The Crisis, January 1916

This issue of The Crisis is, as usual, an incredible read. I am glad to announce that I've gotten a summer fellowship to do a project on The Crisis through the Simpson Center for the Humanities here at UW-Seattle, so I'll have the time and space to do more in-depth work with it this summer. That makes it a little easier to skip so much of it now. 

In my ongoing attempt to understand W.E.B. DuBois' editorial practices, I was very excited to find him explaining his process for accepting or rejecting work for the journal in an editorial labeled "Our Policy" on page 134. He reveals that his method is entirely shaped by the magazine's relationship with its readership: "PERSONS who send us clipping contributions and pictures often assume or seem to assume that the acceptance or rejection of articles is purely a personal matter between them and the editor. They forget the Third Person, the Reader." He goes on to explain that his own feelings on a piece are always measured in relation to the reader, even when printing things that are difficult to read: 

"If the editor likes the manuscript this is not sufficient reason for publishing it. He must ask : Will the readers like it? If the answer is "yes"—the manuscript is accepted; if it is "no"—then there comes the greater and more difficult question: How far is this something which the readers ought to read despite their likes? How far is it something that they should be educated up to or become intelligent about or aroused over? How far will publication now and in this form induce them to read what they are not willing to read?"

DuBois uses this editorial to split the difference between two kinds of criticism the magazine has received, as he explains that some readers complain that the journal has too much of a political agenda, and others that it has too much entertainment mixed into its politics. That this editorial statement is framed by a photo of a Hatian fighter killed by American troops during the US occupation of Haiti on the one hand, and an account of racially motivated arson on the other, enhances the power of his stated willingness to put before readers things they will not like for educational purposes. 

His editorial practices are on full display in another section of the journal: a collection of obituaries for Booker T. Washington, clipped out of papers from all across the country (they start on page 122). It's an amazing portrait of Washington--DuBois contributed his own obituary of Washington in the December issue (if I'm recalling that correctly), but this is an entirely different kind of tribute. By showing Washington from so many angles DuBois shows how powerful Washington's impact was while taking himself out of the picture--though he does crop up in several of the obituaries themselves as Washington's militant foil. 

Quick notes:

Football appears in The Crisis, with in-depth coverage of games held between black colleges.

The "Letter Box" contains much correspondence, both in praise and dispraise (but mostly praise) of The Crisis. 

I learned about several artists I hadn't heard of before (and apologies to my teachers if I have, but had forgotten!): Jupiter Hammon and Ira Aldridge stood out, among others. 

An aside:

It's been a while since my last post, and I missed the third birthday of the blog. Heading into year four of what I'd originally conceived of as a ten year project, I am again inspired by my readings in the archive and my good luck to have access to it. Here's hoping I reach the halfway mark this November.

The New Age, November 11, 1915

The war dominates this issue of The New Age, as it often does. The Battle of Gallipoli is lost, and it's not clear how Britain is going to extract its armies there. Bulgaria has joined the war on the side of the Central Powers, though The New Age underestimates Bulgaria. Bechhofer writes that the Russians are willing to make a separate peace to preserve the tottering czardom.

"War Notes" by pseudonym "North Staffs" is pretty interesting. Here's a chunk of text that caught my eye in an argument generally refuting Liberal tendencies to see everything in terms of progress toward democracy:

"In the first place, evolution in our sense of the word-that is, evolution towards democracy-is not only not inevitable, but it is the most precarious, difficult and exigent task political man has ever conceived. And, in the second place, far from it being the predestined path of every nation and race, only one or two nations have attempted to pursue it, while the rest deliberately and even, we might say, intelligently, pursue another path altogether as if that were progress, and are thus sincerely hostile to our own." (29).

Then we must turn to Beatrice Hastings, here reporting as Alice Morning. This is the way the world ends: with a brilliantly original thinker utterly discrediting half of humanity (a half that includes her) as being incapable of original thought. This has been a side of Hastings for years at this point. I'm going to be analyzing the trend in more depth in a paper I'm presenting at a conference next weekend, but the upshot is that Hastings is an original artist whose ideas went utterly unrecognized. Her turn against women in general is in part out of frustration with her lack of recognition, paired with her disillusion with the suffrage movement. At least there's a letter in the correspondence refuting her position.

I noticed that the ongoing Stendhal translations are now appearing with the translator identified as Paul V. Cohn, who (according to Google) also translated Nietzche. I'm curious whether the translations have been by him all along, when it seemed like it was Hastings doing that work for some time.

Electric Beauty

I was just reading The New Age when a new glitch occurred--it's happened a few times, so this time I was ready and caught it in a screenshot. I'm posting it because it's lovely. Real posts again soon!

The Egoist, October 1915

The Egoist is replete with interesting material, as usual. I'm currently working on a paper on Dora Marsden, and I really should be spending all my time on it... but here goes.

Speaking of Marsden, she continues her anti-government reading of contemporary politics. The upshot of the month's "Views and Comments" is that the media is misrepresenting the people--that the controversy over conscription is unnecessary because the people support the war, and are willing to do what they need to do to win it.

M. Montagu-Nathan continues a series on problems with the translation of Russian literature into English. He wants more Gogol.

Edward Storer contributes many translations of Sappho, giving his own take on the sort of Greek lyric poets that Aldington has been publishing lately. He cited the Wharton edition as his source, and translated both whole poems and fragments, but corrects Wharton's more prudish reading of the poems with this: "That her poems were chiefly love-poems, and love-poems written to women, is clear even from the mutilated fragments which remain. Any other explanation destroys at once their art and their reality. Yet sedulous hypocrites are to be found to-day who will wilfully mistranslate and misconstrue in order to envelope the manners of antiquity in a retrospective and most absurd respectability." Cool. So are the poems. I have read many translations of Sappho, but in these, the aphoristic epigrams stand out:

The indefatigable Huntly Carter reviews A.J. Eddy's book, "Cubists and Post-Impressionism," an early critical work on those movements. Carter, having been on the scene since Manet and the Post-Impressionists in winter 1910, weighs in quickly and decisively. He accuses Eddy of jumbling up which artist belongs in which school ("Picasso is not a Cubist, but an essentialist." [!!!]) Carter does point out that writing about avant-garde art should be investigated with caution, especially when "painted theories of a school do not agree with the written ones." Intriguingly for me, Carter boils Eddy's theory down to a paraphrase of imagist doctrine (without citing imagism): "the painter is seeking to make an abstraction of the individualising features of a movement experienced by him in a moment of time. In this trifle resides the only possible theory and practice of art." Here Carter is condensing Eddy's reading of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," and this is the first time I've seen Duchamp referenced. Carter has nice things to say about Kandinsky.

Someone signing as "E. H. W." translates Peter Altenberg's story "Une Femme est un Etat de Notre Ame." It's very interesting, a portrait of the emptiness of a young woman's bourgeois life, written in an experimental fashion. It's ambiguous to me on a first reading whether Altenberg is using the relationship with the young man to redeem and transform this life, or whether the relationship and its poetry is also ironized as empty. I lean to the latter. I wonder who "E. H. W." is.

John Gould Fletcher continues Ghosts of an Old House, his southern Gothic serial poem. I'm not into it, but he prophesies my (and your!) reading his poem after his death in this one:

Perhaps the perfect answer to this comes on the same page, facing: Marianne Moore's "Diligence is to Magic as Progress is to Flight," a poem in part about how a poem can escape becoming ephemeral. The other Moore poem is "To a Steam Roller," and both are amazing, but here I'll post just "Diligence" because of my (contrived) attempt to make it a response to Fletcher's anxiety:

I should wrap up this post, and I'll do so with Richard Aldington: he writes about Laurent Tailhade, praising him for his obscene satire. What does this suggest? Yes! Aldington's own attempt at poetic satire follows it. To continue the theme established by Fletcher and Moore: Aldington's satire ends with another accurate prophesy:

And here he is, by Raoul Kristian, who I can't locate online, and that's all for now:

The Masses, October-November 1915

I love this issue: the Women's Citizenship Number.

There's a lot to cover, but I'll start with a general observation: The Masses devoting a special issue to women's citizenship would seem to imply a shift of focus to a single topic, but despite the cover, the issue discusses the vote, labor relations, and race relations--all common topics in its pages. Probably less than half of the text is explicitly in reference to suffrage. It doesn't feel strange, though: the cover is an act of solidarity. Here's the kind of solidarity attempted by The Masses: a short piece apologizing to the suffrage movement for the conflation of its activities with those of The Masses, they print this:

The Masses positions itself as a supporter and acknowledges that this support requires nothing from the suffragists. It's about human rights, not about The Masses. The article continues, and things begin to run together: the piece is about Leo Frank's  lynching and the cover of The Masses that foreshadowed this lynching by depicting Frank on a cross. Apparently the suffragists were blamed for The Masses "blasphemy" when an anti-suffragist used it to implicate that suffrage and The Masses were one and the same. It all holds together--the fact that Frank tried for the murder of a child laborer in the South comes back to have implications for women's suffrage. The whole issue feels like this.

Floyd Dell and Max Eastman contribute pieces directly on women's suffrage. One interesting component of Eastman's argument is that women are already in the workforce--the bourgeois preoccupation with women remaining in the domestic sphere is a hypocrisy in that these pinnacles of traditional gender roles hire women to run their homes, as maids, cooks, etc.

Amos Pinchot explains that labor is reaching a crossroads: the oversupply of labor means that strikes can never really be effective again, and the state-industry monopoly of violence means that strikes will be fatal as well as futile. The only avenue left to reach an equitable society is political, as the wealth of the elites must be countered by creating self-sustaining labor-led alternatives to the mainstream society.

While this issue has bigger issues on its mind, B. Boysen writes a piece titled "What the Universities Need," protesting the dismissal of a professor from U. Penn for his political views, like our current situation with Steven Salaita. Boysen points to the capitalist takeover of the university system as the root problem, and proposes a national instructor's union with heavy student input as a counterweight to the power of the wealthy trustees. Awesome stuff.

Mary White Ovington, cofounder of the NAACP, contributes a short story about a black couple undergoing horrific crimes in the American South, illustrating the cycles of violence that can extend for decades. It links closely, though not overtly, with the coverage of the Frank case elsewhere in the issue.

Jeanette Eaton castigates the women's magazine for its pernicious influence on women, driving them deeper into the domestic sphere instead of focusing their energies on real living, moving into a general critique of men for encouraging this kind of thought:

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

The Egoist, September 1915

Sweet-sadness of the end of many a month's serial story:

I'll be teaching it in a few weeks, for the first time--so it's not like I'm parting ways with The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for long. A note on serialization: this book is poetic enough, and the chapters self-contained enough, that I never felt like I was utterly lost in regard to plot, etc. But on thinking back over the last two years of it, I have trouble remembering what happened--I can recall the plot via the time I read the book-as-book, but as serial, strangely, it seems like a whole different novel. 

Quick Notes:

John Cournos eulogizes Gaudier-Brzeska, drawing a strong contrast between Gaudier-Brzeska's artistic power and motives and that of the Futurists, saying that the Futurists represent things, while G-B interpreted them. 

Richard Aldington contributes a series of short translations from Anyte of Tegea, "one of the great women-poets of Greece."

There's more--Marsden's anti-democratic philosophy, for one--but no more time today. 

Others 1, 2, 3

It's the beginning of a new quarter here in Seattle, which means chaotic wrappings-up of summer projects and chaotic scramblings to get new projects going. But I have to do a quick post on Others. 
   
The first three issues are absolutely epic.

The first issue (July) contains poetry by Mina Loy, and is the first time I've seen her on the MJP. Her Love Songs are racy and provocative, right away.

The August issue contains poems by this august crew (deep breath): Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. It also has a couple mostly-forgotten poets that I'm interested in: Skipwith Cannell and Robert Carlton Brown. The real treat, though, is Wallace Stevens.  I think this is the first time I've seen Stevens in the archive, and like Loy, his first contributions are amazing: "Peter Quince at the Clavier" as debut!

Lastly, to get me up to date, the gem of the September issue is T.S. Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady." John Gould Fletcher appears too, but his appropriative Native American themed poem is a mess.

I have to go to work!