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 Republic, November 7, 1914

This one's a backtrack to the first issue of The New Republic, a new journal that's been attracting a lot of buzz around the modernist journal scene. I have access to a scan of a bound volume (much like my big bound volume of Poetry and Drama), so I'm missing out on all the cool paper-grain, coffee-stain, bibliographic code that one gets at the Modernist Journals Project, and I only have access through my school library. Not ideal. I'm guessing that this is because The New Republic still exists, and might defend its archives?

I'm going back this far in time to greet the new journal, but particularly because Rebecca West an essay, "The Duty of Harsh Criticism," for it. Despite my claims to horizontal reading, I'm still a sucker for my favorite names, and I've missed West since she dropped out of The New Freewoman. 

West attacks complacent, congratulatory, and academic criticism, claiming the need to "rebel against the formidable army of Englishmen who have achieved the difficult task of becoming men of letters without having written anything" (19). A common feeling, but more unusually, she claims that criticism matters more now because literature has expanded its scope from the representation of emotional life to the representation of all life, which has the concomitant effect that they must be constantly representing life in order to capture its changes. The result is a sort of blurry photograph: "often it happens that because of their haste they receive a blurred impression or transmit it to theri readers roughly and without precision." Criticism exists to slow them down. She follows this with criticism of Shaw and Wells. Her critique of Shaw seems to be, actually, less harsh--his problem is that his critics don't see him as a poet, a "spiritual teacher," so that his best work gets lost to bad criticism. Wells is raked over hotter coals. I'm more interested in her approval of Shaw because West takes a load of buckshot from The New Age over it in the current January issues (stay tuned).

Following this is an essay by "L.S.," "Panic in Art." This is nice because of how closely it shadows some more-recent theories of the avant-garde: "One conviction, however, [radical painters] hold in common: art, which has been the courtesan of princes and the holiday playmate of republics, is dead. Painting, which began with Giotto, has completed its cycle, and a new art made possible by a new freedom is to begin" (20). L.S. follows this with a summary of the new painting, contrasting its ravenous search for inspiration in other times and cultures with its radical rethinking of objects as unstable illusions.

That's all for this back-issue, but I'll be checking in on TNR from time to time in the future...

The New Age, October 23 1913

First, politics:

I've been reading George Bornstein's Material Modernism for my PhD exams, and it is really the perfect companion text to my work on this blog. In it, Bornstein examines (for example) Yeats' poems in their original contexts (as much as accessible) and in other editions that have emerged since. His readings of Yeats' "September 1913" have been reminding me to keep an eye on things Irish (like A.E./George Russell's letter last issue) and on labor disputes.

This issue of The New Age begins with a discussion of the Senghenytdd mining disaster. It moves to a more usual topic, the railroad strikes. There's revolution in the air--threats of a massive strike to take place in 1914. Remember that worker's movements have been urged to arm themselves in TNA and The New Freewoman.

The link between armed resistance in Ireland and the possibility for it in England is actually explicit: "The trade unions... though their grievance is of a parallel nature to that of the colonies of Ireland, are even today unaware of its true nature. For them as for these the remedy is Home Rule" (746). See also the poem by Susan Mitchell, "To the Dublin Masters" on page 760, which ends with an unveiled threat of the guillotine. The focus moves back to South Africa, and the editors of TNA wonder whether the armed strikes there will emerge in England. Then more on the lockout in Dublin, which is starving1/3 of the city's population. The desire for a more comprehensive revolution informs The New Age's rejection of a legal minimum wage.

Second, feminism:

Beatrice Hastings reviews a housekeeping guide by Mrs. J. G. Frazer, "First Aid for the Servantless," a book that attempts to show how women don't need house servants. The review is fascinating, though, not for that--but because it stands in as a sort of autobiography of Hastings. She explains her position in the literary world by contrast to her domestic life, continuing her generally anti-feminist approach: "I am a minor poet of the first class. I have never created anything" (759). Hastings' literary ability boils down to the fact that (in her own account) she knows her limitations, many of which are dictated by her gender. Frustrating, revealing.

"Readers and Writers," by Orage presumably, is a take-down of Pound. It hits him right where he's most sensitive when it questions his credentials: "What qualification, may I ask, has Mr. Pound revealed for making a fair estimate of English writing as compared with French?" He also gloats somewhat over having baited EP into an over-emotional response, which I don't think actually happened: Pound has been very reserved about the awful situation he's in (being pilloried in the very journal that is releasing you serially). Pound showed a definite lack of tact (or tactic) but strategic foresight when he slighted the writers of TNA, and of course he ultimately wins the fight (or has for the foreseeable future).

As for pseudonyms and identities, this issue has two delightful plot-thickenings:

J.M. Kennedy replies to "The Writers of the National Guilds Articles" that he hasn't written for TNA for six months and that they have misrepresented his theories. "The Writers" immediately reply, a privilege usually reserved for the editors or the inner-circle of TNA. I imagine that The New Freewoman must be wrong in identifying "Romney" with Kennedy (see earlier discussion). Or it's really getting conspiratorial: could the editors be the "writers?" Orage singled out the "writers" for praise in one of his self-righteous reviews earlier, which he also uses to boost Hastings. Evidence mounts.

Hastings goes after Rebecca West's analysis of Hall Caine's roman a clef that supposedly stars Hastings (see above TNF), saying that her Pages from an Unpublished Novel are NOT autobiographical. Judging by the Stephen Gray biography of Hastings, Hastings is lying (or perhaps Gray repeated West's error? I doubt it). The public image management of Hastings is really fantastic, sort of like Fox News' fake bloggers.

All for now...

The New Freewoman, October 1 1913

The New Freewoman is really hitting its stride. It is full of interesting articles and well-written literature (though the poetry is still hit-or-miss). This issue includes progressive views on environmentalism and what-will-be queer politics, as well as hilarious comments on contemporary literature. Here's a digest of what you'll find:

If you're into modernist literature and want a good belly laugh, turn to page 149 for a hilarious table of reviews. All sorts of famous reviewers are summed up in one sentence, and the reader is supposed to cobble together a book's reception by selecting each review from the database. Featured: Henry James, Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, Beatrice Hastings, Alfred Noyes, and others who have fallen into more or less obscurity. A sample: 7. "Mr. Ezra Pound says that someone else has praised the book and therefore it must be bad."

The "Chancellor" of the "Angel Club" explains his/her plan to found an intellectual nation somewhere, populated by exceptional people--a Utopia for overmen.  The plan is to seize an island and run it like a giant university/publisher/order of knights (yep). I can't find anything about the ultimate fate of the Angel Club online because too many strip joints are named that for Google to power through them... but I'm curious.

Other quick notes:

Rebecca West reviews books by H.G. Wells and Hall Caine. I will definitely need to Caine's roman-a-clef about Beatrice Hastings, The Woman Thou Gavest Me: West says it is overly sentimental, but fascinating.

"R.A." (Richard Aldington) contributes a letter from an "imaginary poet" in which he defends himself from an American reviewer who claims that he should include more personal experiences in his poetry.

Havelock Ellis is making a splash. Classics as revolutionary--invoking a sexual emancipation. E.B. Lloyd is eloquent in his plea for understanding of sexuality as a spectrum, cites Whitman.

I need to look up Horace Traubel, an American poet who keeps turning up these days.

The advertisements at the end of the issue announce that Pound's Canzoni by Arnaut Daniel has been published! Bon anniversaire.

The New Freewoman, September 15 1913

This issue of The New Freewoman begins with a remarkable essay on ecological responsibility, Stephen T. Byington's "On Interference with the Environment." The thesis: "If one person injures another by making the material environment unfit for that other's use, the injury should be regarded on the same level with a direct assault on another's person or on the products of his labour. I say 'material environment,' meaning such things as the air, the water, the hosts of birds and beetles and bacteria, not the social environment."

Rebecca West's review of Granville Barker has the characteristic mix of fin-de-siècle pessimism and double-edged compliments that make it seem like there is no good art being made in 1913. She makes me want to read his play "The Marrying of Anne Leete " because she likes it: "There never was written anything quite like it except Tchekov's Cherry Orchard, which it resembled both in the fastidious hands it laid on the sterile and sentimental governing classes and in its Futurist technique" (128). It's interesting to think of Chekov as a Futurist...
 Pound's review of John Gould Fletcher is classic Pound--while not really boosting his friend (who was always frustrated by Pound's self-declared superiority), he manages to make Fletcher come across as a leading poet of English (if not to be compared with the French).

There are a set of poems by Richard Aldington, in the Greco-Imagist fashion. I really do like them for their soft tones--an understated version of what H.D. does so well. Again, that pessimism creeps in at the end of a long prose translation from Moschus: "O Anax Hyperion, golden Apollo, cease thy task of sending mortals light/ and teach this generation not to write" (133). That is also very Poundian, of course--I like Aldington's place in the triad, though. He seems more aware of the repetitiveness of artistic cycles, turning to the Greeks not because they are classic but because they remind him of himself. That's strictly a blog statement, though--I'd have to do some thinking before defending it.

Perhaps most interesting for the purposes of getting a feel for the fractures that exist between my two main journals is the paragraph in Huntley Carter's essay "The Stone Citizen," which takes on The New Age directly. It has given me a few names to research that I hadn't run across before: Samuel Hobson, who Carter says founded Guild Socialism, which he calls "balderdash" (135); Field Marshal Bruce Williams, who sounds VERY familiar (Pound related?), and a "Geddes" who may be this Geddes, but may not. He blames Geddes for the idea that people should be citizens, rather than individuals, "civics" and not "cosmics." That's all very Huntley Carter. He also makes an idenfitication: Romney of TNA is J. M. Kennedy, though the Modernist Journals Project pseudonym database doesn't agree. The similarities in tone between Romney and S. Verdad leads me to agree with Carter, and the MJP admits that it isn't sure who Romney really is. Here's the text: "it has set its handy man J. M. (Julius McCabbage) Kennedy disguised as Romney to reconstruct the British Army with Williams' pale system for pink persons."

Well, we'll see what happens next.