The Little Review, April 1916

Now for The Little Review.

Charles Zwaska, the young office boy who joined the magazine at seventeen (he insisted on being called office boy), contributes a scathing take-down of Vachel Lindsay. As someone who is often irritated by Lindsay, I disagree with the faint penciled-in criticism in the scan of the magazine, which says "rather silly." The best part of this article comes when Zwaska writes about Lindsay's book of film criticism, The Art of the Moving Picture. To counter the theories there, Zwaska cites the disdain of the audience for the films Lindsay praises--he sketches a vivid portrait of their collective expertise, as they live in the theater, and sleep there all night. A golden age of audience engagement, cut short by the police now patrolling there. This is reminding me of Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," a little. I'll look it up.

Quick Notes:

Like The Egoist's praise of Jane Poupelet, this issue mentions a few women who were highly regarded artists and performers at the time--here, a cabaret singer and a playwright--Yvette Guilbert and Alice Gerstenberg.

Allan Ross MacDougal writes about Guilbert, a French cabaret singer: "But whatever she sang—and I didn't know a word of what she sang—carried me away completely. Not a mood did I miss—not a suggestion of a mood. Perfect is her art. She has my adoration" (30). Hear for yourself on Youtube!

Gerstenberg appears in a blurb about her play Overtones. That link connects to a website that has the full text available, and at a glance, it seems pretty cool. Characters are followed by actors playing their "real selves," so the two characters are in dialog with their internal selves and each other, simultaneously. 

Ezra Pound, of course, appears in this issue--here he rails against the import duties leveled on books imported to America, and his complaints seem justified. Sometimes they are.

Lastly, The Little Review courageously announces a set of lectures by Margaret Sanger:

The Crisis, May 1915

In this issue of The Crisis, I came across this double-column piece on page 45. It is quoted from a Bristol, Tennessee paper, and presented without commentary:

The police were indicted and charged with murder. This story was not posted as a lynching in the space The Crisis reserves for recording that crime (see page 12). It is instead placed as the second-to-last piece in the whole issue, though not, I think, as an afterthought.

It is an example of TC's deft use of secondary materials. Much of TC each month takes place in long lists of events of interest to the readership of the journal, naturally inclining to people of color. The Crisis is powerful in part because it is a voracious record. It is also indelible.

Because of my rudimentary skills, I've had trouble getting the text of each block to be the same size: my apologies. 

The biggest piece of news in this issue is the release of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and is also, to my memory, the first time I've encountered criticism of a specific film in the Modernist Journals Project. The NAACP uses this moment as a chance to display their effective organization, as "Fighting Race Calumny" provides a day-by-day account of the NAACP's actions against the film. The editorial also contains a response to The Clansman, as the film is referred to in the journal. Du Bois, the editor, fulminates against the film, noting that "a number of marvelously good war pictures" precede "the second part... the real 'Clansman.'" This gives credit to Griffith's first half, and Du Bois calls not for the the total suppression of the film, but of its second half. That's a side note, though, to the strong and consistent criticism of the film and the concerted campaign to protest against it.

This issue also contains TC's response to Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo." It is characteristically terse:

"Colored readers may be repelled at first at Lindsay's great poem but it is, in its spirit, a splendid tribute with all its imperfections of spiritual insight. In a private letter Lindsay says:" (18)

There follows a long and rambling letter from Lindsay, making clear his good intentions, which TC at this point, at least, seems to tolerate without accepting them. Notably, he talks about the poem as if it was a painting, and perhaps an impressionist or post-impressionist painting at that. Also notably, he claims it was inspired by Joseph Conrad.

There's much, much more here. But that's all for now--

Poetry, March 1915

Somehow this month is slipping away, and I have so many posts to catch up on before the end of it! So this will be a very, very cursory glance over the contents of the months' Poetry. 

The best part for this H.D. fan is her set of five poems. They end up split between Sea Garden and The God in the collected poems--something I'd like to investigate sometime. I am not sure I've read an account of her own editorial practices.

Pound's poetry gets an obligatory mention: "Provincia Deserta" is a poem about his trip to Provence, and is a poem containing history, including personal history--as does "The Gypsy." The most interesting is the openly vorticist "Dogmatic Statement Concerning the Game of Chess: Theme for a Series of Pictures," which isn't included (at least I don't remember seeing it) in the Sieburth/Library of America Pound, Poems and Translations that is usually my go-to collected works. Pound also translates Rihaku/Li Po's "Exile's Letter."

EP also contributes part two of his "Renaissance," this time focusing on what is necessary for an American renaissance: patronage, centralization.

Harriet Monroe has a short piece on a meeting of Chicago literary magazines. It's pretty good as a barometric reading of modernism in Chicago--there's an account of The Little Review, Poetry, Drama and The Dial as being condescended to as "uplift magazines," and a rebellion against this label.

Ellen FitzGerald reviews Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts, and Alice Corbin Henderson reviews Vachel Lindsay's The Congo and Other Poems. This review is interesting because Henderson follows up on the Linday-Marinetti connection that Pound made earlier.

A column labeled "Our Contemporaries" declares that "Boston is discovering Imagism!" It explains that Amy Lowell's new anthology is coming out, and that the Flint and Pound founding essays have been reprinted by The New Statesman. It also has a gesture toward the fact that Pound won't be appearing in this anthology--Amygism has begun.