The Egoist, April 1915

The Egoist in April, 1915:

Marianne Moore makes her Egoist debut, with her poems appearing just after those of a forgotten modernist, Richard Butler Glaenzer--who has the tragic fate of not yet having a wikipedia page. His poems are cool, though. More on that in a second, after more on Moore's two short poems.

The first is dedicated to Gordon Craig, modernist director:

I can almost see the last line as the very very first draft of her much-drafted poem "Poetry." Note the careful rhymes, the way that meaning enjambs from line to line, the very-slant rhymes of "wake" and "retrospect." It's very interesting that the dedication is part of the first line. This poem makes me think of my late teacher, Herb Blau, who I wish I could show this to--I have a feeling he would have identified with Moore's portrait of Craig.

The second poem, "To the Soul of 'Progress,'" doesn't fit neatly on to a page and would look kind of weird on the blog here, but it is certainly worth a look in the pdf of the journal. On the level of content (or discontent), the poem is about how war can emerge from the desire for progress. It fits perfectly with the Egoist's skepticism. It also has an extremely tight and unusual rhyme scheme, a prevision of "The Fish." She seems to be channeling Yeats in a certain stanza that contains clapping wings and a tumult...

Returning to Glaenzer: his poems are about his hatred of cities, contrasted Imagistically with his love of Bermuda--and then, there's also a poem about an Antoinette. His poems are powered more by raw Whitmano-Futurist energy than intricacies, but I noticed that they are attempting to fuse that kind of dynamism with imagist technique, which feels odd in the context of how imagism is understood retrospect-ively, but actually makes a lot of sense in following the journals.

Huntley Carter contributes a piece that has a few interesting points--titled "The Curve of Individualism," it contains several points that are made stridently, then hedged back, so take this summary with its own hedging. First, he claims that Futurist art predicted the war. Then he explains that their art reveals the fundamental inequality of humans, and Carter postulates that one could create a chart in which "the height of the curve above the base line will represent the varying value of human beings" (59). He jumps from this to review Theodore A. Cook's The Curves of Life, which finds that the perfect spiral is that basis for biology and art, a claim Carter appreciates but qualifies with Cook's own "nothing which is alive is ever simply mathematical." This might mitigate the brutality of charting human worth somewhat? Maybe? Because he comes to a philosophy of difference:

"Advance (progress we call it) resides in differences freely expressed. If human beings are to move significantly in any direction they must not be tied up in inseparable bundles, called groups, guilds, and communities. Each must belong wholly to himself or herself. Each must be free to feel, act and choose a path of his or her own. The social or artificial restraint of differences in human beings is slowly but inevitably making for the destruction of the human soul" (60).

Note the pointed critique of The New Age's Guild Socialism.

So much more to do, but I will stop here for today after my customary

Quick Notes:

Marsden continues "Truth and Reality," and it is amazing. Too much to review on a blog, I will hopefully be devoting a chapter of my dissertation to Marsden. For now, this nugget: "The two terms 'real' and 'Reality' are very near to being the expression of opposites: real—the sign attached to a thing whose potentialities have been proved to be like to another's, and Reality—the name of a nominal " something " which has never yet existed and which, should '"it " ever achieve existence, would become degraded into Appearance and thereby cease to be part of Reality" (51). 

Richard Aldington contributes an essay on "Decadence and Dynamism" which in turn continues his own literary researches. He finds that most new art can be considered either decadent or dynamic, and that investigating the decadent, one finds that dynamism is merely intensified decadence. He reads Huysmans' A Rebors to make most of his points, and is probably one of few people who read enough obscure Latin to pronounce judgment on Des Esseintes' classical criticism (Aldington thinks it is brilliant).

Portrait continues...

Frank Denver reviews a modernist art show, praises Epstein, and declares that there isn't much good art around in those days.

"Fighting Paris" declares that it will return to its old title, "Passing Paris," as things are back to normal in the capital. I wonder if that will stick.

That's all for now...

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.