Highlights from this issue include:
Romney claims that the thing about modern armies is that they are good at having conclusive battles: "Almost as soon it becomes apparent that one side or the other is about to win, and Fortune, no longer fickle, seldom gives the under dog a chance to recover himself" (781). Hindsight makes his constant bloody-mindedness ridiculous. See also his descriptions of how airship combat might change all this. Very steampunk.
M. B. Oxon. contributes an interesting review of Jessie Weston's book The Quest of the Holy Grail, which from his description seems to be a version of the Waste Land-inspiring (or was it?) From Ritual to Romance (on page 790). Oxon's mystical critique of the book claims that Weston doesn't go back far enough, as the source for the grail legends is probably older than vegetation rituals. He's wink-wink nudge-nudging toward the fantastic. Anyway, I think Eliot would have been intrigued by the general goal of the review, which is to claim that materialism hasn't taken over at all.
There are, of course, lots of other things in the issue, but I'm going to finish this post with a few letters to the editor.
First, there's a clutch of the sort that praise The New Age and make it sound powerful, always written in the same New Age-y tone, almost as if Orage wrote all of them. The letter from repetition of his suggestion that the "National Guild" articles be bound as a book (made by Orage, who I think wrote the articles, while under pseudonym) by one "W.L." is suspect, especially as the letter does not refer to the earlier article at all. Hmm.
J.M. Kennedy and TNA continue their feud, with Kennedy asking for an apology before he will respond (and getting one, albeit a backhanded one).
Anti-feminism galore in the letter by Pallister Barkas, another pseudonym, naturally. Sorry I'm in conspiracy theory mode.
All for now...
Showing posts with label J.M. Kennedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J.M. Kennedy. Show all posts
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
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...
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...
Saturday, September 28, 2013
The New Freewoman, September 15 1913
This issue of The New Freewoman begins with a remarkable essay on ecological responsibility, Stephen T. Byington's "On Interference with the Environment." The thesis: "If one person injures another by making the material environment unfit for that other's use, the injury should be regarded on the same level with a direct assault on another's person or on the products of his labour. I say 'material environment,' meaning such things as the air, the water, the hosts of birds and beetles and bacteria, not the social environment."
Rebecca West's review of Granville Barker has the characteristic mix of fin-de-siècle pessimism and double-edged compliments that make it seem like there is no good art being made in 1913. She makes me want to read his play "The Marrying of Anne Leete " because she likes it: "There never was written anything quite like it except Tchekov's Cherry Orchard, which it resembled both in the fastidious hands it laid on the sterile and sentimental governing classes and in its Futurist technique" (128). It's interesting to think of Chekov as a Futurist...
Pound's review of John Gould Fletcher is classic Pound--while not really boosting his friend (who was always frustrated by Pound's self-declared superiority), he manages to make Fletcher come across as a leading poet of English (if not to be compared with the French).
There are a set of poems by Richard Aldington, in the Greco-Imagist fashion. I really do like them for their soft tones--an understated version of what H.D. does so well. Again, that pessimism creeps in at the end of a long prose translation from Moschus: "O Anax Hyperion, golden Apollo, cease thy task of sending mortals light/ and teach this generation not to write" (133). That is also very Poundian, of course--I like Aldington's place in the triad, though. He seems more aware of the repetitiveness of artistic cycles, turning to the Greeks not because they are classic but because they remind him of himself. That's strictly a blog statement, though--I'd have to do some thinking before defending it.
Perhaps most interesting for the purposes of getting a feel for the fractures that exist between my two main journals is the paragraph in Huntley Carter's essay "The Stone Citizen," which takes on The New Age directly. It has given me a few names to research that I hadn't run across before: Samuel Hobson, who Carter says founded Guild Socialism, which he calls "balderdash" (135); Field Marshal Bruce Williams, who sounds VERY familiar (Pound related?), and a "Geddes" who may be this Geddes, but may not. He blames Geddes for the idea that people should be citizens, rather than individuals, "civics" and not "cosmics." That's all very Huntley Carter. He also makes an idenfitication: Romney of TNA is J. M. Kennedy, though the Modernist Journals Project pseudonym database doesn't agree. The similarities in tone between Romney and S. Verdad leads me to agree with Carter, and the MJP admits that it isn't sure who Romney really is. Here's the text: "it has set its handy man J. M. (Julius McCabbage) Kennedy disguised as Romney to reconstruct the British Army with Williams' pale system for pink persons."
Well, we'll see what happens next.
Rebecca West's review of Granville Barker has the characteristic mix of fin-de-siècle pessimism and double-edged compliments that make it seem like there is no good art being made in 1913. She makes me want to read his play "The Marrying of Anne Leete " because she likes it: "There never was written anything quite like it except Tchekov's Cherry Orchard, which it resembled both in the fastidious hands it laid on the sterile and sentimental governing classes and in its Futurist technique" (128). It's interesting to think of Chekov as a Futurist...
Pound's review of John Gould Fletcher is classic Pound--while not really boosting his friend (who was always frustrated by Pound's self-declared superiority), he manages to make Fletcher come across as a leading poet of English (if not to be compared with the French).
There are a set of poems by Richard Aldington, in the Greco-Imagist fashion. I really do like them for their soft tones--an understated version of what H.D. does so well. Again, that pessimism creeps in at the end of a long prose translation from Moschus: "O Anax Hyperion, golden Apollo, cease thy task of sending mortals light/ and teach this generation not to write" (133). That is also very Poundian, of course--I like Aldington's place in the triad, though. He seems more aware of the repetitiveness of artistic cycles, turning to the Greeks not because they are classic but because they remind him of himself. That's strictly a blog statement, though--I'd have to do some thinking before defending it.
Perhaps most interesting for the purposes of getting a feel for the fractures that exist between my two main journals is the paragraph in Huntley Carter's essay "The Stone Citizen," which takes on The New Age directly. It has given me a few names to research that I hadn't run across before: Samuel Hobson, who Carter says founded Guild Socialism, which he calls "balderdash" (135); Field Marshal Bruce Williams, who sounds VERY familiar (Pound related?), and a "Geddes" who may be this Geddes, but may not. He blames Geddes for the idea that people should be citizens, rather than individuals, "civics" and not "cosmics." That's all very Huntley Carter. He also makes an idenfitication: Romney of TNA is J. M. Kennedy, though the Modernist Journals Project pseudonym database doesn't agree. The similarities in tone between Romney and S. Verdad leads me to agree with Carter, and the MJP admits that it isn't sure who Romney really is. Here's the text: "it has set its handy man J. M. (Julius McCabbage) Kennedy disguised as Romney to reconstruct the British Army with Williams' pale system for pink persons."
Well, we'll see what happens next.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
The New Age, May 29 1913
The gem of this issue is Ezra Pound's continuing piece on the state of the American system of higher education. He calls for what sounds a lot like an MFA program to be established in New York City, and it sounds really great. The biggest difference being that one's tenure in the program would be based on artistic performance--I haven't heard of anyone being expelled from an MFA for writing bad poetry. But then, what is bad poetry? E.P. calls (predictably) for originality and knowledge of contemporary art to be the primary qualifications for entrance into the "super college" of 100 multimedia artists. Also intriguing is the idea of having great artists brought in to "abuse the bad work of the fellows of the college, or to commend it on such rare occasions that any of it seemed worthy of commendation." So, the art college isn't just about quality, after all. There's a paradox between wanting artists to feel more comfortable (with a salary) and wanting them to be under pressure to produce good work. At the end, he writes that this is not "a passing fancy of the hour." The Ezuversity in embryo?
Also in Pound-related news (circa 1913): Orage reviews a translation of Japanese NO (sic) plays, by Dr. Marie Stopes, a badass writer, translator, poet, women's rights activist, and paleobotanist. The book is available here. Pound's translations of the Noh plays (from Ernst Fenollosa's notebooks) are favorites of mine--I'm going to try to find a play he translated in Stopes and compare it to his version. A quick hop to JSTOR led to this tantalizing tidbit in an article by Roy E. Teele in Contemporary Literature: "Stopes wrote to friends of [Pound's] delight in the materials he had found in Ernst Fenollosa's manuscripts" (346). I'm going to do some follow-up work, will report anything cool I find. The New Age's thesis about the plays would have piqued Pound's interest: that the reason the plays seem odd is because they have a subtle, aristocratic morality: "unless you're on the level of the author, you miss everything--as you deserve to do." Sound familiar?
Of a more personal interest, right next to the NO plays is a review of a Maeterlinck play about Mary Magdalene. A negative review. It points readers to the source: Mead's translation of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This intrigues me, because Mead's translation was mostly off the radar until the Nag Hammadi codex sparked interest in all things Gnostic. I've been curious for a long time about H.D.'s sources for the gnostic elements in Trilogy, especially the ways her poem seems to quote lines that were only dug out of the desert years after the poem was finished. Maybe Mead has the answers--and the close proximity to Pound gives a logical path-of-influence.
I love reading this way, but I worry that a Poundian proper would be able to point to all my little discoveries having been made before...
The New Age complains about all the other little magazines that are coming out... ha. They run down The New Freewoman before it has even printed its first issue! I'll look forward to that issue, coming out in two weeks 100 years ago. I'm also really glad it's starting during the summer-of-exam-reading, and thankful for my advisors who have allowed me to make this project part of my PhD exam list.
Lastly, at least The New Age has the decency to print the feminist counter-attacks to their misogyny. Very reasonable, very angry letters to the editor--and they seem more on the right side of history. This actually ties back to Stopes a little, because there was a whiff of misogyny in the review of her book. J. M. Kennedy writes a passionate rebuttal of the idea that women-intellectuals are somehow subpar.
Also in Pound-related news (circa 1913): Orage reviews a translation of Japanese NO (sic) plays, by Dr. Marie Stopes, a badass writer, translator, poet, women's rights activist, and paleobotanist. The book is available here. Pound's translations of the Noh plays (from Ernst Fenollosa's notebooks) are favorites of mine--I'm going to try to find a play he translated in Stopes and compare it to his version. A quick hop to JSTOR led to this tantalizing tidbit in an article by Roy E. Teele in Contemporary Literature: "Stopes wrote to friends of [Pound's] delight in the materials he had found in Ernst Fenollosa's manuscripts" (346). I'm going to do some follow-up work, will report anything cool I find. The New Age's thesis about the plays would have piqued Pound's interest: that the reason the plays seem odd is because they have a subtle, aristocratic morality: "unless you're on the level of the author, you miss everything--as you deserve to do." Sound familiar?
Of a more personal interest, right next to the NO plays is a review of a Maeterlinck play about Mary Magdalene. A negative review. It points readers to the source: Mead's translation of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This intrigues me, because Mead's translation was mostly off the radar until the Nag Hammadi codex sparked interest in all things Gnostic. I've been curious for a long time about H.D.'s sources for the gnostic elements in Trilogy, especially the ways her poem seems to quote lines that were only dug out of the desert years after the poem was finished. Maybe Mead has the answers--and the close proximity to Pound gives a logical path-of-influence.
I love reading this way, but I worry that a Poundian proper would be able to point to all my little discoveries having been made before...
The New Age complains about all the other little magazines that are coming out... ha. They run down The New Freewoman before it has even printed its first issue! I'll look forward to that issue, coming out in two weeks 100 years ago. I'm also really glad it's starting during the summer-of-exam-reading, and thankful for my advisors who have allowed me to make this project part of my PhD exam list.
Lastly, at least The New Age has the decency to print the feminist counter-attacks to their misogyny. Very reasonable, very angry letters to the editor--and they seem more on the right side of history. This actually ties back to Stopes a little, because there was a whiff of misogyny in the review of her book. J. M. Kennedy writes a passionate rebuttal of the idea that women-intellectuals are somehow subpar.
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