Barbusse's Le Feu in the Journals

This post is for my collaborators at UW's Modernist Studies Research Cluster--we're preparing to read Henri Barbusse's Le Feu, and I was going to put together a selection of reviews of that work, taken from the Modernist Journals Project. I figured it might be useful for other people gliding through the Web, so here it is for any others that Google might shunt in this direction.

The first reviews I found come in The Egoist, where the able book reviewer Muriel Ciolkowska writes on French literature from wartime Paris. Barbusse's prior novel, L'Enfer, was reviewed by several of the periodicals. That book (which I haven't read) seems to have been a kind of super-decadent parable of a peeping tom in a hotel room... something very different than Le Feu. Ciolkowska reports her fascination with L'Enfer in the February 1917 issue--she also mentions that he has just won the Croix de Guerre elsewhere in that issue. But we're going to look at Le Feu, not L'Enfer. Here's a link to the issue containing her long review--once on the MJP site, click "View PDF" to open the issue.

May, 1917: The Egoist, Muriel Ciolkowska, 55-57. 

Ciolkowska is a very interesting figure in her own right, providing a running commentary on the war's effects on literary Paris--but I'll proceed to her thoughts on Le Feu. Her long review of the book appears in the May 1917 issue, printed just after H.D.'s fantastic poem "Eurydice." The review, beginning on page 55, begins with a translation of Barbusse's army citation, which praises his morality and his courage. Ciolkowska, who loves a hero, does this very much on purpose.

 Ciolkowska is one of my favorite truly obscure writers from the era. Her articles are a running commentary on the war's effects on literary Paris--but I'll proceed to her thoughts on Le Feu. Her long review of the book appears in the May 1917 issue, printed just after H.D.'s fantastic poem "Eurydice." The review, beginning on page 55, begins with a translation of Barbusse's army citation, which praises his morality and his courage. Ciolkowska, who loves a hero, does this very much on purpose—she’s going to talk about the political controversy of Le Feu and does this to get out ahead of any kneejerk reactions against Barbusse’s internationalist views.  Only, I sense that she’s been changed by reading the book, too—her own occasionally jingoistic pro-French nationalism has found itself challenged by this book. It’s telling that she lingers on its form, its politics, and its rejection of the past and tradition; something quintessentially modernist at least in Ciolkowska’s reading of it. On form, she does complain that his use of soldier’s slang makes it difficult to follow. If Ciolkowska has trouble with the French… well, I downloaded the French and the English versions, but I sense that I might end up spending more time with English. But on modernism, what better than this selection she makes from the book:

“‘In a word, the enemy is the past. The perpetrators of war are the traditionalists, steeped in the past… for whom an abuse has the power of law because it has been allowed to take root, who aspire to be guided by the dead and who insist on submitting the passionate, throbbing future and progress to the rule of ghosts and nursery fables.”

Ciolkowska then comments: “Verily the criminals are those who echo, ‘because it was, it must be.’”
It’s a heck of a review, so good that Margaret Anderson reprints the key points (fully cited) in The Little Review next month. That deep questioning on the part of Ciolkowska ends up not being fully resolved: she writes in August (p. 106) that Barbusse concentrates too much on the sacrifices of the lower classes, ignoring those of the upper classes.

Here are a few more reviews, some covered at more, some less length depending on my arbitrary interest in each. I've listed them chronologically, but read Reed/Bryant if you have to pick just one.

August 1917: The Seven Arts, Paul Rosenberg, p. 518-520.

The review in Seven Arts is passionate, emphasizing the revolutionary character of Le Feu and praising it to the skies—it is Euripides for the modern era. This issue of Seven Arts opens with an article by John Reed—a nice coincidence, as I’ll be covering his reading of Le Feu below.

September 1917: The New Age, anonymous (possibly A.R. Orage) p. 453

The New Age takes note of the importance of Le Feu: “This book is not a mere record, it is an apocalypse.” Apocalypse meaning literally, a lifting of the veil. The review is short, but emphasizes (like all of the book’s reviews) the truthful quality of the narrative.

October 1917: The Masses, Louise Bryant and John Reed, p. 5-6

Husband and wife Louise Bryant and John Reed’s account of Le Feu is embedded in an article on the general state of the war, published in the October 1917 issue of the brilliant New York-based socialist magazine, The Masses. This is the penultimate issue of The Masses, just before the journal is shut down due to wartime censorship. The duo is famous for Ten Days that Shook the World and Six Months in Red Russia, accounts of the October Revolution and its aftermath. The date of this issue is somewhat portentous.

Reed/Bryant’s reading is actually very similar to Ciolkowska’s—but even more intense, because while Ciolkowska is gradually coming around to Barbusse’s position, The Masses has inhabited it all along. The article explains “ ‘Le Feu,’ by Henri Barbusse… to my mind is the biggest thing next to the Russian revolution that the war has so far produced.” Pretty intense. Reed/Bryant believe that the internationalist, pacifist book reflects the realities of French public opinion—that it is the harbinger to a revolution.
 
February 1918: The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois, p. 190.

To oversimplify--at this point, Du Bois was pro-war. He admires the French African troops fighting for France, and admired France's attitude towards them. Rather than reviewing Le Feu, he excerpts a passage praising French African troops. That's very characteristic of his editorial style--he uses quotation rather than commentary whenever possible, and is always willing to let a text stand on its own merits or demerits. Photography has a similar effect--here's an image and caption from May 1917 that illustrates the point (do check out the caption):

I'll leave it at that, for now--there's more, but those are the best I found.  The upshot is that Le Feu had an immediate international impact. It was very highly praised--I only found one letter to The Little Review complaining that it was overrated, and of course Ciolkowska's strange waffling about social class and suffering mentioned above.

The Masses October 1917

It’s been a long while since my last post—I finished my PhD in August, and have been working on other projects since. I doubt anyone still checks on this blog, but I hope to get it ramped up again.

It seems most important to check in on the penultimate issue of The Masses. While it will be reborn as The Liberator, it is soon to be shut down by the wartime censors. The Post Office refused to distribute the August issue—then has the gall to argue that because they weren’t circulating issues, they are no longer a magazine, and thus have none of the legal protections of a magazine. It’s all a delaying action designed to sink The Masses by running out the clock on their resources. The whole censorship fight is an interesting story—the young brilliant socialists mocking the courthouse—I forget where I read it just now, but I’ll dig around and see if I can provide a link.

This issue revolves around the war. The Masses and the American socialist movement in general are being hounded by the wartime government. Meanwhile, they continue their coverage of the war in Europe and around the world.

It opens, somewhat surprisingly, with a page hastily inserted by Max Eastman which praises Woodrow Wilson’s letter to the Pope. In Eastman’s response to the letter, he absolves Wilson of most of the criticism heaped upon him in The Masses. Wilson promises that Germany will not be punished, and that his conditions of peace will be negotiated with the Reichstag, not the Kaiser. Eastman sees this as a move toward establishing the war as a fight for authentic democracy, though he is still nervous (rightly so, considering what actually happens in the Treaty).

Louise Bryant and John Reed write “News from France,” a blend of Francophilia and anti-militarism that praises the rationality of the French in their cold-blooded assessment of the war. It includes a review of Le Feu by Henri Barbusse, causing it to quickly ascend to the top of my to-read pile. 

Check out this quip:

 

Quick Notes:

George Bernard Shaw writes a stuffy letter highly critical of The Masses, Eastman has fun responding to it by pointing out the stuffiness.

Mabel Dodge’s story “The Eye of the Beholder” stands out as somewhat of a sore thumb, as its aesthetic parable about the power of the gaze to transform women into art sits uneasily in a magazine fighting for its life. It’s so-so, but I liked seeing Dodge in print, having encountered her due to the Taos colony—which she moved to in 1917.

In other art news, there’s a short note on John Storrs and a collection of his drawings. Very cool, modernist, Rodin-influenced, sculptural drawings by an artist-architect.

There’s an interesting review of W.H. Davies’ autobiography, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. It’s on LibriVox, so I’ll put it in line there—read by Expatriate of Bangor Maine, one of my favorite readers.

Louis Untermeyer writes a scathing review of… his own book? Funny.

There’s a cool poem by Miriam Vedder just inside the front cover, “Pins,” a prose poem of private ecstasies physical and religious.

That’s all for now…

The New Age, April 12, 1917

I’m going to do a series of posts on each magazine’s reaction to the American entry into World War One, starting here with The New Age, because it’s a weekly: the USA entered so early in April that the monthlies had almost an entire month before they could respond.

I have been reading the journals without posting as often because I’m finishing up my dissertation, but I regret not getting around here more often: the Russian Revolution is also in its early phases, and has been discussed in The New Age and elsewhere. I was interested to see how that commentary would link with the journal’s coverage of the US entry. TNA sees its Guild Socialist ideals becoming reality in Russia.

So, with that smidgen of context, what happens: Orage writes an extremely positive review of Woodrow Wilson’s speech requesting the declaration of war. Orage is impressed by Wilson’s philosophical grounding of the American intervention, especially Wilson’s compassion to the German working people. 

Remarkable--the US seen as the guardian of the Germans. This sent me to look at Wilson's address, here. 

“Three of the mightiest political events ever known in the history of the world have occurred within three years of the lives of the most common of us. The war is unique for its dimensions and its issues in the history of mankind; the Russian Revolution is a phenomenon of epic size; and the intervention of America in, a European ,war carries with it such implications that our remotest descendants will date an epoch of history from it.”

Yeah, that’s why I wanted to do a post on this. Intriguingly, TNA reports that the mainstream press was cynical about the intervention. TNA hates the Daily Mail.

Quick Notes:

S. Verdad points out that the US will now seize all German ships in US harbors. He performs a cold-blooded computation showing that the Germans sank less tonnage with their submarines than the US is about to confiscate from them. Celebrating the intervention, he praises the US for its plans for mild censorship—something the fate of The Masses might refute (it will perish at the end of the year). 

G.D.H. Cole prints an article arguing that capitalism can’t be overthrown by a frontal assault on the monopoly of production: first the workers must attack the function of exchange. This mirrors some 2016-17 calls for alternative modes of distribution. Without those networks, the general strike knockout blow won’t land.

Bechofer interviews Lord Haldane about education (he wants a hybrid Montessori/apprenticeship model).

There’s a letter from someone named G. E. Fussel about a show of Epstein sculptures, linking modernist art with social progress.

Pair that with a review of a review of Bernard van Dieran’s  music, and a further hostile letter against Epstein, and it seems that modernist art manages to be discussed despite the war: but in the correspondence pages.

The Little Review, September 1916

So, real work has come between me and my blog project lately--even though it was the beginning of much of that real work. But I have to hop on for a quick post on this month's issue of The Little Review. It's the famous blank issue, where the arts pages have been left entirely empty as a statement of the magazine's high standards--there was nothing good enough to print this month, so they print nothing. Awesome.

But... they didn't print nothing, strictly defined. They also printed little comics of what Margaret Anderson, the editor, was doing instead of editing. They are delightful. Here she is, depressed and eating a ziggurat of fudge for breakfast, for instance:

She also plays piano for 18 hours a day (and brings it to bed at night), converts the sheriff to "anarchism and vers libre," etc.

Also, the issue has no art, but it wasn't empty save for the comics. Its political coverage (of bomb attacks in San Francisco!), reviews, and correspondence are intact. There's even a letter from Frank Lloyd Wright, encouraging the journal.

A legendary moment in a legendary journal. That's all for now, though...

The Egoist, July 1916

Still working through The Egoist backlog, things are exciting:

Marsden begins the next phase of her philosophy by broadening her scope and heightening her ambitions, now aiming to change all philosophy forever. I'll try to explain what I think she's trying to do: philosophy is about to have a revolution like the scientific revolution, and Marsden is placing herself at the epicenter. The revolution will be a linguistic turn, one that reads, creates, and investigates symbols from other realms. It will be scientific, analytical, and based in facts--but because of the strong vitalist strain in Marsden, it will be full of life, fully acknowledging that the observer changes the observed, and is changed by it in turn. Here are some tastes:

"The symbols adequate to express the part are inadequate for the expression of the whole. But it is quite otherwise with the powers of the symbols which have grown up for the expression of the whole." (100)

That kind of optimism about the power of language feels very modernist to me, though I often think of it more in the context of poetry than symbols as such (though the gap is small). Echoes of Imagism. Which brings us to this, the climax of the essay:

"For while its agency is the living energy of mind which impregnates with change and growth everything it touches, its manner of activity (which is its distinction) is mind in concentration. The notion that its activity means just a disintegration of a composite whole into its constituent parts and that by analysing a subject we arrive at a predicate which contains merely the sum-total of the parts of the object with which we started fails to appreciate the true features of the observing process, and it is indeed utterly refuted by the growth in the world's multiplicity and richness. Exactly as the tree is not in the seed but— given devotion and care—is capable of being developed out of it, so in analysis: at the outset the subject does not contain the predicate but, given the fertilizing energy of mind, above all in the concentrated strength in which it appears in analysis, then out of the subject can be grown such a wealth of predicates as might beggar the imagination of a magician." (102)

Mind and matter, co-creating.

Marsden's piece, in a fantastic coincidence, is followed by one of my favorite H.D. poems, "Cities." I've written about "Cities" several times, but this is the first time I've seen it in its Egoist form--in the Collected Poems, it contains a different final stanza, one that redeems the horrors of industrial society. This poem doesn't.

And, as if that's not enough, Muriel Ciolkowska contributes a review of Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu! It's one of her best pieces yet, containing large tracts translated from the novel, and ending with a reflection on the difficulty and limits of book reviewing. I feel like the book has rubbed off on Ciolkowska's style, at least for the review, as her descriptions seem to mirror what they describe as they meander from metaphor to precision.

In other news from Ciolkowska, she writes an obituary of the incredible Jane Dieulafoy.

Quick Notes:

Aldington contributes a dialog on conscientious objection.

Edward Storer writes in defense of Ireland after last month's editorial, and Marsden writes a very squirrely response, classic Marsden. She fends off Storer's criticism by explaining that he misread her and misunderstood her vocabulary.

Leigh Henry, more commonly in The Egoist for his articles on music, contributes a trio of Imagist-esque poems.

And of course, Tarr continues, with Kriesler and Bertha's convoluted walk to the party.

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 Crisis, July 1916

I'm just starting a fellowship to work on The Crisis this summer, and I'm excited to get to work on that. After a sparse June, I hope to get more posts up, and more promptly--but I bet the fellowship will distract me somewhat. I'll be setting up a component of UW's "Mapping Social Movements" website in its NAACP section, using information from The Crisis.

Transposing text from a magazine into a map poses some challenges--the magazine is at once a series of discrete events and a continuously evolving, living thing. Its life is more the life of the fossil now, perhaps, but I can catch much of the enthusiasm of the journal as it evolves. I want to keep my maps consistent, while also representing its evolution. This is just some prewriting here. I'll get more done soon.

On to the post on the issue:

The defining event of this issue is The Crisis' coverage of the lynching of Jesse Washington, "The Waco Horror," in a supplemental section. This is unusual, as there are only two of these supplements, to my knowledge. The Crisis uses its conventional tactics: graphic photography paired with a spare account of the facts, with moments of bitter irony and editorial comment that yet grant much ethical impetus to the story. This supplement is fascinating--it sets ups its accusation first by a long description of Waco itself, the kind of description that often precedes praise of a community in other sections of The Crisis, setting up the fact that Waco is a thriving, educated, typical town. The fact that the crowd was not drunk or rowdy is emphasized by subtle comments and captions. The Crisis also dwells on the fact that the murder was covered as a "news item" rather than as something more than that, that the media was not living up to its responsibilities. These careful rhetorical settings force the reader to confront that this is not an isolated event, or hysteria, or even mere news.

I'm curious about the development of this piece from the account of a lynching in Temple, Texas in the January issue. The Waco Horror supplement has its own wikipedia page, while the Temple lynching has comparatively little presence online. The Crisis' tactics in the two cases make the coverage of Temple seem like a precursor, and this might be worth a deeper look soon. 

Which brings me back into The Crisis itself. This issue is a deft counterpoint to the supplement, celebrating educational and artistic achievements. The text of the magazine itself reflects on this intellectual heritage in little details--using "yclept" rather than "named" just once, such a small detail, so full of meaning (130).

A couple details I noticed: the "Crime" section was folded into the "Ghetto" section this month. I am curious to see if that continues and if it signals a shift in the coverage of lynching in The Crisis. 

Of particular interest to me is the description of the NAACP's formation of what is essentially a PR department in order to counter the racism of the Associated Press (141-142). 

I was glad to see a graduate of UW-Seattle celebrated in the issue: