The Egoist, June 1916

I have a backlog of posts, but good reasons: I spent the last month or so working on a project on The Crisis, which I'll post about soon. These backlog posts will be quick sketches of interesting moments. Some might be more than that. I've been trying to keep up with my reading even as I'm not writing much here, and there were some interesting moments in the June 1916 Egoist. 

Primarily, Marsden's long editorial on the Easter Rising. Marsden illustrates the continuing development of her philosophy of political linguistics by explaining the relative successes and failures of England and Ireland during the rising, finding the roots of the crisis in rhetoric rather than reality. It's a problem of difference:

"Ability to distinguish "cheese from chalk " is the people's criterion of intelligence, and no doubt a scale of intelligence could be drawn up on the basis of the number of distinctions which people can bear in mind at a given moment; and if by some strange fluke a great empire can ignore this fact with impunity and read uniformity where actually there exists difference, lesser powers—rebels and the like—cannot." (82)

Marsden explains that the republicans failed to distinguish between their own situation and that of Ulster. She builds a philosophy of hate, and explains how hate emerges from rhetoric: inflammatory statements are made because, precisely, they are not actions. But they inevitably lead to actions.

"The chrysalis develops into the moth. Beginning in words just because these do not mean action, it ends in the use of words just in order that they shall mean action. The words which in the beginning were excrescences: appendages to men's more serious selves, in the sequel become the main body to which men are the insignificant appendages." (84)

A thought that resonates today. Plain speech is the remedy, according to Marsden, along with ever-finer distinctions and observations. Ironically, many of her more specific arguments seem wrong to me, shaded over by her wartime faith in England's omnipotence. When she generalizes, though, she often hits the mark.

Quick notes:

H.D.'s poem "Sea Gods" immediately follows this notice.

Aldington contributes a prose poem, "The Middle Ages."

Moore contributes "Pedantic Literalist."

Tarr continues, with the spiritually grimy Kriesler meeting Anastasya at a restaurant. The description of the Restaurant Jejune, on page 91, is brilliant.

The Egoist, October 1915

The Egoist is replete with interesting material, as usual. I'm currently working on a paper on Dora Marsden, and I really should be spending all my time on it... but here goes.

Speaking of Marsden, she continues her anti-government reading of contemporary politics. The upshot of the month's "Views and Comments" is that the media is misrepresenting the people--that the controversy over conscription is unnecessary because the people support the war, and are willing to do what they need to do to win it.

M. Montagu-Nathan continues a series on problems with the translation of Russian literature into English. He wants more Gogol.

Edward Storer contributes many translations of Sappho, giving his own take on the sort of Greek lyric poets that Aldington has been publishing lately. He cited the Wharton edition as his source, and translated both whole poems and fragments, but corrects Wharton's more prudish reading of the poems with this: "That her poems were chiefly love-poems, and love-poems written to women, is clear even from the mutilated fragments which remain. Any other explanation destroys at once their art and their reality. Yet sedulous hypocrites are to be found to-day who will wilfully mistranslate and misconstrue in order to envelope the manners of antiquity in a retrospective and most absurd respectability." Cool. So are the poems. I have read many translations of Sappho, but in these, the aphoristic epigrams stand out:

The indefatigable Huntly Carter reviews A.J. Eddy's book, "Cubists and Post-Impressionism," an early critical work on those movements. Carter, having been on the scene since Manet and the Post-Impressionists in winter 1910, weighs in quickly and decisively. He accuses Eddy of jumbling up which artist belongs in which school ("Picasso is not a Cubist, but an essentialist." [!!!]) Carter does point out that writing about avant-garde art should be investigated with caution, especially when "painted theories of a school do not agree with the written ones." Intriguingly for me, Carter boils Eddy's theory down to a paraphrase of imagist doctrine (without citing imagism): "the painter is seeking to make an abstraction of the individualising features of a movement experienced by him in a moment of time. In this trifle resides the only possible theory and practice of art." Here Carter is condensing Eddy's reading of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," and this is the first time I've seen Duchamp referenced. Carter has nice things to say about Kandinsky.

Someone signing as "E. H. W." translates Peter Altenberg's story "Une Femme est un Etat de Notre Ame." It's very interesting, a portrait of the emptiness of a young woman's bourgeois life, written in an experimental fashion. It's ambiguous to me on a first reading whether Altenberg is using the relationship with the young man to redeem and transform this life, or whether the relationship and its poetry is also ironized as empty. I lean to the latter. I wonder who "E. H. W." is.

John Gould Fletcher continues Ghosts of an Old House, his southern Gothic serial poem. I'm not into it, but he prophesies my (and your!) reading his poem after his death in this one:

Perhaps the perfect answer to this comes on the same page, facing: Marianne Moore's "Diligence is to Magic as Progress is to Flight," a poem in part about how a poem can escape becoming ephemeral. The other Moore poem is "To a Steam Roller," and both are amazing, but here I'll post just "Diligence" because of my (contrived) attempt to make it a response to Fletcher's anxiety:

I should wrap up this post, and I'll do so with Richard Aldington: he writes about Laurent Tailhade, praising him for his obscene satire. What does this suggest? Yes! Aldington's own attempt at poetic satire follows it. To continue the theme established by Fletcher and Moore: Aldington's satire ends with another accurate prophesy:

And here he is, by Raoul Kristian, who I can't locate online, and that's all for now:

The Egoist, August 1915

A quick post on The Egoist of this month--

For me, the one of the more exciting things in this issue is Marsden's editorial, which appears to be a fusion of Imagism and her philosophy in a discussion of novelty and the new:

"The directing lures in life then are Images : Feelings in prospect : which can magnetize the vital power, first to Attention and thereafter to Action. Prospective Sensations hook into the Imagination. The prospect of growing into a sensation more and more definitely constitutes the paramount "Urge," and action in life is governed by this attitude towards a progressive definiteness in Sensation. The vital instinct is to follow such sensations as offer promise of developing themselves into something new : which said differently, means that life is in its highest condition of well-being when it is enlarging its world to include something new."

I'll have to think on this, but that discussion will probably end up landing in my dissertation, not on this blog.

In a hilariously-titled section, "Periodicals Not Received," The Egoist takes some measured at Wyndham Lewis' second issue of Blast, which I personally found to be fantastic. The Egoist is less convinced, mixing praise and blame (I suspect Aldington is behind this piece). Here's a sample: "Mr. Lewis writes brilliantly and in some cases with truth on his side; but it makes one weep to see a very talented man like Mr. Pound putting his name to such rubbish, even for a joke—the joke is stale" (131). Awesome: The Egoist is already accusing modernism's foremost practitioners of being derivative, facile, and late (a thesis I remember from Rod Rosenquist's Modernism, the Market, and the Institution of the New). The picture muddies again, and delightfully. No comments on Eliot's debut.

Quick Notes:

This issue includes a small set of Imagist poems by Aldington, Fletcher, and Moore. I recognized Moore by feel before reaching her name--even this early, her sound is unique, excellent. One of her poems is to Browning, another to Bernard Shaw, continuing her trend of writing poems dedicated to artistic men.

John Cournos eulogizes Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

James Whitall contributes English translations of Judith Gautier's French translations of Chinese poetry. Some are very charming.

Muriel Ciolkowska's "Passing Paris" of the month includes an essay on Guy-Charles Cros, and three of his poems.

Richard Aldington praises Eugene Demolder's La Route d'Emeraude, calling Demolder an imagist.

A.W.G. Randall writes about Rilke at length as the most popular poet in modern Germany--I think this might be the first time I've spotted Rilke during this project. He's praised, though Randall thinks his mystical works aren't his best. He includes a translation of a poem, "Pont du Carrousel," which seems like (another) proto-mini-Waste Land with its underworldly bridge and blind but sublime protagonist. Very cool (page 127).

The same page contains the launch of the Poets' Translation Series, chapbooks of classics, one of which I'm fortunate enough to own in real life. Maybe I'll do a post on it, later...

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...