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, May 1917

The end of the school year rush is upon me, so this note will be brief.

This issue of The Masses stands out as particularly full of fiction. Short stories dominate the pages, crowding out the usual essays--seven short stories balance three or four essays, depending on how you categorize things. I wonder if this is a blip, or if it signifies a change in the magazine's policy.

John Reed's "Broadway Nights" was, of the seven stories, the outlier. The other stories are representations of injustice, of militarism, of poverty, or some combination of the above--they are ideological tools as well as stories, and tend toward the sentimental. Lots of dead children. In fact, every short story other than Reed's has a child or a young man die, except the one where the child is abandoned. It is strange to have such a persistent pall of untimely death over the magazine, especially considering the many ways it appears.

Reed's story, though, is a modernist tour de force, a short story about the shimmering lights of Broadway, depicting New York as a surrealist prose poem, or fever dream:

The final sentence: "Why do you insist that there must be a reason for life?" seems almost a response and rebuke to Richard Aldington's "The Tube," which ended asking "What right have you to live?" Instead, Reed celebrates the murky underbelly of the city at night, and its strange paradoxes. 

That's all for now.

The Masses, February 1916

I haven't done a post on the Masses in a while, but I've been reading along. Here's one on the February, 1916 issue. I had my class read this issue last week, so it's particularly vivid in my mind, as the students here at UW really liked it, and we learned a ton together by digging through articles,  ads, and art.

Three featured articles caught our collective eye.

The first is John Reed's report from the Serbian front of the war, titled, "The World Well Lost." Reed opens with a beautiful and horrible parody of travel writing:

"THE Serbian town of Obrenovatz is a cluster of red tile roofs and white bulbous towers, hidden in green trees on a belt of land, around which sweeps the river Sava in a wide curve. Behind rise the green hills of Serbia, toppling up to blue ranges of mountains upon whose summit heaps of dead bodies lie still unburied, among the stumps of trees riddled down by machine-gun fire; and half-starved dogs battle there ghoulishly with vultures" (5).

Reed's embedded in the Serbian army, a staunchly nationalist force. When the soldiers hear that he is a socialist, they send him to the artillery to meet a former Serbian socialist officer there. Reed's interview with this man, Takits, shows the damage that the war can do to both a country and to a left-wing individual. Takits often refers to the fact that he can barely remember his activism, despite it being hugely important to him. He explains that socialism was a natural fit in Serbia, as a nation of freeholding peasants, "we were naturally communists." His original goal was to develop a sense of class loyalty among the lower classes to match that of the upper classes, because the lower classes already owned the means of production. The war has pushed all that into the background: "Well, I have forgotten my arguments, and I have lost my faith!" Takit's tragedy is that an intellectual, committed leftist lawyer could be so completely subsumed by the war as to lose his individuality. It's a cautionary tale for American socialists who are reading The Masses. 

The second text that we discussed was "The A.F. of L. Convention: An Impression" by Inez Haynes Gillmore. As my class has spent a lot of time discussing impressionism and post-impressionism, we were impressed by Gillmore's invocation of "impression" in the title, and discussed how framing it as an impression changes the reader's expectations of the piece. The account itself is joyous about the power of the labor delegates, who are sketched as super strong huge hunky brilliant men arguing intelligently over issues that will change the world. Students hypothesized that the female feminist readership of The Masses would have appreciated the woman's vision of male beauty here, so unusual after our many encounters with male representations of women in the course. Gillmore's writing is poetic and powerful: "The voice of labor is a roar, deep as though it came from a throat of iron, penetrating as though it came through lips of silver. One day that voice will silence all the great guns of the world."


Third piece: "About Schools" by Max Eastman. Eastman comments on the plan to adopt the Gary educational system in New York. He's writing to convince his left-wing audience that the plan is a good one, despite its concessions to religion. The Gary plan involves adding workshops to schools, intense shop class, essentially. Eastman writes that his own education was largely useless, and that he learned versatility and self-reliance at his first factory jobs, not in high school. We got the sense that Eastman sees the potential for worker's solidarity here--if everyone works in a factory as part of their schooling, they will have more sympathy with people who work in factories for life. That's implicit, though, a theory. Students appreciated this cartoon that accompanies the piece:

The caption reads: "Let's go out to Central Park and look at the animals." "I can't, I've got to study my zoology." We discussed how this is funny, a critique of current educational systems, and simultaneously a validation of women's ability to be serious students of sciences. Pretty good, for a single image.

There's more, but that's all for now...

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.