himself writing for small audiences, his habit of quoting a line of poetry and acting as if its virtues are self-evident, etc. Really he gets raked every time he publishes a piece in TNA. His response to the criticism-thus-far is measured: "I have no inclination to argue about these affairs" (607).

His essay on Romains is very fascinating--I feel like reading Romains, now. The end is gracious and heartfelt: "Whatever we may think of his theories, in whatever paths we may find it useless to follow him, we have here at last the poet, and our best critique is quotation." 'Nuff said.

Carl Bechhofer is displaying his classic cheerio pip pip British Imperial racism in his piece on traveling India. If you're into that sort of vomit, read his piece. I don't know why he lacks the imagination to see that it isn't fun to carry someone else's things over mountains, and that if one can negotiate early payment and go home to one's real work, one might just think that makes sense. Not that I am claiming to understand the motivations of the workers who strand him--just that I understand that they have motivations.

Hastings' translations continue to build her persona, as again she and Orage practice subtle laminations of articles to advance their points. Again she uses translations of the Mahabrata to illustrate current rhetoric: this time she casually retells a legend about a rich but enlightened man who avoided a vicious robbery by explaining to the thief that he understood said thief's superiority over the common herd. Punchline? That the thief was the enlightened man's ego all along.

Hastings' contribution to "Pastiche" is, as usual, quite excellent. She's much better at prose than poetry, especially when she adopts a surrealist mode. I believe that "Valerie" is Katherine Mansfield, and "Alice" is BH.

Some notes from Orage's "Readers and Writers"

"Students intent on mastery prefer the original sources; and the general reader is of no account" (601). This makes a researcher's heart warm.

Orage then goes after H.G. Wells. My favorite part is when he says that Wells should stick to "scientific romances" but perhaps not, because "the field is exhausted."

Usually I skip John Francis Hope's "Drama" column, but this bears repeating: "Yet we are inundated with plays of the "Who Shall Win Her?" type, as though it mattered to anybody but the poor devil who succeeded... It is true that one can set men and women on the stage, lying, murdering, seducing, and committing suicide all for the sake of sex; but to those who think that this is drama I have nothing to say." Ha!

This issue was particularly rich and I haven't begun to do it justice, but I must skedaddle on because I'm already two days into the next week and I haven't done this month's Poetry or The Masses or the second monthly installment of The New Freewoman. And I feel like I should be broadening to more journals... these first, though.