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.
Showing posts with label Morgan Tud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morgan Tud. Show all posts
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Thursday, February 19, 2015
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.
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:
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.
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