The New Age, February 25 1915

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.

The New Age, June 19, 1913

I miss Beatrice Hastings.  She hasn't written an article in the last few issues of The New Age (unless, of course, I miss Hastings because I miss her pseudonymous publications).  The other writers seem largely concerned with cultivating the cold hauteur of English masculine intellect--and their writing suffers for it.  The post on this issue, then, will be primarily historical rather than critical.

It's refreshing when The New Age is intelligently socialist.  I liked the opening article on why poor people shouldn't have to put skin in the game through taxes--it could have been reprinted during the last election.  The thesis: if you take money away from wage earners who are living at a subsistence level, you will have to provide services to make up the gap, which defeats the purpose of taxation.  Of course, it's wages that are the problem--The New Age wants to abolish them altogether.

While S. Verdad and Romney, the international and military correspondents, are often very very wrong, sometimes they really nail it.  This is from S. Verdad: "Everybody knows that Russia is supporting Servia, and that Bulgaria is counting upon the assistance of Austria.  What will happen in the event of a dispute?  May there not be another crisis?  And, if so, war is inevitable" (197). Inevitable because Germany is losing its allies and needs to put up a show of strength. 

On eugenics, The New Age has a common-sense response to Edgar Schuster's book about how England is degenerating etc. etc (209).  The response: nobody knows how heredity really works, or what can be passed down, or how--so why make assumptions?  I wonder how this piece resonates in 2013.  I'll ask my friend and subject-matter-expert Adam Turner next time I see him. 

Remember how Poetry was in ecstasies over Tagore?  Not The New Age.  Awful skewering satirical piece on page 213. 

Henri Bergson seems to haunt everything modern/ist: he gets attacked in a letter to The New Age for being mystical (214-215). 

There's a great caricature of G.K. Chesterton on the back cover.

Last, a quick thought: The New Age  is always quick to run down poets and authors, but the poetry they publish is awful.  I hope someday they explain what they like. 

The New Age, May 26 1913

Oh, New Age, bottomless well.  As usual, there's so much in this issue that I can hardly begin to catalog it all. I'll just be looking at a pair of columns from this one, "Present Day Criticism" and "Views and Reviews," back to back and by the same author [update: "PDC" was by Hastings all along. RTB 5/20/15].  Check it out:

“The recent judgment given against the woefully fallen Theosophical Society will in all probability paralyse the tentacles of this particular octopus, though its dying spasms may be even more malignantly directed than those of the suffragettes. But in our opinion the influence over the feeble-minded of quacks like Messrs. Yeats, Carpenter, and Tagore, is scarcely less pernicious than the more audacious and despotic humbug of Mrs. Besant and Mr. Leadbeater” (88).

This selection, from the column “Present-Day Criticism,” is a microcosm of the larger article.  The first half is a scathing attack on occult mysticism, particularly what we might now refer to as “New Age” mysticism, and in fact The New Age started more as that sort of New Age than the guild socialist New Age of 1913 (or so I recall from my research last quarter, I don’t have the books on hand but would be happy to find specifics for any interested party).  Orage used to be a young light of the theosophical movement, which he does not mention here (he writes under a pseudonym, “R. H. C.”).  His thesis is simple: all the books being published on Eastern mysticism miss the point of the actual texts.  We readers are advised to “go to the source” where there will be “nothing… mysterious,” simple messages like “Know Thyself.” 

Paired across the page, as if to prove the point, is one of Hastings’ translations of the Mahabharata.  The title is, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”  Point proven?  Naturally I think that the quick abstraction from poem to paraphrase is too violent, and also misses “the point.”  The Mahabharata passage is relevant in 2013, for one: it is a meditation on capital punishment. 

Some of the people he attacks are old friends, old enemies—but the anger directed at Yeats and Tagore pricks my 21^st century ears. 

Tagore and Yeats are both being touted over in Poetry, as reported earlier.  I wonder if Orage is aware of that part of their publicity: he doesn’t name Poetry, and probably didn’t need it (part of the story is about receiving an invitation to a Tagore reading), but I am still curious. 

On that reading Orage declined to attend:  I was thinking about this article last night at a poetry reading here in Seattle, a reading that left me mostly cold (with significant exceptions).  Here’s why Orage didn’t go to the Tagore reading:

“I myself received an invitation, but my ears, among other things, would not permit me to accept it. They told me, truly enough, that they were not yet to be trusted to judge in matters of literature. Without a good deal more training than mere education provides, our ears are much less reliable as critics of style than our eyes. Abracadabra may be made to sound well… I have heard Mr. Yeats chant a “poem” in the voice of an oracle delivering the Sibylline … and when I came afterwards to read the lines myself, the imposition on my ears was exposed. Until, then,

I can read with my ears as well as with my eyes they shall mew their inexperience in private practice.”

Well folks, there you have it.  I am curious whether readings were in fact as much a new phenomenon as R.H.C. seems to consider them.  Still, it’s fascinating how Yeats and Tagore, poets who rank among the most eminent of the 20^th century, are so cursorily deflated as performance pieces, even linked to advertising techniques.  My teacher, the late Herb Blau, told us that Yeats was the finest poet of the century.  Orage says Yeats is a charlatan.

Which, as an H.D. scholar, is something I have to constantly confront.  What is the value of personal lyrical mysticism in a modern age?  I’ll let that question shade my future posts.

Also of note in the issue: Pound continues his suggestions for improving graduate education with a two-pronged approach.  Grad students should be sure to be making positive contributions to knowledge, and their expertise should be collected in databases that the media can access whenever experts on particular poets are needed.  That’s the problem!  We need the media to do its part… ha.

Plenty of other good stuff, but I should stop. Will someone please pay me to recreate Richard Aldington’s “Letters from Italy” column?

hough: