The Egoist, March 2 1914

This issue opens with another essay deconstructing (aware of anachronism, but it suits) the decalogue, presumably by Dora Marsden. Marsden's criticism turns to "love one another" this issue. The gist of her argument is that a commandment making love compulsory has the effect of acting as an incredibly powerful repressive tool by giving license to interfere with (love) one's neighbors. Contrasting this with real love, which is a childish (in a good way) friendship that allows for self-expression, Marsden makes a plea for an immoral life based on taste, hoping that  "men begin un­ashamedly to judge the quality of life by its flavour in actual living: by their own "taste" in regard to it, forming thereby their principle as to what they accept and what they reject in it, which is living by a "principle of taste"—a principle which is no principle. It is living according to personal desire: life according to whim: life without principle: the essentially immoral life" (83). Pretty radical. As I understand it, this fits nicely into the arc of The Egoist by attacking terminology and then redefining it. The grounds of morality are completely undermined to allow each individual to set the terms of their own existence. Cracks are taken at churchmen and feminists who promote herd-mentality. It's an attractive philosophy for an artist, though--taste as the arbiter of morality, Pound's dilettante?

The next column is the repeating "Views and Comments," and it slides in nicely, following up the ideas introduced above. In South Africa, major labor unrest is shaking the foundations of the Boer-controlled government. General Smuts is brutally repressing the strikers, winning the admiration of The Egoist: "General Smuts, who affirms frankly to an astonished world that the means which keeps men free is the necessary force to defend whatever state or condition it pleases any whatsoever to give the name of " freedom" (84). No shared basis for morality.

Ok: then the editor(s) go on to continue sparring with Benjamin Tucker, who has labeled them "Archists" rather than "Anarchists," a lovely term with its inclusion of "arch" and Archy. The editors take this opportunity to explain the difference between the anarchy they prefer and Tucker's: Tucker wants anarchy of conscience, in which everyone treats everyone well without a state because it is "right." The Egoist prefers anarchism as a resistance to state power, of space for individuals to reach a higher form of self-determination (including, presumably, space to oppress people?). Scary.

Miss Hoskyns-Abrahall is advertising a series of lectures. I'm going to try to screen-capture the ad, because it is too cool for summary. Anyone who has read Yeats' A Vision want to comment on the similarities? How effortlessly it moves from discussing biology and education to spirituality!

Aldington contributes translated dialogues from Lucan, the Pan one is particularly nice.

Madame Ciolkowska reviews drawings by Andre Rouveyre. She intro's them with (of all things) a quotation from Paraclesus and the animal nature of man (especially woman). Apparently Rouveyre's value comes from being able to show how animal we are. And then there's this terrifying Marie Curie Zombie:

On the poetry front, John Gould Fletcher's Irradiations are selected in this issue--see my discussion of them from Poetry, if you want.

The last thing I'll mention here, despite the wealth of stuff in the correspondence pages, is the next chapter of Portrait of the Artist. This is the one where Dante Riordan gets in a big fight with Simon Daedelus over Parnell and the place of the Church in Ireland. I want to point out how perfectly this chapter illustrates everything Marsden says at the beginning of the issue: the debate is the source of morality.

Ok I lied: "Auceps" satirizes Pound in the correspondence section, showing off his (Auceps') knowledge of Greek sculpture and making fun of Pound's claims to knowledge of everything. On the way he compares Pound to Ruskin, though, which is interesting. Auceps must be Richard Aldington? Not sure about that...

The Little Review, March 1914

The inaugural issue of The Little Review! 

It's been a while since I added another journal to the project--strange, how time telescopes down to entries in a bibliography when I read criticism. It's so different to go about reading things in some sort of analogous time-space. The proud, imperious Little Review begins relatively quietly, with a paean to creative criticism and appreciation (by editor Margaret Anderson). The first editorial, "An Announcement," positions The Little Review among its contemporaries, with veiled nods to publications like The New Age. The differences:

"Criticism that is creative — that is our high goal. And criticism is never a merely interpretative function; it is creation: it gives birth!" (2).

The privileging of birth isn't merely the old-hat metaphor, because later in the issue actual motherhood is used as a position of authority to argue from. Which points to another difference: "Feminism? A clear-thinking mag­azine can have only one attitude; the degree of ours is ardent" (2).

Next difference: independence. Here's where I sense some New Age tension: "Finally, since THE LITTLE REVIEW, which is neither directly nor indirectly connected in any way with any organ­ ization, society, company, cult or move­ment, is the personal enterprise of the editor, it shall enjoy that untrammelled liberty which is the life of Art." (ibid.).

Beyond TLR's self-definition, though, I noticed a characteristic tendency to include both sides of a critical question--both in discussions of Rupert Brooke and Henri Bergson, the journal prints arguments pro- and con. The Brooke argument hinges on whether his excellent lines outweigh his tendency to write about vomit etc. 

Anderson's feminist essay beginning on page 21 is pretty excellent, arguing that women have always worked very hard, and that their labor should be recognized (along with their right to self-determination).

Sherwood Anderson comes in with an article arguing for craft in art.

The poetry in the magazine is... not great. Yet?

Gertrude Stein, though, gets a shout-out from someone who has heard her read by someone who figured out how to read her: "But one night my host — a great, strong, humorous, intelligent hulk of a man, himself a scoffer at cubism — read part of her essay on Matisse so that it was almost intelligible. His in­ flection and punctuation did it." (43).

"Tagore as a Dynamic" is an essay about T.,  with an editorial proviso that they disagree with it. Interesting.

All for now...

The Egoist, Feb 16 1914

The Egoist does not disappoint. This issue, again, has a lot of great content.

Most notable (besides the continuation of Portrait) might be Pound's contribution, "The New Sculpture," a futurist manifesto (or very close kin) about the immanent takeover of the world by an artistic aristocracy. This is the first manifestation of angry-Pound I have encountered, which is a pretty significant centennial. Up to this point, he's been content to adopt a superior attitude that was predicated on distance and quotation. Now, he's yelling: "Modern civilisation has bred a race with brains like those of rabbits and we who are the heirs of the witch-doctor and the voodoo, we artists who have been so long the despised are about to take over control" (68).

Pound attacks Greek art and the psychological-realistic novel. This points to a deep fissure between his outlook and that of Richard Aldington. Aldington reviews de Gourmont and Conrad: his review of Conrad's Chance makes a distinction between Conrad's adventure tales and this more-psychological text. Aldington draws a comparison to Lawrence Sterne, praising the novel's long flashback. Fractures.

Amy Lowell contributes imagist poems of the John Gould Fletcher genre, with added weight of morals. Some, though, are quite good: the rhythmic play of "The Pike" is nice. The weirdest and best, though, is "The Precinct. Rochester." It's a portrait of a Roman wall at Rochester cathedral, and fits best the Egoistic worldview: "People who say:/ They are dead, we live !/ The world is for the living."/ Fools ! It is always the dead who breed." (69).

The editors continue their attack on ideas, this time through a perverse reading of the decalogue.

Correspondence contains a couple interesting letters: one on the normalcy of the sex drive, in women in particular. It takes an anti-suffrage turn.

Another unfavorably compares The Egoist to The Freewoman, because The Egoist has become obsessed with "art" instead of life.

Dissatisfying post... must get on, though.

The New Age, Feb 19 1914

Back to The New Age after several month's absence. I've been reading a few of them along the way, just haven't had time to type up anything.

The clouds of war are gathering over Europe.

I wish I didn't have to be so scary. The New Age's theory about why there may be war: the industrialization of Germany requires raw materials, materials which the British Navy can cut off at any time. The solution is a railroad from Germany to Turkey to Iraq and the Persian Gulf, a railroad that could carry those materials to the factories of the Ruhr. I keep thinking of Peter O'Toole. S. Verdad mentions Kuwait as a focal point of the crisis! Have we really been fighting the same darn war for the past 100 years? S. Verdad can be hawkish, but even he doesn't see what's coming (this week, he called it several months ago), as he says the result of this political jobbing will be "acrimonious discussion."

Arthur Penty begins a series on Guild Socialism and the arts. I took a moment to chew on on this:

"Now it is to be observed that though the interests of architecture and the crafts and the interests of democracy are ultimately identical, it is nevertheless true that in the immediate and practical sense their interests are opposed. It is the immediate aim of democracy to place power in the hands of the people ; the immediate need of architecture and the crafts is to re-establish authority."

He ends by advocating small workshops and local markets as the best way to promote the arts. Sort of like the artsy-scene in medium-sized American town and cities?

A different paradigm.

Quick notes:

Romney, though in a military context, entertainingly writes about "the modern cult of the specialist." Less entertainingly, he retains his right to categorically attack Jews in the press (along with anyone else he wants to attack: only he doesn't).

There's an article about the state of Egypt...

In a satirical piece called "The Cabinet Council" by "Conclavist," the Home Office minister McKenna explains that the militant suffragette movement is dying: "from the moment one of the leaders proclaimed herself an authority on the subject of pox the militant movement began to decline." There was something of this in The Egoist, if it was in the Feb 1 issue, it was to the effect that the Pankhurst wing of suffrage had begun crusading against venereal disease by resuming their campaign against prostitution. The next bit (bite) of satire has the Cabinet resolving to gas paupers. Phew.

H. Caldwell Cook contributes the first segment of The Play Way, a book advocating experiential education.

"Present-Day Criticism" is a plea for teaching Greek myth instead of Norse, contra Caldwell Cook.

Beatrice Hastings' current "Tesserae" is about how women should be homemakers instead of faux-intellectuals. Tough stuff.

There's plenty more in there, but I'm stopping here--off to do other things.

The Egoist, Feb 2 1914

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was, there was a moo-cow..."

This issue's claim to epic fame is its inclusion of the first chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young  Man by James Joyce. That book has enough commentary that I won't add anything directly about it here: only, maybe... in the Dec 25 issue of The New Age Beatrice Hastings published a short story from the perspective of a child that was very similar. I was kind of surprised by the very positive response she got, because I thought it was... too simple? But in representing child consciousness and of Portrait's first chapter, BH beat JJ to the publishing punch by a month. 

Poems by H.D.! Racy ones. Imagism has a reputation for being cold, but these poems are anything but. "Priapus" is in the Collected Poems as "Orchard" or something. The real find, though, is "Incantation," which I can't recall having read before. A new H.D. poem, or a memory short-circuit? Here's the last stanza in its glorious intensity:

Arise, 

Lest I bend my staff 

Into a taut bow, 

And slay, 

And tear all the roots from the earth. 

The editorial, though, caught my eye: Marden or Shaw Weaver on a great Egoist tear about the emptiness of concepts, including a refutation of The New Age. I'm sure they answered, hope I get a chance to see what they had to say...

Allen Upward contribs. a weird racist-y piece which I didn't finish because I'm...

Off to another journal!

The Egoist Jan 15, 1914

This is one of my favorite issues of The Egoist, but because I am so many issues behind in so many periodicals I will make this response quick, with the hope that someday I'll have the chance to explain all the things that are great about it.

There's a series of letters by James Joyce explaining the trouble he's had in getting a publisher for Dubliners. The upshot is that the publishers are too worried that it will be censored for its immoral content to take it to press. Pound sponsors the letter: he would.

Really though the great and best and wonderful thing about this issue is Richard Aldington. Perhaps in no other time or place does he so display his Aldingtonicity, that wonderful paradox of being the youngest one in the room who therefore has to act like the oldest-fashionedest fuddyduddy: his essay, "Anti-Hellenism," was recently described by me in an essay in the following way:

Richard Aldington demonstrates both sides of this in a recent-minus-a-century issue of The Egoist. Aldington  is representative of the Imagist moment. Among the core-three of Aldington, H.D., and Pound, Aldington appears to have least exceeded Imagism. H.D. quickly grows out of it, even by Sea Garden (a wonderful book) in poems like “Cities” and Pound’s very un-Imagist envoi-poetics in Contemporania already strain at the boundaries of Imagist doctrinal “Don’ts.” Aldington’s poetry is intensely Greek-influenced, and he is a kind of a 1900s Nova Poeta. In the January 15, 1914 issue, he contributes an essay to the journal titled “Anti-Hellenism: A Note on Some Modern Art,” followed by a series of satires of Ezra Pound’s Contemporania, titled Xenophilometropolitiania. In “Anti-Hellenism,” writes a manifesto against being contemporary:

But there are two main kinds of art ; there is the art which is in sympathy with its time, which seeks to express the whole life of its time—that of Shakespeare, for example—and there is the art of Ben Jonson or of Theocritus, the art of men who run counter to the spirit of their time, or rather to the accepted artistic notions of their time. (I have nothing but praise and admiration for the artists and poets who are striving "to render their times in the terms of their times." But I would have them recollect the other kind of art which seeks to create those things which the time has not.) (35).

Considering that his examples of artists who “render their times” is Picasso, Lewis, Epstein, Barzun and Pound, it is an odd point to make because they are usually considered the artists who are adding something to the age. Aldington strategically lays claim to a kind of anti-contemporaneity, founded in simple “Hellenic” wisdom, which incidentally places him in the vanguard and disposes of the avant-garde artists he cites into a sort of vulgar “holding a mirror up to the events of their day.” That he follows this with a series of parodies of Pound creates a kind of poet-critic whiplash in the reader. Satire of recent, uncanonized avant-garde poetics, after all, contains a date-stamp: it is as contemporary as possible while being fully conditioned by the past (recent though it is). Xenophilometropolitania also hardly illustrates the simple virtues that he praises in “Anti-Hellenism.” Aldington, then, is an example of a poet-critic who officially opted out of the anxiety of modernity, but who continued to participate in the modern in his satire. Genre allowed a way in. Rod Rosenquist describes similar situations in Modernism, the Market, and the Institution of the New. He describes “modernist latecomers” as authors who had to reckon with an already-entrenched modernism. Aldington may have been, as the youngest imagist, the first latecomer, and his solution was to ground himself outside of his own time. Ironically, he ended up being characteristic of a moment of modernism. His lumping-together of Pound and Picasso etc. as his antitheses in their contemporaneity shows how he performed the “easy” division of the contemporary and the past, but placed value on the side of obsolescence. 

The best, though, is yet to come: Xenophilometropolitania is his satire of Ezra Pound's Contemporania. I am not such an EP fanatic to know whether he took this very much to heart: I think that Pound was able to take a joke at this point. Look upon his works, ye mighty, and chuckle heartily:

ANCORA.
Rest me with mushrooms,
For I think the steak is evil.

Compare to the EP version from Lustra:

"A Song of the Degrees"

Rest me with Chinese colors

For I think the glass is evil.

Much more where that came from at the MJP. 

I will get this blog caught up, I will!


Edited: I forgot to include this gem:

"Do educated women marry in Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, Tacoma, or San Francisco? They certainly do not. If any man wants to see the most beautiful and vigorous collection of old maids that the sun ever shone upon, I advise him to go and stand on the main street of one of the cities I have named. In an hour's observation, he will see many of the finest-looking women of thirty and thirty-five that any man ever saw; and he will find on inquiry that a surprisingly large proportion of these women have lived most of their lives on the Pacific coast, and have never even been engaged, not to speak of married. He will find that some of the most beautiful have never even been mentioned in connection with a man." R.B. Kerr, The Egoist, January 15 1914

Brief hiatus

Hello every/anyone who reads this blog--I'm going to take a brief break for the next two weeks as I get ready for my PhD exams. When I come back I'll get caught up on the things that have passed, and get back on track. Look forward to Xenophilometropolitania!

--tyler