The New Age, April 6, 1916

"Man and Manners" continues. I'm more and more certain that Hastings is behind it--this week, it includes a characteristic castigation of women's writing in general. At first, I'm all set to groan, as the passage opens "If it were not for the feminine label on the cover it would usually be difficult to decide whether the writer of a book is a woman or a second-rate man" (542). However, the anonymous author works her way around to making a feminist argument, one that first appeared in D. Triformis, way back in 1910 or so (not going to look it up right at the moment): that women need to stop writing like second rate men, and start writing like women. Check it out:

"Why? Is it to draw men’s approval and praise? I appeal for a new race of women-writers to right the wrong, and to portray people and things as women see them. Men have written themselves up to such an uncorrected extent that we (and they) have got into the habit of taking them at their own value, as though their standards were rules for the Day of Judgment. Again, I say, there are no women-writers. If there had been--hear me while I whisper--this diary of mine would never have been made--public!" (543)

That's amazing! And heading right into the dissertation. 

One quick note: Bechofer seems to be pastiching the master of pastiche this week in "Impressions of Russia," mocking Hastings' "Impressions of Paris" and other contemporaries. At least that's my first impression. 

That's all for now...

The New Age, March 23 1916

I'm currently wrapping up a dissertation chapter on The New Age which is why I'm posting so exclusively about it lately. That, and I know Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings, the main subject of my chapter, is going to take April off from writing for TNA, at least judging by my MJP search results for Alice Morning as author. There may yet be some things hidden in there, and I'll look for them, but I want to write about Morning while I can.

That said, there's only a few small things I'll note right now about this issue. Morning/Hastings continues "Men and Manners," and this week she comments on the scandal over D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow. The puritans are condemned as hypocrites for privately enjoying the novel, while publicly reviling it. In some ways that's rich, coming from Hastings--but it's also been her position for a long time that puritanism ruins fiction.

R.H.C. continues his reboot of his novel, now titled "Seventh Tale for Men Only," which I'm beginning to suspect is a fictionalized account of his relationship with Hastings--the main character, Doran, has been led by philosophy to fall in love with a mysterious dark liberated moon-woman. I'll keep reading it and see what happens.

Imagine  my disappointment: the Pastiche art column of the week says it has a poem by H.D. in it! But it's some other H.D.

More on The New Age and others soon! I should be dissertating more than blogging, though.

The New Age, March 16, 1916

 S. Verdad summarizes the battle of Verdun on page 460. Most of my post will be about literature, but it's a reminder that The New Age is appearing against the backdrop of history. Verdad correctly predicts that Verdun will hold.

R.H.C.'s "Readers and Writers" is the most exciting piece in this issue--he moves from speculating on whether Shakespeare was a particular individual or a collaboration to considering literary collaboration more generally, dropping some big hints to the collaborative nature of The New Age: 

"Still more to the point and the date, I know (and so do you) a weekly journal of some reputation

for smart writing in the country, of which all the articles received and accepted for publication undergo an editorship the effect of which is to make them indistinguishable from one another in style. Nay, I have seen one such article before and after this collaboration had been practised upon it; and, upon my life, you could not tell the second from a good translation of the first" (470). 

He follows Shakespeare with Milton, criticizing Milton's logic while applauding his energy. I'm thinking the discussion of rhetoric could possibly be useful for student papers, as R.H.C. accuses Milton of many freshman mistakes that persist to this day. Might be fun? 

Elsewhere, Orage/R.H.C. resume the novel "Tales for Men Only" as "Seventh Tale for Men Only," a blending of fiction and criticism of Ibsen. I'll follow along as it continues. 

Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning continue the anonymous "Men and Manners," including a funny parody of Pound's "Don'ts" titled "Don'ts in Polite Conversation." Many are still relevant. She/they also continue their fantasy novella, now seemingly titled "As It Fell Out," but I'm less and less interested in it. 

More on The New Age soon...

The New Age, February 17, 1916

A quick post on the seventeenth--I'm going to push through a flurry in the closing days of this month, so there may well be a few more posts in the next couple days.

Hastings continues both "Men and Manners" and the story that began as "Feminine Fables," with the current iteration titled "Ropes of Sand."

"Men and Manners" is more interesting to me this week: the strange brew of Hastings-style feminism/anti-feminism is on full display (page 374). I'll walk through it here. Joan and Harry are having a fight. Harry is mad because Joan won't speak, and Joan won't speak because she's convinced that Harry won't understand. Here we go:

"Here, snapshot as it was, I saw one of the perennial complaints of men and women against each other-on woman’s side, man’s inability to see from the woman’s point of view; on man’s woman’s silence."

When the author of "Men and Manners" gets Joan to explain herself, here's Joan's point of view:

"DO you think Harry would waste his time trying to explain a joke to a man without a sense of humour? Then, what’s the use of my putting the woman’s case to a man without a sense of woman?"

That's cool, feminism of the gap. But the author answers Joan:

"S’pose so, said I ; but doesn’t that partly come about because women are so unfair to each other?" She goes on: "That’s where I blame women. If they were sex-loyal enough to found an institution similar to the Trade Union that exists among men for the protection of man against the wiles of woman, things would be very different. As it is, thanks (for nothing) to the spirit of rivalry among them, women are like a city divided against itself, and they fall at each other’s hands."

Again, cool: women need to build solidarity to counter the power of the patriarchy, or something like that. Next stop:

"Well personally, I blame both men and women for it. In the interest of general justice men should try to acquire this sense of woman (which Joan analogised with a sense of humour), and it is only by talking to women that they will learn it. Women again, should do their best to help men to acquire it, by at least trying to put the woman’s point of view before them. Necessity gives power, and if women would only begin to talk I wouldn’t be a bit surprised should they discover, after a trial or two (patience, please, men!) that they could ! Indeed, they might find that all the time they had been playing- rabbit to his weasel. Had they but known it, they could have outstripped the brute any day!"

We end up roughly here at the end of the article: women fall back on silence as their primary weapon, because men have no "sense of woman" that will allow them to understand women. The solution is not more silence, but more communication. Women will attain eloquence through engagement and building relationships with men, not by remaining in isolation. Note, though, the sexism that is like the sugar on the pill in phrases like "patience, please, men!" All this also has to be taken in the context of the opening of the piece, which made much fun of presumptuous women that hang around cafes.

Quick notes:

Max Nordau appears in translation, defending Germans from the snide comments of the French press, and appealing to moderation of racial profiling between nations.

Another Max: Max Jacob writes an article on French literature, ending by declaring himself "a champion of Art for Art's sake" if that is understood to mean art that represents, rather than declares.

This from Orage/R.H.C. on modernism and Dostoevsky: "Dostoievsky was a remarkable thinker even above the remarkable writer. The Pushkin address, in particular, appears to me to be decisive of his rank; for in it-and thirty years ago now-he diagnosed the sickness of intellectualism as pride. More, even, he anticipated in several other respects the judgments elsewhere being passed in these pages (by my respected colleagues Mr. de Maeztu and “T. E. H.”) on modernism, even before it was modern" (372)

The New Age, February 10, 1916

Alright, I lied about doing a post on a different magazine before returning to The New Age. The weekly pace is too quick!

These notes will be too quick too:

Hastings/Morning/Anonymous's "Men and Manners" continues, commenting on the rudeness of swearing. She satirizes the crowd at the Cafe Republique, which rang a dim bell in my mind. Googling, I found that part of the recent Paris attacks took place outside the Cafe Republique. So strange.

Then, she continues her story about the rogue peri, this time titled "A Yarn for Marines." The peri ends up on a dreadnought, where she seduces an officer. Rollicking, if a bit silly. No sign yet of the alleged backlash in the correspondence pages. I just noticed that "Peri" and "Paris" are pronounced similarly.

T.E. Hulme continues his notes on abstraction, making an interesting argument about the frameworks that undergird thought. Our logic eventually must rest on self-evident truths, but the problem is that we find our self-evident truths largely through culture, which means they aren't true at all. But he doesn't stop there--things get a little weird first. He argues that there are in fact objective self-evident truths, and that they are often found at the heart of religious dogmas. His belief in original sin, that a human "is a wretched creature that can yet apprehend perfection," is valid, while the humanist optimism about humanity is not (354). It's the large, underlying category of original sin that can change the way we perceive the world. He's going to shift to discussion of literature soon, and I look forward to that. Maybe if Hulme hadn't died, he'd have been T.S. Eliot.

Off to the dissertation.

The New Age, February 3, 1916

So many New Age posts in a row! Sorry if they are a little boring for my regular readers--I'm following Beatrice Hastings very closely these days because, at some point, she's going to stop appearing here. Posts on other journals soon!

Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings continue their short story about the supernatural Peri.

Someone is contributing stories from the Ambulance Corps as "War Notes." I believe this is the poet "Andre B." who used to publish here, and who I know went to war. I don't know who Andre B. is, and "War Notes" are signed simply "B.," but they are the first vivid descriptions of World War One that I've seen. The Western Front's mud and misery have found The New Age. 

Quick Notes:

Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings continue their short story about the supernatural Peri. This week's installment has her bamboozling upper crust people. 

 "Men and Manners" continues with a piece on why one should not call the waitress "Miss."

Feminist Alice Smith has been debating the position of women in industry and in guild socialism for some time now--this issue has a long and eloquent letter from her.

One R.M. Fox fills the week's Pastiche column with "Factory Echoes: Sketches from Life," which are what they sound like.

The New Age, January 27, 1916

Two big things to discuss in this issue: more fiction from Hastings, and T. E. Hulme, elaborating his philosophy.

First, Hastings:

The story from the last post continues in this issue of TNA: Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning has dropped the "Feminine Fables" header from the tale, which appears here as "In Between Whiles." Many Hastings themes in the next installment, as the Peri wanders the sea until forced to land at a nearly deserted island, where one fisherman lives. The encounter devolves into an armed standoff fairly quickly as they have a battle of the sexes for dominance.

In other Hastings news, "Men and Manners" is an anonymous column that is probably hers. This week's argues that men are mostly just ignorant of how to treat women. Distastefully, it seems to say that men are inherently better than women, but that's not a good reason to strut about acting superior.

Last thought, mostly for myself: there's a letter praising "Men and Manners" in this issue. If the author of "Men and Manners" is Hastings, as I suspect, then this would somewhat undercut the narrative that she's alienating the readers from The Old New Age.

Second, Hulme:

He's been contributing philosophical articles, but this is the first I'm going to write about. It's part of a series titled "A Note-Book," and I'm sure it's been covered by Hulme scholarship before I got to it, but here's my take, anyway. Hulme says that there are grand, large-scale beliefs that are so prevalent and powerful in both individual minds and collective cultures that they become invisible, despite the fact that they are assumptions. The focus of the essay is on two of these beliefs, religion and humanism. In a moment of modernist gnosticism, Hulme explains that the religious attitude believes in a version of original sin, that man is bad, and can partake in perfection without ever being perfect. Understanding this leads one to discipline and order.

Humanism doesn't believe in the inherent badness of people. The goal of humanism, then, is to help people unleash their inherent goodness. Hulme hates this, because "It distorts the real nature of ethical values by deriving them out of essentially subjective things, like human desires and feelings." According to Hulme, this is now breaking up, and society will return to something more philosophically aligned with medieval Europe than renascence Europe. The solution? Here:

"A complete reaction from the subjectivism and relativism of humanist ethics should contain two elements : (1) the establishment of the objective character of ethical values, (2) a satisfactory ethic not only looks on values as objective, but establishes an order or hierarchy among such values, which it also regards as absolute and objective."

Prefiguring Eliot? We'll see. Hulme's complaint about subjectivism and relativism that permeate his society is very familiar to me, as I see such complaints around all the time. The strange thing is that the complaints often point to a different moment or era as the source of subjectivism or relativism, the 1960s, for example. Hulme sees it everywhere, all the way back to the renaissance.

The New Age, Jan 6, 13, 20: Feminine Fables

Breaking the usual procedure of this blog, I'm going to cover three related moments in the first three New Ages of the year: the jumbled, confusing publication of the beginning of "Feminine Fables," a serial story by Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning that began in the Jan 6 issue, and continues in the Jan 13 and further issues. This is the text that Hastings later blames for breaking her relationship with The New Age.

The jumble: Orage and company accidentally printed the second chapter on the sixth, and the first on the 13th. This is sort of a shame, because I thought the first story was a cool stand-alone satirical tale about a witch transforming an evil spirit into a contemporary woman. The hilarious central trope is the spirit asking the witch for various kinds of beauty that would involve physical transformation her her part, and the witch's squirming that these kinds of transformations are beyond her power. Unfortunately for the witch, the spirit has clippings from the newspapers advertising cosmetics able to effect each of the transformations she desires. This leads the witch to cave in, and she actually pulls it off.

Because of the mixup, we get the reasons for the spirit's presence in the witch's hut on the 13th. The spirit is a Peri, one who has accidentally been locked out of paradise, and who decides to go live among humans instead of dealing with the shame of the situation.

Here's how the story is reported in Hastings' memoir, The Old New Age: 

 "Towards the end of 1915, I had profoundly sensed the war-weariness that might have induced the people to accept any honourable offer of peace. I ceased my weekly "Impressions of Paris", and led away from the pall of inertia; (that soon was converted into ignoble rage by powerful schemers) all around us in a series of lightly satirical tales about an independent Peri, making her deal with various situations where prejudice chains us down when we want to get up. The unstated moral was to "cut through". According to Orage, these tales infuriated people. People were suffering, and there was I writing witty nonsense... Letter after letter complained of my indifference to the public misery... I was seriously damaging the paper... I now regarded the readers as a kind of treacherous, ungrateful, idiotic herd of swine."  (24-25)

By January 20th, there are already signs of the problem: Hastings/Morning writes incredulously, "why do you harbour serpents of readers who write and ask me where is the moral of the fable?"
She continues with a self-destructive self-defense (characteristically!), writing that the stories are more a way to keep herself from pining away, that they should be labeled "for women only" (a reference to Orage's own "Tales for Men Only."

What fascinates me is this: In The Old New Age Hastings writes that the whole fury of the readers is "according to Orage." There's doubt. I also doubt: Orage hasn't printed any of these alleged angry letters yet, and there simply is not enough in the stories themselves to justify outrage. Also, Hastings has done this before both in Impressions of Paris and in the stories about/by Anastasia Edwardes (which I tentatively attribute to Hastings). I'll continue to monitor the situation.

One Quick Note:

Jan 13 has an article by TNA's soldier correspondent North Staffs, advocating that literary men should enlist, and explicitly calling out Clive Bell (Virginia Woolf's pacifist brother in law) as someone who ought to enlist, calling him "a contemptible ass." It gets even more intense.

The New Age, July 22, 1915

First, I want to welcome Katelyn Kenderish, who has written the first guest post for Poetry of July, 1915. She'll be covering Poetry for Little Review Reviews, giving us a poet's perspective of that journal.

Turning to The New Age: it's been a while since I last posted on this journal. For those of my readers who have been following my progress since the beginning (probably only Katelyn!), you know how interested I've been in Beatrice Hastings' career at The New Age. This career is drawing to a close: Hastings, as Alice Morning, is caught in her own sexism, as her traditionalist and old-fashioned view of femininity is not compatible with the demands of World War One in The New Age. Asked whether she supports the war, she retreats into her gender role: "War is a man’s affair, and I don’t come in at all in the matter of believing in it or not. My part is to nurse or sew or cheer or shut up. If I break out into an opinion it must be blamed on to a false education, or the double-edged licence of the modern woman, or, at its best, the contact with men on service" (276). That's just a sampling. Hastings/Morning's tone is another fault: her emotional and light style can appear flighty and flippant, and incompatible with the demands of the moment (in the eyes of the moment). Her staunch opposition to war-as-such, which she sees as essentially feminine, is an offensive defense, labeling her female critics as unwomanly. But it's not going to work.

While I think Hastings is a brilliant stylist, it is difficult to read these arguments, and they are difficult to categorize. The relationship of femininity to war changes, in an ebb and flow--last night Katelyn wondered if the that women should oppose war categorically would seem so sexist during the Vietnam era. We decided that it was an interesting lens, but also the wrong perspective. Reading Hastings as ahead of or behind her times decontexualizes her in a way that might be worth a moment's provocative thought, but it is more important to try to understand the context in the ways it is available to us now.

After discussing the war, Hastings cites a review of her "Impressions of Paris" that appeared in The Atheneaum. This passage caught  my eye as prophetic: "I like the “Athenaeum,” which will not mind a bit about my bypaths fifty years hence, will even, perhaps, raise an eyebrow at the indiscretion of some publisher’s editor who may suppress them. Not that I would bother to go down all of them twice myself! But then, one doesn’t write Impressions with an eye on Immortality" (277). This is a foreshadowing of the occlusion of Hastings from the literary record, remarkably presciently, unless she was already suspecting that Orage was going to throw her out and keep her down. In fifty years it won't be a publisher's editor who suppresses Hastings, but a scholar: Wallace Martin rarely mentions her in his histories of The New Age. 

Quick Notes:

Paul Selver contributes a poem satirizing, I think, how Rupert Brooke and perhaps Gaudier-Brzeska have been eulogized and praised as heroes for dying in the war, which will ensure their lasting fame. He's right of course. The satire calls out Aldington and Pound by name. Page 268.

R.H.C./Orage reviews some interesting texts in "Readers and Writers": Pound's Noh has appeared in The Drama, a periodical that should probably (with Poetry and Drama) be added to The Modernist Journals Project some day. Orage praises Noh for all but the translations themselves, and theorizes that they are remnants of an ancient mystery cult. He accuses Pound of "eating peas with his knife," which is a funny way to say that he is too slangy. Then, he turns to review an essay in The Yale Review by J.C. Ransom, who I wasn't expecting to see in the MJP. I usually associate him with later modernisms.

The New Age, June 17 1915

Ivor Brown's "Aspects of the Guild Idea" of the week is the perfect explanation of why the Guild Socialists are antifeminist (150-151). First, the classic-in-the-internet-age move of agreeing with your foes in principle: "In so far as the Woman’s Movement demanded the right of every one, male or Female, to live his or her own life it was asking for something extremely right and extremely vague." But of course, it's not the principles that are in question here, it's execution: "First of all it ceased to be a philosophy of woman and became a fight for the suffrage." Here's half of the problem. By fighting for suffrage, women were fighting for the wrong thing, because democracy had proven completely hollow: "At the very moment when man, after seventy years of political freedom, had laboriously discovered it to be barren, woman found fruit and virtue in the vote." The second half of the problem is that labor agitation is only as powerful as its ability to constrict the supply of labor, and women entering the workforce would flood the labor market. Brown wants women to wait until after the revolution to demand freedom, because when everyone is embedded in a broken system, moving up one rung will not ultimately be satisfying. Brown makes the case as clearly as anyone has in The New Age. That he is making this case in the middle of the war makes it seem belated.

Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings continues "Impressions of Paris." I'm most interested in her ongoing skirmish with Arthur Hood. In the last issue Hood had attacked Hastings over her history of the French Revolution. First, BH/AM self-deprecates: "What can it matter what such a scribbler [herself] says about the French Revolution? Yet Mr. Hood attacks me in person as though my words were of importance" (153). Then, she counters with a more detailed rendering of her understanding of the Revolution, and a claim that "nothing is served by comparisons of atrocities."

R.H.C./Orage reviews Stendhal's L'Amour, recommended by Alice Morning in a prior issue. This passage feels to me like a covert love letter to Hastings, who is with Modigliani in Paris at this point. That's speculation--but since there are signs of the ultimate break between TNA and Hastings, perhaps this was a last shot at reconciliation? Especially with its texture of inside jokes: "I am trying to get it translated, possibly to run as a serial in THE NEW AGE--with the editor’s permission!" (150) He is the editor! But could this be a nod to Hastings' former position as secret literary editor, and maybe even a suggestion that she might be the translator? I hope so.

S. Verdad's "Foreign Affairs" contains sharp criticism of the English administration in India, accusing them of unfairness and inflexibility in their dealings with the Indian people (148-9). While that's not a surprise, he divides his palpable frustration on the behalf of the empire, on the one hand, but also on the side of competent Indians who are being shut out from influence by the administration. 

The "National Guildsmen" print this critique of "Marxian dogma": "In reply to several correspondents we may say that we accept an economic interpretation of history, but not the economic interpretation, as if there were none other. Reality being infinite in its aspects, and history being the record of reality, it follows that there are as many interpretations or readings of history as of reality ; and the attempt to reduce them all to the economic is equivalent to the old fallacy of the economists who conceived an 'economic man'" (149). It seems like the angle the Guilds are taking, lately, is that other theories are too narrow, while the Guild theory can embrace many readings of history.

The "Notes of the Week" that begin every issue of The New Age contain a very interesting shift in political allegiance. They call for a general election, and support Lloyd George in the eventuality that it would occur. There are many nice things said about Asquith, as well, even though he'd be the loser in the hypothetical election. Odd--in the past TNA has hated these guys. On research, this will actually happen in 1916.

The New Age, June 10 1915

Normally I don't go back in time to pick up issues that escape me, but I've got a little extra time today, so this will be an extended edition of--

Quick Notes:

Beatrice Hastings' "Impressions of Paris" contains reflections on people she calls "calmatives," the people who suppress panic in cities and in the military. More dramatically, she excoriates airplanes as weapons of war, and prophesies that they will end cites because people will want to spread out to avoid gas bombings!

R.H.C. (Orage) launches an attack on a new literary journal, The Gypsy. I imagine it will be short-lived because I can't find much about it online right now.

This issue also contains an allegorically/satirical story, "The Placard" by Arthur F. Thorn (Beatrice Hastings?). It is an attack on The New Age's arch-nemesis, The Daily Mail. In it, the author accuses Lord Northcliffe of conspiring with the Germans to end the war--at the end of the essay, "Organgrind" (Northcliffe) comes up with his antiwar slogan, "Peace with Honour." Whoa. (134).

In the correspondence section, there's a letter by Ramiro de Maetzu debating luxury with Beatrice Hastings. It has some cool moments: "an article of luxury, like a Louis XV chair, is a kind of myth." I would dwell on this debate more--perhaps in the next post. Which I ought to go write.

The New Age, June 3 1915

Notes and highlights from this issue:

From "Notes of the Week," an explanation of why England needs to avoid conscription. I think I've written about this before: they've been arguing against conscription for some time now. The reason: if capitalism won't end soon, England's going to need to be able to kick butt on land, because submarines are ruining its naval advantage:

"If, indeed, we could assure ourselves that the present war would end war, something might conceivably be said for adopting a temporary measure of desperation in the certainty that no precedent would be created by it. But unfortunately this is not likely to be the case. On the contrary, as far as we can see, and in the continued postponement of the destruction of Capitalism, the need for military efficiency in England will be greater in the future than ever before." (97-98)

Note that The New Age has no illusions about a "war to end all wars." Their objection to conscription is that it will play into the hands of big business, the real enemy. If you can conscript in wartime, why not in peace? Etc.

One theme of the week's "Notes" that gets taken up again in the later column "Towards National Guilds" is that the capitalists have formed what is essentially a super-coherent blackleg-proof union of the owners of production (102).

Alice Morning/BH continues her "Impressions of Paris," this time describing wounded soldiers in Paris and continuing her campaign against war photography. Then she pivots into a critique of de Maetzu's own critique of luxuries--she argues that luxury is culturally and individually relative, so that a beer is not a luxury in a land rich in beers, and might be a need to someone who relies on alcohol (Beethoven is her example).

More importantly for her story: dark clouds gathering in the correspondence pages. I know from my research that "Impressions" are going to get her in trouble because of their flippant treatment of the war. I feel bad for missing a few issues that contained the beginnings of this, and will go back to catch them in my own reading. Arthur Hood writes that Hastings has besmirched the reputation of French Revolution revolutionary Danton, and hits her hard with this: "We can endure the meanderings of Miss Alice Morning when she writes of ants, influenza, and midinettes, although these subjects are not extraordinarily interesting; it is a different matter to pass a careless judgment on mighty occurences in a nations’ history; to attempt this, without willfully insulting the dead, a wide outlook and a more spiritual insight are required" (119). I can't imagine Morning/Hastings off The New Age and, for all her considerable faults, I'm not looking forward to it.


Quick Notes:

Marmaduke Pickthall returns, this time explaining the systems of local government in Turkey, especially the system of election by acclaim rather than by, well, election. Prominent men are cheered into office and shouted out of it. Unfortunately, Turkey has been tricked out of this system by its attempt to apply English law and democracy to its own internal government, creating all kinds of problems. I have no idea if this is true, but contemporary examples of Western powers trying to impose democracy around the world resonate. (103)

Ivor Brown contributes a piece on socialism, but his first novel gets an awful review. I had a student write a paper on Jane Austen, and it turns out that Brown became an Austen scholar (among other things I'm sure).

"Pastiche" contains an interesting, if nasty, satirical story by pseudonym "X." titled "Whit-Monday," in which sentences rigorously constructed in linear fashion describe a kind of Virginia Woolvian London park scene, meant to be grotesque, but coming out ugly.

The New Age, April 15, 1915

There's much to cover, and as usual, I'm a little behind. I've come to look forward to the end-of-the-month push to get all these posts out, even as it comes with its minor dread, too. Before dealing with the monthlies, though, I have to get the weekly out of the way. It is so hard not to fall behind The New Age. 

As usual, I'll start with Beatrice Hastings' "Impressions of Paris," as Alice Morning. This week's is a portrait of deep wartime depression: "I am in a horrid state of soul, right down in a rut of the war, and hanging head downwards--your perfect egoist... There's such a state as bleeding without fighting at all. The universe seems only just as far away as Paris is, and not more worth going out to behold" (653). Mixing modes, as usual, she tells a parable, an anecdote from French literary history, and stories of things she's seen and of her past. I've been thinking about how cool it would be to gather together the "Impressions of Paris" and The Egoist's "Passing Paris" and "Fighting Paris columns by Muriel Ciolkowska, perhaps as a book, or--what about an audiobook organized chronologically, and released through Librivox? Maybe someday.

Someone, probably Beatrice Hastings, is continuing the satirical columns of Anastasia Edwardes. I think it must be Hastings, because they are similar in tone to her "Impressions." In the last Edwardes column, she was a satire of the New Woman, a faux intellectual flirt. This week, the column is more about her husband, a middle-aged solicitor, who wants to go to the war and instead plays soldier very assiduously. It's slapstick-funny.

Ramiro de Maetzu writes an essay "On Art and Luxury," which goes something like this: people are worried that the war will kill off the arts because it will damage the patronage networks that art relies upon. This is incorrect, because art does not rely on patronage. This gives de Maetzu a space to critique Oscar Wilde and Theophile Gautier, who he considers to have made an error in advancing a doctrine of art for art's sake, which he sees as really being art for luxury's sake. In rating art so highly, they began to lose touch with reality: "In his essay, 'The Critic as Artist,' [Wilde] goes the length of declaring resolutely that, “'As civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised, the elect spirit of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what art has touched.' Both in life and in art his ideal was marginal,--luxury" (641). The saving grace of this error was that Wilde and company thought that luxury implied craftsmanship, and this led them to perfect their art--even though in reality, luxury is based on scarcity of materials and the amount of labor they represent, not craftsmanship, per se:

"The object of luxury resembles the object of art in that both are expressions of power; but, while the object of luxury is only the expression of property or monopoly, the work of art tells us, through the power of the means of expression, that man is the master of Nature. Craftsmanship means power. In the object of luxury the thing to be shown is the power of the proprietor. In the work of art the essential thing is the power of the artist."

This ends with Romanitic declarations of art's power to connect humanity to the infinite, etc. De Maetzu has fused Romanticism with Marxism in an attack on art as luxury.

Quick Notes:

Arthur Thorn's short story/dialog, "Discovering Drama" includes a discussion of the reasons for the cinema's popularity vs. drama.

C.E. Bechofer quotes at length from Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov.

Rebecca West appears in "Current Cant"'s crosshairs for representing Germany as a poor country.

And lastly, as my United Auto Workers chapter prepares for a strike for a new contract, a note on wartime dock worker's strikes in England, discussed in The New Age and the correspondence pages. The upshot is that in a time when shipowners are purposefully hiding their merchant vessels in neutral ports to keep them safe from being commandeered and sunk, the country is instead angry at dock workers who refuse to be exploited. The high-level traitors go unnoticed, while the low-level protesters are pilloried.

The New Age, April 8 1915

Beatrice Hastings, as Alice Morning, contributes another installment of "Impressions of Paris," and as usual, it is the most interesting piece in this particular issue of The New Age. She dips into the surrealist mode that she used in stories between 1910-13, and which appears only occasionally in "Impressions." I think she's describing the struggles of having a maidservant (remember, Hastings wrote a column on how to live without servants a while back), but she figures her servant as a "patent doll that boils your tea-kettle" (611). It's not Hastings' finest moment, but it gives her space to pivot and reflect on the war and feminism, an intriguing glimpse into the past: " Do not expect any thoughts from me. I am become simply a suffering receptacle of the horrid comedy of things. The battle of a mechanised, over-feminised world against itself leaves me without any other excuse for existence." War, mechanized and over-feminized? One, but not the other, has become a cliche. I believe that for Hastings, feminized is equivalent to emotional, and the nominal manliness of the emotion doesn't exonerate it from being feminine, as opposed to intellectual. It's an old and invalid train of thought, and I wonder what her career would have been like if she had managed to avoid it.

She then pauses to look back at the suffrage movement, seemingly nostalgically:

"Only to think how, two or three years ago, nothing had a banner to its name save the Rights of Women, and now we are thankful to be out of reach of violation and slaughter ! Just when we were on the Point of leading men to Glory, getting the vote and putting everything right- just there and then they went frantic and spoiled it all. And they may very well stay frantic for another thirty years, settling what’s what and who’s who among themselves, while the real question as to who shall decide about vaccinating little Johnnie is left without a man behind it! And here is a case of one of those curious, bungling, partial conditions of Nature: it needs a man even to decide who shall decide. If Papa decide that Mamma shall decide, Mamma will decide; but if Papa decide to decide, Papa will decide."

The men have brushed aside the struggle for women's rights, which has revealed the unshakable patriarchy controlling the system. Hastings, who has been a collaborator with the patriarchy for years now, seems yet to see the tragedy of this system.

Turning abruptly to the lighthearted (and mean-spirited), TNA satirizes The Egoist's announcement of Pound's College of the Arts from last November's Egoist. In a similar announcement, it is dubbed "The College of Tea-hearts," where one can get instruction from Mr. Pound-Cake in the Cake Atelier, among other confectionery's delights. Check it at page 619.

Similarly, intellectual woman artists get satirized in "The Confessions of a Solitary Traveler," nominally by Anastasia Edwardes. It's probably a satire of someone in particular--but who, I'm not sure. She goes to the beach with Dostoyevsky and Hume, but ends up getting seduced by a man who buys her candy. The form, content, and boots lead me to guess that the author is actually Beatrice Hastings.

Quick Notes:

The issue has several anti-American articles. Not allies yet.

"Letters to a Trade Unionist" describes how clerks have shifted their alliance from the management to the proletariat and the unions.

Sol Davis's "The Mad City" is a transparent allegory of the war in Europe, told as a brawl between neighbors. Not that great

"Readers and Writers" complains of a press boycott, accusing the London publishers, except Macmillan, of ceasing to send him books to review. He also praises The Yale Review as the best magazine America has produced.

Llewelyn Powys contributes a story set in British East Africa, titled "Rubbish," about the tragedies of Africans under British colonialism. The story doesn't escape its own racism and sentimentality, but it fits into the genre of abolitionist writing turned to the colonial situation.

Lastly, I noticed a strange letter under the pseudonym "Ignotus Quondam" on why England might be better off losing the war. This is pretty radical, for the time and place.

The New Age, March 11 1915

Hello all: I skipped an issue of The New Age because none of my favorite authors appeared in it, and a lot of it was saddening or offensive--but if you are looking for patronizing antifeminism from the time period, do take a gander at March 4 for the first installment of Maurice Rickett's "Women in a Guild Socialist State." Unfortunately many of the arguments are very familiar and still alive.

"It is no secret to the foreign Press that large forces of French and British troops have been landed on the Gallipoli peninsula, and that the Greek army is mobilising for a march on Constantinople as soon as the Dardanelles are forced... it will be seen that the attack on the Dardanelles is probably the happiest solution of the problem which could have been devised... There will be the minimum loss of
life; the minimum destruction of property" (S. Verdad, 500).

The battle of Gallipoli has begun. This issue of The New Age is an almost-unbelievable testament to British confidence at the beginning of the battle. Even Marmaduke Pickthall, the unabashedly pro-Turkish writer at The New Age, seems to have given up on the Turkish Empire, hoping instead that Turkey preserves an independent state ("The Fate of Turkey," 503).

For his part, the military adviser Romney (never a favorite of mine) takes a cheap shot at his co-contributor: "Before long, one may hope, the fall of Constantinople will have given Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall something to cry about" (501).

Of course, they are all wrong. The campaign will last until next January, and fail, killing half a million people in the process.

Quick notes:

B. Hastings contributes another "Impression of Paris" as Alice Morning. The funniest moment comes when she is explaining that she's moved, rented out three rooms for herself, which is one too many. The extra room has become The Necropolis:  "If anyone coming over here would bring me a parcel or two from THE NEW AGE office, I would reward them with a cup of tea and a view of my third room, the Necropolis, where I put masterpieces of dead art, and volumes of vers libre and Imagism, and yesterday’s milk bottle" (507).

And, under the heading of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, R.H.C. (presumably Orage) ends his "Readers and Writers" column with the below. Oh, for a vorticism-producing machine! Something went off deep in my memory, sending me to Ann Ardis' Modernism and Cultural Conflict, where I found that she discusses this passage on pages 167-8.

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, February 18 1915

This post will be brief because I'm making good progress on my dissertation. Hopefully I'll be able to return to this one sometime, because there's a lot of good stuff.

Histoire D'Enfant by Augustus John, pg 429:

This issue contains two unwitting prophecies. Sorry if this is overly mystical, but again, I'm going to rush this one for the sake of my diss.

Ezra Pound is the subject of one prophecy: in a satire of Vorticism by one John Triboulet, this pre-vision of his incarceration in Pisa. The context is that Obadiah has become a "euphemiste," and is a fool compared to his interlocutor. But look, page 434, bottom right, Pisa! Or Pisa, interpreted by Obadiah, who is a fool, after all.

The second prophecy: the Lusitania is the subject of a false flag controversy. When worried about encountering Germans, the Lusitania flew an American flag, which was a legal move--but it made the Germans state that in the future they will target ships that they suspect are British, even when under neutral flags. The Lusitania creeps closer to its doom (420-21).

Max Jacob contributes aphorisms as "Extracts from Unpublished Volumes."

de Maeztu contributes an essay on "Marx and Wealth and Power."

Beatrice Hastings' "Impressions" continue her discussion of sculpture, reacting against Pound. Of particular interest is her critique of Pound's prose style.

There's a hilarious and comprehensive response to Austin Harrison's scurrilous anti-Semetic rant from last week's correspondence pages.

Correspondence in general is really good, but Austin Hertslet's letter about Pound, Lewis, and representation in painting might be useful for my work.

"Notes of the Week" is on British speculation against British interests--English capital is cornering the grain market in America, according to the editor, which is putting strain on the lower classes. Pretty nasty, if true.

All for now--apologies for the rush.

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.

The Masses, February 1915

After giving The Masses short shrift in January, I'm going to do my post on it early this month.

This image stands for one of the main meditations of The Masses this month: how impoverished women relate to sex, especially as prostitutes, or otherwise exploited. January's issue had the story "Nobody's Sister" on the same subject--but this month's Masses is anchored by a story by John Reed, Daughter of the Revolution. He tells about meeting a prostitute from a third-generation Socialist family--she is impoverished because her father rejected her desire for freedom. That's the irony of it. As a story, the writing is good, if a little prone to over-exposition. Marcelle, the prostitute, tells the story of her grandfather dying at the fall of the commune, her father's activities as a strike leader, and all the rest of the family history. She herself hates socialism for the way her family has been crushed by the system--and yet, she herself feels free. The story comes off as part inspiring, part sordid--another glimpse into wartime Paris, and one more polished than the others I've covered. It's worth reading. Contrast this vision to that of "The Bachelor Girl" drawing above, and with the poem "You Turned" by Robert Carlton Brown below (page 9):

Robert Carlton Brown is one of my favorites--and a forgotten modernist I want to spend more time studying, someday. He doesn't even have a wikipedia page yet, as I think I've noted before--I keep meaning to write one, but finding sources on him is difficult. See also his drunken Whitmanic prose poem rollick, "A Nickel at Night" on page 20. 

Quick gossipy note: when Reed is establishing the scene at the beginning of the story, and for no readily apparent reason, he writes that "Beatrice and Alice were farther down along under the glare of the yellow lights" (5). Could this be not two women, but Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning of The New Age?! Conspiratorial of me to think it, but the coincidence--BH/AM would have been in Paris at the time the story was set.

Quick notes:

This issue of The Masses contains some interesting poems beyond Brown's above. Carl Sandburg publishes "Buttons," about the horror of abstracting the war. 

I may have made a minor discovery in another one of the poems... but I'll keep some secrets for myself, until they are ready. 

Karl Liebknecht, covered in my last post, has his tragic insurrection prophesied by The Masses on page 14. 

Floyd Dell contributes an essay on Gilbert Murray's comparing the era to the Greece of Pericles. It's interesting for the connections with the Hellenism of so much of the art of the day. 

The Masses has set up shop as a mail-order bookstore, a prototype of Amazon: you let them be your middleman, and the profits support the journal. We'll see how the scheme plays out. 

I'm going to take off now, but there's plenty more to say about this issue--the best way to experience The Masses, its worldview, its black humor, its art, is not this blog post. Here's to the thing itself.