The Egoist, May 1916

End of the month means a flurry of short posts:

The oddest thing, perhaps, about this issue of The Egoist, is that it doesn't have an editorial at all. Harriet Shaw Weaver had been filling in for Marsden in the role, but this one opens with an essay by Aldington. He also contributes an elegy for Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, "A Life." It's a beautiful, subdued tribute.

The best things, perhaps, are the two poems by Marianne Moore, including one with this amazing title: "You are Like the Realistic Product of an Idealistic Search for Gold at the Foot of the Rainbow."

Quick notes: 

Pound contributes a translation of one of the dialogs of Fontanelle, 

There's a story about the trauma of a young girl who listens to her father beat her mother every night--signed B. Durak, a pseudonym I can't track a the moment.

Tarr continues--this time through, I'm noticing how thoroughly narrated the narrative is. Even the slippages between narrator and character are part of the narration, it seems. Incredibly rich prose, peppered with the occasional false note--or is it salted? 

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 Little Review, April 1916

Now for The Little Review.

Charles Zwaska, the young office boy who joined the magazine at seventeen (he insisted on being called office boy), contributes a scathing take-down of Vachel Lindsay. As someone who is often irritated by Lindsay, I disagree with the faint penciled-in criticism in the scan of the magazine, which says "rather silly." The best part of this article comes when Zwaska writes about Lindsay's book of film criticism, The Art of the Moving Picture. To counter the theories there, Zwaska cites the disdain of the audience for the films Lindsay praises--he sketches a vivid portrait of their collective expertise, as they live in the theater, and sleep there all night. A golden age of audience engagement, cut short by the police now patrolling there. This is reminding me of Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," a little. I'll look it up.

Quick Notes:

Like The Egoist's praise of Jane Poupelet, this issue mentions a few women who were highly regarded artists and performers at the time--here, a cabaret singer and a playwright--Yvette Guilbert and Alice Gerstenberg.

Allan Ross MacDougal writes about Guilbert, a French cabaret singer: "But whatever she sang—and I didn't know a word of what she sang—carried me away completely. Not a mood did I miss—not a suggestion of a mood. Perfect is her art. She has my adoration" (30). Hear for yourself on Youtube!

Gerstenberg appears in a blurb about her play Overtones. That link connects to a website that has the full text available, and at a glance, it seems pretty cool. Characters are followed by actors playing their "real selves," so the two characters are in dialog with their internal selves and each other, simultaneously. 

Ezra Pound, of course, appears in this issue--here he rails against the import duties leveled on books imported to America, and his complaints seem justified. Sometimes they are.

Lastly, The Little Review courageously announces a set of lectures by Margaret Sanger:

The Egoist, April 1916

So, I had to get that belated March post up in order to get one ready for April. It's a heck of an issue.

Before turning to the canonical coolness of several of these pieces, a moment from Muriel Ciolkowska's "Passing Paris" that turned into a half hour's exploration of the internet: Ciolkowska informed us about "Mme Poupelet," Jane Poupelet. The wikipedia article's in French--she doesn't have an English page, not yet. This passage caught my attention:

The idea of "our leading woman-sculptor" making dolls of "remarkable qualities" caught Kate's and my imagination. We have yet to locate any of these dolls online, either mentioned or in images. We did find some of her sculptures, like this whimsically chubby cat, apparently sold a couple years back in Rockland, Maine--a town where K used to sell farmer's market produce. Such a small world. Too bad we weren't living in the area and aware of this at the time!

So cute! We probably couldn't have afforded it. Further searches turned up this blog post by Alain Verstichel about her work sculpting prosthetic masks for wounded soldiers. It's also in French, but you should follow the link even if you can't read it to look at the images. From here, I learned that Poupelet worked with American Anna Coleman Ladd building these masks.

Katelyn also turned up this article in Harper's, titled "A Great French Sculpturess," written by Janet Scudder in the April 8, 1916 issue--coincidentally coinciding with the century immersion project of this blog. Scudder's extremely excited about Poupelet--here's a prophecy she makes, though, that might be true, at least most of the time: "Poupelet's name will be forgotten just as the name of the sculptor of the Narcissi is forgotten--that is unimportant."

Then we noticed that April 19th is Poupelet's birthday, which means I have to post this post today instead of worrying it over overnight, the way I often do. Happy 142nd, Mme Poupelet!

In other, more canonical news:

Tarr begins. I read it for my PhD exams, but reading it in this immersion project changes it considerably. Tarr, the character, talks like The New Age, and like The Egoist itself. Tarr's criticism of the world indicts the reader as well as his companions in the artistic Knackfus Quarter. The misogyny reverberates through the women's movements I've seen, and the anti-German sentiment gathers force next to the coverage of the war. Even H.D.'s recent poems of turmoil and initiation seem to be of a piece with Tarr as a piece of The Egoist--the dream of being alone, together, holds these things in an uneasy conversation. Or something like that. Is it a coincidence that it is followed immediately by a letter titled "Second-Rate Supermen" about the German misapplication of Nietzsche? Probably not.

Quick Notes:

Harriet Shaw Weaver's editorial criticizes the worship of wonder, the feeling of wonder, in itself: wonder properly appreciated ends with an inspiration to destroy it through learning. Knowledge is the proper end of wonder, not wonder itself. 

H.D. contributes "The Helmsman," a poem I know from Sea Garden. 

Richard Aldington contributes an understated prose poem about an English town, one about "the perfect book" which resonates with the first chapter of Tarr, and a lineated poem about Italy.

The Egoist, March 1916

A belated post on The Egoist for March! I thought I'd written one, but when working on April I noticed that I hadn't.

The big news here is that Tarr is beginning. Wyndham Lewis' novel opens with a few forerunners here--Ezra Pound's "Meditatio" excoriating the stupidity of the literary public for not liking Lewis and Joyce is one of these. The others are short stories by Lewis himself, "The French Poodle"  and "A Young Soldier." Both are war stories, as is Tarr, at least in that it appeared in The Egoist during the war and will certainly resonate with it. They are themselves a matched pair: "The French Poodle" is about a young soldier attempting to sort through his trauma, and mostly failing. "A Young Soldier" is much shorter, a sketch more than a plotted story, about seeing a soldier who looked like he was born to kill.

Quick Notes:

Harriet Shaw Weaver continues to write the editorials, though Marsden is still on the paper, apparently.

Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, and H.D. all contribute poems, as does Alice Groff. Leigh Henry writes on Ravel, Huntly Carter on American photography and French cubism. 

The Crisis, April 1916

I'm just jotting down a few thoughts on this issue here, there's so much more to say.

The editorial section contains an account of a lynching in Lee County, Georgia, including a graphic photograph. Here's the take: "What was the real cause back of this wholesale lynching and back of the lynching of six Negroes in Early County, December 30th? The answer is clear: Peonage. Slavery under another name..." (302). A man named C. D. Rivers from Somerville, VA is then quoted, as apparently he wrote a letter to some newspaper to explain why things are so bad in Georgia. Du Bois catches him in his own rhetoric, showing that Rivers' justification of lynching is based on profits, not morals. 

I grew up southeast of Somerville, a town so small it almost doesn't exist now. Just a store on a corner.

This is immediately followed by a supportive letter from Helen Keller, who also sent one hundred dollars along for the NAACP along with it.

I noticed these things, there are many more, with a lean toward coverage of religious affairs due to this being the Easter special issue. There's a new section titled "The Looking Glass," which seems to be halfway between "Along the Color Line" with its news snippets and the long-form essays and articles that appear from time to time. It's an extended digest of news and events.

Last, here's an image of the "automobile phalanx" against segregation in St. Louis.

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...