Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism 9780748645220

Citation preview

TRANSATLANTIC AVANT-GARDES

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd i

25/01/2013 15:53

EDINBURGH STUDIES IN TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor Modern global culture makes it clear that literary study can no longer operate on nation-based or exceptionalist models. In practice, American literatures have always been understood and defined in relation to the literatures of Europe and Asia. The books in this series work within a broad comparative framework to question place-based identities and monocular visions, in historical contexts from the earliest European settlements to contemporary affairs, and across all literary genres. They explore the multiple ways in which ideas, texts, objects and bodies travel across spatial and temporal borders, generating powerful forms of contrast and affinity. The Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures series fosters new paradigms of exchange, circulation and transformation for transatlantic literary studies, expanding the critical and theoretical work of this rapidly developing field. Titles in the series include: Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois, Daniel G. Williams Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, Michèle Mendelssohn American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation, Daniel Katz The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag, Ellen Crowell Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells, Frank Christianson Transatlantic Women’s Literature, Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective, Günter Leypoldt Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money, Erik Simpson Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826: Rewriting Conquest, Rebecca Cole Heinowitz Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion, Paul Giles South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970–2010, Ruth Maxey Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World, Leslie Elizabeth Eckel Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism, Eric B. White Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages, Jeffrey Einboden Forthcoming Titles: Emily Dickinson and her British Contemporaries: Victorian Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America, Páraic Finnerty Visit the Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures web site at www.euppublishing.com/series/estl

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd ii

25/01/2013 15:53

TRANSATLANTIC AVANT-GARDES LITTLE MAGAZINES AND LOCALIST MODERNISM

◆ ◆ ◆

ERIC B. WHITE

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd iii

25/01/2013 15:53

© Eric B. White, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Baskerville MT by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4521 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4522 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8159 4 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 8160 0 (Amazon ebook) The right of Eric B. White to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Susan Manning (1953–2013), one of the founding editors of Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures, was committed to the exchange of ideas across languages, cultures and nations. Indeed an expansive intellectual generosity characterised her entire academic career, one that has been cut all too short. The Series is a testament to her work and contributes to her legacy as an outstanding scholar, a supportive colleague and a good friend. Andrew Taylor

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd iv

25/01/2013 15:53

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Notes on Sources

vi viii xii

Prologue 1 1. Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village 19 2. The Vortex of the Page: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis and the Modernist Problem of Place 50 3. ‘Backgrounds and Extensions’: The Ascent of Localist Modernism 81 4. Location, Location, Location: America, Relativity and ‘the New Science of Advertising’ 110 5. Secessions and Symposia: American Identity and Transatlantic Colour Lines in Modernist Magazines 140 6. New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces 173 Epilogue 208 Notes Index

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd v

211 260

25/01/2013 15:53

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Front Cover, Others 1.1 (July 1915). Sourced from material owned by author. 1.2 Mina Loy, ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’, Rogue 2.1 (15 August 1915), p. 10; Clara Tice, ‘Virgin Minus Muse’, ibid. p. 11. Image reproduced with permission of the Clara Tice family and courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; text reproduced with permission of the Estate of Mina Loy. 1.3 Djuna Barnes, ‘The Tragedian’, Rogue 2.1 (15 August 1915), p. 9; Alfred Kreymborg, ‘Overheard in an Asylum’, ibid. p. 9. Image reproduced with permission of the Estate of Djuna Barnes. 2.1 The Amphitheatre of Arles before 1850. Justin H. Smith, The Troubadours at Home: Their Lives and Personalities, Their Songs and Their World, 2 vols (Vol. 1) (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), p. 120. Image reproduced with permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 2.2 Front and Rear Covers, Blast 1 (July 1914). Copyright © The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/Bridgeman Art Library. Image reproduced courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. 3.1 Front Cover, Contact 1 (December 1920). Image reproduced with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd vi

27

33

35

55

72

101

25/01/2013 15:53

List of Illustrations 4.1 Front Cover, Contact 4 ([September] 1921). Image reproduced with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 4.2 Front Cover, New York Dada, April 1921. Copyright © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012. Image reproduced courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 4.3 Nujol Advertisement, The Rutherford Republican, 2 April 1921, p. 12. Sourced from microfilm owned by author. 4.4 Standard Oil Company Advertisement, The Rutherford Republican, 20 August 1921, p. 3. Sourced from microfilm owned by author. 5.1 ‘Boni & Liveright: Good Books’ Advertisement, ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’, Special Number, ed. Alain Locke, Survey Graphic 6.6 (March 1925; rpt Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1980), p. 707. Image reproduced with permission of Black Classic Press. 5.2 Winold Reiss, ‘Dawn in Harlem’, in ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’, Special Number, ed. Alain Locke, Survey Graphic 6.6 (March 1925; rpt Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1980), p. 664. Image reproduced with permission of Black Classic Press. 6.1 Ezra Pound, ‘The Twelfth Canto’, originally published in A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound: for the Beginning of a Poem of Some Length (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925). Copyright ©1925 by Mary de Rachewiltz and Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. 6.2 Front Cover, Pagany 1.2 (April–June 1930). Sourced from material owned by author. 6.3 ‘Oratorical and Poetical Gestures’, in Charles Reznikoff, ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’, Contact 1.2 (May 1932), pp. 99–108 (p. 100). Sourced from material owned by author.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd vii

[ vii

113

114 118

120

156

168

182 196

205

25/01/2013 15:53

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has grown out of many transatlantic crossings and contacts, beginning with my graduate studies at the University of Cambridge. I owe my first debt of gratitude to my doctoral supervisors there, Fiona Green and Ian Patterson. Their extraordinary depth and breadth of knowledge and their unfailing support over the years has continually inspired me. I also extend my thanks to current and former members of the Faculty of English, and especially Jean Chothia, Richard Gooder, Paul Giles, J. H. Prynne and David Trotter. The support I received from the Fellows of Clare College, Cambridge, was invaluable, and I would like to thank Patricia Fara in particular for her encouragement. I am also thankful to the members of Clare College, especially my friends Joanna Daly, Anthony Miller and Will Swaney. It has been a privilege to work at Oxford Brookes University, and this book could not have been completed without the sabbatical and teaching remission provided by the Department of English and Modern Languages. I am grateful to my students and colleagues for enriching my academic life at Brookes, and in particular I would like to thank my colleagues working in modernism: Niall Munro has been inspiring to teach with, Steven Mathews kindly offered his advice and input at a crucial time, and I would especially like to thank Alex Goody, who kindly read drafts of my work during the composition process. I would like to thank Nigel Bowles and the fellows and staff of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, where I held a visiting fellowship during the final stages of writing this book. The intellectual community and scholarly resources of the RAI were a great tonic. I am also extremely grateful to the staff and fellows of the Institute for Advanced

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd viii

25/01/2013 15:53

Acknowledgements

[ ix

Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, which was an intellectually rich and congenial place to conduct research during a pivotal moment in my postdoctoral career. In particular, Laura Marcus was very supportive during my time at Edinburgh. I am also grateful to Andrew Taylor, Michèle Mendelssohn and Randall Stevenson for their encouragement, and to Anthea Turner and Donald Fergusson for their help at IASH. I would like to extend a special acknowledgement of gratitude to the late Susan Manning for her guidance and encouragement over the years. She made a lasting impression on several generations of scholars and will be greatly missed. While teaching at Anglia Ruskin University I was fortunate to work with Sarah Brown, Mark Curry, John Gardner and Rowland Wymer, who were very supportive throughout my time there. Katy Price generously shared her knowledge of the popular reception of Einstein with me, and Rebecca Stott provided illuminating discussions of science and literature. I also am grateful for the enthusiasm and conversation of Mhairi Burden, Sarah Cain, Sara Crangle, Meg Foulkes, Michael Kindellan, Edward Holburton, Alexander Howard, Tom Jones, Sam Ladkin, Tim Morris, Edward Ragg, Keston Sutherland, Tony Paraskeva, Neil Pattison and Anne Stillman, who all enhanced my time at Cambridge. I have been fortunate to meet a number of scholars of modernism in my travels, who have very kindly shared their expertise and enthusiasm with me: Ian Bell, Peter Brooker, Ian Copestake, David Herd, Andrew Krivak, Christopher MacGowan, Ira Nadel, Peter Quartermaine, Erin Templeton, Andrew Thacker, Emily Mitchell Wallace and Mike Weaver, and the broad community of Williams, Pound and little magazines scholars, have all been extremely encouraging over the years. This project would not have been possible without the support of research centres and archives. I am particularly grateful to James Maynard and Mike Bassinski, for their help at the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, and to Nancy Kuhl at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, where I was privileged to hold a Gallup research fellowship. I would like to acknowledge the following funding bodies, whose generosity enabled me to complete my work: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Board of Graduate Studies at the University of Cambridge, the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, and the British Association for American Studies. Early versions of chapters in this work appeared elsewhere, and I am grateful to the following publishers for granting me permission to use that

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd ix

25/01/2013 15:53

x]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

material: Intellect for material from ‘Advertising Localist Modernism: the Transatlantic Avant-garde in Contact’, European Journal of American Culture 28.2 (Summer 2009), pp. 141–65; and Oxford University Press for material from ‘In the American Grain: Contact (1920–3, 1932) and Pagany: A Native Quarterly (1930–3)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume II: North America, 1894–1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 249–70. I would also like to thank the editorial team at Edinburgh University Press for their unflagging support of this project, and to the anonymous readers of this book, whose suggestions undoubtedly enriched it. For permission to reproduce copyrighted material in this book I gratefully acknowledge the following agencies: the Estate of Djuna Barnes; Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012; the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/Bridgeman Art Library; the Estate of Mina Loy; the Carl Sandburg Family Trust; and the Clara Tice family. Quotations from Claude McKay are courtesy of the Literary Representative for the Works of Claude McKay, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; images from Survey Graphic are courtesy of the Black Classic Press. Quotations from ‘The Poems of Abel Sanders’ by Ezra Pound are copyright ©1921 by Mary de Rachewiltz and Omar S. Pound; the image from A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound is copyright ©1925 by Mary de Rachewiltz and Omar S. Pound; quotations from material collected in Ezra Pound, Personae, are copyright ©1926 by Ezra Pound; and quotations from Ezra Pound, A Walking Tour of Southern France, are copyright ©1992 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. All quotations are reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Quotations from unpublished and uncollected material by William Carlos Williams are copyright ©2012 by Paul H. Williams and the Estate of William Eric Williams and reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. I would also like to thank the following institutions for permission to reproduce material held in their collections: the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin; the Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois; the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York; the University of Delaware Library, Special Collections; and the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked then the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. I extend my warmest thanks to Jason and Louise Watson, my friends

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd x

25/01/2013 15:53

Acknowledgements

[ xi

and extended family in Canada and the UK, and to the Hallegger family in Carinthia. And finally, I am thankful for the love and support that I have received from my family in British Columbia, Canada, and from my wife Martina; I dedicate this book to them.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd xi

25/01/2013 15:53

ABBREVIATIONS AND NOTES ON SOURCES

Archival Collections Beinecke The Collection of American Literature in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. Citations refer to the originally uncatalogued William Carlos Williams papers (Za Williams) unless otherwise indicated, and are followed by relevant archival data. Buffalo The Manuscripts and Letters of William Carlos Williams, housed at the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Citations are followed by relevant cataloguing data provided in Neil Baldwin and Steven L. Meyers, The Manuscripts and Letters of William Carlos Williams in the Poetry Collection of the Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo: A Descriptive Catalogue (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978). HRC Charles Henri Ford Papers, Series II Correspondence: Kathleen Tankersley Young, TXRC97–A13, Box 16, Folder 6, the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd xii

25/01/2013 15:53

Abbreviations and Notes on Sources

[ xiii

Newberry The Mitchell Dawson Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois (MSS Dawson, followed by relevant cataloguing data).

Books AWT Ezra Pound, A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 1992). BMM Marianne Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1909–1924, ed. Robin G. Schulze (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). C ANTOS Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1996). CP1 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I: 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000). G AUDIER -B RZESKA Ezra Pound, A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska (New York: New Directions, 1970 [1916]). IAG William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956 [1925]). I MAGINATIONS William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd xiii

25/01/2013 15:53

xiv ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes P OUND /W ILLIAMS

Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, ed. Hugh Witemeyer (New York: New Directions, 1996). T ROUBADOUR Alfred Kreymborg, Troubadour: An American Autobiography (New York: Liveright, 1924).

Little Magazines B LAST , ed. Wyndham Lewis B1: Blast 1 (July 1914) B2: Blast 2 (July 1915) C ONTACT (first version), ed. William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon, 1920–3 C1: Contact 1 (December 1920) C2: Contact 2 (January 1921) C3: Contact 3 (March 1921) C4: Contact 4 (September 1921) C5: Contact 5 (June 1923) F IRE !!, ed. Wallace Thurman Fire!!: Fire!! 1.1 (November 1926) S URVEY G RAPHIC Special Number, ed. Alain Locke SG: ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’, Special Number, ed. Alain Locke, Survey Graphic 6.6 (March 1925; rpt Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1980).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd xiv

25/01/2013 15:53

Abbreviations and Notes on Sources

[ xv

Unpublished Manuscripts ANTLP, ANTPP and DLA William Carlos Williams, ‘The Letters & Poems of Alva NP Turner’ (ANTLP), ‘Alva N. Turner – preface to poems’ (ANTPP), and ‘The Degradation of Life in America’ (DLA), Beinecke, Za William Carlos Williams Correspondence, Alva N. Turner Correspondence Folder 2. Williams typed DLA on the verso of Others letterhead, and he probably composed it between the summer of 1919 and the winter of 1920. He used the verso of the same letterhead to draft a series of six poems that he sent to The Little Review; see Litz and MacGowan in Williams, CP1, p. 294. ANTLP and ANTPP are typed on a single side of the same foolscap stock that Williams used for Contact 1 and 2, which, together with internal evidence from his correspondence with Turner, dates the manuscripts ca. autumn 1920–winter 1921. NFET and T ATTERS William Carlos Williams, ‘Tatters’, Beinecke, William Carlos Williams Papers, YCAL MSS 116, Box 65, Folder 1381. Seven of this manuscript’s nine pages were presented as ‘Notes From a European Trip, 1909–1910’ and included in William Carlos Williams, Poems, ed. Virginia M. WrightPeterson (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002). I cite the ‘Notes From a European Trip, 1909–1910’ material as NFET, and the two unpublished pages as Tatters. NRM Robert McAlmon, ‘Note by R. McA.’, Buffalo, F362. Typed manuscript included in Robert McAlmon to William Carlos Williams [late January/ early February 1921], Buffalo, F362. V ORTEX WCWA and V ORTEX WCWB William Carlos Williams, ‘Vortex – William Carlos Williams’, Buffalo, C147a (Vortex WCWA) and C147b (Vortex WCWB). Williams composed the manuscript in 1915 and made revisions in 1918; see Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 787. Bram Dijkstra’s collated version, entitled ‘Vortex’, appears in William Carlos Williams, A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd xv

25/01/2013 15:53

xvi ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Artists, ed. Bram Dijkstra (New York: New Directions, 1978), pp. 57–9. A complete presentation of ANTLP, ANTPP, DLA, NFET, Tatters, Vortex WCWA and Vortex WCWB will appear in the forthcoming William Carlos Williams Review 30th Anniversary issue.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd xvi

25/01/2013 15:53

PROLOGUE

‘A Core About Which / Not a Box Inside Which Every Item’: Little Magazines and the Modernist Transatlantic Modernist magazines were the crucible of the historical avant-garde. The fugitive status of these journals and their long-standing association with radical politics and counterpublic spheres helped create the melange of daring advances and tactical retreats that reinforced the military metaphor of ‘advance guard’, which has since defined their cultural niche.1 Although they often made incursions into mainstream print culture, the predominant feature of the little magazines in the rise of literary modernism was their ability to catalyse and sustain the production of avant-garde artworks and specialised discourse networks.2 In the pages of Others, The Little Review, Blast, Contact, Fire!!, Blues, Pagany, Secession and many other journals, modernists plotted, baited, feinted and counter-plotted with and against each other in debates that spanned continents. Concomitantly, the increasingly efficient distribution of printed matter shaped the cosmopolitan language of modernism in the early twentieth century, circulating ideas and experiments rapidly across vast distances, bringing ‘the modern’, ‘the international’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ into ever closer proximity in critical usage. Yet recently, scholars have been drawn to analysing the historical avant-garde’s contrapuntal focus on localism – the specificities of place, time, nationality, region and milieu – that emerged as a component of (rather than as a trend opposed to) the transnationalism generally taken to characterise literary modernism. The present study engages with a spectrum of transatlantic print cultures in its attempt to ‘locate’ the evolution of avant-garde networks

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 1

25/01/2013 15:53

2]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

and to triangulate the modes of localist modernism that they inaugurated. Drawing on locational readings of literary modernism and the recent rise of geographical materialism in transatlantic studies, the book considers how modernists such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Alfred Kreymborg, Wyndham Lewis, Alain Locke, Robert McAlmon, Marianne Moore, Kathleen Tankersley Young, and an intersecting nexus of fellow writer-editors, from the dada movement to the New Negro Renaissance, complicate the boundaries that have traditionally divided modernist literature into canonical categories of ‘homemade’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ writing. But it also distinguishes cultural localism from the broader framework of locational modernism by examining how writers on both sides of the Atlantic configured their projects according to the physical loci of geographic places, the temporal flux of cultural spaces and the textual locus of the printed page. By delving into the specialist spheres of little magazines, and the networks that inaugurated them, an alternative history of the modernist transatlantic from the perspective of the avant-gardes who ‘stayed at home’ emerges. Few modernist writers were as keenly aware of the transnational reach and transformational power of the little magazine as Ezra Pound. In a letter of 1950 offering advice to the aspiring poet and editor Robert Creeley, Pound articulated his governing principle for creating a magazine’s editorial ‘program’, a ‘declaration of policy’ which he distilled as ‘a core about which / not a box inside which every item’ was contained.3 His instructions not only served as a blueprint for a little magazine, but also provided a template for creating an avant-garde. As Pound was aware, modernist print culture gave editors the chance to create a physical centre around which a vortex of ink and energy could flow. The little magazine inaugurated new aesthetic principles, or held existing ones in suspension before they were picked up and developed by the next generation. Throughout his long career, Pound was adept at co-ordinating (or at times simply provoking) the discourse networks that developed between such centres. Reflecting on his relationship with Williams, for instance, Pound, in a typically charming letter of 1917, remarked that it was ‘possibly lamentable that the two halves of what might have made a fairly decent poet shd. be sequestered and divided by the fuckin buttocks of the arse . . wide atlantic ocean’ [sic].4 As the expatriate struck out into Europe, he was conscious that Williams’s cultural ‘rootedness’ might stimulate a different – yet potentially equally valuable – response to modernity. Pound wrote, ‘you may get something slogging by yourself that you would miss in the Vortex [of London] – and that we would miss.’5 As the years advanced, and their letters continued to flow across the Atlantic, each remained conscious that their poetic ‘other’

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 2

25/01/2013 15:53

Prologue

[3

resided an ocean apart, and each monitored the other’s career in the literary magazines that ricocheted between Europe and America. The Pound/Williams relationship emphasises both connectedness and the divisions that emerged within the modernist transatlantic in the early twentieth century: ‘local versus expatriate, impersonal versus personal, and social versus individualistic’.6 Their exchanges and interventions surface frequently in the matrices of contact that sprang up in the little magazines between 1910 and 1932. These international dialogues engendered themes of national identity, translocation, cultural exchange and hybridity, and little magazines which criss-crossed the Atlantic inflected this vocabulary as they became the ‘core about which’ these debates took shape. Mark Morrisson has labelled these periodicals ‘the quintessential genre of modernist publication’, and building on the cultural studies approaches pioneered by Cary Nelson, David Bennett, Jayne Marek and Lawrence Rainey, little magazines have experienced a major resurgence of scholarly interest in the past two decades.7 In addition, the Modernist Magazines Project, headed by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker in the United Kingdom, and the Modernist Journals Project, directed by Robert Scholes and Sean Latham in the United States, have accelerated the development of the field by contributing a range of critical responses and scholarly resources to a growing research community.8 Crucially, the renewed focus on modernist periodicals has coincided with the transnational turn in literary studies, and the natural intersection of these two research areas has created a wealth of new interpretative frameworks for re-evaluating modernists’ explorations of geographic place and textual space. Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor have argued that ‘the vocabulary of circulation, flow, movement’ that characterises transatlantic studies has drawn attention to its ‘ideas of crossing and connection’, which have in turn ‘helped to rethink the ways that national identity has been formulated’, especially in the context of American studies.9 Transatlantic studies has encouraged a reappraisal not only of ‘canonical texts’ but of the avant-garde networks that helped form them, and consequently the process of canon formation itself has come under renewed scrutiny by critics. Nevertheless, transnational studies of modernism have tended to focus on the phenomenon of expatriation, especially in analyses of artists and writers who had close relationships with America. Responding to the transatlantic contexts of such debates in its discussion of modernist networks, this book regularly addresses movements and milieus that took shape wholly or partly in Europe and Great Britain, such as futurism, imagism, vorticism, dadaism, unanimisme and the ‘lost generation’; however, it provides a localist counterpart to recent studies of modernism’s

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 3

25/01/2013 15:53

4]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

expatriates, including Daniel Katz’s American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation and Anita Patterson’s Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernism.10 As Manning and Taylor point out, the other side of the transnational coin is an increased interest in localism, regional cultures and place-specific writing, what Rob Wilson has called ‘the process of differentiation’ whereby local cultures ‘recognize the global design and world market and yet assert [the possibility] of alternative spaces’.11

The ‘alternative spaces’ in which this localist impulse emerged are precisely the territories that this book focuses on. From the little magazines in which it was first articulated to the notebooks, unpublished manuscripts and archives where it was plotted, this study proposes a version of localist modernism that configures the aesthetic expressions of avant-garde modernists as responses to specific regions and cultural moments. However, it locates the development of those responses within rather than outside of the transatlantic discourse networks of the early twentieth century.

Locational Poetics and Geographical Materialism ‘Locational’ and ‘localist’ iterations of modernism, though related and co-constructing, are distinctive terms. In the field of transatlantic studies, locational readings have focused on how writers explored the relational metaphors of place, time and geopolitics in the ‘global design’ of literary modernism, often to interrogate the ways in which the modernist canon has been configured; by contrast, localist modernism is one of the key ‘isms’ that emerged in response to these themes primarily (though not exclusively) in North America. Susan Stanford Friedman proposes a ‘locational modernist studies’ based on a form of ‘cultural parataxis’, which she identifies as ‘a deliberate echo of the poetics of “high modernism,” that is, the juxtaposition of disparate elements in non-hierarchical ways’.12 Jahan Ramazani similarly proposes to supplant traditional dialectical models of modernist literature, but with a ‘translocal poetics’: Neither localist nor universalist, neither nationalist nor vacantly globalist, a translocal poetics highlights the dialogic intersections – sometimes tense and resistant, sometimes openly assimilative – of specific discourses, genres, techniques, and forms of diverse origins.13

As Katz incisively argues, however, ‘such a position is not without its paradoxes, as Ramazani is well aware: “a cross-cultural poetics depends on the

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 4

25/01/2013 15:53

Prologue

[5

identitarian paradigms it complicates”, and Ramazani realizes the extent to which a translocal poetics finds itself caught in a dialectical doublebind’.14 Thus, Katz and Ramazani accept the translocal paradox as a difficulty that is preferable to ‘the regionalist and universalist alternatives’. However, the advent of geographical materialism points towards ways in which locational modernisms might be refined. Locational studies of the modernist transatlantic have emerged in parallel with recent geographical materialist readings of literature, with a similar aim of rebalancing prevailing critical hegemonies. As Paul Giles has recently noted, taking their cue from Foucault’s admission in 1976 that space had heretofore been ‘treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile’ – unlike time, said Foucault, which had been seen intellectually as ‘richness, fecundity, life, dialectic’ – a new generation of cultural geographers in the last decades of the twentieth century set about restoring the spatial dynamics inherent in American culture.15

Edward Soja and David Harvey established the theoretic framework for this new generation, inaugurating the geographical materialist model that has begun to guide a resurgence of interest in spatial readings of modernist literature in the last decade.16 Developing Anthony Giddens’s concept of the ‘locale’ as ‘a bounded region’ that brings into relation ‘the unique and particular as well as the general and nomothetic’, Soja argues that ‘localities [. . .] encompass contexts, enclosures and nodal concentrations of human interaction which are linked to both social and system integration’.17 Soja’s concept of ‘location’ describes such cultural and geomorphic transactions productively, and the version of localist modernism proposed in the present study takes its cue from his definition. In this configuration, localist modernism is distinguished by its practitioners’ aesthetic encounters with regionally specific socio-cultural markers, such as landscape, language and visual culture, often as a response to some form of translocation. Like other forms of literary modernism, localist iterations emphasise temporality and the effects of the passage of time on physical space. This emphasis creates a focus on occasional, as well as geographic, specificity, especially when we consider that the verb ‘to locate’ carries meanings of discovery and exploration (as well as recovery and ‘fixing’ one’s location in time and space) (OED). In this sense localist writing maps time as well as place, and encourages a further triangulation of site-specific writing in the modernist transatlantic. To this end, it is worth clarifying the critical languages of place used in this book.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 5

25/01/2013 15:53

6]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

The outward stability of terms like ‘place’, ‘space’, ‘nation’, ‘region’ and ‘location’ belies their remarkable flexibility in critical studies. Like geographical and geopolitical boundaries themselves, these terms are elastic, expanding and contracting to suit their context. Michel Foucault’s famous critique of historicist epistemology set the deadness of ‘Space’ against the dynamics of ‘Time’.18 Michel de Certeau refined Foucault’s terminology so that ‘place’ ‘implies an indication of stability’ and, as such, acts as a ‘law’, whereas ‘space’ is ‘composed of intersections of mobile elements’, making space ‘a practiced place’.19 Conscious of de Certeau’s useful distinctions between the terms (but wary of the value judgements that he ascribes to them – for instance, the notion that the act of experiencing a built environment necessarily subordinates the intellectual networks and workforce that inaugurated it), in this book, place carries a material, physical and geomorphic emphasis, and space an experiential and socio-cultural one, linked more strongly with perceived modulations of history and time.20 ‘Region’, ‘territory’ and ‘nation’ denote geopolitical relationships, alluding to the ways in which places and spaces are divided, conjoined, distinguished and negotiated by various populations over time. If space, place and time form a cluster of theoretical associations, and region, province, territory and nation form a geopolitical cluster, then terms like ‘location’ (and its variants) and ‘site’ mediate and instantiate the interplay between these aggregates of terms at the quotidian level, as they unfold over time. In the early twentieth century, that interplay accelerated at an unprecedented rate through the phenomenon of time-space compression, in which ‘the removal of spatial barriers’ by technological and market forces made the world seem a much more connected place.21 Like David Harvey, Andreas Huyssen has argued that ‘geographies are also shaped by their temporal inscriptions’.22 Modernists recognised that the traditional geographical markers of identity had also shifted as a result of these compressions. As Pound pointed out in his 1930 article ‘Small Magazines’ one ‘cannot [. . .] divide literary history on a merely geographic basis’.23 However, he also acknowledges that although geography, nationality and literature remain inextricably linked, affiliative processes often took place outside of the nation of an artist’s or organisation’s birth.24 For instance, he argues that if Eliot’s ‘Criterion is not strictly a magazine “in the United States” ’, then ‘it emerged definitively from American racial sources; and the story of American letters cannot be told without it (or of the Egoist and, in less degree, the New Age)’.25 Modernism emerged from a tangled system of such international communications – from transatlantic crosstalk as well as from direct lines of contact – including via processes that Craig Saper has described as ‘networked art’.26 As F. T. Marinetti and the futurists

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 6

25/01/2013 15:53

Prologue

[7

immediately demonstrated, attempts to use such channels to articulate distinctive national projects emerged almost as soon as their aesthetic programmes did.27 During the same period in the United States, the relationship between modernism and national identity was explored with a particular urgency. Morrisson has observed that ‘in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American writers (modernist or not) were grappling with the “American-ness” of their own writing, seeking to understand what could define their literature as a national literature and not simply as a provincial footnote to English literature’.28 And yet, as he reasonably adds, ‘the national (or international) identity of modernism was by no means as lucid then as later scholarly assessments [. . .] might suggest’, particularly as American writers crisscrossed the globe.29 Katz, for instance, has convincingly argued that the phenomenon of expatriation can be read as ‘in itself a highly venerable form of “American identity” ’, rather than a rejection of it, an assertion supported by numerous studies of Pound.30 And, by virtue of the itinerant expatriate’s ability to compare and contrast a vast range of locations, it is a form of American identity that bestows a unique opportunity to assess the effects of ‘place’ on the literary imagination. Moreover, there is a further flipside to the ‘dialectical double-bind’ identified by Katz in his analysis of translocal poetics:31 localist modernists were not necessarily excluded from the experience of exile. Even modernists such as Kreymborg, Moore and Williams, who were famous for remaining in the US, travelled widely at various points in their careers, and used their neighbourhoods, suburbs or rural enclaves to undertake tactical retreats from, as well as guerrilla incursions into, cosmopolitan urban centres.32 Writers such as Williams complicate attempts to pair locational poetics and literary nationalism reductively. His milieu was deeply invested in the exploration of their national identity, of course, but not to the exclusion of reciprocal exchanges with international artists. Indeed, as Bennett remarks, from certain perspectives, it is one of the great paradoxes of Williams’ conception of a distinctively ‘local’ literature grounded in ‘a reawakened [sense] of place’ that he should have derived its poetics, not from the American realist tradition [. . .], but from the transition modernists, the rootless cosmopolites of whom Harold Rosenberg wrote: ‘The Paris Modern . . . produced a No-time, and the Paris “International” a No-place’.33

But recalling Pound’s arguments from ‘Small Magazines’, in the transatlantic context, was Williams’s situation really so paradoxical? Many of those

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 7

25/01/2013 15:53

8]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

‘transition modernists’ (including James Joyce and Gertrude Stein) were equally invested in exploring the geographical and geopolitical dynamics of literature, often in comparative contexts. Furthermore, as William J. Maxwell cautions, a ‘consequential ahistoricism’ necessarily results by overlooking ‘the ways in which the cross-national exchanges of modernism were themselves framed by the “surveillance of territorial boundaries” ’.34 By examining the modernist archive within a networked historicist framework, those ‘surveillance’ tactics appear frequently as avant-garde writers cross and manipulate the boundaries of place and nation. Their dialogic manoeuvres challenge traditional categories of ‘expatriate’ versus ‘rooted’ writing, but by re-engaging with those categories, there is a sense in which one must also subtly reinstate them. Furthermore, the ‘nativist’, ‘regionalist’ and ‘localist’ emphases adopted by modernist avant-gardes and particular magazines (as well as by contemporary critics) during various cultural moments have yet to be fully explored – particularly given American studies’ lopsided emphasis on modernism’s expatriates. Nevertheless, there has been a longstanding interest in describing a located American modernism that also accounts for its transatlantic contexts. In his influential study A Homemade World, Hugh Kenner describes the poetry of Williams, Moore, Wallace Stevens and their associates as exemplifying a particular mode of ‘homemade’ American modernism, implying that their decision to remain in the United States forms an important part of their poetics.35 This locational grouping has since been broadened into a clearly delineated but loosely defined schism in the Anglo-American canon reinforced by decades of research and pedagogy, which persists even in overtly transnational studies. In The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, for instance, Michael North has provided an illuminating and expansive investigation of a particular ‘wing of the modernist avant-garde [. . .] represented, in varying degrees, in little magazines, such as [Broom], Others, Poetry, Seven Arts, Secession, the Little Review, and Contact’, which attempted to stimulate ‘an indigenous American cultural renewal’.36 Peter Nicholls’s far-reaching study Modernisms: A Literary Guide also positions Williams and other segments of the localist network ‘at a tangent’ to the ‘most familiar form of Anglo-American modernism’, creating a category of ‘other modernisms’ which were connected to but competing with the dominant strains of high modernism and more visible avant-gardes, such as the ‘men of 1914’ (who included Pound, Joyce, Lewis and T. S. Eliot) and the dadaists.37 However, by accentuating the rhetoric of rupture and difference that emerged in the exchanges of the Anglo-American modernists, Nicholls, North and other critics have also created an opportunity to interrogate areas of aesthetic and theoretical convergence between the

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 8

25/01/2013 15:53

Prologue

[9

various polarities represented by transatlantic modernists, not necessarily as a means of deracinating that ‘wing of the modernist avant-garde’ into a transnational literary canon, but as a means of recontextualising it within its own regional and national print cultures.

‘The Locality Is the Only Universal’: Distinguishing Localist Modernism Transatlantic exchanges were a fundamental aspect of the localist aesthetic. Acutely conscious of their place in both the modernist transatlantic and the spectrum of site-specific writing taking shape under the rubric of self-consciously ‘American’ literature, the localist avant-gardes attempted to distinguish their aesthetic and formal radicalism from the more orthodox literatures affixed to concepts of place and nation, whilst staking an equal claim to their systems of signification. The localist credo – ‘insisting on that which we have not found insisted upon before, the essential contact between words and the locality that breeds them’ – has remained a persistent but curiously elusive feature of American modernist studies.38 This elusiveness is partly due to the lateness of its articulation in relation to other modernisms, partly due to its reliance on ephemeral print cultures, and partly because of its insistent provisionality (in Contact, for example, McAlmon refused to speak for ‘group or theory’, and Williams insisted that ‘we have nothing to show but a beginning’).39 Kenner has argued that the ‘homemade modernists [. . .] shared hidden sources of craftsmanship, hidden incentives to rewrite a page, which we can trace to a doctrine of perception’.40 This ‘doctrine’ is never quite defined, however, but rather takes shape over the course of the book’s examples. Similarly, in their influential study Locations of Literary Modernism, Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins incisively differentiate the ‘version of cultural localism’ practised by Williams from the representational idioms of ‘New Republic style cultural nationalism’, and also distinguish it from the ‘sectional’ regionalism of the agrarians (who included Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren).41 Davis and Jenkins cite Williams’s engagement with European modernisms as a crucial feature of his poetics, but they stop short of describing exactly what features distinguish localist projects from regional(ist) writing, and how the apparent paradox that Bennett identifies with Williams’s brand of modernism might be accounted for. Indeed, in sharp contrast to recent discussions of regionalism, there has been little critical reflection on what ‘localism’ or ‘the local’ actually represents in relation to literary modernism. Nevertheless, Davis and Jenkins are correct to identify localism oppositionally: localist praxis involved a consistent process of rearticulation and

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 9

25/01/2013 15:53

10 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

refinement, a subtle, even overly cautious emphasis on transaction and dialogue. In short, localists were more confident describing what they were not than what they were. The avant-garde networks that clustered in New York, New Jersey, Maine and Connecticut in the early twentieth century would not have applied the term ‘localist’ to themselves contemporaneously, possibly because, like regionalism and nativism, it carried connotations of parochialism or signified a work of tertiary importance. Even so, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, an influential theorist of cultural localism admired by many modernists, used the term regularly, making ‘localist’ an apposite choice.42 Dewey conceived of American localities as instructive, aesthetically charged fora in which experience hones the perceptions of the artist and the public at large. Tellingly, he aligned localism with the immediacy of periodical print culture, and presciently declared that the two-way relay system between global events and local spheres of activity made ‘the locality [. . .] the only universal’.43 The transatlantic avant-gardes were one of the many styli that contributed to the writing of place in the twentieth century, and their mutability and mobility reflected the increasingly (and, in some cases, self-consciously) unstable constructions of identity that emerged during the period. As Anita Patterson points out, the ‘renewed interest in comparative methodologies’ converging in the present ‘ “transnational moment” in literary scholarship’ has had a significant impact on American studies, ‘helping critics uncover hidden nationalist agendas and move beyond regional ethnocentrism’.44 This is undoubtedly true, and yet the emphasis on transnationalism in work such as Patterson’s hints at underlying critical tendencies to align (sometimes inadvertently) regionally focused literatures with xenophobic nationalism and parochial, even reactionary political conservatism, with which localism has (not always correctly, as I shall argue) often been conflated. Walter Benn Michaels’s influential book Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism continues to shape recent debates concerning national identity and cultural politics in relation to literary modernism. In Our America, he identifies a strain of ‘nativist modernism’ that he applies to several modernist projects, including those of Waldo Frank, Willa Cather and William Faulkner, but also of Pound and Williams. According to Michaels, the ‘valorisation’ and preservation ‘of difference above all is pluralism’, which makes pluralism a necessary component of nativism.45 In this configuration, ‘the first defining characteristic of nativist modernism is [. . .] its deep hostility to assimilation’, while its second ‘is simply the reverse face of the desire not to let aliens become American’.46 It is important to register

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 10

25/01/2013 15:53

Prologue

[ 11

the distinctiveness of Michaels’s ‘nativist’ categorisation, however, and to remember that in journals such as Contact and Pagany: A Native Quarterly, the term ‘native’ did not necessarily imply ‘hostility to assimilation’ (although it certainly could do in some cases) or hybridisation. As North points out, Michaels’s work exposes the ‘deeply essentialist (and often overtly racist) ideology’ that underpinned certain strands of cultural pluralism, and which found expression in some of its key proponents’ work.47 However, little has been said about the localist iterations of cultural pluralism, which frequently emphasised the provisionality of American identity. Nevertheless, Michaels’s characterisation has had significant implications for critical discourse pertaining to site-specific modernist writing. Katz encapsulates the dilemma neatly in American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene when he argues that the ‘often facile opposition between “nativist” and “internationalist,” or “cosmopolitan” and “universalist” forms of American modernism’ has become problematic.48 In this respect, the relatively few (and usually fleeting) accounts of American writers such as Williams, Moore, Kreymborg and Kenneth Burke in discussions of cultural localism in the modernist transatlantic risk aligning American modernism with a homogeneous brand of inward-looking literary nationalism, eliding various categories of localism, regionalism, nationalism and nativism with what Patterson has labelled ‘regional ethnocentrism’.49 While it is true that forms of regionalist and nativist expression became aligned with and co-opted by the politics of the extreme right in the modernist period, Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Price have argued that regionalist writing can also be used as ‘a tool for critique of hierarchies based on gender as well as race, class, age, and economic resources’50 – categories to which they subsequently ‘add national identity’, as John Duvall notes.51 The Southern agrarian writer Donald Davidson first identified regionalism’s tendency to ‘correct overcentralization by conscious decentralization’ in his 1935 article ‘Regionalism and Nationalism in American Literature’.52 David Jordan has argued that regionalism’s defining feature was precisely this emphasis on decentralisation, which could and did co-exist alongside a ‘preoccupation with regressive agrarian politics’, but not always.53 Indeed, the oppositional strategies of regionalism could be co-opted for a range of purposes – literary, political and otherwise – and American regionalism represents a complex and variegated area, especially in the modernist period. Equally, though, regionalism has come to be associated with a fairly stable battery of formal and thematic features. Duvall describes twentiethcentury regionalist fiction ‘as an outgrowth of realism and naturalism, playing out in rural settings the same thematics of realist ethics or naturalist

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 11

25/01/2013 15:53

12 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

determinism that urban writers had already staked out’.54 Similarly, ‘regionalist poetry often thematizes alienation and an awareness of the forces of modernization’.55 Its tradition of dissent could also be enlisted in the service of various literary nationalisms in magazines such as Poetry, especially when differentiating American literatures from British traditions.56 As Cather, Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg demonstrated in certain of their works of the 1910s, however, regionalist tendencies did not preclude writers from engaging with more experimental literary forms. Nevertheless, its lingering associations with literary conservatism, reactionary politics and parochialism distinguish it from the self-consciously avant-garde expressions of localism.57 The localist aesthetic involved a creative engagement with the sitespecific contingencies of a given locality rather than with creating affirmations of static national or regional identities, or delineating the bases of such affiliations. Recent research in the field of cultural geography and philosophical pragmatism has demonstrated that Dewey’s localist ‘view of place’ is ‘constantly emergent or in flux’, and as such ‘the human and natural [environment] are continuously in transactive processes’.58 Read retrospectively using the geographical materialism of Soja, Deweyan pragmatism helps to triangulate the ‘brand of cultural localism’ that Jenkins and others have identified in the work of writers such as Williams; moreover, these intellectual matrices help to distinguish localist modernism as a literary praxis distinct from regionalist, nativist and various forms of nationalist modernisms circulating in early-twentieth-century American magazines.59 Consciously drawing on Dewey’s philosophical and literary-critical writing, the localist avant-garde explored the forces that rooted settled populations within particular geographic regions. However, they also took a sympathetic interest in demographic fluidities within those same areas, as technology and economic conditions made international multiculturalism a condition not only of modernity, but of an increasingly permeable American identity.60 By contrast, writers whose sympathies have been linked with nativism (such as Frank and Faulker) as well as the more conservative spectrum of regionalism (such as the agrarians), whilst they may have acknowledged or even lauded America’s capacity for cultural pluralism, tended to oppose the various forms of cultural and racial hybridisation that occurred in America, particularly along its urban and frontier ‘contact zones’.61 The localist modernists who published in Others, Contact, The Little Review, Blues and Pagany in some cases shared with their more conservative counterparts (who predominantly published, for example, in Poetry, The Seven Arts and The Midland) an analogous emphasis on regional specificity, idiomatic language and an investment in local

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 12

25/01/2013 15:53

Prologue

[ 13

customs and social geography. However, they are distinguished from regionalists and nativists (and aligned in some respects with certain writers of the New Negro Renaissance) by their fascination with and enthusiasm for the unpredictable hybridisations that could occur as part of the American experience, rather than the impulse to preserve difference and affirm orthodoxy and tradition. And although the comparison must be approached with a certain degree of caution, this enthusiasm can be linked with a correlating telos in their experiments with literary form. The link between cultural localism and the aesthetics of modernist avant-gardes is therefore (and perhaps surprisingly) apposite: the implications of reconnaissance, mobility and risk evoked by the military metaphor ‘advance guard’, and its broader associations with pioneering and innovation, corresponds with the localists’ experimental ethos. These associations also distinguish localist projects from the anti-modernising siege mentality, nostalgia and formal orthodoxy frequently associated (fairly or otherwise) with other forms of site-specific modernism in America. In this configuration, regional particularities could frame, engage with, and often (though not always) embrace cultural diversity as another component of the geographic and cultural markers of modernity in dialogue with their formal hybridisations. Although these sympathies and strategies did not necessarily preclude racist or xenophobic attitudes from being expressed in their work, localist modernists were attuned to the creative and social transformations being accelerated by transatlantic immigration. Thus, culturally and methodologically, localist modernists valorised an ethos of focus rather than of exclusion. Of course, James Clifford cautions that ‘every focus excludes; there is no politically innocent methodology for intercultural interpretation’.62 Yet as Williams explained in Contact 2, the localists were alert to such dilemmas: in concentrating on ‘the local phase of the game of writing [. . .] we realize that it is emphasis only that is our business’.63 In Contact, the editors consistently identified Moore’s early poetry as an exemplar of their localist emphasis.64 By analysing the minutiae of American localities, she affirmed their viability as poetic subjects for the avant-garde, appraising her environment with techniques specifically attuned to the interrelationship between sensory perceptions and place: ‘imaginary gardens’ should be populated with ‘real toads’, ‘the raw material of poetry in / all its rawness’.65 Moore contributed the formally intricate first version of ‘Poetry’, in which these axioms appear, to the final issue of Others in July 1919. As Robin Schulze notes, the poem’s dialogue with its typographical environment (which included Williams’s bombastic editorial ‘Gloria!’) addressed the aesthetic preoccupations of the Others

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 13

25/01/2013 15:53

14 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

group, a precedent consciously developed in later journals such as Contact and Pagany.66 The little magazines facilitated such convergences between the temporal inscriptions of geography and the printed page, making the little magazine the principal site of localist modernism.

The Advance Guard Magazine Reflecting on the networks that emerged from the modernist magazines, Pound argued in 1930 that, paradoxically, ‘the term “art movement” usually refers to something immobile. It refers to a point or an intersection or a declaration of conclusions arrived at. When the real movement or ascent has occurred, such a declaration is made, and things remain at that point or recede.’67 The theorist Hans Marcus Enzenburger has offered a similar version of Pound’s observation, arguing that ‘the avant of the avant-garde [. . .] contains its own contradiction: it can only be marked out a posteriori’.68 In its analysis of cultural localism, the present study aims to emphasise the ‘ascent’ of collective projects, on the one hand, and to relax the strictures imposed by an overly prescriptive focus on critical canonisation, on the other. Accordingly, it locates ‘the avant of the avant-garde’ with writers’ and artists’ contemporaneous intentions and aspirations, using both published and archival sources; and whilst I analyse their relationship with mainstream art and literature, and with subsequent patterns and critical orthodoxies that have emerged in the canon of modernist literature, I prioritise their willingness to affiliate their projects with self-consciously experimental, marginal or specialised networks. Modernist magazines bear witness to their contributors’ and editors’ intentions, but they also reveal the impulse amongst practitioners to revisit those aspirations continually. In their analyses of the mechanisms by which modernist poetry entered the public sphere, Jerome McGann, Michael Davidson, George Bornstein, Robin Schulze and Caroline Goeser have attended to the technical ways in which typography and editorial and bibliographic contexts inflect the perceived meaning of a text.69 Close reading and bibliographical analysis have until recently been viewed almost as separate disciplines, and part of the project of this book is to explore how textual studies, literary-historical analysis and transnational cultural studies can form complementary matrices of meaning. In this sense, the ‘bibliographic codes’ of modernist magazines and manuscripts frequently expose tangible intellectual contact between international and local avant-gardes – between global events and local news – and, as such, these codes become valuable components, and not mere adjuncts, of literary-historical close reading.70

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 14

25/01/2013 15:53

Prologue

[ 15

Brooker and Thacker have further refined the ‘bibliographic codes’ outlined by McGann in The Textual Condition by identifying ‘the periodical codes at play in any magazine’, from those ‘internal to the design of the magazine (paper, typeface, layout, etc.)’ to ‘those that constitute its external relations (distribution in a bookshop, support from patrons)’.71 Moreover, as Schulze has argued, ‘the selection pressures imposed by the economically and socially constrained literary environment of publication will often (but not always) alter the text’.72 Such ‘selection pressures’ are all the more intense in periodical environments, especially when a given avant-garde community engages in the process of setting down a series of semiotic ‘codes’, frequently under severe publication deadlines, which will determine its interactions with both its specialised audience and the public sphere. In this study, I focus on editors who consciously and persistently exploited that relationship in their editorial programmes. Energised by the emerging visual languages of futurism, vorticism and dadaism as well as global advertising campaigns, modernist writer-editors configured their avant-gardes with explicit reference to the material configuration of the text as a way of establishing a basis for affiliation with other writers and movements. The localist modernists exploited this dynamic with particular flair, since the journals that they produced themselves provided a visual language to create bridges between continents, on the one hand, and to encode the specific contours of their particular regions, on the other. Accordingly, this book constructs its account of modernism from a patchwork of textual locations, and shows how localist avant-gardes relied on that transatlantic traffic to establish a means with which to represent their ‘homemade worlds’ to their international peers. And since my account of the ‘global design’ of modernism originates primarily within America, this is where the first chapter begins. Chapter 1 investigates Alfred Kreymborg’s influential journal Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, and reconsiders its tumultuous publishing life in the context of its transatlantic print cultures and its locational modernist poetics. Kreymborg bound the magazine’s physical and literary elements into a complementary textual composite, which seminal modernists such as Mina Loy, Moore, Stevens, Pound, Sandburg and Williams, as well as key marginal figures, exploited ingeniously. Others attended to ‘the new shoots emerging from the American soil’, which grew out of the counterpublic politics, transatlantic contacts and guerrilla marketing tactics of the Greenwich Village literary nexus of the 1910s.73 In doing so, Kreymborg and his associates laid the textual groundwork for the localist avant-garde to take root in. In Chapter 2, the book’s focus shifts from the typographical environments of little magazines to the physical environments of geo-

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 15

25/01/2013 15:53

16 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

graphical locations – from the public forums of literary journals to the private realm of poets’ notebooks and manuscripts – and from a locational to a localist reading of modernism. It joins Pound and Williams in their early attempts at self-location in private journals, before investigating the impact of Lewis’s vorticist journal Blast on either side of the Atlantic. The chapter reincorporates Williams into the transatlantic history of imagism and vorticism, and reads his early poems and travel writing against both Pound’s imagist ‘problem of place’ and the oppositional aesthetics of Lewis.74 The comparison suggests a new way of interpreting the aggressive typographical designs and manifestos of Blast, in which Lewis drew on contemporaneous crowd theory to frame the vorticists’ encounter with urban space. Lewis’s fascination with these areas inevitably directed his attention to America, in both the mooted (but never published) ‘American Number’ of Blast and in the transatlantic afterlives of vorticism. Chapter 3 begins by outlining the transition from the locational poetics of the early to mid-1910s to the first articulations of localist modernism. When Others was in its final phase of activity, a proliferation of other journals (including The Soil and The Seven Arts) supplanted its ‘Americanist’ emphasis. Nevertheless, its demise galvanised the modernists who felt increasingly marginalised by the rise of high modernism in The Little Review and The Dial. In 1920, Williams and McAlmon applied Dewey’s axiom ‘the locality is the only universal’ to the dialogic poetics of Contact. In the magazine a range of canonical and marginal modernists remapped the boundaries of literary experiment in America, to begin an American literature rather than assert an American identity.75 Using recently available archival materials, Chapter 3 sheds new light on the evolution of these debates in key journals, and in the unrealised periodical projects which contain crucial expressions of localist modernism but remain shelved in archives. The final issues of Contact began a frenetic, and until now largely overlooked, series of transatlantic dialogues involving a number of unlikely interlocutors, including Pound, Louis Untermeyer, Marcel Duchamp and Harold Loeb’s self-consciously ‘expatriate’ internationalist journal Broom. The focal point of Chapter 4 is the ‘Advertising Number’ of Contact, which, together with New York Dada, The Dial, Broom and Secession, created a point of departure not only for the programmatically cosmopolitan ‘transition modernists’ of the late 1920s, but for a new generation of American localist writers who confronted the problem of place in the light of new economic and political realities. The mid-1920s began the methodological shift from high to late modernism, and the emergence of alternative modernisms. As North has noted, it is a persistent irony of American modernism that writers associ-

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 16

25/01/2013 15:53

Prologue

[ 17

ated with the Harlem Renaissance have garnered so few comparisons, and brokered so few literary exchanges, with other American avant-gardes.76 Yet by examining the periodical codes in modernist and even mainstream print cultures, the same textual networks that expose fault-lines between the Harlem Renaissance and other American modernisms can also provide opportunities for reconnecting them. Beginning with a discussion of the community of expatriate American writers who produced and published in Broom, Gorham Munson’s Secession and Norman Fitts’s S4N, Chapter 5 explores the reified aesthetic debates and heated political discussions which coincided with the explosive convergence of these two parallel but, at times, consilient modes of modernist discourse in New York. The literary relationship of Munson, Frank and Jean Toomer and their engagements with both the Young American critics and the French unanimiste movement provide a point of entry into these textual spaces. With particular reference to the work of Gwendolyn Bennett, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, the fifth chapter explores how Alain Locke’s Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro special number of Survey Graphic and Wallace Thurman’s avant-garde journal Fire!! were unique articulations of a locational praxis which successfully undertook an aestheticised form of cultural critique. These journals also achieved political interventions that the localists would not even approach until the early 1930s, and articulated new possibilities for approaching modernist problems of place. The sixth and final chapter analyses the re-emergence of cultural localism from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s as a strand in the narrative arc of late modernism.77 Edwin Seaver’s 1924 and the American dadaists’ interventions in transition provided a background for the resurgent interest in the localists’ unfinished business. Fine press editions produced by Americans in Paris, as well as Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review and Pound’s first solo editorial venture The Exile, reinvigorated the Williams/ Pound relationship, which also had repercussions in the US. Both contributed to the radical literary review Blues, launched by Charles Henri Ford and Kathleen Tankersley Young in Columbus, Mississippi, which provided a framework in which a new generation of localist modernists began to appear. As Marjorie Perloff has observed, ‘ “Make it new!” could hardly be the watchword of a poetic generation that came of age in the Great Depression’.78 However, the young writer and editor Richard Johns co-opted and developed a re-emergent localist impulse in his new journal Pagany: A Native Quarterly. Along with Williams, McAlmon and Nathanael West’s revived Contact magazine, this loose collective publishing in Blues and Pagany re-examined the localist tenets of Contact in the light of the new global economic crises. The new localism mediated a cultural transition in

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 17

25/01/2013 15:53

18 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

American modernism from imagist to objectivist poetics, where issues of race, class and gender inequality in the inhabited world were brought into increasing contact with the written word.

Conclusion In his 1932 article ‘The Advance Guard Magazine’ Williams wrote that ‘nothing could be more useful to the present day writer, the alert critic than to read and re-read the actual work produced by those who have made the “small magazine” during the past thirty years’, before concluding with the cryptic assertion that ‘the measure of the intelligent citizen is the discretion with which he breaks the law’.79 If we extrapolate from Williams’s conclusion – that the fiercely contested margins of literary expression had become a mode of preparation for provoking and transforming the public sphere through a process of viral debate and ongoing experimentation – then we can begin to appreciate the escalating political stakes of modernist print culture in the early 1930s, a trajectory that began with the first avant-gardes in the 1910s. Ultimately, the ephemera produced by modernism’s avant-gardes contain some of its most critically significant chronotopes, the ‘core about which’ and the ‘box inside which’ long-hidden ‘programs’ can be recovered. By examining periodical print culture and its modernist archive, we can discern the formative contests that gave rise to specific techniques, political arguments and theoretical emphases of individual writers and collective projects. Successive generations of modernist writers identified little magazines as textual locations in which the margins of aesthetic expression might be tested and transformed, and any attempt to ‘locate’ literary modernism must continually retrace its origins, conscious of yet impelled by the inherent limitations of periodical print culture. In studies addressing little magazines, the principal concern of literary critics (especially those engaged in single-author studies) has generally been to show how editorial policy influences authorial agency, and to what extent textual variants of poets’ work in periodicals reflect their intentions. But what happens when we invert these problems: when the poem itself, implicitly or explicitly, is called upon to reflect a magazine’s editorial policy, or configure an incipient avant-garde; and, furthermore, how elevating an ‘ephemeral’ periodical not only to an aesthetic object, but to a statement of the editor’s policies, poetics and cultural agenda, alters how we perceive its content? These are the questions that captivated Alfred Kreymborg as he launched his little magazine Others, and where our first chapter begins.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 18

25/01/2013 15:53

CHAPTER 1

CONTRA MUNDUM: OTHERS AND THE TRANSATLANTIC VILLAGE

Introduction In the first issue of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, Alfred Kreymborg devised a quietly radical method of articulating his manifesto for free verse in America using a diptych of poetic editorial statements, ‘Contra Mundum’ and ‘Per Contra’: Contra Mundum There is one sanctuary that is never shut – to you. Per Contra Don’t weep. There is sanctuary from me as well. Come.1

The Latin phrase contra mundum means ‘against the world’ (OED), a spatial metaphor with which Kreymborg positions his avant-garde in opposition to the broader reading public. When the first issue of Others appeared in July 1915 to ‘a small-sized riot’ of scandal and publicity in the national press, ‘Contra Mundum’ appeared to serve as Kreymborg’s rallying cry for a dissenting, unified movement taking shape at the margins of American culture.2 But looking past the usual headlines, a more complex

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 19

25/01/2013 15:53

20 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

position emerges. ‘Per Contra’ – which means ‘on the other hand’ – converts the strident stance implied in the first title into one of reconciliation in the second, as Kreymborg reassures his contributors that his ‘sanctuary’ will not harden into an exclusive, programmatic clique, but remain open to all who seek it. Others’ reputation for radicalism, libertarianism, scandal, haphazard production values and literary nationalism may seem at odds with this controlled and conciliatory manifesto, but in fact Kreymborg’s diptych demonstrates how cannily the editor established and capitalised on his position in the canon of American modernism – a canniness which is perhaps more radical than its traditional ‘bohemian’ niche might suggest.3 Like most issues in its four-year lifespan, the first number of Others contained no editorial prose. However, through his strategic manipulation of literary space, Kreymborg mobilised the materiality of the text, imagist poetics, free-market capitalism and the cross-cultural contact zones of early-twentieth-century America to cultivate an outwardly indigenous avant-garde from a network of transatlantic contacts. This chapter situates Others within an intersecting matrix of local and transatlantic print cultures, which included the Greenwich Village impresario Guido Bruno, the uptown editors of Rogue Allen and Louise Norton, the Ridgefield-based artist Man Ray, and the imagists. These groups shared Kreymborg’s conviction that the little magazines could cultivate not only the visual means but also the protocols by which literary content was transmitted and received. But what distinguished Kreymborg’s approach was his method of constructing an avant-garde, and the title of ‘Contra Mundum’ gives a clue about his strategy. The Latin phrase is associated with St Athanasius, a bishop of Alexandria who aligned ‘his own cause’ – the defence of the Nicene Creed – ‘with the defence of true faith’ against the Arians’ attempts to weaken it.4 Just as the Nicene Creed eventually became a ‘touchstone of orthodoxy’,5 Kreymborg’s Athanasian stance defended his contributors’ artistic integrity in the conviction that their modernising aesthetics would eventually occupy the centre of the nation’s cultural life.6 However, the Associate Editor of Others William Carlos Williams started to propose a new Franciscan order for the emerging avant-garde, as he worried that the magazine’s success would compromise its innovative project.7 He demanded ever-closer contact with increasingly marginal groups and causes, and that Others push relentlessly into society’s fringes. Finally, in July 1919, he brought the magazine down rather than compromise these editorial principles.8 Yet the tensions between Williams’s and Kreymborg’s distinctive locational strategies were essential to the evolution and eventual articulation of localist modernism, which was defined by opposition as well as allegiance.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 20

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 21

Drawing on economic strategies pioneered by other Greenwich Village publishers and literary contacts based in London and beyond, Kreymborg artfully and self-consciously conjoined the postures of ‘American-ness’ and ‘other-ness’ in Others through a careful – and remarkably successful – balancing act. The model of national identity delineated by its predominantly white and middle-class contributors proved to be every bit as provisional as the marginal ‘others’ whom they purported to represent or embody, and it relied on the levelling language of the American marketplace to sustain this sleight of hand. They maintained a precarious sense of operating on the fringes of the public sphere, but their marginality became a commodity with a limited shelf life.

A New Washington Square: The Greenwich Village Nexus and the ‘Marketplace-to-be’, 1913–16 Following the launch of Others, Bruno anointed Kreymborg the ‘poeta laureatus of Greenwich Village’, a fitting tribute from a fellow editor with the strongest and most visible presence in the area.9 The Glebe, The Ridgefield Gazook and Others were all founded in the artists’ colony of Ridgefield, New Jersey, but their editors and contributors maintained strong ties with Washington Square. The many bookshops, galleries and transportation links within this Greenwich Village neighbourhood served as a portal to New York City and beyond, and its avant-garde print culture emerged directly from its market culture.10 Kreymborg described this ‘New Washington Square’ as a ‘marketplace-to-be’, a ‘common ground’ where ‘a democratic effort [. . .] has been made to centralize the output of poet, sculptor, feminists, madmen, etc’.11 More broadly, Washington Square was the point at which Village’s diverse inhabitants converged. As Gerald W. McFarland notes, the ‘class and ethnic heterogeneity of Greenwich Village’s population’ was a result of ‘its long evolution from a separate settlement to a twentieth-century urban neighborhood’.12 Kreymborg and his contemporaries immediately grasped that American free-market capitalism could both facilitate and act as a metaphor for cultural exchange between disparate groups, and here an early connection between ethnic diversity, political activism and aesthetic radicalism was made. Greenwich Village suggested an early ‘free trade zone’ in which the protocols for such exchanges could be trialled in a relatively circumscribed area. However, as Kreymborg acknowledged in ‘The New Washington Square’, Greenwich Village was both unique and inchoate, a ‘marketplace-to-be’ and not a fully mature system. Indeed, the very uniqueness of the Square was evidence that America lagged ‘far behind its European

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 21

25/01/2013 15:53

22 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

sisters, whether in art or propaganda production’, because groups and individuals operating on the margins of society – ‘poet[s], sculptor[s], feminists, madmen, etc’ – were excluded from its much-vaunted and supposedly meritocratic market culture.13 Like other Greenwich Village editors, Kreymborg frequently inverted conventional wisdom to align society’s ‘others’ with mainstream American values, particularly the virtues of competition and independence. The editors of The Masses in particular shared Kreymborg’s enthusiasm for the marketplace, and as Mark Morrisson argues, in the magazine’s early days, the ‘unacknowledged increase in the magazine’s turn toward commercial culture as the unifying glue in the American public sphere’ was an attempt ‘to foster [. . .] a “proletarian public sphere” by adopting and adapting institutions of the dominant sphere’.14 By parodying advertising conventions in their illustrations and cover art, Floyd Dell and Max Eastman used The Masses to suggest that the marketplace could sustain class and ethnic differences whilst also preserving national interests, social harmony and individual freedoms. The gesture proved overly optimistic and eventually unsustainable, however, given that the iniquities of capitalism were usually inseparable from the systems that oppressed the classes for whom the journal claimed to speak. This realisation, combined with the journal’s prosecutions by the Society for the Prevention of Vice (for obscenity in August 1916) and the United States Postmaster (for subversion and conspiracy to obstruct enlistment in 1917) eventually proved destructive.15 Versions of these divisions played out in a range of little magazines, but at its ‘bohemian’ apex in 1913–16, this free trade zone for the arts became a means of connecting artistic experimentation with cultural and economic marginalisation – an obverse, co-constructing relationship between the ‘others’ and the ‘masses’. Bruno established the most brazen example of this project in both his publishing enterprises and the building that housed them. He published important early works by modernists such as Richard Aldington, Djuna Barnes, Robert Carlton (Bob) Brown, Kreymborg and Marianne Moore in Bruno’s Weekly, and an influential series of Bruno Chap Books. However, it was his relentless promotion of Greenwich Village as a tourist destination and his prosecution by the Society for the Prevention of Vice in 1916 for the publication of Kreymborg’s novelette Edna: The Girl of the Street that earned him celebrity status in the New York dailies.16 As Luther S. Harris notes, Bruno (born Curt Josef Kisch) ‘had emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1906’ and by 1915 acquired his famous ‘garret’, ‘the top floor of a two-story wooden building at 58 Washington Square South’.17 The site was a landmark almost instantly, and it attracted the attention of

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 22

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 23

The New York Times.18 However, the most dominant element of the garret was its advertising, which featured huge signs promoting both ‘Bruno’s Garret’ and ‘Greenwich Village’. A typically self-promoting advertorial in Greenwich Village, where, without a trace of irony, Bruno identified his target market as the ‘thousands of people [. . .] who are getting acquainted with our metropolis from the top of the bus’, fuelled the rise of Bruno’s Bohemia.19 The scale and layout of the fonts of Bruno’s signage matched that ambition and mimicked the format, if not the decorative font, of the CocaCola adverts on the shop below his garret. In this respect, Bruno quite literally conjoined the visual language of advertising with his promotion of bohemian culture and its geographic origins. The New York Times immediately understood that Bruno had positioned art and literature as ‘niche’ products, operating within and dependent upon the mainstream economy, but appealing to a more selective group of consumers. Bruno admitted that ‘the huge signs on the part of the garret which faces Washington Square’ were ‘undignified and unaesthetic’, but argued that they were ultimately democratising, because ‘Art is not the exclusive property of a chosen few’.20 Like the editors of The Masses, Bruno attempted to co-opt the language of the marketplace to sell experiences and aesthetic products whose divergences from and resistance to mainstream culture also determined their value to it. Uptown consumers were tempted by a ‘genuine’ version of the South Village’s post-decadent exoticism but without having to leave Washington Square, or subject themselves to undue risk. Inevitably, the bohemian Village was undermined by its value as a tourist spectacle. Even so, Village artists, writers and editors exploited the increasing contacts between the districts of New York and its satellite communities, whilst also attempting to evade the inevitable pitfalls of contradiction and hypocrisy, as well as the genuine risk of prosecution for obscenity, which these new contacts introduced. Djuna Barnes was one such figure, and her Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings negotiates the tensions between the Village’s communities and the economics of cultural tourism through the bodies of its female workers. The sequence was published as a ‘special series’ Bruno Chap Book in November 1915, when the bohemian Village had very nearly descended into self-parody but still sustained the grey and black market economies that originally attracted its colonies of artists. As the title of Barnes’s sequence suggests, artists themselves were implicated in the attractions and repulsions of market forces at work in the Village, given their status as cultural tourists in, and interpreters and marketers of, its various subcultures. ‘Seen from the “L” ’ was written two years before

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 23

25/01/2013 15:53

24 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

the Seventh Avenue elevated subway line to Greenwich Village was completed in July 1918, and shortly before construction began in the summer of 1916.21 In it, Barnes offers a glimpse at the invasive vantage points offered by both modern transportation technology and the rise of late capitalism, as a woman (very likely a prostitute) ‘stands – nude’ in an apartment building whilst being watched by an unidentified observer riding a subway train. ‘Seen from the “L” ’ also implicates the speaker in the Village’s grey and black market tourist economy. New York’s economic centre and its bohemian fringe were being brought into closer relation, and Barnes critiques the forces that conditioned its youth culture to participate in the production and consumption of ‘vice’.22 Throughout The Book of Repulsive Women, the body, the manufactured object and the language of advertising are relentlessly ‘chain-stitch[ed]’ together.23 Indeed, Barnes’s constant references to the materiality of print culture throughout the sequence insist on the status of ‘bohemian’ literature as one commodity among many; like the collection’s subjects, the worth and security of such literature fluctuates depending on the whims of market forces, both mainstream and niche. The uncomfortable subtext of poems such as ‘In General’ and ‘In Particular’, in which ‘tricks’ and ‘games’ convert ‘rag[s]’ to riches, is that Village writers were implicated in the economics of exploitation, a position that Barnes often reflected on in her early journalism.24 From some perspectives, bohemian writers like Barnes, Bruno and Kreymborg titillated their readers with tales of the underclasses, subcultures and ethnic minorities, benefiting by exploiting their misery for (albeit very limited) personal gain. The poet, like the ‘L’, becomes a trafficker in this marketplace, revealing the realities of marginal cultures to a sometimes unsuspecting public, but also sustaining, even enhancing and profiting from, the social divisions and economic iniquities that marginalise the subjects as tourist spectacles.

American Free Verse: Ridgefield’s Magazines, Imagist Print Cultures and the Ascent of Others In Troubadour, Kreymborg’s editorial Bildungsroman revolves around his struggle to cultivate the ‘new shoots emerging from the American soil’ in a homeland struggling against its own Europhilia and its unwillingness to investigate the new forms emerging in its own backyard.25 Kreymborg frequently returns to his struggles with collaborators, such as The Glebe’s backers, Albert and Charles Boni, supposedly over their preference for European translations instead of the indigenous experimental literature he favoured.26 But in fact, Kreymborg continually traded on his international

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 24

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 25

contacts to establish the ‘American’ ground for his many projects. Beyond the reaches of New York City and Greenwich Village, the rural but fairly accessible artists’ enclave of Ridgefield (also known as Grantwood) operated like a satellite production site for the Village’s literary, art and print cultures. Although small and relatively obscure, the site channelled an international network of modernist culture into New York. As the artist Man Ray recalled, Ridgefield harked back to the transcendentalist retreat of Concord, Massachusetts, in both its proximity to and sense of distance from a major urban centre.27 Together with Kreymborg and Samuel Halpert, Ray sought to syncretise the bohemian environment of Greenwich Village with the bibliographical environments of little magazines and transform Ridgefield into ‘an advanced cultural center embracing all the arts’.28 Part of that project was to distinguish the new enterprise from Greenwich Village’s self-consciously post-decadent literary scene (exemplified by Bruno) and its overtly political print cultures (for instance, The Masses and the Village’s pamphleteers). As Suzanne Churchill notes, the new syndicate named their magazine ‘ “The Glebe” – an archaic synonym for “soil” ’, which announced that American literature ‘was an open field; The Glebe would cultivate it, harvesting the fruit of American labours’.29 However, Ridgefield’s reputation as an ‘advanced cultural center’ was primarily attributed to its residents’ associations with imagists and The Egoist (both based in London). Of course, Poetry magazine in Chicago had introduced ‘Imagisme’ to America in March 1913, when Pound (via F. S. Flint) outlined its central tenets;30 nevertheless, Greenwich Village, Bruno’s Weekly and The Glebe also formed an important imagist centre around which the American free verse movement coalesced. The Glebe was launched in September 1913 and survived until November 1914, providing ‘the best work of American and foreign authors, known and unknown’ (my emphasis).31 Kreymborg’s associate John Cournos originally brought The Glebe to Pound’s attention, and from London he sent the typescript that Kreymborg eventually published as the influential February 1914 Des Imagistes number of The Glebe (issued one month later as a hardbound anthology).32 The adjective in the technical term ‘free verse’ provided the bridge between the ‘absolute freedom of expression’ championed by Kreymborg, the Village’s ambiguous, post-decadent notions of artistic, political and sexual ‘liberty’, and the minimalist rigours of imagism.33 Following The Egoist’s special ‘Imagist Number’ of May 1915, Richard Aldington contributed a synopsis of the London movement to Greenwich Village to recalibrate the elision between ‘free verse’ and ‘freedom of expression’ undertaken by American free verse poets. He was also keen to

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 25

25/01/2013 15:53

26 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

distinguish the London imagists from the ‘Amygism’ of Amy Lowell, the poet who had co-opted and aggressively publicised the movement in the US. Thus, Aldington credited Pound with the movement’s title, principles ‘and the conception of the first anthology, published by “The Gleve” [sic]’.34 In doing so, he performed a quintessentially imagist inversion, whereby adhering to the original tenets of the movement reaffirmed a poet’s status as an artistic pioneer. But he also took the opportunity to reinforce ‘the cardinal points of the Imagist style’ and sound a cautionary note to the legion of would-be vers librists and imagists publishing in America: This desire for naturalness and a simplicity which shall be unaffected [. . .] leads almost inevitably to ‘free verse’ [. . .] But this evolution, this emancipation, which they accomplished slowly, with care, with long studies of classic and modern poetry and poetic methods, has been unhappily fatal to a number of their imitators.35

Despite his claims to austerity and artistic purity, however, Aldington in some respects continued a promotional campaign for The Egoist’s ‘Imagist Number’, proving that, actually, blatant self-promotion remained a consistent feature of the movement on both sides of the Atlantic.36 Aldington’s article for Greenwich Village was published the same month as Others appeared, and his promotion of free verse as a cultural product coincided with Kreymborg’s silent articulation of imagist principles. In the summer of 1915, Kreymborg orchestrated one of the most successful little magazine launches in the annals of Anglo-American modernism. His self-effacing account in Troubadour carefully disguises the shrewd design and marketing of this Magazine of the New Verse, ‘where no appeal to subscribers appeared, and no editorial pronouncement. Only the motto, “the old expressions, etc.,” and a table of contents impinged upon the space to be silently devoted to the contributors.’37 In Others, Kreymborg applied the technical rubric of imagism – especially the ‘direct treatment of the “thing” ’ and avoiding elements which do not ‘contribute to the presentation’ – not only to the magazine’s content, but also to its typography, which is showcased on its austere cover (Fig. 1.1).38 In effect, Kreymborg concocted a form of editorial imagism that exploited a crucial interim period between the dissolution of The Glebe in November 1914 and Bruno’s enforced exit from his garret in 1916 due to his prosecution for obscenity by the Society for the Prevention of Vice. Although Kreymborg claims that ‘it was a policy too chaste to appeal to any but the most private circles’, the early issues of Others did indeed provoke ‘a small-sized riot’ of scandal and publicity.39 Kreymborg was

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 26

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 27

1.1 Front Cover, Others 1.1 (July 1915). Sourced from material owned by author.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 27

25/01/2013 15:53

28 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

adept at trading on the notoriety that his Greenwich Village connections afforded, whilst maintaining a reticent, youthful and shrewdly naïve public persona.40 ‘The little yellow dog’, as Others was sometimes called, fuelled this reputation for dissenting poetics, and whilst he was willing to trade on his Village credentials, Kreymborg had erected a screen of editorial silence and austere typography to help deflect charges of deliberate sensationalism and, especially, to deter the censor, which continued to plague independent writers and publishers in Greenwich Village.41 For example, following raids by the Society for the Prevention of Vice on Polly’s Restaurant (which had targeted drawings by the Greenwich Village artist Clara Tice), Adon Lacroix lampooned Anthony Comstock in The Ridgefield Gazook, a one-off pamphlet published by Ray in the spring of 1915. Lacroix’s pseudonymous satirical poem ‘To HIM. . . .’ featured a woodcut design where text interspersed with ellipses appeared between blank musical staves. The poem’s blank spaces and ellipses alluded to the artworks that he had removed from the public domain: Comstock . . . He destroyeth all evil . . . . He destroyeth all art . . . . Hell-e-luyah . . Ahem!42

As well as making a political point, Lacroix’s poem also insisted that material and social contexts not only inflect but also are inseparable from poetic meaning. Ray deliberately bated the censor by featuring sexual images and innuendo throughout The Ridgefield Gazook, and his cover design ‘The Cosmic Urge’ featured copulating insects. Whilst the pseudonyms afforded the poets protection from the law, however, the force of the magazine’s critique was blunted by cloaking its polemics in anonymity and the visual language of schoolboy pranks. Kreymborg took the opposite tack in Others, using a plain yellow jacket (a tactic common in nineteenth-century erotica, incidentally) to signal his ‘chaste’ (meaning ‘austere’) editorial policy and the ‘loose’ poetics of the magazine’s contributors. His cover implied that he was erecting a protective barrier against the censors. The austerity of Kreymborg’s policies and typographical designs served aesthetic as well as these pragmatic functions, however, and, like many aspects of his projects, it was the result of seemingly paradoxical partnerships. Walter Conrad Arensberg, a prominent patron of the New York arts world, initially acted as the publisher and financial backer of the magazine, but Kreymborg also enlisted the help of Mr Liberty at the Liberty Print Shop in the Bronx, a self-styled anarchist who offered to print ‘five hundred copies of each issue, goldenrod covers and all, at cost’, without deriving personal profit from those whom he

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 28

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 29

considered fellow ‘redicals’.43 The phrase that appeared on the back of Others’ wrapper until December 1915 reads, ‘Hand-set and printed by the workers of the Liberty Print Shop in New York City’, which underscored the co-operative industry which produced both the physical object and the early Ridgefield phase of Others, as well as the ‘liberty’ of American free verse. Others rarely published overtly political material, but this association with political radicalism further enhanced the ‘other-ness’ of the journal, whilst Kreymborg’s connections to New York’s patronage networks conferred economic stability. Thus, the minimalist aesthetics of Others absorbed both the socialist politics and the refined tastes of New York’s elite gallery culture. As ‘a thing’, in the imagist sense, ‘with a physical ideal as austere as the one which [governed] the choice of manuscripts’, Others mediated two distinct spheres of sponsorship: upmarket artistic patronage and working-class political allegiance, each catalysed by the promise of an enduring partnership.44 However, as both Arensberg and Mr Liberty evidently realised when they withdrew their support for Others after its first year, any interests that the partnerships served were ultimately Kreymborg’s alone. But equally, Kreymborg’s success depended upon the intervention of third parties, who continually defined and redefined his market position. For example, when she launched Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Harriet Monroe had nearly single-handedly established a viable American market for a periodical solely dedicated to new poetry.45 Kreymborg’s almost identical subtitle, ‘A Magazine of the New Verse’, implied a polemic that established his own cadre as the ‘new’ verse aligned against the mainstream represented by Poetry, but the jibe relies upon a reader’s familiarity with the rival magazine’s subtitle in order to function. Furthermore, Kreymborg also copied Monroe’s price structure and sold his magazine at exactly the same rate as Poetry, fifteen cents an issue; while the circulation of Others averaged around three hundred copies, apparently sales climbed at one point to over one thousand, proving that Others could achieve parity with Poetry, if only briefly.46 In Troubadour, Kreymborg later recounted how his initial rivalry with Poetry eventually formed a partnership, and that he periodically assisted with editing duties for Poetry when he was in Chicago.47 However, the advantages of ‘freedom’ and avant-garde affiliation that his policies imparted on contributors were later undermined by his unwillingness to articulate those policies in prose, or to adapt to new aesthetic and market pressures.48 This was a trait shared by Others’ more urbane uptown rival Rogue, which also cultivated a space for dissenting poetics by the free verse poets, including Kreymborg and Mina Loy, who had both become emblematic of the free verse movement.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 29

25/01/2013 15:53

30 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Love Songs and Rogue Traders: Others, Rogue and Transatlantic New York Not even Kreymborg’s considerable promotional talents could ingratiate Mina Loy into America’s poetic mainstream. Her iconic poem ‘Love Songs’ appeared in the first issue of Others, and it (or rather, its first four lines) instantly became associated with the ‘Others group’. According to Kreymborg, Loy was a particular target of popular acrimony ‘because of her sardonic love song beginning – Spawn of fantasies Silting the appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage. . . .’49

Kreymborg frequently referred to the uproar provoked by ‘Love Songs’ in his narratives about Others, but he insisted that Loy’s inclusion in his magazine was not an attempt to court scandal. Rather, the opposite: as Churchill has argued, Kreymborg’s defence of Loy’s dissenting sexuality stemmed from his commitment to a kind of artistic purity and a poet’s ‘absolute freedom of expression’.50 Kreymborg remarked that ‘detractors shuddered at Mina Loy’s subject-matter and derided her elimination of punctuation marks and the audacious spacing of her lines’.51 The plain typography of the magazine and its generous margins, small, clear font and iconic orange and yellow covers enhanced the eccentric lineation and punctuation frequently used in the journal. Moreover, it originally contained no advertisements, and created a sense of freedom from commercial culture (which masked, as previously argued, an intricate network of patronage and commercial relationships within and beyond Greenwich Village). In particular, Loy’s eroticism and self-consciously experimental prosody – her loose poetics – came to exemplify the early free verse of Others, the Village and Ridgefield.52 The blank spaces and erratic lineation created at a formal level the kind of textual nooks and crannies that Kreymborg appealed to at the cultural level. Making Loy a cause célèbre was therefore connected to his broader project of claiming a cultural niche for Others, and, from the outset, ‘Love Songs’ declared the group’s intentions to explore the boundaries of that territory. Loy consistently yokes sexual reproduction to processes of textual reproduction in the first appearance of the ‘Love Songs’ sequence. Peter Quartermain has noted that the imagined sexual act – ‘we might have coupled / In the bedridden monopoly of the moment’– ‘hints at the printing term, to put to bed, which points towards the close [of the poem’s third section]’.53 Loy also posits that ‘we might have given birth to a butterfly /

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 30

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 31

with the daily news / printed in blood on its wings’.54 The ‘birth’ process specifically links sexual reproduction with printing. By using bloody newsprint to decorate these butterfly wings (which symbiotically mimic the shape of a newspaper), Loy also links the business of printing to the biology of camouflage and sexual display. Print, then, could simultaneously disguise and advertise one’s poetics; but in Loy’s case, as in Barnes’s, those tactics meant exposing the intimate spaces of the private sphere and the human body, and revealing how they became transformed by public exposure in literary forums. If ‘Contra Mundum’ and ‘Per Contra’ established Others as a textual ‘sanctuary’, then ‘Overheard in an Asylum’, also published in the inaugural issue, suggested that Kreymborg harboured anxieties about publishing poetry’s ‘others’. The poem reveals the thin line he trod between sanctuary and spectacle, as an asylum warden displays the song, and the imagined offspring, of an inmate ‘Overheard in an Asylum’: And here we have another case, quite different from the last, another case quite different – Listen. Baby, drink. The war is over. Mother’s breasts are round with milk [. . .] Baby, sleep. The war is over. Daddy’s come with a German coin. Baby, dream. The war is over. You’ll be a soldier too. We gave her the doll – Now there we have another case, quite different from – 55

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 31

25/01/2013 15:53

32 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Since the detractors of Others frequently depicted the magazine as the print equivalent of a padded cell (one reviewer claimed that the poems presented ‘unrhythmic jangle to the ear’ and ‘kaleidoscopic convulsions of nothingness to the mind’), Kreymborg may have anticipated the charge of exhibitionism – that putting his ‘others’ on display would attract public curiosity, but perhaps for voyeuristic reasons rather than literary merit.56 Like the woman in the asylum exhibited by the briskly moving warden, Others became a group of ‘others’ precisely because of their marginalised context, so what began as a sanctuary might become a circus side-show.57 However, ‘Overheard in An Asylum’ is also a feminist commentary on the war. We are told that the inmate treats her doll as though it were her child, who may have died because she could not afford to support it in its father’s absence, and her hallucinations take the form of wish fulfilment. However, to the warden, her ‘case’ is simply another exhibit in his cabinet of curiosities. By aligning this critique of the treatment of the mentally ill with a reference to the financial and human costs of the war, Kreymborg’s poem critiques the brutality of early-twentieth-century patriarchies from his own secure textual sanctuary; however, Others was not the only place in which ‘Overheard in an Asylum’ appeared. Kreymborg reprinted ‘Overheard in an Asylum’ in the August 1915 issue of Rogue, and although its new context accentuated both its feminist and anti-war contexts, it also introduced new complications.58 Rogue was a typographical and editorial parody of Vogue perpetrated by Allen and Louise Norton, most obviously in its titular pun, but also in its fin de siècle illustrations and Louise Norton’s witty ‘Dame Rogue’ persona.59 Although the ‘cigarette of literature’ usually featured playful pastiches of fashion and popular culture, it also included sophisticated feminist critiques of the public sphere. The well-known August 1915 issue featured a two-page spread in which Loy’s poem ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’ and Tice’s drawing ‘Virgin Minus Muse’ (which depicts a woman modelling underwear) faced each other (Fig. 1.2).60 Like Rogue, these pieces championed fashion as a tool of liberation, but parodied the sometimes conservative sexual politics of Vogue. For instance, Loy and Tice’s submissions to Rogue may have been a response to Claudia Cranston’s illustrated poem ‘Lines to Miss Vogue’, which satirised a pretentious fashion enthusiast who slips French words into her conversation and is ‘put in her place’ by the speaker (who is rebuffed by a shrug of the subject’s ‘pretty shoulders’).61 The poem appears in the regular feature ‘As Seen by Him’ in May 1915, which discussed marriage protocols. Loy and Tice attacked such insidious gender hierarchies propagated by magazines such as Vogue, whose hermeneutic codes constrained women’s choices even as they expanded them.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 32

25/01/2013 15:53

1.2 Mina Loy, ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’, Rogue 2.1 (15 August 1915), p. 10; Clara Tice, ‘Virgin Minus Muse’, ibid. p. 11. Image reproduced with permission of the Clara Tice family and courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; text reproduced with permission of the Estate of Mina Loy.

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 33

[ 33

25/01/2013 15:53

34 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Loy’s draperies and use of textual space both conceal and accentuate the bodies under discussion, as ‘fleshes like weeds’ become similes for the products they wear or (taking the line ‘White with soft wings’ to denote pages, as well as Cupid, the masculine ‘god’ of ‘love’, who also appeared in ‘Love Songs’) the commercial language used in the popular press (and perhaps in private diaries) to describe them.62 As Alex Goody has argued, Loy’s ‘Virgins [. . .] are the victims of the fictitious value of Virginity’, and against this constrictive image, Tice’s virgin is depicted without the restrictions of a corset.63 This strategic mis en page suggests that ‘a change in poetic form’ and a change in fashion ‘can expose the arbitrariness of traditional forms of literature’ that style virginity ‘as the ultimate commodity fetish’.64 In Rogue, contributors such as Loy, Louise Norton, Gertrude Stein and Tice ruthlessly satirised the patriarchal values and exploitation of the female body as ‘Seen by Him’ by turning the language of the marketplace against itself. Nevertheless, the awkward gulf between Greenwich Village’s dissenting politics and its compromising attraction to the marketplace also surfaced in Rogue, and its mis en page could undermine as well as enhance poetic meaning. This was illustrated (in fairly literal terms) by the submissions that bookended Loy and Tice’s contributions: ‘Overheard in an Asylum’, Djuna Barnes’s ‘The Tragedian’ and two anonymous poems (probably by Allen Norton), ‘In England Now’ and ‘In New York Now’. ‘In England Now’ is a dialogue in which the first speaker reports ‘good news from the / front’: ‘ “what, is Charles safe?” / “Yes, safely wounded” ’.65 War, like satire and irony, inverted the meanings of words; in this case, physical harm becomes a form of safety when it keeps a soldier from facing probable death at ‘the front’. The next poem presents a similar dialogue as a transatlantic response to England’s predicament: In New York Now ‘That mosquito bit me twice on the left cheek.’ ‘Then turn the other cheek.’66

‘In New York Now’ is a chronotope that refers to both America’s nonintervention in World War I and the triviality of New Yorkers’ problems compared to those faced by the English. Whereas Kreymborg’s poem ‘Overheard in an Asylum’ is unspecific in its geographic location, the anonymous poems in this issue of Rogue can only function in terms of their geographic specificity. But the contextual power of location can introduce contradictory as well as complementary matrices of meaning. As Jay Bochner rightly argues, the Loy and Tice ‘double-page spread’

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 34

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 35

1.3 Djuna Barnes, ‘The Tragedian’, Rogue 2.1 (15 August 1915), p. 9; Alfred Kreymborg, ‘Overheard in an Asylum’, ibid. p. 9. Image reproduced with permission of the Estate of Djuna Barnes.

encourages the reader ‘to think in two directions or more, to think in complementary directions or even opposite ones’.67 Indeed, when the other elements of the mis en page created in pages nine to eleven intervene, a certain amount of crosstalk complicates the transatlantic exchange between Tice and Loy. For instance, Barnes’s satirical caricature of a ‘Tragedian’ in

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 35

25/01/2013 15:53

36 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

a diner who ‘discovers that even his part in the menu is a small one’ sits uneasily with Kreymborg’s ‘Overheard in an Asylum’, tipping his carefully balanced and entirely serious satire of the war and mental health care towards a position of detached, even callous irony (Fig. 1.3).68 Similarly, Louise Norton, in her ‘Dame Rogue’ persona, provides a caption above Tice’s illustration on page eleven: ‘Miss Tice’s little ladies fastening garters look as if they should be set to music’.69 Here, Norton playfully comments on the aesthetics of quotidian ritual, but in some respects, the term ‘little ladies’ might also be taken to mock the immaturity of the subject, blunting the complex dialogue that it forms with Loy’s poem. Moreover, the contributions by Barnes and the Nortons (especially ‘In New York Now’) could be read as implicating Tice’s figure in the urbane indifference of New Yorkers and Americans (especially since, in profile, the figure averts her gaze and literally ‘turns the other cheek’). To a certain extent, the Nortons’ attempts to stay ‘on brand’ subvert the more serious aspirations of the other contributors, and complicate as well as complement the contributors’ interventions in political and aesthetic debates. Like Blast, Rogue used contradiction programmatically (‘Rogue sells the truth and the untruth for 5 cents $1.00 a Year’), marketing its self-conscious ephemerality and potential self-destructiveness as a strength rather than a weakness.70 But unlike Blast, which, as I will argue in Chapter 2, successfully adapted its adversarial format to cope with new social realities that art contended with following the outbreak of World War I, Rogue’s ironic editorialising did not. Ultimately, the same pitfalls that plagued Village publications also undermined the midtown-based Rogue, as their attempts at satire sometimes backfired, or collapsed into hypocrisy. Nevertheless, Rogue continued to conduct its uneasy textual dialogues, which, although fraught with competing interests and unintended readings, also delivered insightful cultural analyses. Until its demise in December 1916, Rogue continued to configure ‘Philosophic Fashions’ as polemical devices that could be used to help women to ‘stand up against their old master, man’, and ‘even to withstand their so subtly seductive and much more tyrannical mistress, Madame la Mode’.71 However, Norton also understood that if ‘comfort means control’, then that control could work ‘seductively’ both ways – that the market could manipulate, as well as liberate, those who attempted to control it, and that negotiating these duelling interests required constant critical scrutiny.72

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 36

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 37

‘Native by influence if not by species’: Others and American (Market) Places As Kreymborg’s early journalism about Greenwich Village suggested, the provisionality that modernist poets discerned in the early-twentiethcentury American identity depended as much upon the economic relationships emerging in its heterogeneous regions as on the mass cultural discourses being discussed in its national periodicals. To adapt a line from the Irish-American poet Padraic Colum, during the spectacular rise of Others, its editorial framework enabled its network of contributors to become ‘native by influence if not by species’.73 In its first volume of six issues, one third of Others’ thirty-three contributors were expatriated Americans living abroad, foreign nationals or recent migrants.74 In the early numbers of Others, Kreymborg’s emphasis on cultivating an American identity from these disparate ‘new shoots’ of free verse had less to do with identifying the unities of American experience than with the levelling power of its brand of late capitalism. But of course, the terms of that affiliation were constantly under pressure. In brokering its sustained dialogue between a wide range of competing factional interests and aesthetics, Others ultimately exacerbated the divisions within the American modernist canon, precisely because Kreymborg’s ingenious editorship brought them into closer (though highly regulated) contact with one another, and with the broader public sphere. Although he did not usually delineate his policies with editorial prose in Others, Kreymborg became adept at covert editorialising, usually through a combination of quotation and enlistment. For example, in the magazine’s fourth and fifth issues, he surreptitiously defended its contributors’ free verse techniques, on the one hand, whilst asserting the magazine’s nationalist credentials, on the other, by enlisting the prose of Pound and J. B. Kerfoot. Pound’s ‘Foreword to the Choric School’ appeared in the October 1915 issue, and by introducing his latest school of poetry, not to Poetry, where he was still Foreign Editor, but to Others, he endorsed the technical agenda of the magazine. Tacitly, his ‘Foreword’ provided an instruction manual for apprehending the vers libre of Others’ contributors, as well as the Choric School’s. The Choric School included the British poets Hester Sainsbury, Kathleen Dillon and John Rodker. Pound explained that ‘their work has about it an aroma, sensuous and naïvely sophisticated [and] fitted to “cause admiratio” to my more scholarly and puritanical mind’, chiming ideally with Kreymborg’s credo of youthful experimentation.75 However, Pound also offered a technical analysis of the Choric School, explaining that ‘the elaborate system of dots and dashes with which this new group is wont to adorn its verses’ was their method of encoding dance movements into verse.76 The

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 37

25/01/2013 15:53

38 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

School itself did not make any lasting impact, but like Aldington’s defence of imagism in Greenwich Village earlier that year, Pound’s ‘Foreword’ suggested that there was a studious methodology behind the new poetry and its avant-gardes, who had found themselves open to charges of deliberate opacity or empty posturing. In this typically indirect way, Kreymborg offered a technical (and moral) defence of the unusual formal tropes used by poets who appeared in Others. Kreymborg came even closer to violating his ‘chaste’ policies when he opened the November 1915 issue with a favourable review of his magazine by ‘J. B. Kerfoot, the critic of Life’, which retrospectively acted as a thirdparty manifesto for Kreymborg’s ad hoc ‘movement’.77 Attention in the national press contributed to the ‘small scale riot’ of Others’ impressive first year, but Kerfoot was not just a ‘critic of Life’. In fact, he enjoyed a close association with Kreymborg, and as an associate editor for Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work, he was also active in the New York avant-garde art and poetry scenes.78 But his affiliation to the mainstream magazine was far more important to Kreymborg in this context: a review in Life magazine meant that Others was involved in a national debate about the new American poetics, rather than perpetuating a specialist dialogue. In his review, Kerfoot claimed that the ‘new poetry’ exemplified by Others was ‘revolutionary’ and represented ‘a democracy of feeling rebelling against an aristocracy of form’.79 He recognised that the perceived marginality of the Others poets was a major component of its cultural impact, but he also framed its broader cultural project as a serious social impulse rooted in the country’s revolutionary history and its tradition of free enterprise. However, it is telling that this particular issue of Others carried Kerfoot’s endorsement. The November 1915 issue imported its two most prominent poets from England, including six poems by Pound and two poems by Aldington. Aldington’s poems ‘In the Tube’ and ‘Cinema Exit’ had previously appeared in The Egoist (in the May 1915 ‘Imagist Number’ and in July 1915 respectively), whilst Pound’s were satires closely related to his vorticist poetry in Blast.80 As Morrisson remarks of their appearance in The Egoist, although the poems are ‘cruelly disdainful of the masses about them and mass culture’, nevertheless, to Aldington, mass culture is ‘not just inconsequentially banal and insipid, but also active and powerful’.81 However, the malevolent forces that transform ‘the tube’ into an effluvium of hatred also fuel the speaker’s paranoid fantasies of mass execution, which turn the ‘chemical processes’ of cinema production against the ‘Millions of human vermin’ that comprise its audiences.82 The speaker’s wish to ‘disintegrate them all’ resembles a tyrannical and murderous aristocrat rather than a benevolent revolutionary.83

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 38

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 39

Pound’s ‘The Tea Shop’, ‘Shop Girl’ and ‘Another Man’s Wife’ similarly (but less extremely) satirise the banality, promiscuity and moral poverty that he and Aldington felt underpinned London’s commercial culture.84 Although Pound’s poems were not specifically anti-democratic, they were certainly misogynistic and anti-mass-culture. Perversely, then, in Others, Aldington’s and Pound’s poems actually presented the antithesis of a ‘democracy of feeling’, seeking brutally to reassert the ‘aristocracy of form’ against the rise of a feminised mass culture. This awkward sequence puts Pound and Aldington directly at odds with the preceding poems by Frances Gregg and Helen Hoyt. Hoyt’s maternally inflected ‘Homage’ in particular presented a feminist celebration of sexuality, and her poem ‘Park Going to Sleep’ configured a benign encounter with motorised transportation and the modern cityscape.85 In the latter poem, ‘The sound of the cars, rumbling’ move ‘drowsily’ by the Park’s gas lamps, which ‘gleam softly’ and wed the pastoral imagination to the forces of modernity.86 Given the almost total contradistinction between the poems of Gregg and Hoyt and those of Pound and Aldington, Kreymborg’s sequence for the November 1915 issue seems to push his inclusive approach to absurd extremes. Rather than a unified avant-garde response to American modernity, the first volume of Others actually represents a variegated and conflicted range of poems about urban experience emerging from multiple centres of production – not just New York and Ridgefield, but also Chicago and other parts of the United States, as well as London, Italy, and France. Despite their (sometimes superficial) formal similarities, these pan-American and transatlantic perspectives on modernity existed in creative tension with one another. In fact, the main points of thematic convergence in the early issues of Others are critiques of English culture and ambivalent responses to urban life in America, both of which speak to the provisionality and defensiveness that characterised the early avant-garde forming on the East Coast of America in 1914–16. The American poet and interior designer Skipwith Cannell’s ‘To England’ in August 1915 encapsulates these dilemmas, straining against the modern world, but equally constricted by the ancient one: I am American. My pagan head Bows to old things. Yes! I, in London, Heart choked with rage, Smile and bow!87

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 39

25/01/2013 15:53

40 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Here, Cannell identifies a central problem of the American avant-garde: many of its poets were still in thrall to ‘old things’, but had yet to find a satisfactory method to encode either their rebellious, dissenting poetics or the urban contours of their new metropolises. Effectively, they were reduced to ‘Vandals’, who ‘Cringed their unconquered way’ through the ruins of previous civilisations.88 The dichotomy of expatriation, exacerbated by the Anglo-American tensions in ‘To England’, established American identity primarily in terms of its distinction from and opposition to the Old World, a recurring trope in American modernist poetry at the time. But ironically, alongside Cannell’s contribution, the most overtly (and very nearly parodically) ‘American’ contribution was a series of poems entitled ‘Songs of the Arkansas’ by the (temporary) expatriate John Gould Fletcher, a wealthy Southerner from Arkansas who contributed poetry and criticism to the imagist movement (and particularly to Lowell’s brand) and, later in his career, to the Southern agrarian regionalist movement. In a departure from his early imagist models, Fletcher contributed a series of poems to the September 1915 issue of Others that appropriated the voice of the Arkansas First Nation. North American ‘Indian poetry’ – primarily translated, or simply interpolated, by white English-speaking Americans – had started to appear in Poetry in 1914 as exemplars of ‘indigenous’ aesthetic expression.89 As Alan Trachtenberg notes, contributors such as Mary Austin and Alice Corbin Henderson ‘sought [the] revitalization of American letters and culture by an infusion of the spirit of the aboriginal’.90 In 1915, Fletcher was among the first wave of modernist poets to identify American Indian poetry as a nativist trope. As Walter Benn Michaels notes, ‘if identification with the Indian could function at the turn of the century as a refusal of American identity’, then by the early 1920s it would serve as ‘the assertion of an American identity that could be understood as going beyond citizenship’.91 Tellingly, Fletcher’s ‘Invocation’ in Others was not politically neutral, nor did it passively mourn the extermination of America’s indigenous peoples; instead, it staked out geographical, tribal and racial boundaries. Whilst it would be reductive to equate the Arkansas tribe directly with the Southern United States, Fletcher’s depiction of the ‘thieving Shawnee’ – whose traditional territories were in present-day Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky – and their allies, the ‘Men with white faces and lying hearts’, suggests at least a regional alignment with the North, tacitly conjoining the cause of the Southern artist with the aggrieved tribe’s.92 In this way, the tribal and racial segregations in Fletcher’s ‘Songs of the Arkansas’ anticipate the sectional regionalism of the agrarians.93 Fletcher’s inclusion in Others is important for two reasons: firstly,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 40

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 41

it underscores the inconsistent and provisional nature of a ‘national’ poetics, which was tenuously aligned with Others’ loosely defined but self-consciously ‘American’ free verse; and secondly, it demonstrates the contributors’ willingness to test that identity by engaging with regionalist and racially (as well as culturally) ‘other’ discourses without necessarily proposing or resolving a model for a distinctively ‘American’ poetics of place beyond their use of the free verse form. Perhaps ironically, elements of the regionalist aesthetic are immediately recognisable in the ‘cosmopolitan’ imagism and vorticism of Aldington and Pound: in their submissions to Others, they joined Fletcher in their suspicion of the commercialised and industrialised public sphere, and its deleterious effects on contemporary culture, and fantasised about the ways in which the artist might transcend it by restoring traditional (and almost always patriarchal) hegemonies. And as Others became increasingly engaged with the literary marketplace and further identified with a distinctively ‘American’ poetics, additional tensions and dissent emerged from within a new editorial syndicate, which in 1916 included Williams, Helen Hoyt and William Saphier.

The ‘Competitive Number’ and the Limits of ‘Otherness’ Despite its high profile in the mainstream press, as an institution and typographical object, Others remained wilfully inscrutable to the public gaze; yet Kreymborg’s ‘austere’ ideals were increasingly susceptible to the overt influence of market pressures. A change of publisher coincided with the first major alteration and embellishment of the magazine’s cover design and format, as well as the introduction of advertisements. However, the new Canadian publisher John Marshall’s unexpected departure took Kreymborg (who was on a sabbatical in Chicago at the time) by surprise, and left him with a considerable financial burden.94 In his first substantial editorial ‘Bulletin’ of May–June 1916, Kreymborg announced that ‘beginning with its birthday issue – July, 1916’, ‘various writers are being invited to edit Others’.95 Following Marshall’s departure, the associate editors secured the Isaac Goldmann Co. as printers for the summer 1916 issues – this was the same firm that printed Rogue.96 The new look and Kreymborg’s first major editorial in the May–June 1916 number coincided with a return to form spearheaded by Williams: adverts were purged, and the modest flourishes of typographical design introduced by Marshall were curtailed (although Marshall himself was still listed as the publisher on the cover). In this way, the contributors reclaimed the physical ‘sanctuary’ for their craft that Others had initially promised, and Williams set about implementing his embryonic Franciscan model for constructing an avant-garde

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 41

25/01/2013 15:53

42 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

by reaching into the fringes of society, and pushing the technical limits of poetry into ever more experimental territory. During this period, however, as Aldington predicted in Greenwich Village, the diluted versions of imagism and tepid free verse by lesserknown poets – and, more worryingly, also by major ones – subsumed the formal innovation exhibited in the early numbers of Others. As Aldington had warned readers of Greenwich Village, vers libre and imagism were ‘unhappily fatal to a number of their imitators, whose productions are, if anything, worse than those of old regular verse writers’.97 Edgar Lee Masters’s solemn free verse poem ‘The Subway’ strained under its archaic phrasing, its languid pace and sentimentality providing a mirror image of Aldington’s brusque indictment of modernity in ‘The Tube’.98 Moreover, Conrad Aiken’s ‘Meretrix: Ironic’ seemed to allude to Bruno’s recent prosecution by Sumner for publishing Kreymborg’s Edna: The Girl of the Street. A conventional and rhymed but ellipsis-strewn depiction of a prostitute, Aiken’s strained attempt at satire (or at Kreymborg-esque naïvety) is typified by the line ‘You are crying, and that is strange, for you are a / whore’.99 Masters’s and Aiken’s attempts to pay homage to (or perhaps, in the case of Aiken, to spoof) the now-caricatured forms and subjects that Others had come to represent made Aldington’s warning all the more poignant. If, as Williams and some critics believed, such hollow gestures had become distinctively ‘Other’ – and, simultaneously, distinctively ‘American’ – then Kreymborg’s incessant promotional work was doing Others more harm than good. With no editorial prose to frame the poems and no outlet for correspondence or debate, the contributors and readers did not have the opportunity to evaluate such trends. By the winter of 1916, Williams had become exasperated by the diverging poetics and aspirations amongst the Others contributors, and he attempted to quash the makeshift ‘movement’ and its commercial associations (but not the magazine that had created and sustained it) with two projects: first, with his strategically sequenced July 1916 ‘Competitive Number’ of Others; and second, with an article entitled ‘The Great Opportunity’, published in the London-based little magazine The Egoist in September 1916.100 ‘The Great Opportunity’ reads as a manifesto for Williams’s first editorial effort, and at one point the article (or an early version of it) may have been included in the July 1916 number.101 But, more importantly, the article underscores the centrality of The Egoist to the Anglo-American avant-garde, and the interdependence that Williams identified between Others and transatlantic locations of literary production. In the article, Williams contends that although editors ‘began to accept

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 42

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 43

and pay for free verse’ thanks to Others, and the magazine had attracted attention in several national periodicals, success had come at a cost: he complained that ‘Kreymborg was receiving the lion’s share of the praise. Though he insistently spoke, alas, not for the poems, but for Others.’102 From this standpoint, Kreymborg’s editorial and promotional strategies had achieved widespread brand recognition at the expense of the individual writers and the merit of their own work. The problem was that forging a movement, whether by design or by accident, without publishing a clear manifesto or explaining a series of distinguishing characteristics in prose meant that the poems and paratextual signifiers exhibited in Others had become dominated, rather than simply enhanced, by third-party interpretations. So when Williams took the reigns of Others for his ‘Competitive Number’, he worked within the restrictions of Kreymborg’s original policy to craft a mis en page that reflected the hermeneutic codes of craft, form and language – codes which Williams believed had formed and should continue to form the basis of the Others poets’ affiliation. When Williams wrote to Marianne Moore to request a poem for the ‘Competitive Number’, his plan was to find ‘the best work’, and then ‘jam [those] various units together and forget the “ensemble” – that will take care of itself’.103 And yet, when he received Moore’s poem ‘Critics and Connoisseurs’, he declared that it ‘fit the very purpose’ that he intended for his Competitive Number.104 Indeed, Moore’s critique of ‘ambition without understanding’ recalls ‘the movement’ that Williams targets in ‘The Great Opportunity’, and critiques the posture of ‘otherness’ for its own sake.105 Moore’s detailed memories of the foreign locality of Oxford, England, and her cautionary analysis of the unsustainable eccentricity that she encountered there, accentuate the predicaments inherent in reading Others as a cohesive textual location, or as a ‘sanctuary’ for a specific scion of a distinctively ‘American’ avant-garde. So it is especially telling that the opening salvo of the ‘Competitive Number’ was Carl Sandburg’s poem ‘Others’. As a prominent Midwestern poet who worked for and frequently published in Poetry, Sandburg recognised that he himself was an ‘other’ amongst Others, even as Williams’s sequence appointed him its spokesman. Unlike the conspicuous failures written by Masters and Aiken, Sandburg’s poem exploits this position strategically, and self-consciously relies on its typographical environment and publishing context to generate meaning. ‘Others’ appeared in the July 1916 number of Others and the 1917 Others anthology, and not in any other collections by Sandburg.106 The poem’s experimental form – most notably its eccentric punctuation, lineation and spacing – is simultaneously a pastiche of and tribute to the poetics

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 43

25/01/2013 15:53

44 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

typified by Others’ contributors, and relies on its readers’ familiarity with its periodical codes and its popular reputation to generate both its critique and its humour. Sandburg delights in the fact that his poem resists comprehension, but equally its interrogation of the lyric ‘I’ makes a serious point about Others as an American project: Others (Fantasia for Muskmelon Days) Ivory Domes . . white wings beating in empty space . . Nothing doing . . nuts . . bugs . . a regular absolute humpty-dumpty business . . pos-I-tive-ly . . falling off walls and no use to call a doctor, lawyer, priest . . no use, boy, no use. O Pal of Mine, O Humpty Dumpty, shake hands with me. O Ivory Domes, I am one of You : Let me in. For God’s sake – let me in.107

Amid its caricatures, ‘Others’ contains an incisive appraisal of Others as a literary institution at the formal, linguistic and typographical levels. Sandburg’s oblique references to form and typography surface regularly and, like Loy’s ‘Love Songs’, Sandburg’s ‘white wings’ may represent pages; but here, amid the ‘ivory domes’ of Others, those pages are blank, and their content is lost or obscured – they are ‘white wings beating / in empty space’.108 ‘Humpty Dumpty’ is of course the Others enterprise, which is a cunning allusion on the part of Sandburg – in Lewis Carroll’s Alice tales, Humpty Dumpty is the obstinately solipsistic philosopher of language, who is comically (or tragically) blind to his own fate.109 By shearing the final syllables off the ‘regular’ and ‘business’, Sandburg emphasises the precariousness of publishing a monthly magazine of verse. But the steep plunge seems inevitable: ‘and no use to call a doctor, lawyer, priest’ – or any of the king’s men – ‘no use, boy, no use’.110 This list may contain a well-placed swipe at Others’ new Associate Editor, Dr William Carlos Williams, MD, and Wallace Stevens, the insurance lawyer; even their ‘ivory domes’ (a specialist or professional (OED)) could not figure out how to put ‘Humpty Dumpty’ together again. Yet in American slang circa 1915, ‘ivory dome’ also meant a stupid person, or ‘bonehead’ (OED). The

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 44

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 45

problem seems to be distinguishing the ‘boneheads’ from the ‘egg heads’ in this ‘empty space’. The poem itself performs this entropic process, continually subverting meaning to context and insider knowledge. To an uninitiated observer, any given meaning may in fact refer to its opposite, and the lack of editorial context or an explicit interpretative framework blurs the poems in Others – and, to a certain extent, the poem ‘Others’ itself – into an indistinguishable frenzy, the product of ‘crazy’ poets who were ‘Nuts’, or ‘Bugs’ (OED). On the other hand, the group’s eccentricities may form a kind of insulation, designed to limit its poetic discourse to an internal dialogue. Accordingly, Sandburg renders the first stanza in a colloquial American voice; it reads like a layman’s perplexed and derisive view of Others, whilst the second stanza appears to be the more formal speech of the poet (the ‘other’ amongst Others). Despite this shift, Sandburg sustains his colloquial American voice as he demands entry into its ‘Ivory Domes’, even as he calls attention to its cracked surface. In his 1918 poem ‘Chicks’, Sandburg performs a similar manoeuvre, in which ‘the chick in the egg picks at the shell, cracks open one oval world / and enters another oval world’.111 Although the ivory dome of an eggshell acts as a nurturing sanctuary for a new life over a specific duration, it must be broken in order for normal development to proceed. By fracturing ‘pos-I-tive-ly’, Sandburg’s lyric ‘I’ asserts itself from the world in which it developed by emerging as an individual voice from a sanctuary that was now (typographically) broken, and outgrown. Sandburg’s American working-class dialect and the formal codes of free verse work collaboratively to inscribe the time and place of ‘Others’ on the poem’s creation. As Fiona Green notes, under the pressure of historical circumstance, the ‘immaculate surface’ of the lyric can be reshaped by ‘local as well as national conditions’.112 In ‘Others’, Sandburg’s speech acts rupture the institutionalised solipsism that may once have liberated Others’ contributors but had now shackled them, and, simultaneously, through its use of contemporary working-class dialect, the poet offers his own iterations of American ‘other-ness’ to break out of the magazine’s ivory domes. Michael North has argued that modernists such as Pound, Eliot and Aiken (all Others contributors, incidentally) used African American and working-class dialects in order to assert an American identity ‘against the grey cultural authorities established in Europe’.113 The ironies of these appropriations are manifold, since posing as ‘class outlaws, defying the standard language’ also meant reinforcing the stereotypes and hierarchies that made such languages of resistance viable.114 As a Swedish immigrant from a poor family, Sandburg had working-class immigrant roots as well

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 45

25/01/2013 15:53

46 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

as a college background, so his jibes at Williams, Stevens and the other middle- and upper-class professionals who contributed to Others (or, in the case of Masters and Aiken, established poets who attempted to ape their style) are directed at their anxieties rather than his own. But, perhaps more potently, the demotic American English that Sandburg claimed more insistently than his fellow contributors reminded the other contributors about the limits of their own ‘other-ness’ (although, as I shall argue in Chapter 3, Sandburg did not necessarily heed his own warning). Others contributors regularly mined America’s heterogeneous subcultures, ethnic populations and regional literatures throughout its publication run, and with decidedly mixed results. For example, Maxwell Bodenheim’s poem ‘The Cotton Picker’ attempts to celebrate a ‘lithe, grimacing negress’ and her songs in the September 1915 issue.115 In Others, however, such gestures usually signalled a form of social critique, or a nebulous defence of ‘other-ness’ (in racial rather than social terms). In the ‘Competitive Number’, Loy’s poem ‘To You’ also confronts the problem of racial marginalisation and its cultural echo, racial masquerade, both in print culture and in ‘the tattle of tongue-play’.116 In contradistinction to Sandburg’s use of the lyric ‘I’ (which in ‘Others’ acts as a foil for the collective identity of Others), Loy confronts the contingency of identity itself with her use of the lyric ‘you’. ‘To You’ presents a literary encounter between disenfranchised members of a modern urban commercial landscape, which, as an AngloJewish woman living in Florence, Loy was in a unique position to explore. As Jahan Ramazani notes, ‘bricoleur migrants’ such as Loy were ‘entangled in, and tensely divided amid, the various cultural affiliations mediated in their poetry’.117 In ‘To You’, the addressee ‘hob-nob[s] / with a nigger / And a deaf-mute’, but does so ‘statically’, without crossing any boundaries into ‘other’ worlds. Initially, the city drives clear ‘wedge[s] between impulse and unfolding’; however, ‘Round / the aerial news-kiosk’, a ‘diurnal splintering / Of egos’ create bridges between the subjects.118 As in ‘Love Songs’, the material intercession of commercial print culture slowly transfigures the subjects addressed in the poem. The ‘you’ of the poem becomes a ‘hybred-negro [sic]’ by staining his ‘finger’ with ‘Stephen’s [sic] ink’.119 Stephens’ Ink was the first indelible ink on the market, created by the Conservative MP Henry Charles Stephens and manufactured in Finchley, North London.120 The bodily inscription of indelible, massproduced ink paradoxically produces the ‘hybrid negro’, which is in turn counterpointed with ‘A couple of manuscriptural erasures’ to produce ‘your deaf-mute’.121 By dipping his finger into a hegemonic print culture, the subject simultaneously performs a clumsy racial masquerade, and in

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 46

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 47

doing so loses his voice. And as ‘the tattle of tongue-play’ enters the city ‘incognito’ to place the subject’s writing in the ‘glassy embrace’ of the city’s ‘Lit cavities’, namely bookshop windows (‘Lit’ indicating ‘literature’ as well as ‘illuminated’), the ‘mask of unborn ebony / And the silence of your harangue’ perform the roles of both racial and disabled ‘other’ within the literary and commercial theatres of the city.122 The city facilitates these transactions and performances, but intervenes in the final strophe to detach ‘the tattle of tongue-play’ from ‘the monorabble’, which ‘Plays the one-stringed banjo / On the noise of its ragged heart’.123 Here, the act of writing becomes a high-wire performance on a ‘tight-rope stretched above commotion’, whilst the ‘mono-rabble’ and the voiceless become Inaudible In the shattering city Alien as your aboriginal In the levelling dirt—124

The final strophe underscores the tenuous business of masquerading as an ‘other’, and the equally sticky business of critiquing that process within the strictures of the lyric, characterising both as an unsustainable trick.125 But ‘the shattering city’ and ‘the levelling dirt’ render each component of this lyrical exchange as ‘Alien as your aboriginal’ – that is to say, not alien at all, because in the theatre of the city, the ‘noise of its ragged heart’ foreshadows the elimination of diversity as inevitably as it does for life when it is reclaimed by ‘the levelling dirt’.126 Thus, death and anonymity, like the immaculate surface of the lyric in ‘To You’, threaten to erase the ‘historical vicissitudes’ imprinted on the poem, but equally, like its invective against masquerade, the language of that urban theatre is irrepressible. The contingencies of place and the materiality of the text rub up against and imprint themselves on the poem, commingling with and complicating the identities that Loy attempts to negotiate. Cristanne Miller argues that ‘Loy had little apparent interest in her Jewish ancestry or in an art that merged ideas of creativity with religious and cultural mixed inheritance’ before 1920, but ‘To You’ indicates that Loy had explored, if not necessarily resolved, the city’s potential for splicing, eliding and trialling marginal identities long before that.127 Yet the ambiguities of Loy’s ‘To You’ create problems. For instance, which voice utters the racial epithet ‘nigger’? And what, if any, anxieties underpin its rhetoric of racial mixing? ‘To You’ seems more concerned with indicting writing and printing as praxes that are complicit in potentially destructive

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 47

25/01/2013 15:53

48 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

acts of mimicry and performance. The historical contingencies operating in the poem stain the surface of the lyric with indelible ink, and the editorial poetics of the ‘Competitive Number’ amplify its discussion of mass print culture, avant-garde poetics and the tensions between the genuine experience and the literary tourist’s simulation of marginalisation, which becomes at its worst a form of cacaphonic minstrelsy.

Conclusion With the Franciscan zeal that characterised Williams’s ‘Competitive Number’ of Others, Loy explored the connections between marginal cultures and the experimental, materialist poetics that Williams had called for when he assembled the special issue. The interplay between its poems began to elucidate the complex dialogue between the urban contact zone and the printed page. To adapt Ramazani’s reading of Gertrude Stein, Others serves as a site in which the materiality of the printed page intervened ‘between the spectral context of one nation and the lived metropolis of another’.128 Moore, Sandburg and Loy incorporated print culture as a fundamental component of their avant-garde poetics – a ‘precise technique’ that Williams had demanded but not yet identified. The ‘Competitive Number’ encodes the transatlantic basis of an emerging localist project, and the print cultures of Greenwich Village and Ridgefield had demonstrated how the exilic perspectives associated with being foreign, expatriated or ‘other’ contributed to those poetics. But being ‘other’ had its limits, and the ‘Competitive Number’ suggested that this particular posture was rapidly approaching its sell-by date. Skipwith Cannell’s poem ‘On a London Tennis Court’ conspicuously fails to articulate any new knowledge of American places, or produce a meaningful engagement with London as a result of his translocation: the speech Is strange to me As words Spoken from another star.129

Moreover, while Loy, Moore and Sandburg began to interrogate the complications and limits of being ‘other’, especially as a literary form of masquerade, Williams merely complained about the canonisation of Others in ‘The Great Opportunity’ – about the contributors being ‘other’, but not quite ‘other’ enough. And as he formulated this Franciscan editorial stance, he was still groping around the margins of American culture in the

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 48

25/01/2013 15:53

Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village

[ 49

‘Competitive Number’, comparatively oblivious to his own subject position. His poem ‘Drink’ explores the perspective of a ‘penniless / rumsoak’ driven by ‘earthy’ desires, in terms of his professed lasciviousness and his desire for ‘solid ground’; however, as he wanders between the ‘gold hair ornaments/ of skyscrapers’ the poet revels in the subject’s sense of liberation and individualism, rather than his deprivation.130 And despite the poetic freedom that he fought for in poems such as ‘Drink’, Williams was nevertheless compelled to make a drastic change to Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘The Worms at Heaven’s Gate’ by removing the couplet that concluded the poem in its first manuscript draft and replacing it with a line of suspension points.131 Clearly, Williams would subordinate the individual expression of a poet to his vision for a specific collection, or collective, when it suited his purposes to do so. Ultimately, the rifts and allegiances within the so-called ‘Others group’ replicated the fissures in other Greenwich Village milieus, such as the personal ruptures that divided the Arensberg and Norton salons, or the institutional and political crises that affected Bruno and The Masses. In turn, the little magazines of the modernist transatlantic shifted, folded and were launched anew to accommodate the American avant-gardes that subdivided and recombined in ever more distinctive groupings. For Williams, the little magazine was a tool with which the avant-garde continually honed its edges, and in ‘The Great Opportunity’ he announced that Others in its current form had outlived its usefulness, both to him and to his peers: ‘At last Others is dead. Now for the advance.’132 As his Franciscan model pushed beyond the boundaries of literary community and into discussions of locality and place, he came to view the ephemerality of periodicals as a means with which to transform literary texts into multi-authored chronotopes. But like his transatlantic ‘other’ Ezra Pound, he arrived at this conclusion following a series of highly personal encounters with landscapes during his overseas travels. Accordingly, the next chapter shifts its focus from the socio-economic and textual spaces of little magazine publishing to the physical places of Europe, beginning with Pound’s travels through Southern France.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 49

25/01/2013 15:53

CHAPTER 2

THE VORTEX OF THE PAGE: EZRA POUND, WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, WYNDHAM LEWIS AND THE MODERNIST PROBLEM OF PLACE

Introduction This chapter explores the earliest attempts of three seminal modernists to document their problematic relationship with place: from manuscripts to little magazines, and from the rural enclaves of Europe to the vortex of London, the early experiments of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Wyndham Lewis reconfigured the methods by which the AngloAmerican avant-garde conceived of travel, landscape and writing in the early twentieth century. The early poems that Pound and Williams published in Poetry and The Egoist and the unfinished travel writings and manuscripts that shaped them form telling correlations with the material languages of Lewis’s magazine Blast. Indeed, the ‘ephemeral’ textual spaces of unpublished manuscript drafts, notebooks and little magazines complement the provisionality of these modernists’ encounters with place. Taken together, the works of Pound, Williams and Lewis reveal a succession of ruptures between the subject-orientated poetics of early modernism and the insistent empiricism that underwrote earlier analyses of physical geography. These disjunctions preoccupied Pound, Williams and Lewis as they traversed the landscapes (both geographic and geopolitical) of Europe in the early 1910s and attempted, as David Harvey phrases it, ‘to reconcile the perspective of place with the shifting perspectives of relative space’.1 One important upshot of these experiments was that the writers eventually identified America as the common ground that most capably dramatised these modernist problems of place. For example, in his eleven-part essay ‘Patria Mia’, Pound wrote that ‘[y]ou will get no idea of America if you

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 50

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 51

try to consider it as a whole [. . .] The lines of force run from New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco.’2 Pound identified both the problems and the opportunities bound up in ‘a country which has no center’, and which struggled in its relentless quest for the new to engage with and articulate a stable system of traditions and values.3 In Williams’s unfinished travel writings and vorticist manifestos, and in Lewis’s seminal journal Blast, America also became a vast screen upon which to project their disjunctive encounters with geographical place and national identity. During the rise of vorticism, those destabilising ‘lines of force’ identified by Pound encompassed the temporal and spatial energies that moulded urban landscapes and reconfigured the ‘writing of place’ in dynamic and urgent new ways. Eventually, the mobility and fragmentation engendered by the modernists’ transatlantic travels inaugurated a locational poetics that reverberated on either side of the Atlantic, moulding the shape of the little magazines they published in, and articulating a road map for subsequent avant-gardes.

A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound’s Journey from Image to Vortex In the summer of 1912, Pound travelled through Provence to explore the physical landscapes celebrated by the troubadour poets Bertran de Born, Cavalcanti, Arnaut Daniel, Dante and Villon. His excursion was motivated by philology and business, but was punctuated by the tragedy of his patron Margaret Cravens’s suicide.4 Richard Sieburth has meticulously reconstructed the broken record of that journey in A Walking Tour in Southern France.5 In it, Pound cross-cuts aesthetic meditations, Baedekerstyle notations and imagistic poetic fragments in a patchwork of hastily, if accurately and sensitively, scribbled notations. As both Sieburth and Peter Nicholls note, Pound’s precisionist gaze in these writings often acts as a gateway to nostalgic reveries that commingle legend and history.6 These interdependencies anticipate the two sides of imagism – a keen focus on detail and technique informed by empiricism, on the one hand, and an emphasis on classical traditions of poetry, on the other – whilst their peripatetic mytho-poetics gesture towards the epic landscapes of the Cantos. However, Pound’s early encounters with Provence were not entirely deferred until the Cantos. He published a sequence of imagist and vorticist poems and prose after the walking tour in the American magazine Poetry and Lewis’s journal Blast in which he attempted to surmount the contradictions that he had encountered in his travels. This process involved not only the places he visited but also the rhythms of quotidian life that evolved

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 51

25/01/2013 15:53

52 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

in and around them. I want to suggest that Pound’s heuristic diagnosis of what he called the ‘failure in synthesis’ between an artist’s consciousness and the ‘objective reality’ of things and places was the most important result of his travel writings.7 The image provided specific techniques for mediating the ‘indeterminate reality’ between idea and thing – between textual space and geographical place.8 Pound’s engagement with crowds and rituals also provided a conceit for conceptualising these interstices, which found its fullest expression in his vorticist writing. These motifs became central to his lifelong engagement with American culture, creating a point of reference to which he would incessantly return. Although it was encumbered with anachronistic and self-consciously ‘literary’ diction, Pound’s first substantial travel article, ‘Burgos: A Dream City of Old Castile’, established a precedent for his project in A Walking Tour (and Burgos was a place that Pound revisited in his Ur-Cantos).9 As he moved through the city in search of a mythical site that no longer existed, the architectural landmarks of Burgos and a ‘time-stained parchment psalter leaf’ (a single synecdoche of medieval print culture) act as gateways to the ‘dream Spain’ that enables him to escape from the ‘taint [. . .] of modernity’.10 Pound would later replicate this gesture in his imagist poetry, but not before his travel writing took a decidedly empirical turn. Gironde, the travelogue ‘opus’ that Pound planned to construct from his notes in A Walking Tour but eventually abandoned, may well have been modelled on this early article; however, the collection of notebooks that he actually assembled on his travels reveals far more about his emerging poetics than a more cohesive (and more overtly financially motivated) project might have done.11 In his earliest entries from Poitiers and Angoulême, Pound reflects on the nature of travel writing and, perhaps with ‘Burgos’ in mind, writes that his ‘real objection is to the idea that one come to “see” or that all travel is to study the phases of architecture [. . .] or that one should tap a certain cask of emotions in the teeth of every cathedral’.12 Angoulême prompts him to explore new methods of travel writing, which move beyond the purely constructed, stylised features of ‘landscape’ and into the realms of geometry and geomorphology. Thus, as Nicholls observes, it is in A Walking Tour, ‘for the first time, that Pound moves beyond the mystical locations of his early verse to discern the traces of poetic energies in an actual landscape’.13 Pound’s travel notes intersperse detailed descriptions of specific sites with aestheticised and often self-consciously exotic phrases, shifting between pragmatic notation and proto-imagistic axioms, often within the same passage. In Roquefixade, for example, he becomes acutely aware of the area’s threatening geological features, including the ‘fangs

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 52

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 53

of rocks’ that line the route to the castle, before revelling in the views at the peak, ‘where the land lies below darkening like copper, & the roads like white corals upon it’.14 For Pound, negotiating the ‘sharp peaks’ that emerge from the landscape is rewarded by the perspective he achieves at their summit, and he reconfigured this process in his poem ‘Provincia Deserta’, first published in March 1915: I have lain in Rocafixada level with the sunset, Have seen the copper come down tingeing the mountains, I have seen the fields, pale, clear as an emerald, Sharp peaks, high spurs, distant castles.15

As well as suggesting the jagged features of the rock peaks, the line divisions in this section create a prosodic division between his perceiving ‘eye’ and the distant features of the landscape, which dramatises a gulf between the poetic ‘I’ and the site it encounters, where the speaker and the sunset are geometrically ‘level’ as the poet’s circadian rhythms respond to and shape the landscape. Tellingly, despite the empirical turn in his writing, the walking tour led Pound down familiar paths, as the landscapes he travelled in Southern France transformed into updated versions of the exoticised and nostalgic dreamscapes that he sought in Burgos. In Angoulême, for example, he confesses that ‘it may be objected [. . .] that I make & write a voyage of pure sentiment, that I say I come to feel rather than to see’.16 His emphasis on ‘seeing’ clearly privileges the empirical gestures that he cultivated throughout the travel notes, but his contention that ‘I am a lover of strange & exquisite emotions, [and] I find this in no way incompatible with the “scientific spirit” ’ preserves his investment in the affective vocabulary of poetry.17 As Pound’s emphasis shifts from topology to aesthetics, and from subject to method, the upshot of his stay in Angoulême is a series of sidesteps and displacements. He diagnosed a ‘failure in synthesis’ in his critical meditations on the ‘realist’ method of nineteenth-century novelists while in the area, ‘a failure to see where description of a thing is worth while either because it is normal or because extreme’.18 Yet Pound himself suffered a version of that ‘failure in synthesis’, analogous to the modernist problem of place identified by J. Gerald Kennedy. This disjunction is ‘caught up in the phenomenology of subject-object relations’ and the Bergsonian conception of the ‘image’, a ‘construction halfway between an idea and a thing’, which seeks to balance internal and external ‘objective reality’,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 53

25/01/2013 15:53

54 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

but is ‘registered only through perception’, ‘inscription’ and affect.19 For Kennedy, ‘the writing of place, the textual construction of perceived environment, gives at least a tentative account of the interplay between the inner and outer realities which merge to produce our sense of where we are’.20 This ‘interplay’ is precisely the area that Edward Soja and other postmodern geographical materialists have argued for in their project to ‘rebalanc[e]’ the historicist ‘prioritization of time over space’, which attends to ‘interplay of history and geography’.21 Formally and thematically, Pound’s walking tour notes remind us that attempting to triangulate that barrage of interrelated forces pertaining to space, place, time and consciousness, on both the individual and mass scale, is an inherently difficult, messy and contradictory process. Indeed, some of the most intriguing aspects of modernist travel writing and the poetics of place are precisely the imbalances that persist when we consider the ‘interplay’ of the elements that condition our experiences of landscapes. In Rochechouart, Pound alluded to a ‘contact with greater force’ in an attempt to create that elusive sense of cohesion between landscape, culture and the artist’s gaze.22 While travelling through the Provençal city of Arles, a small city on the Grand Rhône River, he attempts to derive this level of ‘synthesis’ through the trope of the crowd.23 This epiphanic moment in Arles describes the city as a tangible, tactile, even ‘seductive’ presence, with its population en masse mediating and instantiating the perceptual energies of the poet: there [are] cities that are passionate in their personal hold on us. You may play the string as you like. It is not the bath of the crowd, it is different, it is the place that made the people, it is seductive as the creative principle is always seductive, it touches or it clings and we go out & through & into it, and are one with it, infused & inflowing.24

Here, Pound distinguishes the people of Arles from the ‘bath of the crowd’. As Christine Poggi notes, psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and Gustave Le Bon in particular) conceived of ‘the crowd’ as ‘ “feminine” in its malleability [. . .] and its secret desire to be seduced and dominated’.25 Pound reverses that gendered inscription by assigning a ‘feminine’ quality to geographical place that is anything but malleable and passive; instead, the site becomes actively ‘seductive’ and progenitive. But equally, Pound was attracted to structures designed to marshal and contain the energy of crowds. In Arles, the Roman arena (les Arènes) and the Roman amphitheatre (le Théâtre Antique) form the geographic and cultural heart of the urban site,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 54

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 55

2.1 The Amphitheatre of Arles before 1850. Justin H. Smith, The Troubadours at Home: Their Lives and Personalities, Their Songs and Their World, 2 vols (Vol. 1) (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), p. 120. Image reproduced with permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

co-ordinating the actions of the people around them and strengthening the city’s connection with its past. Justin H. Smith’s The Troubadours at Home, one of the texts Pound consulted in preparation for his walking tour, contrasts the shifting states of the Roman amphitheatre.26 In its present state, it was a ‘cyclopean ruin that might be taken in moonlight for Vulcan’s forge’, but before the tenements of poor families had been removed between 1825 and 1830, it stood as ‘a town of itself, densely packed with houses’ (Fig. 2.1).27 The sloping roofs, descending tiers of buildings and small central courtyard form a whirlpool effect, distilling the place into an ‘Inferno. Amphitheatre. / Arles’.28 With their still, open centres and concentric circular designs, both the amphitheatre and Roman arena of Arles suggest a visual template for the Poundian Vortex, where ancient and contemporary forms interact with and counterpoint each other, infusing and suffusing the cultural landscape of the city. During this transitional phase of Pound’s project, the filial and quasisexual bond between people and place represents a reciprocal relationship modelled on a ‘creative principle’, which elevates the population from a

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 55

25/01/2013 15:53

56 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

‘crowd’ to a collective of artists and/or art objects. But Pound also identified a paradox in Arles, similarly linked to sexuality, which later proved to be a central problem for his imagist doctrine. Whilst place assumed an almost biological identity in its physical interaction with people, it was also incorporeal, and unknowable through the senses: you can not in any real sense see such places, you pass & you return, & you know like fate in the weaving that some time you will come back for good there, for a time that is, for a liaison, for this is in the end what it comes to, a satiation, a flowing out from yourself into the passion and mood of the complex.29

As he (re)turns his gaze to celestial, symbolic spaces – ‘The air. The sun. The Wind. / & the stars above the city’ – the city becomes a conduit to a transcendental experience.30 Impelled by the ‘liaison’ with place, the observer, at the climactic moment, steps outside himself and ‘into the passion and mood of the complex’, triggering a moment of spiritual transcendence. In 1913, Pound uses the same word, ‘complex’ (a term that he borrowed from the Cambridge psychologist Bernard Hart), to describe the image: ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’ (my emphasis).31 Crucially, that ‘ “complex” instantaneously [. . .] gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art’.32 This transcendent experience is based on a praxis of compression and elision. In his article ‘Vorticism’, Pound famously described the process of reducing ‘a thirty-line poem’ to ‘the following hokku-like sentence’:33 In a Station of the Metro

The apparition

of these faces

Petals on a wet, black

in the crowd :

bough .34

Perhaps the most iconic imagist poem, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ replicates Pound’s transcendent gesture in Arles, presenting a moment of ecstasy without recording his return to the corporeal mass of the crowd. In this reading, the blank spaces on his travel notepaper (a product of hasty composition) might be read as a rough formal palimpsest for the exaggerated blank spaces in the original version of ‘In a Station of the Metro’, a quest for the ‘still centre’ that lay beyond the madding crowd and the grime of the urban locus achieved by extended reflection and editing. In his description of ‘pedestrian rhetoric’, de Certeau refers to these

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 56

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 57

sorts of ‘spatial organizations’ in literature as ‘synecdoche’, which ‘replaces totalities with fragments’, and ‘asyndeton’, which ‘disconnects [totalities] by eliminating the conjunctive or the consecutive’.35 For Pound, rendering place according to his imagist principles was still an exercise in displacement, a persistent tendency which ultimately became a feature of his later poetics. As Daniel Katz notes, Pound’s travels in the Cantos persistently result in a ‘deferral of destination’, and a ‘sacrifice of progression for digression’.36 However, the poetics of synecdoche and asyndeton associated with restless travel, and even exile, are also inseparable from the poetics of return, and thus ‘travel or exile can never be a simple escape to the foreign, without always also being a return to the “native” ’.37 In this respect, the Walking Tour serves as both a point of departure and one of return for Pound. In the context of his early poetics, he revised and remodelled the spatial resonances of both the image and the vortex when he returned to the Provençal landscapes encountered in his 1912 walking tour. Along with ‘Near Perigord’, Sieburth includes ‘Provincia Deserta’ and ‘The Gipsy’ as ‘the sole published writings to emerge from [Pound’s] travels in southern France’.38 However, this interpretation is somewhat restrictive, because in March 1915 Pound published a selection of poems in Poetry that also revisited Provence. The sequence included ‘Provincia Deserta’, ‘Image from d’Orléans’, ‘The Spring’, ‘The Coming of War: Actaeon’, ‘The Gipsy’ and ‘The Game of Chess’, as well as a translation from Li Po entitled ‘Exile’s Letter’, and in these poems he continued to grapple with the poetics of place and populations.39 Like ‘The Spring’, ‘Image from d’Orléans’ and ‘The Coming of War: Actaeon’ implement the gnomic minimalism of imagism; however, the latter two poems also introduce the military subjects favoured by vorticists, and ‘The Coming of War: Actaeon’ develops a theme originally identified by Pound in Arles regarding the primal, generative forces of place. ‘The cool face of that field’ and the ‘Unstill, ever moving, / Host of an ancient people’ embody the restless exchange between populations and places over time, which Pound transmutes into a ‘silent cortège’ on the page.40 Here, the act of travelling through the landscape, led and ordered by ‘Actaeon of golden greaves’, enables the people to become a part of, and not merely a synecdoche for, the landscape; thus, ‘Host’ refers simultaneously to the land and to the ‘cortège’, uniting the travellers with the place they traverse.41 This dynamic is typical of Pound’s vorticist writing, and it can be traced to the walking tour of 1912, where the landscape itself becomes a conduit for a focused concentration of talent which can blast through and from ‘the bath of the crowd’, so that ‘the place’ makes and ‘infuse[s]’ ‘the people’.42 As Christine Poggi argues in her discussion of futurist art,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 57

25/01/2013 15:53

58 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

‘once a crowd is disciplined’, for example by a leader, ‘it loses certain of its “feminine” attributes, and instead, assumes a regimented or military character’.43 As we have seen, Pound’s growing attraction to these organisational strategies is apparent in his 1915 Provençal sequence. However, in ‘Provincia Deserta’, he configures the crowd with a ritualistic rather than military force: I have walked into Perigord, I have seen the torch-flames, high-leaping, Painting the front of that church, And, under the dark, whirling laughter.44

The ‘torch-flames’ and ‘whirling laughter’ produce a circulation of spontaneous and uplifting but also potentially destructive emotion in a clear instance of vorticist doubling. As Robert Nye argues, the line between the ‘festive crowds, carnival crowds’ and destructive, violent crowds is a fine one, and part of the modernists’ attraction to crowds resided in their unpredictable potential for ‘mischief or regeneration’.45 But as in ‘The Coming of War: Actaeon’, Pound uses the motif of travel to inscribe order on the carnival vortex of ‘Provincia Deserta’, and he situates the lyric ‘I’ against both the crowd and the landscape so that each element can be focused into a productive dialogue. The most overtly vorticist poem in the collection, ‘Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess (Theme for a Series of Pictures)’, was later featured in Blast 2, and, rather than a poetry of place, it presented a geometry of space.46 It was a time when Pound had developed a clear vorticist aesthetic, and yet, in the pages of Poetry, he was simultaneously seeking to reassert the tenets of imagism which, as he complained in many letters to Harriet Monroe, Amy Lowell was attempting ‘to turn [. . .] into a democratic bear-garden’.47 The military edge in the poem matched Pound’s combative mood, and yet its inclusion in the 1915 Provençal sequence also suggests productive correlations with his 1912 walking tour. Pound does not explicitly refer to chess in his walking tour notebooks, but Sieburth is correct in his observation that Pound’s notes on Hautefort, Exideuil and Chalus configure ‘the terrain in the Walking Tour as a chessboard of strategic possibilities’, which ‘transforms the local geography into a topographical allegory of Bertran de Born’s embattled psyche’.48 Like other pieces in Pound’s March 1915 Poetry sequence, ‘The Game of Chess’ refines his configuration of crowd dynamics in a particular ‘vortex’ under the aegis of military strategy. As the pieces ‘Whirl! Centripetal! Mate!’ with

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 58

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 59

the ‘King down in the vortex’, the poem echoes the eroticised rituals and landscapes of A Walking Tour.49 In contrast to the anarchic ‘whirling laughter’ of ‘Provincia Deserta’, the circulation in this passage is ordered and ‘centripetal’, circulating around the ‘vortex’; nevertheless, ‘The Game of Chess’ also situates the contest as a sexual ritual culminating in an ecstatic release. Pound’s pun on ‘Mate!’ foregrounds the notion of sexual conquest, which, in line with his other vorticist writing, links battle and artistic creation, and eclipses the more reciprocal erotics of place that emerged in A Walking Tour. Pound replicates the strategy in his seminal poem ‘Near Perigord’, in which Bertran de Born conducts a geopolitical (and romantic) game of chess in Pound’s reading of the troubadour’s landscape: The four round towers, four brothers—mostly fools: What could he do but play the desperate chess, And stir old grudges?50

Here, chess becomes a metaphor for a simmering dynastic conflict, but the pieces serve as structures with strategic and economic significance rather than the personifications of subjects and techniques on display in ‘The Game of Chess’: ‘Pawn your castles, lords! / Let the Jews pay’.51 Echoes of the anti-Semitism that Pound unleashed in his 1913 essay ‘Through Alien Eyes’ make an unwelcome reappearance in these lines from ‘Near Perigord’, and the act of ‘pawning the castle’ introduces a corrupting financial force that reduces a valuable piece to an expendable one (a critique in keeping with Pound’s satirical poems on commercial culture in Blast 1 and 2).52 Like his vorticist and political writing, in ‘Through Alien Eyes’, Pound’s emphasis on economics becomes a form of shorthand for addressing the forces that impel crowd behaviour in the early twentieth century. This shift in his poetics of place formed part of a broader trajectory that moved his attentions beyond contingent, physical sites and into the forces that traversed them. When Pound settled in London and began to formulate the principles and collaborations that would produce imagism and vorticism, his thoughts continually returned to America, especially following his appointment as Poetry’s Foreign Editor in September 1912. In the eleven-part essay ‘Patria Mia’, written following his brief return to the States, he lamented that the country had ‘no center, no place by which it can be tested’.53 However, in his four-part essay ‘Through Alien Eyes’, Pound likened the ‘national spirit’ of America to a magnetic force and its ‘economic mess’ and cultural ‘muddle’ to ‘a heap of iron filings’.54 Using cultural hegemony as an organ-

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 59

25/01/2013 15:53

60 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

ising force, he imagined that with ‘a strong enough magnet [. . .] at once they leap into order’ and ‘move in unison’.55 The problem was, despite the energetic ‘spirit of the country’, America possessed neither the ‘living complex’ that he detected in Arles, nor the vortex derived from a mutually sustaining exchange of still and torrential, ancient and modern ‘lines of force’ in London.56 Nevertheless, Pound’s locational poetics followed a consistent trajectory during this period that he also applied to America’s metropolises on the rare occasions on which he was moved to do so. Thus, when he took a ‘sheer delight in mass & line’ when reminiscing about New York’s skyscrapers in A Walking Tour,57 his praise was bound up in, rather than separate from, the ‘sentiment & lust for age’ that he detected in other architectural forms during his walking tour and subsequent poetry.58 And in ‘Patria Mia’, Pound reawakened the transcendent nostalgia that he once experienced for Burgos as he recalls that New York’s ‘great buildings lose reality and take on their magical powers’, becoming ‘immaterial’ in the ‘urban night’.59 To Pound, these towering embodiments of American modernity and identity had already become bound up in his mytho-poetics of longing. The poet revelled in the physical detail of the city, but relentlessly sought to escape it by distilling its frenetic energy into a motionless, transcendental locus that would transport him beyond the material world. In the heyday of imagism and vorticism, that locus became embodied by the physical site and turbulent artistic milieu of the London Vortex. However, Pound’s contacts with America, conducted primarily through the transatlantic little magazines, continually tested and refined his locational poetics and, equally, expressed the problem of place to its nascent avant-gardes.

The Other’s Vortex: William Carlos Williams’s Transatlantic Backgrounds Not long after Pound had exiled himself to Europe, but almost two years before he undertook his walking tour in Southern France, his friend Bill Williams set sail for Europe on a sabbatical to recover from a year of serious professional, personal and creative crises.60 Williams travelled to Antwerp aboard the SS Marquette on 23 July 1909, a few weeks after he had proposed to Florence Herman, the sister of his brother’s then-fiancée, Charlotte Herman (whom Williams had originally hoped to marry).61 Beginning in August, he pursued a paediatrics fellowship in Leipzig, where he spent the majority of his time until March 1910, when he travelled throughout Europe, reconciling with his brother (who was on an architectural fellowship in Rome) over the issue of their engagements, reuniting with Pound

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 60

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 61

in London in March 1910, and visiting sites in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, Spain and Gibraltar, before returning to Rutherford, New Jersey.62 In the final leg of this journey in Spain, he made a pilgrimage to the monastery at Santa Maria la Rabida and the town of Palos de la Frontera, where Christopher Columbus set sail from to the New World. As Mariani notes, it was here, in a letter from Madrid dated 15 May 1910 at the closing stages of his sabbatical, that Williams was first able to articulate his project to his fiancée. He planned through his writing ‘to infuse Americans with the strength and purity of their own traditions which are lying all about us unused’.63 In a characteristic inversion, however, for Williams, those ‘American’ traditions drew not only their ‘strength’ and ‘purity’ but also their identity as specifically American traditions precisely from their mixed provenance and ‘unused’, fragmentary state. Other cultures may have inaugurated them, but these tatters of traditions – ‘lying’ dormant and considered cultural detritus by some – had come to represent America in Williams’s mind, a conviction that began to consolidate as he explored Europe with his own alien eyes. Throughout his year abroad, Williams, like Pound, kept careful notes, which he also used as the basis for an unpublished manuscript, and which also included compositions that pre- and post-dated his trip. As with Pound’s Walking Tour, Williams’s route through Europe ‘suggest[s] a sequence’ for these writings, which progress through ‘Antwerp, Germany, Spain, [and] Gibraltar’.64 His title, ‘Tatters’, captures not only the patchwork of American experiences that he alludes to in his letters home, but also the faded grandeur of Europe. The title also describes the fragmentary, multimodal form of the unpaginated manuscript, and the chaotic state of his personal and creative life during the period.65 Together with his abortive attempt at a vorticist manifesto in 1915, these early manuscripts collect the chaotic blueprints from which he would later assemble his localist aesthetics, and more fully integrate the quintessentially ‘homemade’ modernist into the transnational vorticist movement. Although rooted in his European travels, these early writings contained crucial encounters with America, and formed the backdrop to his major poetic breakthroughs in The Egoist, especially ‘The Wanderer: A Rococo Study’.66 He presented his American landscapes to the international readership of this London-based journal, and conjoined these vistas with his locational poetics, anticipating their full articulation whilst analysing and revelling in their incompletion. In ‘Tatters’, Williams intertwined his own evolution as a writer with the nation’s rapid development. On the first page of the manuscript he returns his gaze to the New York skyline and declares that ‘[m]y mind is full of tall buildings with their tops hidden in clouds’.67 Appropriately,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 61

25/01/2013 15:53

62 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

the sequence of poems charts Williams’s progression from a yearning Romantic neophyte to a more confident, modern craftsman. The passive lyric ‘I’ in his untitled acrostic poem for H.D. transforms into a strident, proto-imagistic voice paying homage to the painter John Wilson.68 ‘To J.H.W.’ is constructed from impressionistic blocks of colour, which form the ‘tall buildings’ of the rapidly changing concrete skyline of New York.69 This pattern replicates itself throughout ‘Tatters’, as discrete units of text combine to form blueprints for a modernist landscape. Williams’s poem ‘Modern Invocation’ describes his arrival in Europe, which follows a prose meditation beneath postmarked ‘Antwerp. Hotel La Vielle Tour. Aug 4. ’09’.70 Williams stayed at the hotel with twelve collegeeducated peers (‘cattle men’ apparently involved in ranching) when he first arrived in Belgium in August 1909, shortly before his paediatric fellowship in Leipzig began.71 As a site of ‘first contact’ with the Old World, the visit left an indelible impression on him. In a letter to his brother, Williams described a meeting in the hotel’s restaurant with an old man who had been reduced to singing for money, who ‘must have had a voice but now it was [. . .] shot to pieces’; for Williams, this man embodied ‘the very essence of the old world spirit [. . .] not to be understood by our Americans and [their] young [and] ignorant but enterprising New World spirit’.72 This encounter established a template for Williams’s later work, in which the Old World became a realm of ragged and decaying but undefeated dignity, which he continually longed for and reached out to, but never entirely understood. Paradoxically, however, when Williams alluded to the event in ‘Tatters’, he focused on the subject of youth, which he argued was both ‘fickle’ and the ‘very birthright of true strength’.73 ‘Modern Invocation’ was composed with his arrival in Europe in mind, and yet it charts a return to ‘my own land’ following a creative exchange with an Old World.74 In it, his ‘letters to my people’ revealed the deeply domestic and local boundaries that catalysed his poetics of the modern, which, expressed in his rough-hewn early mode, ‘sing[s] with beauty not always sweet’.75 Indeed, the prose fragments that Williams distributes amongst the poems are anything but harmonious. They range from philosophical formulations, to self-consciously improvisational dicta, to non sequiturs and observations about (or snippets of reported speech from) European cities and villages. It is sometimes difficult to tell where a fragment begins and a poem ends; however, this is precisely the point. Whilst there are instances where the connective tissue between the pieces is suggested, or can be recovered through archival research, the logic that Williams seeks to generate within the text is predominantly associative and cumulative rather than linear and discursive. For example, he abuts a translation of

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 62

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 63

‘The Madman’s Death’ by an anonymous Bohemian writer, published in The New York Times, with the phrase ‘France, the laboratory of freedom’.76 The juxtaposition implies a transatlantic poetic tradition, in which alienation, madness and ‘other-ness’ are necessary by-products of (or requisite for) artistic freedom. However, as Williams extends his tour into Germany and the Netherlands, some interjections bear little obvious relation to the surrounding text. For example, when he exclaims, ‘Leipzig! Leipzig! Where the grass is swept with broom / And roses bloom ’til December in the public parks’; or ‘wonderful ruin at War[t]burg, We[st]phalia’; or a ‘remarkable brass urn at the Hague’, he creates a disjunction between textual production and geographical location.77 Although it is not a conventional travelogue, ‘Tatters’ actually replicates the disorientating experience of travel deploying the processes of ‘synecdoche’ and ‘asyndeton’ described by de Certeau.78 The rapid generic shifts in ‘Tatters’ amplify the ‘ellips[es]’ between ‘conjunctive loci’ that Williams experiences, while the poems in the manuscript offer unifying motifs that impart cohesion on Williams’s textual travelling.79 The experience of wandering is embodied in the river muse that he configures in the (subsequently deleted) poem ‘Fiume’, which is both the Italian word for ‘river’ and the former Austria-Hungarian city now known as Rijeka in Croatia. In an early glimpse of the strategy that would shape his epic poem Paterson, Williams’s title ‘Fiume’ simultaneously addresses a geographical place and a geological feature, which also forms the feminine river muse: ‘Her eyes are as blue light through the tips of waves / Her voice is as the call of the waves’.80 The presence of ‘Fiume’ in the final ‘Gibraltar’ section of ‘Tatters’ retrospectively unites the patchwork of locations in the manuscript using the river-muse as a conceit for, or rippling ‘mirror’ to, the modernity that he later refined in his breakthrough 1914 poem ‘The Wanderer: A Rococo Study’: But one day crossing the ferry With the great towers of Manhattan before me, Out at the prow with the sea-wind blowing I had been wearying many questions Which she had put on to try me: How shall I be a mirror to this modernity?81

Williams described the muse of ‘The Wanderer’ as ‘my grandmother, the river, the Passaic river’,82 surrounding and transporting the speaker as he bears witness to this geographical edge of America as it stands on the cusp of ‘modern’ history, its possibilities sketched out in ‘the great towers

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 63

25/01/2013 15:53

64 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

of Manhattan’. The river embodies the contradictions and potentialities of America’s own problem of place: it is an eternal muse, geomorphically fixed to its place, yet is also an itinerant ‘wanderer’, rising, falling and meandering with the seasons; it is a space of transience that both divides and connects places, regions and even nations, whilst facilitating the placeless elision of travel; and in the context of ‘Tatters’ and ‘The Wanderer’, it also forms a transatlantic conduit to Europe. So it was especially appropriate that the poem was first published in Dora Marsden’s little magazine The Egoist, where it followed Pound’s musings on the proto-vorticist Rebel Art Centre in ‘Exhibition at the Goupil Gallery’.83 ‘The Wanderer’ captured the transatlantic oscillations between the Old World and the New that Williams sketched out in ‘Tatters’, transactions heightened by the poem’s appearance in The Egoist, which at that time revealed London’s Anglo-American avant-garde during its transition from imagism to vorticism. The Egoist maintained some contact with the counterpublic legacy of its previous incarnation The New Freewoman, although in its shift to a literary review, it more regularly delivered critiques of mass culture (typified, for example, by Assistant Editor Richard Aldington’s attacks on cinema audiences) than overt appeals to it.84 Williams’s ‘The Wanderer’ contributed to the spectrum of more politically engaged works in The Egoist, but unlike the work of Pound and Aldington, it celebrated rather than decried the disruptive forces of modern commercial culture, and it showed little nostalgia for European hegemonies. In the ‘Broadway’ section of ‘The Wanderer’, for example, Williams invokes the ‘old world spirit’ to guide him through the New World’s emerging popular culture.85 In the ‘Paterson – The Strike’ section, however, that same ‘old queen’ leads him to confront America’s socioeconomic plights, ‘the death living around me’.86 The ‘streaming tatters’ that trail in the ‘old queen’s’ wake echo the title of his travel manuscripts, and create a sense of continuity between the poverty and decay he encountered in Europe and the social strife unfolding in Paterson as he descends to the street:87 Hot for savagery, I went sucking the air! Into the city, Out again, baffled, on to the mountain! Back into the city! Nowhere The subtle! Everywhere the electric!88

The Paterson Silk Strike united Greenwich Village artists and intellectuals (including editors of The Masses) with workers and political

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 64

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 65

activists in a struggle against factory owners and civic authorities.89 In ‘Tatters’, Williams’s poem ‘In Socialasia’ presents American ‘working [men]’ who are kept ‘ignorant’ with ‘arbitrary rule[s]’, and a repressive iambic tetrameter forms a hyperbolically controlled structure with which Williams parodies the government’s suppression of individuality and, thus, political dissent.90 In ‘The Wanderer’, however, those working masses are unleashed on the streets, swarming through them in river-like crowds in an expansive free verse form. Like Pound, Williams was both wary of and enthralled by the electricity of the crowd. Initially, ‘The Wanderer’ groups its citizens in small, local units, in ‘bread-lines’, and as mechanised grotesques exploited by factory owners: ‘the ugly legs of the young girls / Pistons too powerful for delicacy’, and, like fork lifts, ‘the men’s arms, red, used to heat and cold, [. . .] toss quartered beeves’ and ‘crates of fruit’.91 Thus, the people form a mechanised crowd, tragicomic cyborgs who recall the feminised crowd model described by Poggi: ‘Dominated by one idea: something / That carried them as they are always wanting to be carried’.92 That feminised, wandering crowd with its ‘Rasping voices, filthy habits with the hands’93 surges and flows into Williams’s descriptions of ‘the Passaic, that filthy river’ and its muse, which merges with his maternal grandmother, ‘dabbling her mad hands’ in its waters.94 For Williams, the crowd and the Passaic churns with a power that is unpredictably redemptive or degenerating, and it is precisely this dichotomy that conjoined these forces to Williams’s conception of America as a locus of modernity. And yet, Williams’s America presented a co-constructed sense of modernity, linked inseparably to Europe, and that transatlantic dynamic played out constantly in Poetry, The Egoist and Blast. As Nye argues, at the turn of the century in both America and Europe,‘[c]rowds were no longer merely representative of local or corporate interests but dramatic representations of powerful social and cultural forces in the modern nation-state’.95 Williams’s crowds, like Pound’s, adjoin the ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ antipodes that fuelled key modernist movements and moments, such as futurism, vorticism and cubism (a feature highlighted in his mechanistic descriptions of Paterson’s citizens). However, in ‘The Wanderer’, Williams’s decision to encounter the crowd at street level in a commercial district rather than in a historical battle or religious ritual clearly distinguishes his emphasis on New World vernaculars and experiences. The problem that Williams encountered is that in his tactile, sexualised ‘contact’ with this New World, his poetics were still bound up in the Romantic fantasies attached to the muses that he invoked from the Old, and, in fact, still replicated Pound’s imagist problem of place.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 65

25/01/2013 15:53

66 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

By 1915, his attempt to write himself into the vorticist movement in the unpublished manuscript ‘Vortex – William Carlos Williams’ revealed the side-steps and displacements that still underwrote his locational poetics, at the very moment in which he began to immerse himself in the production of Others.96 Before Williams contributed his major new poems to The Egoist in March, August and December 1914, the vorticist movement had already been taking shape in the journal. Williams had been reading The Egoist with avid interest as Pound, Lewis and the sculptor Henri GaudierBrzeska formulated its principles, and his own work evolved alongside it. Tragically, Gaudier-Brzeska became one of the most prominent modernist casualties of World War I. Williams followed the sculptor’s career with interest, and used the occasion of his death as a means of responding to the sculptor’s manifestos.97 ‘Vortex – William Carlos Williams’ commingles his emerging interest in the texture and detail of his own locus (it contains Williams’s first prominent use of the word ‘contact’) with the self-consciously borrowed stream of vorticist compositional theory flowing from London.98 However, his sense of exclusion from that milieu also became a stimulus in these early exercises, helping him articulate his own localist project. Furthermore, his strategic use of quotation in the ‘Vortex’ manuscripts, first trialled in ‘Tatters’, also helped him approach language as a raw material rather than as a spiritual barometer. But there were also side-effects: rhetorical sleights of hand and self-contradictions remained glaring and unresolved despite Williams’s protracted revisions, and eventually he simply replicated the conceptual pitfalls of Pound’s imagist problem of place. As Mike Weaver has noted, in the ‘Vortex’ manuscripts, Williams was obsessed with a particular passage from Gaudier-Brzeska’s final Blast manifesto, composed ‘from the trenches’ of World War I:99 I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES, I shall present my emotions by the ARRANGEMENT OF MY SURFACES, THE PLANES AND LINES BY WHICH THEY ARE DEFINED.100

Here, Gaudier-Brzeska locates an immanent aesthetic quality in the artist’s chosen materials, and he conveys this positive feedback loop in the simultaneous derivation and presentation of ‘the arrangement’ of ‘surfaces’.101 Williams begins the ‘Vortex’ manuscripts with a similar tack, substituting ‘forces’ for ‘lines’ in his opening salvo: ‘I affirm my existence by accepting other forces to be in juxtaposition to my own either in agreement or

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 66

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 67

disagreement’.102 However, the awkward fact of his own transatlantic position, and the fact that he was ‘borrowing phrases from Gaudier-Brzeska’s “Vortex” ’ complicated his efforts to use these ‘forces’ in ‘apposition’ to his own.103 Nevertheless, quotation becomes a creative rather than derivative act for Williams, and by following Gaudier-Brzeska’s lead (the sculptor had also ‘borrowed’ phrases from Pound in his manifesto), he reduced other writers’ expressions to raw materials to be turned to his own purposes at will.104 However, this position forced Williams to confront the site-specificity of his project. He contends that ‘by taking whatever character my environment has presented and turning it to my purpose I have expressed my independence of it’, and that ‘I will not make an effort to leave that place for I deny that I am dependent on any place’.105 Predictably, this solipsistic strategy eventually implodes. The sentence that Williams eventually creates at the end of the manuscript – ‘[f]urthermore by this acceptance I affirm my independence from time and space’106 – very nearly duplicates Pound’s imagist credos verbatim, swapping synonyms for key terms to avoid replicating the imagist’s ‘freedom from time limits and space limits’.107 By renouncing his connection with time and space, and by ‘affirming’ his reliance on borrowed language, Williams has effectively swapped freedom for originality, transcending the specificity of time and location for a universal fraternity of artists. Thus, in the ‘Vortex’ manuscripts, he replicates a version of the ‘failure in synthesis’ that Pound arrived at in Arles by displacing the problem of place without resolving it.108 Nevertheless, the ‘Vortex’ manuscripts signal a shift, as Williams ‘affirm[s]’ his ‘independence from any one technique’, distancing himself from both imagism and vorticism in the process.109 And it was not the first time that he had adopted Pound’s theories only to partially reject them. His December 1914 poem ‘Aux Imagistes’ consciously reformulated Pound’s ‘petals on a wet, black bough’, an instance of textual ‘borrowing’ that reflected the factionalism of a diminishing movement: I think I have never been so exalted As I am now by you, frostbitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches110

Given the context and timing of the poem’s publication, Williams’s focus on the demise of the blossom issues a timely warning to imagist poets: the ‘envious black branches’ and the ‘twigs’ which ‘conspire against you’

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 67

25/01/2013 15:53

68 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

allude to the fissure between the Pound-led English imagists and Lowell’s own American ‘wing’.111 But ‘Aux Imagistes’ also charts a progression in William’s own poetics: he infuses Pound’s metaphysical ‘complex’ with the passage of time, dragging the image, and the ‘instant’ it attempted to arrest, back into the flow of time, and into contact with the contingencies of inhabited space. As Williams began to experiment with the ‘Improvisations’ in 1916, he began to realise that a ‘natural object’ (or, metonymically, a geographic locus) could not be dissociated from socially constructed space, and he began to feel the same about avant-gardes.112 Characteristically, Williams kept returning to this problem and reworking it, and in September 1918 he reprised a few arguments from his ‘Vortex’ manuscripts in his ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell, which was published serially in The Little Review in 1919.113 Vorticism, like imagism, appeared to be fading into history, and yet, I wish that I might here set down my ‘Vortex’ after the fashion of London, 1913, stating how little it means to me whether I live here, there or elsewhere or succeed in this, that or the other so long as I can keep my mind free from the trammels of literature, beating down every attack of its retiarii with my mirmillones. But the time is past.114

Here, Williams fashions an American ‘vortex’ whilst simultaneously denouncing his model for it, and rejects a foreign example only to appropriate its combative motif. Configuring the modernist transatlantic as a gladiatorial arena, he depicts himself and his milieu as mirmillones, Roman gladiators named for the fish that adorned their helmets, stolid and strong but largely stationary warriors who were often pitted against the more mobile net- and trident-wielding retiarii (who in this context refer to the expatriates Pound and T. S. Eliot and the English critic Edgar Jepson).115 Recycling his gladiatorial reference, Williams inserts puns about ‘hooks’, ‘bait’ and fishermen incessantly throughout the second half of his ‘Prologue’. His wordplay had a serious intention, however: during this period, Williams joined other members of his emerging localist avantgarde in staking their claim to ‘native’ United States verse. As World War I drew to a close, an intense debate about the role that artistic avant-gardes might play on the national and international stage erupted in the autumn of 1918.116 For Williams and his milieu, the modernist problem of place demanded intimate, even messy creative contact with specific localities in order for anything like a ‘national’ literature to emerge. As Williams asked in an unpublished manuscript entitled ‘The Degradation of Life in America’,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 68

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 69

who has the intelligence to realize that England hangs on a thread of spittle from the mouth of Wyndham Lewis? [. . .] Or that Ireland holds its head up over England through James Joyce alone. And that the Egoist is a woman rescuing England by retaliation against Joyce, publishing his work? No nation lives forever save by the word.117

The ‘word’ in its most culturally (and, purely incidentally, nationally) significant form distilled literary debates which were still in the process of formation, and thus the literary avant-gardes were best placed to reflect the state of the nation’s writing. Following the vorticist moment, Williams’s embryonic avant-garde began to gravitate from a locational to a localist poetics, which attempted to surmount the modernist problems of place and nation by exploring the conceptual potential of location. Lewis’s seminal journal Blast merged the Poundian vortex with the kinds of paratactical and paratextual logic that attracted Williams in ‘Tatters’, and situated the vorticists’ specialised debates within a site-specific ‘practiced space’.118 In this respect, Blast and Lewisian vorticism dramatised the modernist problem of place for both European and American audiences with unprecedented flair and precision, exploiting the materiality of the little magazine to inaugurate a debate about how the urban ‘vortex’ would be configured by twentieth-century artists on both sides of the Atlantic.

‘The Crowd Master’: Blast and Wyndham Lewis’s Urban Spaces Emerging from the pages of The Egoist and the lively gallery culture that supported the Rebel Art Centre, vorticism launched an interdisciplinary assault on the art world as Lewis and Pound attempted to breathe new life into the faltering imagist movement. Williams remained on the periphery of vorticism (his name only appeared in connection with Blast in an advert for The Egoist in the first issue), but Pound’s input proved central to Lewis’s magazine. Blast 1 was originally scheduled to appear in April 1914, but it eventually appeared in July, largely due to Pound’s late articulation of the ‘Vortex’ concept.119 However, the material language of Blast was almost entirely the creation of Lewis. Blast 1 was heavily dependent on its geographical and temporal referents to generate meaning and, drawing on the visual cultures and swarming crowds of London, Lewis proposed a new method of traversing the modernist city, dragging the reader through a deliberately contradictory textual space. Throughout its publishing life and its various afterlives, Blast triangulated the dialectical tensions between geographical place, (mass) cultural space and typographical environments in a single textual locus – tensions

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 69

25/01/2013 15:53

70 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

that Pound and Williams had only begun to address in their explorations of crowds, places and cultural spaces. Vorticism emerged from precisely these kinds of individual encounters with place and modernity, and Lewis and Pound co-ordinated them in ‘a correlated aesthetic which carries you through all the arts’.120 Blast 1 distilled that aesthetic into a dialogic textual field that exploited the full range of resources in the little magazine format, using its specialist languages to interrogate national print cultures. Blast 2 marked a radical change of tack in this field, as the War prompted Lewis to analyse the nature of crowd behaviour and nationalism within specific urban locations, and how they interact with modernising forces of advertising, fashion and mass media. Almost inevitably, these preoccupations turned his attentions towards America, particularly in his short fiction work ‘The Crowd Master’. A proposed ‘American Number’ discussed for Blast 3 was never published, but nevertheless vorticism experienced a transatlantic afterlife in The Little Review under the stewardship of Pound, who was installed as the American journal’s Foreign Editor in May 1917.121 In each incarnation of vorticism, however, the interplay that Lewis inaugurated between the literary, visual and typographic elements of little magazines showed how it was possible for modernists to ‘talk with two tongues’: for their own aesthetics, and for their avant-gardes.122 Lewis’s Blast manifestos are an accretion of site-specific details: locations, institutions and people populate its pages alongside abstractions, structures and objects, each with a particular significance, blasted or blessed, stated or implied.123 These accumulated particulars act as the physical archive of cultural heritage, and Lewis deploys milieu- and site-specific language to imbricate the vorticist movement within its geographic place. But he also uses economic exchange as a metaphor for the aesthetic transactions between artists and locations: the proliferation of advertising hoardings, motorised transport and electricity radically redefined urban space, responding to and fuelling the rise of free-market capitalism. Mark Morrisson has argued that in Enemy of the Stars, the centrepiece of Blast 1, Lewis pits the artist against a social and commercial sphere where ‘self-promotion’ becomes a masculine spectacle couched in terms of economic competition.124 However, for Lewis, those tactics are at once opposed to and in collusion with the goals of advertising and propaganda. In Blast, he both celebrated and satirised the marketplace, using a complex matrix of humour, images and strategic layout, filtered through a site-specific milieu. In Blast 2, for example, Lewis argued that ‘there should be a bill in Parliament at once FORBIDDING ANY IMAGE OR RECOGNIZABLE SHAPE TO BE STUCK UP IN ANY PUBLIC

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 70

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 71

PLACE; or as advertisement or what-not, to be used in any way publicly’.125 This statement typographically represents that which it critiques, a gesture characteristic of Lewisian satire. For Lewis, typographic space codifies geographic place, and in certain instances provides a programmatic tool for defining an emerging avantgarde. Using the card wrapper (itself a confluence of art and advertising theory) and Lewis’s ubiquitous ‘vortex’ symbol, Blast 1 itself operated like a typographical pun. The line that bisects the conical vortex symbol suggests that vorticism exposes and divides the opposing sides of every subject or position, whilst the oval at its base also suggests three-dimensionality, implying that these opposing sides will eventually meet. Indeed, the opposing orientations of ‘BLAST’ on the front and back covers allude to the contrasting meanings of the word itself: a destructive, potentially life-threatening explosion, and an embryonic cell, the beginning of life (Fig. 2.2).126 And when the reader opens the magazine, the ‘T’ of the back wrapper and the ‘B’ of the front cover meet at a vertex, and with the spine bisecting the resulting triangle shape, the two-page fold-out resembles the vortex icon (and folding it further produces its conical shape). Furthermore, when the reader rotates the magazine whilst holding it diagonally, the Blast title forms a stable axis, and the letters appear to retain their orientation in relation to the front and back covers, which reverse their position with every turn. Handling the magazine in this way produces a crude but effective form of animation, mimicking the process by which geographical place becomes semiotised as cultural space and producing a visceral method of tactile reading. In this respect, Lewis’s tactics become a materialist take on de Certeau’s ‘pedestrian rhetoric’ of travel, whereby ‘an act of reading’ becomes ‘the space produced by the practice of a particular place’.127 To extend the conceit, Blast takes the reader off the street and into the buildings, up the fire escapes and through the sewers of London. Lewis’s editorial poetics coax the primarily unidirectional, two-dimensional process of reading more forcefully into a multidirectional, three- and fourdimensional practice that relies on strategies of parataxis, simultaneity, anticipation and recursion, as well as tactile and visual strategies, to generate meaning. As a result of these perverse manoeuvres, he extends vorticist logic onto the discursive space of the printed page, which enables the reader to interrogate geographical place and cultural space according to the principles of the avant-garde that authored it. Like Arghol’s fist in The Enemy of the Stars, Blast assaults readers’ senses so that when struck, they, like Hanp, become ‘part of [the] responsive landscape’, drawing them into ‘the nervous geometry of the world in sight’.128

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 71

25/01/2013 15:53

72 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

2.2 Front and Rear Covers, Blast 1 (July 1914). Copyright © The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/Bridgeman Art Library. Image reproduced courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 72

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 73

In this respect, the graphic and textual melange of Blast’s first number serves as its own paratextual manifesto: statements, jokes and aphorisms proliferate like the glaring billboards that increasingly crowded London’s commercial districts, as Lewis incorporated typographic strategies that advertisers used to lend authority to a statement or brand.129 In addition to its ingenious cover, the techniques within the magazine range from capitalisation, sudden shifts between ‘assertive’ or distinctive typefaces, and unexpected juxtapositions of images and text. Critics have noted that the vorticists developed on the futurists’ earlier typographic experiments (even whilst they opposed futurist theory).130 However, whilst Marinetti denounced traditional ‘typographical harmony of the page’, he, like advertisers, held a fairly utilitarian view of typography; ‘[f]or example,’ Marinetti stated, ‘italics for a series of similar or swift sensations, boldface for violent onomatopoeias, and so on’.131 Like advertisers and propagandists, the futurists simply substituted one form of ‘typographical harmony’ for another, prescribing particular typographic practices to achieve specific and correlated semiotic effects. Lewis, of course, did this regularly, but in aggregate, Blast actually revels in the opposite process, eliciting varied responses to contradictory stimuli, and courting the audience of the mass market it emulates even as the vorticists lampoon it. For example, in ‘Manifesto I’, Lewis satirises promotional travel literature. His all-capitals ‘WHISPER’ deliberately contradicts the semantic ‘harmony’ of word and design. He blasts the provincial tourist who glides through London in garishly outmoded conveyances to repel crowds of potential visitors rather than attract them: DAMN all those to-day who have taken on that Rotten Menagerie, and still crack their whips and tumble in Piccadilly Circus, as though London were a provincial town. WE WHISPER IN YOUR EAR A GREAT SECRET. LONDON IS NOT A PROVINCIAL TOWN.132

Configured in the visual language of Piccadilly Circus, Lewis sarcastically bellows at the ‘Rotten Menagerie’ of ‘Dickensian Clowns’ by adopting the persona of a modernist ringmaster, baiting the mass audience that he both craved and despised. Paul Edwards describes such oppositional gestures as ‘characteristic of Lewisian vorticism’: ‘the Blast manifestos do not simply line up heroes and villains, for what is blasted on one page may be blessed a few pages later [. . .] Self-contradiction is programmatic, self-conscious, playful but aggressive.’133 As such, the dualistic ‘logic’ of Blast must be read

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 73

25/01/2013 15:53

74 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

according to the hermeneutic codes embedded in its typography, and in the immediate environment inhabited by Lewis and his milieu. Richard Aldington provided an insight into Blast’s audience in a review for The Egoist. He remarked, ‘I won’t pick out little spots of humour for quotation – readers will find them quickly enough.’134 This comment alludes to the specialised frame of reference that Aldington assumes he and The Egoist’s readership (initially around 400, but declining to 200 after 1916) share:135 to be in on the joke, one needed to speak the same site-specific languages that the vorticists did. We see an instance of this humour in ‘Manifesto I’, where Lewis blasts ‘THE BRITANNIC ÆSTHETE’ for the decadence of the fin de siècle movement.136 He felt that nineteenth-century aestheticism still dominated mainstream arts and literature in 1914, but he also thought it a threat to the English avant-garde. For example, Lewis alludes to the ‘literary death’ that Algernon Swinburne died in 1879 upon taking up residence with Theodore Watts-Dunton: raptures and roses of the erotic bookshelves culminating In PURGATORY OF PUTNEY.137

Here, Lewis describes in metonymic shorthand the fate of an earlier literary avant-garde. Until his actual death in 1909, Swinburne could be seen haunting bookshops in Putney, his literary force spent, the ‘raptures and roses’ of his earlier work (which Lewis and Pound also disapproved of) ‘culminating’ in the ‘purgatory’ of irrelevance and decrepitude in suburbia. Lewis also alludes to the idea of literary tourism in his reference, where the artist’s physical environment is no longer a vital force in artistic production, but a ‘circus’ where eccentric personalities are put on display for the amusement of spectators. It is telling, for instance, that Lewis culminates Section 6 of ‘Manifesto I’ by stating that ‘we do not want the GLOOMY VICTORIAN CIRCUS in Piccadilly Circus’; the final declaration, ‘IT IS PICCADILLY’S CIRCUS!’ directly aligns with the ‘PURGATORY OF PUTNEY’ on the foot of the opposite page, pitting the vibrant commercial and cultural hub of central London against an affluent but irrelevant satellite community.138 By aligning his vorticist project with the commercial circus of Piccadilly, programmatically ‘blessing’ England, and dismissing Continental avantgardes as ‘effete’ and ‘sentimental’, Lewis co-opts the tactics of advertisers and nationalist propaganda in Blast – that is, to ‘sell’ the vorticist pro-

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 74

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 75

gramme and promote specific areas and institutions whilst deriding the competition.139 In Blast 1, Lewis models his version of literary nationalism along similar lines as his fascination with the marketplace: although some critics have interpreted his appropriation of advertising culture as a form of nationalist propaganda, in fact his appropriation was generated at least in part by his disdain.140 As Ian Patterson argues, Lewis did not necessarily advocate a ‘nationalist art group’, but rather ‘[argued] against the pastiche that necessarily follows from the adoption of a style that is not rooted in and adapted to the climatic conditions (in the broadest sense, as well as the most literal) of its production’.141 Accordingly, Lewis ridicules the nationalist bravado of futurism and decides to ‘BLAST First (from Politeness) ENGLAND’, destabilising his jingoistic headline with a mixture of allcapitals and sardonic parenthetical statements.142 At root, such gestures reinforce his primary allegiance to the artist: ‘we fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the SAME cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours’.143 It is no surprise, then, that Blast 2 largely dispensed with references to promotional culture, and instead concentrated on the artist’s role within national life at the outbreak of World War I. In his 11 August 1915 letter to John Quinn, Pound wrote that ‘BLAST IS A HIGHLY DIVERTING but highly specialised magazine, it might suffice for the presentation of Wyndham Lewis’ curious genius, but it cannot and never intended to become a general source of information or a general presentation of international letters’.144 Pound, like Aldington, surmised that Lewis targeted a specialist audience in Blast. So instead of declaring, as he had done in Blast 1, that ‘Blast will be popular, essentially’,145 in Blast 2, Lewis filtered the World War through the concerns of a specific community. He explained that since ‘this paper is run by Painters for Painting, and they are only incidentally Propagandists, they do their work first, and, since they must, write about it afterwards’.146 As vorticism’s de facto war correspondent Gaudier-Brzeska verified in ‘Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska’, the ‘VORTEX’ and its technical apparatus was relevant even amid the carnage of trench warfare. So instead of competing with the conflict, Lewis integrated the war into his vorticist programme whilst setting his ambitions for Blast on ‘the serious mission it has on the other side of World-War’.147 Following his ‘War Notes’ and four further essays on the war and its effects on the arts world, the topic recedes into the background of the non-fiction prose in Blast 2.148 ‘The Crowd Master’, an incomplete work of vorticist fiction that appeared only in the ‘War Number’, concludes the issue, and, tellingly, it follows a similar trajectory. The first rumblings of war captivated Lewis, but although he

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 75

25/01/2013 15:53

76 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

eventually served in the war, in this issue he was more interested in crowd behaviour and nationalism, a fascination that directed his attention across the Atlantic.149 ‘The Crowd Master’ features an English protagonist named Blenner who becomes increasingly preoccupied with how individual artists negotiate mass culture. As Peppis notes, ‘the story stages a stylistic and thematic competition between mass patriotism and avant-garde critique’.150 For Lewis, the ‘threat’ posed to the ‘masculine’ characteristics of the crowd by feminisation, domestication or infantalisation is never entirely surmounted,151 and the role of commercial print culture in mediating these dynamics is alternately stimulating and enervating. Under a banner headline of ‘THE CROWD’, Lewis analyses its structure at its ‘peak’ intensity, significantly time- and date-stamped ‘1914. London, July’, the month that Blast 1 was published: THE CROWD is now formed in London. [. . .] It serpentines every night, in thick well-nourished coils, all over town, in tropic degustation of news and ‘stimung’. [. . .] The bachelor and the Husband-Crowd. The Married Man is the Symbol of the Crowd: his function is to set one going. At the alter he embraces death.152

In these passages, the crowd takes on a protean, satanic presence, but the ‘serpentine’ also alludes to the river in Hyde Park, suggesting (like Williams’s river muse in ‘The Wanderer’) its mutability and fluidity, but also its immutable status as a landmark. In ‘The Crowd Master’, the Serpentine also invokes a Stygian boundary that mediates life and death, which takes the form of a marriage/suicide. For Blenner, then, ‘the war was like a great New Fashion’, uniting death, consumption and mass culture in wedlock.153 Here, Lewis acknowledges that warfare, like fashion and advertising, had become an expression of modernity that had been wedded to the recent explosion of print, advertising and urban culture. It shares a symbiotic relationship with the ‘serpentine’ crowd he depicts. When engorged by the machinations of propagandistic print culture, the banks burst and engulf the individual with ‘these sheets of inconceivable News’, as ‘tons of it a minute’ gush out and ‘[flood] the streets with excitement’.154 Thus, in Blast 2, the artist is constantly under threat from but continually energised by these shifting masses and the leaves of newsprint that merge with them. For Blenner, it becomes clear that ‘[t]he only possibility of renewal for the individual is into this temporary Death and Resurrection of the Crowd’.155 The key word here is ‘temporary’, because as Lewis argues in ‘A Review of

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 76

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 77

Contemporary Art’, ‘Futurism and identification with the crowd, is a huge hypocrisy’.156 Crowds are only useful to artists when they act as liminal spaces of artistic transfiguration, and in this sense the onus was on the artist to negotiate with the crowd and the mass cultures it embodied. Significantly, ‘The Crowd Master’ takes its title from an ‘American Book’ by the poet Brown Bryan Multum (probably based on Pound), which projects crowd psychology and the aesthetics of the crowd onto the rise of an entire nation – and, equally significantly, its title first appears as an advert displayed in a bookshop.157 Blenner’s exaggerated, self-consciously xenophobic paraphrase of the polemical book allows the possibility of reading The Crowd Master’s paean to America as an alternative model for harnessing the modernising potential of the crowd. Thus, when Blenner initially asserts that Multum’s Crowd Master ‘appeared to contain the barbarous “go” and raw pedantry of that abominable and peculiar [American] race’, Lewis also implicitly critiques Blenner’s parochialism.158 America is blasted more than blessed in Blenner’s paraphrase of The Crowd Master, but Lewis identifies its artistic and political utility, and its energising contradictions, in vorticist terminology: ‘Although I am so large’ this new America, all through the book, seemed to be saying, ‘I am not to be despised. The material element has outstripped the spiritual: oh yes, of course. But because you see a thing coming backways on don’t form an opinion until you see it turn round. I am so huge and have no Past I am like all your Pasts and the Present dumped into one age together. Just so; what is the matter with you is the matter with me, only more so. But I shall absorb my elements because I am all living, whereas you are 80 per cent. dead.[”]159

Lewis did not complete ‘The Crowd Master’, so he never complements this macroscopic view of America with a closer examination of its urban spaces, as he consistently does with English locations (primarily London) throughout Blast 1 and 2. Thus, he confines his account of the United States to a single published tome, The Crowd Master, rather than the vortex of ephemeral print cultures, which mastered its crowds, and which would continue to obsess Williams, Pound and the localist nexus emerging from the Others group in New York. But there were signs that the next instalment of Blast that he proposed might engage with precisely this territory.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 77

25/01/2013 15:53

78 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Conclusion: Transatlantic Vorticism In Blast 2, Lewis announced that Blast 3 would include his ‘Notes from the Front’ and ‘War Notes’, along with another episode of ‘The Crowd-master’; he also announced literary contributions by Pound and J. Dismor, and ‘reproductions of Drawings and Paintings by Dismor, Etchells, Gaudier-Brzeska, Kramer, Roberts, Sanders, Wadsworth, [and] Wyndham Lewis’.160 Yet the contributors’ correspondence suggests that plans for Blast 3 were in constant flux from its inception. Pound suggested to John Quinn on 13 July 1915 that ‘the next number may contain nothing but Brzeska’, but acknowledged that ‘everything is very unsettled. Both by legal and geographical questions.’161 By April 1916, Lewis had proposed ‘An American Number’ of Blast to accompany the vorticist exhibition arranged by Pound and Quinn, which was eventually held at The Penguin Club in New York in January 1917.162 The third issue of the magazine never materialised, of course, but the impact of Blast continued to reverberate across the Atlantic, as its contributors gained new exposure in the little magazines – particularly in The Little Review. Even though, like Others, it had been repeatedly pronounced ‘dead’, the post-mortem resurgence of vorticism took place in a series of analyses and re-presentations of its outputs and legacies.163 Following his installation as Foreign Editor at Margaret Anderson’s journal in May 1917, Pound announced in his inaugural editorial that Blast was ‘of necessity suspended’, but ‘[s]uch manuscripts as Mr. Lewis has left with me [. . .] will appear in these pages’.164 Lewis’s work made a suitably sensational impact, as his short story ‘Cantleman’s Spring-Mate’, published in the October 1917 number, resulted in the Post Office suppressing that issue of The Little Review due to the story’s supposedly ‘obscene’ content.165 If vorticism as a movement had initially made little impact in America, and had been largely forgotten in Europe, then individual vorticists, such as Pound and Lewis, ensured that its legacy could still be relevant to and belatedly influence artists in the New World. In the two-part short story ‘A Soldier of Humour’, published in The Little Review, Lewis continued his investigation of the voice and national character of the United States as a key site of modernist conflict. Set in France, ‘A Soldier of Humour’ presents the American voice as both ‘venomous’ and a ‘principal vessel’ of ‘vitality’,166 but also expressive of a frontier that was growing exponentially: ‘[o]ptimism, consciousness of power (rib wonder, I thought) surged out of them’.167 Initially encapsulating the very essence of vorticist dualism and the contradictions of marketplace culture, America eventually established itself as an ongoing ‘source of

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 78

25/01/2013 15:53

The Vortex of the Page

[ 79

Lewis’s anxiety’ in both ‘A Soldier of Humour’ and his post-1926 work as his politics, like Pound’s, drifted inexorably to the far right.168 But during the immediate post-Blast period, the vorticists had begun to recalibrate the Anglo-American avant-garde’s relationship with national institutions and the public sphere at large. Pound’s inaugural editorial in The Little Review presaged the end of Blast, and his January 1919 article ‘The Death of Vorticism’ announced the final dissolution of its governing movement. But the two articles also signalled a shift in Pound’s approach to literary nationalism. In ‘The Death of Vorticism’, he suggested that the War had created a new platform for the avant-garde’s relationship with its respective nation, as Pound described the vorticists’ success in ‘finally’ obtaining government funding and government jobs: ‘the government has at last put a vorticist lieutenant in charge of the biggest port in England’ and ‘taken on Mr. Wyndham Lewis’ as a war artist.169 Undeniably, then, ‘vorticist hard-headedness has made good’.170 Yet according to this logic, the movement was certainly ‘dead’ as the oppositional, counterpublic avant-garde set forth in Blast, converting (at least in Pound’s account) its nationalist tendencies into a more public-spirited, ‘useful’ and ultimately collusive team of craftsmen that Poetry’s board of governors might have envied. And perhaps this was the point of Pound’s polemic – that the adversarial, detached and elitist model of artistic production favoured by the imagists and (in more complicated ways) the vorticists was the most effective way to serve the national interest. However, beyond his invective against Poetry – he attacked its support for regionalist writing, arguing that ‘the mere geographical expanse of America’ could not ‘produce of itself excellent writing’ – Pound did not denounce literary nationalism per se.171 Indeed, his editorialising for The Little Review began to propose that avant-gardes could be potential allies of political orthodoxy and national interests, which coheres to a certain extent with Alfred Kreymborg’s model of dissenting nationalism discussed in the previous chapter. But, typically, the splintering avant-gardes that originally converged in Others had different plans. In his seminal ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell, also published in The Little Review, Williams argued that ‘Americans have the parts and the colors but not the completions before them’.172 Yet he perceived that provisionality as a strength, rather than as a limitation. As we shall see in the next chapters, and as his revisions to the ‘Vortex’ manuscripts indicate, Williams and his milieu agreed with Lewis in his emphasis on specificity, extemporisation and advertising culture. So ironically, despite Blast’s failure to create an immediate sensation across the Atlantic, the deferred impact of literary

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 79

25/01/2013 15:53

80 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

vorticism in America re-presented analogous problems of place, space and nation to the post-war Americanist avant-gardes debating the trajectories of their own movements. In the private confines of writers’ manuscripts and in front of the transatlantic readership of little magazines, between 1917 and 1919 these crucial discussions shifted focus away from the locational poetics of the mid-1910s towards the localist dialogues conducted between groups converging in Chicago and New York in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 80

25/01/2013 15:53

CHAPTER 3

‘BACKGROUNDS AND EXTENSIONS’: THE ASCENT OF LOCALIST MODERNISM

Introduction This chapter traces the development of localist modernism from the little magazines, performance cultures and archives of the late 1910s to the moment of its first articulation in the early 1920s. As America prepared to enter World War I, a new era of exceptionalist literature surfaced in the modernist magazines of the period, and avant-garde poets responded with a mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation. As the post-war period dawned in the United States, the decline of Wilsonian internationalism, the rise of ‘Americanization’ and ‘melting pot’ nationalism, and restrictions on immigration began to recalibrate the relationship between literary modernism and national identity. In the latter half of 1918, The Little Review produced two American numbers that bookended the ‘International Episode’, which erupted in several transatlantic little magazines when Ezra Pound endorsed Edgar Jepson’s article ‘The Western School’.1 In the article, Jepson derided recent winners of Poetry’s annual prizes as little more than hackneyed regional writers. The East Coast avant-garde responded with a tangential debate, which ultimately plotted the trajectory of localist modernism. In The Little Review, writers such as William Carlos Williams, Marsden Hartley, Wallace Gould, Robert McAlmon and various members of the Others group used the ‘International Episode’ as a stimulus for a new articulation of locational modernism. Reflecting on this period in his autobiography, Gorham Munson differentiated Williams’s emphasis on ‘the local and the new’ from the high modernism of Eliot and Pound and the ‘mystical nationalism of [Walt] Whitman, [Alfred] Stieglitz and [Waldo] Frank’.2 But this ‘localist who wrote in the United States language’ was

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 81

25/01/2013 15:53

82 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

part of a wider project; the effort to distinguish a unique aesthetic whilst embedding it within the discourse networks of the modernist transatlantic was in some ways the defining struggle of the localist avant-garde.3 Ironically, the Americanist strain of literary modernism began its most intense divergences at the very moment at which little magazine editors were attempting to consolidate a national(ist) canon.4 James Oppenheim’s upmarket literary review The Seven Arts joined The Dial in expounding a culturally pluralist programme in keeping with its base in Greenwich Village, whilst deriving a rejuvenated conception of ‘national literature’ from the new regionalist writing emerging from the Midwest. Meanwhile, magazines such as Robert J. Coady’s experimental miscellany The Soil offered a more aggressively demotic, urban and visually based language for Americanist modernism. Nevertheless, the new regionalist modernism favoured by the ‘Young American’ writers of The Seven Arts and the unfocused aggregate of avant-garde art and popular culture in The Soil created an opportunity for dissenting literary nationalisms to emerge in response. To this end, Williams and McAlmon joined the remnants of the Others group to refine a broader discussion about American modernism which had taken root in The Little Review, The Dial, The Soil and several unrealised projects based in Chicago, St Louis and New York. They focused their interests into a specialised discourse about the contingencies of aesthetic production in their little magazine Contact. Energised by obscure Midwestern talents who emerged during the final stages of Others’ activity, Williams and McAlmon launched Contact to reconfigure the modernist problem of place as one of location.5 Following the emergence of regional ‘Americanization’ programmes in the late 1910s and early 1920s, John Dewey provided Williams and McAlmon with a key distinction between ‘Americanism’ and ‘localism’. Drawing on the context-rich details that emerged in America’s periodical print culture, Dewey noted that ‘a locality exists in three dimensions. It has a background and also extensions.’6 Extending that precept into the specialised spheres of little magazines, the emerging localist emphasis rejected sectional regionalism, vacant nationalism and restrictive nativism. Rooted in Deweyan pragmatism and the avant-garde praxis of the early New York dadaists, localist modernism combined the affective strategies of new regionalism with the transactional processes of cultural localism. The result inaugurated an ongoing project of self-definition, against and in dialogue with the locational poetics of the transatlantic avant-gardes.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 82

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 83

‘Literary Americanism’: The Seven Arts and the New Regionalism In September 1916, a resurgent ‘Literary Americanism’ in The Dial catalysed several vanguards in the autumn of that year, providing New York with a strong link to the Chicago Renaissance.7 One of the most important new enterprises was the New York journal The Seven Arts, which ‘flashed across the literary horizon for only a year, from November 1916 to October 1917’.8 Oppenheim intended to identify ‘that latent America, that potential America which [. . .] lay hidden under our commercial-industrial national organization’ when he founded The Seven Arts.9 His magazine became a forum and catalyst for the ‘Young Americans’, a new generation of nationalist writers which included Oppenheim, Frank, Brooks, Randolph Bourne, Paul Rosenfeld, Lewis Mumford, Louis Untermeyer, Harold Stearns and others. Heavily subsidised by its wealthy patron Annette Rankine, The Seven Arts advanced ‘an indigenous modern culture’ which also mounted a ‘critique of the industrial division of labor and its cultural consequences’.10 This quest for an organic cultural unity was predicated upon Whitman’s sense of ‘mystical nationalism’ and grounded in the Progressive politics of cultural pluralism.11 The new regionalism emerging in The Seven Arts evolved in tandem with the Chicago Renaissance, and its main purpose was to surmount the sectional divisions in the United States by grafting writers’ affective and spiritual bonds with specific regions onto an overarching narrative of cultural nationalism. In an early editorial, Brooks argued that this new affective impulse was quite distinct from ‘the surface values of “local color” ’ and ‘the “social conscience” ’ that had characterised earlier versions of regionalism.12 Despite its sweeping calls for cultural reform and formal radicalism, however, The Seven Arts actually proposed to revamp existing literary paradigms rather than endorse a truly ‘modernising’ literature. Brooks shared Oppenheim’s, Frank’s and Anderson’s suspicion of overtly technical literary methods, the ‘self-conscious and intellectual’ brand of ‘modern art’ in which ‘the artist has longed to be a scientist’.13 In fact, most Young American contributors viewed poets who published in Others, Rogue and even Poetry as symptoms of a cultural decline, not prophylactics against it.14 However, they also perceived a risk in the technical limitations of ‘local color’ regionalism, and sought to distinguish a middle ground from which a new national literature might emerge.15 Thus, the modernism of The Seven Arts was politically progressive but formally quite conservative, and despite Brooks’s belief that ‘our inherited culture has [. . .] utterly failed to meet the exigencies of our life, to seize and fertilize its roots’, the Young Americans preferred writing that did not seek to diverge too drastically from the models set

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 83

25/01/2013 15:53

84 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

down by Whitman or the naturalist writer Theodore Dreiser.16 The aesthetic proposed in The Seven Arts by writers such as Sherwood Anderson offered a spiritual compass to those ‘who, plunging into the American maelstrom’, might otherwise ‘[lose] their vision altogether’.17 Anderson presented a map of small-town America that proposed an affective basis for national identity, but which retained formal and thematic impulses conversant with literary modernism. As Frank observed in the inaugural issue, although he was not the finished article, Anderson suggested a modernising ‘native culture’ aligned against the encroaching menace of industrialisation.18 Anderson’s short story ‘Mid-American Prayer’ from his Mid-American Chants collection configures a Freudianinflected union with his native soil. In this narrative, the goal of his regional specificity is, paradoxically, its obliteration, and his encounter with alterity retreats into a fantasy in which familiar stereotypes and cultural hierarchies are restored in the final passage: I was sucked face downward in the black earth of my western corn land [. . .] In the night the fields mysterious and vast, voices of Indians, names remembered, murmurings of winds, the secret mutterings of my own young boyhood and manhood. The men and women among whom I lived destroyed my ability to pray. The sons of New Englanders who brought books and smart sayings into our MidAmerica destroyed the faith in me that came out of the ground.19

Here, Anderson roots this (Mid-)American identity in the protagonist’s affective connection with the soil, where the remembered ‘voices of Indians’ are already confined to the past and remain only to affirm the territorially inscribed (and thus more authentically) American identity of the white settlers. The ‘prayer’ connects the narrator’s adolescent nostalgia for an idealised American Indian, which is rather unsubtly paired with the lost innocence of childhood. In the context of the new regionalism, this figure ‘resists the hegemonic abstraction of national culture: grounded in the region, but integrated in cosmopolitan networks, [the Indian’s] genuine culture leapfrogs over the industrial State’.20 Anderson distinguishes this regionally ‘grounded’ identity by creating a clear boundary between the cognitive mapping of place represented by the ‘sons of New Englanders’ and the affective and spiritual mapping that occurs in his ‘Mid-American Prayer’. In his vision of a national literature, Brooks proposed a model of affective mapping which ‘proceeds from within outward’, a pan-American ‘dynamic unity’ mobilised against the divisive forces of industrialisation.21

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 84

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 85

Hsuan L. Hsu has identified ‘affective mapping’ as a process by which nineteenth-century American writers, including Whitman and naturalists such as Frank Norris, ‘attempt[ed] not only cognitively to grasp spatial scales but also to invest them with emotional bonds’.22 These strategies ‘instil emotional identification at the global scale [. . .] paradoxically, by deploying feelings of despair and disconnection to convey a desire for global interconnectedness’.23 The Seven Arts updated these regionalist praxes for the twentieth century by co-opting the rhetoric of cultural mourning as a stimulant for national as well as ‘global interconnectedness’. In this formulation, Freudian-inflected modernist subjectivities could be configured as a social utility rather than a distracting decadence, since writers could bring ‘hidden desires into consciousness’ to ‘tap and drain off destructive impulses’ in the reader, thus ‘sav[ing] the individual’ – and, by extension, serving the national interest – ‘through a vicarious experience’.24 Thus, the modernising rhetoric of The Seven Arts tied literature directly to a pragmatist programme of social reform. Nevertheless, the same blind spots traditionally germane to regionalist writing persisted in The Seven Arts. In terms of both form and content, the new regionalists sometimes shared ‘local colour’ regionalists’ nostalgia for technical orthodoxy and traditional hegemonic social structures, as well as the stereotypes believed to sustain them. African American dialect writing also served as a repository for primitivist impulses in regionalist modernism, and glimpses of this tendency appear in The Seven Arts. For example, Alice Corbin Henderson’s sequence ‘Echoes of Childhood: A Folk-Medley’ included poems such as ‘Uncle Jim’, ‘Cross-Eyed Peter’s Valentine’ and ‘The Old Negro Alone’, which situated the racial other as an ‘authentic’ voice of American folk expression, but only insofar as it served and supported the dominant white version of that authenticity.25 Versions of these tactics also surface in the first item printed in The Seven Arts, the Texan writer Barry Benefield’s short story ‘Simply Sugar Pie’. Set ‘on the ragged southern edge’ of the ‘little Louisiana town’ Crebillon, the story initially bears all the hallmarks of conventional local colour regionalism, from the infantalising nickname of its pregnant African American protagonist, to its primitivist stereotypes, to its use of dialect, to its small-town-American setting.26 However, the narrative also expresses the cultural pluralism and Progressive politics of The Seven Arts and the proto-agrarian narratives of Southern gothic literature. Benefield’s tropes critique not only the encroachment of Northern industrialisation, but also the destructive racism that threatened to tear apart American communities in the South when flashpoints occurred. Benefield conveys physical violence analeptically or proleptically in

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 85

25/01/2013 15:53

86 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

the narrative itself, but registers it on Sugar Pie’s body throughout, and the shock of impending mob violence eventually induces a stillbirth in the protagonist. Due partly to exhaustion, and partly to defiance, she remains in the town long enough to bury the child in a ‘blue silk handkerchief and [a] white blanket and [a] red shawl’.27 When the infant was buried, ‘Sugar Pie set both hands to smoothing it into a mounded shape, stooping over frequently to rub her cheek against the cold earth’.28 Effectively, the red, white and blue drapery wraps the stillborn infant in the American flag, and his premature death and ‘almost white’ pallor quite literally embodies a national as well as a regional crisis in race relations. Nevertheless, like Anderson’s ‘Mid-American Prayer’, ‘Simply Sugar Pie’ suggests that the American soil provides the redemptive ground for spiritual and reproductive renewal. If the (political) consciousness of Benefield’s subject remained underexplored, then his warning was clear: when Sugar Pie buries her stillborn infant, she covers it with ‘a multi-colored shroud’.29 As the journal’s first published work, Benefield’s short story underscored the precarious enterprise that The Seven Arts had undertaken in developing its brand of pluralist (or, reductively, ‘multi-colored’) nationalism. George Hutchinson has identified the ‘ “native” modernism’ of The Seven Arts as a movement ‘that identified American transnationalism with global anti-imperialism’, whose objective was to establish an American identity primarily in opposition to an English one, but not by inculcating a ‘melting pot’ model of social homogeneity.30 Although the magazine attempted to represent and celebrate America’s heterogeneity (through its subjects, if not necessarily in its contributors), in practice it could do little more than mourn its racial violence, nativism and urbanisation. Indeed, Stearns argued that America remained divided by ‘sharp and distinct economic and cultural backgrounds’ and ‘politically [. . .] by a sectionalism which reinforces a bitter memory by an actual historical “line” ’.31 In the final issue of The Seven Arts, however, the Afro-Caribbean poet Claude McKay, writing under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, concluded that a new poetics might eventually emerge from this cultural fragmentation. In ‘Harlem Dancer’ McKay gives that ‘Modern time’ a discrete location. He counterpoints the ‘Applauding youths’ and ‘young prostitutes’ in the cabaret with the ‘black prayers’ and musical harmonies that the speaker imagines animate the performer. His portrayal compounds the sense of alienation and risk faced by black artists in America, but indicates that new modes of expression might emerge from these contact zones. The poem moulds that sense of discord into the nightclub the dancer performs in, creating for the speaker both a parody of and an intense longing for the ancestral lands of the black diaspora in America. The speaker depicts the

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 86

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 87

Harlem dancer as ‘a proudly-swaying palm / Grown lovelier for passing though a storm’, but notes that ‘her self was not in that strange place’. Her art, though original, creates a means of transcending her urban surroundings, rather than connecting with them, but the tentative shoots of a new and culturally hybrid art had taken root in the process.32 Perhaps ironically, the Young Americans of The Seven Arts were more confident when mediating America’s transnational relationships abroad than when addressing the cultural diversity of their own nation. In the final issue of the magazine, Oppenheim enthused about essays on ‘Young India’ by Lajpat Rai and an article on Turgenev and Russian literature by Willard Huntington Wright; embracing cosmopolitanism, he believed, could ‘become the nucleus of a greater national consciousness’.33 However, the practical implications of such transnationalism left the Young Americans with some anxieties about the nation’s abilities to cope with this diversity, particularly during an influx of new immigration. In his sweeping study Our America, Frank celebrated America’s plurality, but also detected an ‘ethnic chaos from which a new world must be gathered’.34 Nevertheless, at this stage, Frank was far more concerned with the deleterious effects of industrialisation and the rise of metropolises, an urban ‘chaos’ which he traced back primarily to ‘the clamped dominion of Puritan and Machine’.35 This process of urbanisation produced in Frank’s eyes a worrying overabundance of life, where the ‘streets rise with the poured human waste’.36 Thus, as the 1910s drew to a close, the Young Americans’ programme of national unity actually highlighted intractable regional, ethnic and racial divisions lurking within the ‘latent America’ they sought to uncover37 – and, in the case of Frank, that ‘native modernism’ served as a precursor for his emerging nativist programme of the 1920s.38 The rise of urban culture and a concomitantly urbane modernism ultimately proved divisive to both the Young Americans and the writers they sought to sponsor.

Local Alternatives: The Soil and the ‘End’ of Others Like The Masses before it, The Seven Arts was finally undone by World War I, as its patron eventually found its editors’ (and especially Bourne’s) continued pacifism untenable. However, alternative responses emerged alongside the Young Americans’ early career in New York, not only to the global conflict, but to the anti-urban nationalism that The Seven Arts endorsed. Launched one month after The Seven Arts in December 1916, Robert J. Coady’s short-lived magazine The Soil emerged from Greenwich Village’s modern art and literary milieus, and featured work by Maxwell

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 87

25/01/2013 15:53

88 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Bodenheim, Charlie Chaplin, Arthur Cravan, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, among others. Coady presented a detailed and aggressively metropolitan collage of America’s urban spaces. His grandiose Whitmanian cataloguing revealed an industrialised, youthful and erratic nation whose cultural development had ‘grown out of the soil and through the race and [would] continue to grow [. . .] and add a new unit to Art’.39 Where The Seven Arts used the motif of ‘the soil’ as a spiritual medium for organic growth and a touchstone of agrarian nostalgia, Coady established it as primordial ooze from which an industrial civilisation could blossom. Despite its brief publication run, which lasted only one year, The Soil’s reputation for individualistic and polemical (if not always coherent) criticism persisted until Coady’s death in 1921 in the specialist spheres of little magazines.40 Avant-garde yet stridently democratic, Coady’s strategy was far more ambitious and inclusive than Others, but it clearly overlapped with and extended Alfred Kreymborg’s policies. In fact, according to Gorham Munson, Coady had originally proposed joining forces with Kreymborg and merging Others with The Soil, using Coady’s Washington Square Gallery as the base of a combined enterprise.41 Kreymborg declined, but Coady had already identified the latent commercial impulse in Others and the Greenwich Village journals, and pushed it to the centre of his own editorial policy. Where other journals either were threatened by commercial culture or attempted to disguise their engagements with it, The Soil openly embraced ‘the creative by-products’ of America’s ‘essentially acquisitive drive’; and where the Young Americans looked West to recapture America’s frontier culture, ‘Coady lived in a skyscraper wilderness’.42 And rather than looking to imagism, as Kreymborg had done, Coady referred to the conflicted urban energies of vorticism when he launched The Soil. Like Williams’s unpublished ‘Vortex’ manuscripts, Coady’s quasieditorial article ‘The Book of Job’ eulogised the death of Gaudier-Brzeska, using remarkably similar vorticist techniques of juxtaposition and quotation. Following a lengthy excerpt from the Book of Job, Coady records that the sculptor ‘died a noble death’, and proceeds to quote from ‘Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska (Written from the Trenches)’: ‘ “This war is a great remedy.” “It takes away from the masses numbers upon numbers of unimportant units whose economic activities become noxious.” ’43 Whether a tribute to the sculptor’s sacrifice and artistic principles, or a critique of his cold-blooded logic, the schadenfreude of Coady’s quotation very nearly matches Gaudier-Brzeska’s own, a sentiment compounded in the subsequent mis en page. Photographs of a Chambersberg Steam Hammer and two steam locomotives follow the Gaudier-Brzeska quotation, and the effect is to pair industrial machinery with industrial-scale slaughter.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 88

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 89

Coady’s attempt at urbane commentary is delivered with a rather heavy hand, however, and the end product of these juxtapositions is an ambivalent assertion of American exceptionalism, teetering ambiguously on the brink of self-reflexive critique, crude triumphalism or staggering naïvety. He describes American art as ‘robust, energetic, naive, immature, daring and big spirited’, and whilst some of his efforts cast these adjectives in a pejorative rather than affirmative light, his broader point was valid: ‘American Art’ had acquired new complexities by virtue of its contact with its industrial centres, which had not been fully accounted for by the various ‘isms’.44 To showcase the country’s rapid development, Coady combined futurist themes with Whitman’s democratic poetics, and the insouciant irony of Rogue with contrarian vorticist polemics. Although these formulae sometimes produced muddled juxtapositions where poignant apposition was intended, throughout its publication run, The Soil’s relentless interrogation of American art was provocative. In his review of the 1917 Independent Artists’ Exhibition in the final issue, for instance, Coady asked whether ‘the Society hope[d] to compete with the Paris Independent, of which it is an imitation’.45 The Soil posed uncomfortable questions for New York’s avant-gardes, to which they had no answers. Indeed, Williams praised The Soil as a ‘democratic’ and ‘lively’ aggregation of American culture, but wryly concluded that it was more like the dadaist journal The Blind Man than Coady cared to admit: both were ‘very useful, very “purgative,” very nice decoration, even very true’, but ultimately unfocused, and derivative.46 By the end of 1917, both The Soil and The Seven Arts were folding, and Williams saw no American journal ready to take their place, just partially fulfilled ambitions or faded versions of previously innovative programmes. When Coady first proposed merging The Soil and Others, his own project was in the stronger position. Following the summer of 1916, Others’ publication schedule disintegrated after a succession of guest-edited special numbers (including Williams’s July ‘Competitive Number’, the August ‘Spanish-American’ number ‘Otros’, and Helen Hoyt’s September ‘Woman’s Number’). But in some respects, this period did not diminish Others as a literary movement, but rather demonstrated its strength and resilience as a brand. From the end of 1916 until the summer of 1919, Others appeared infrequently as a journal, but the work of The Other Players, its three anthologies published in 1916, 1917 and 1920, and the Others Lecture Bureau kept the Others name alive.47 In Chicago, the Others Lecture Bureau also presented four successful events convened at the socialite Anna Morgan’s studio in the spring of 1919, following a well-co-ordinated and well-publicised burst of activity from the regional network that had

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 89

25/01/2013 15:53

90 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

sprung up between Chicago, St Louis and New York. Along with Lola Ridge, the poet, lawyer and government agent Mitchell Dawson (who also acted as a notary for The Little Review) played a major role in co-ordinating these activities, and he was assisted by the poets Orrick Johns, Marion Strobel and William Saphier.48 The migration of the Others name not only extended the matrix of contacts that had begun to open up between the East Coast avant-garde and the Midwest regionalist poets in the summer of 1916. It also transferred the Others name from the world of print culture more directly into the public sphere via salons, lecture halls, theatres and galleries. The Others Lecture Bureau series coincided with the ‘recrudescence’ of the journal as a monthly periodical in December 1918.49 This period, marking Others’ fifth and final volume, was motivated by the editorial support and literary salons of Ridge, who became Associate Editor (and who would later serve as Broom’s American Editor). However, Kreymborg’s propensity for reaching out to ‘big names’ and conspicuously ‘American’ material returned in the final phase of Others, as he attempted to correlate the projects of avant-gardes with the Midwestern new regionalists under the banner of literary nationalism. As Suzanne Churchill has observed, the credibility of Others’ policies suffered during this period because ‘Kreymborg persist[ed] in his idealistic faith that he can play the “game” without taking sides, expand the field without encroaching on other people’s territory, and make new alliances without straining old loyalties’.50 Vachel Lindsay’s attempt to update the themes but not the forms of his regionalist praxis for Others in ‘The Daniel Jazz’ was a risible failure which suggested that the ‘Americanist’ poetics of the Greenwich Village/ Ridgefield free verse avant-garde and the Midwestern new regionalists had grown further apart rather than closer together.51 Even Sandburg’s reputation had now declined amongst some Others poets. In July 1917, Williams had praised Sandburg for ‘studying his form’ and ‘thinking like an artist’.52 By the final issue of Others, however, he complained that ‘The Liberator, print[ed] such ataxic drivel as Sandburg’s [March 1919 poem “The Liars”]. Even from the hand of an artist, Carl, such stuff is inexcusable.’53 A muted anti-war poem, Sandburg’s ‘The Liars’ reduced ‘The People’ to passive by-products of an overarching but loosely defined nationalist schema, awkwardly bolted on to their distinctive local rhythms like the poem’s ‘ataxic’, plodding form and metre.54 In the penultimate issue of Others, Sandburg’s ‘Long Guns’ performed a similar rhetorical manoeuvre. Where they had once suggested formal innovation, Sandburg’s ellipses now confined the violent legacies of America’s westward expansion to a safe and distant memory ‘dreamed . . . in the time of the guns’.55 In the wake of World War I, his paternalistic appeals to a federalist hegemony

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 90

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 91

amounted to a valorisation of the status quo, while his increasingly populist ‘folk melange’ had replaced his emphasis on the living language of the streets. In this sense, Sandburg had now become aligned with the new regionalism of Masters and Anderson. His drift towards ‘windy prairie’ traditionalism made his impact in the July 1916 ‘Competitive Number’ of Others a temporary rather than an enduring convergence.56 Finally, it took the newcomer Emanuel Carnevali to articulate the now-insurmountable limitations of the Others movement. An immigrant from Northern Italy, Carnevali arrived in New York in 1914 at the age of sixteen. Shuttling between Chicago and New York, he built a reputation for writing unconventionally phrased and evocative free verse, and for tempestuous behaviour.57 In the spring of 1919, he delivered a scathing speech at a gathering of Others poets in Ridge’s Greenwich Village apartment, which he later published in his only book, the 1925 collection A Hurried Man. Carnevali’s attack stemmed from his love of what Others had once represented and his rage at what they had become: ‘you are old’, he charged, and ‘your lazy swaying, your minute elusive squirming after truth, you call this technique’.58 Given its timing, Carnevali’s invective appealed to Williams’s polemical streak. When he took charge of Others for one final issue in July 1919, Williams dedicated the issue to Carnevali and once again announced the ‘death’ of Others in two caustic editorials, ‘Gloria!’ and ‘Belly Music’. But this time, he meant it: he declared that ‘Others is not enough. It has grown inevitably to be a lie, like everything else that has been a truth at one time.’59 By 1919, the supposed ‘otherness’ of the largely white and middle-class Others group had become at best a performance, and at worst a falsehood; Carnevali ‘show[ed] us what we are, rats’, Williams declared, and, with that knowledge, ‘Others has been blasted out of existence’.60 Carnevali represented the promise and ambition that Others once championed, and through his polemical stance simultaneously exposed its decline into irrelevance. Carnevali attacked the ‘seclusion’ that the Others coterie now stood for, not necessarily by reaching out to regionalists (although he certainly did that – he was particularly enthusiastic about Sandburg’s work), but by interacting and contaminating himself with the locality in which he lived. Wracked by the onset of encephalitis lethargica, a form of sleeping sickness, and obsessed by fin de siècle French poets, Carnevali had tapped into the moribund energies of his locality to reveal the hollowness of both New York’s avant-gardes and the utopian spaces they had once promised.61 He was ‘the black poet, the empty man, the New York which does not exist’, and measured against the ‘recrudescence’ of Others as a successful magazine, his decline underscored

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 91

25/01/2013 15:53

92 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

the failures not only of the original avant-garde, but, more broadly, of America’s periodical print culture.62 To this end, Williams did not limit his attack to poetry magazines, but extended it to larger journals such as ‘Reedy’s Mirror’, which ‘print[ed] only poems of topical and political interest’, and ‘THE MIDLAND’, which dealt only ‘with the middle west’.63 To Williams, the social realist and new regionalist emphases of these magazines subordinated artists’ engagements with specificity and contingency in favour of the general public’s regional interests.64 Due to the collusion with these journals and the writers they sponsored, the title ‘Others’ and the milieu it had once signified became meaningless. Thus, with a gladiatorial address to Carnevali reminiscent of the ‘retiarii’ and ‘mirmillones’ analogy of Williams’s ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell,65 he declared, ‘We [who are about to die] salute you’.66 The difficulty was, with Carnevali ‘disintegrating’ and Others at an end, where would a new avant-garde emerge from?67

The Afterlives of Others The collapse of Others in July 1919 had only served to underscore the need to refine and rejuvenate the scattered impulses which Williams had detected in the final issues of Others and The Little Review, ‘the only [. . .] magazine which is not a ragbag’.68 And by the summer of 1919, Williams had found at least one provisional answer. Emanuel Carnevali was the Chicago poets’ discovery, but Alva Nola Turner – a troubled poet, preacher and former small-town mayor from Ina, Illinois, who submitted a batch of poems to Others in the spring of 1919 – was Williams’s own. As Mike Weaver notes, Williams was attracted to personalities such as Turner’s, ‘[not] because they [were] neurotic, but because their veracity as thwarted human beings – their unimpaired though distorted vigour – finds expression in action’.69 Williams was fascinated by traumatised individuals worn ragged by their personal circumstances but whose ‘morbidity’ bore evidence of their first chaffing contacts with the new beginnings of American writing. In a letter to Turner, Williams wrote that ‘I want to write you up in the Little Review for you represent to me a number of important things that I think America should realize’.70 Indeed, it was not necessarily what Turner had written – ‘and my God he has written reams of drivel’ – but the ‘phenomena’ he represented that had encouraged Williams.71 Turner’s work appeared in Others and later in Contact, and Williams remained fascinated with him throughout his long career.72 But three manuscripts by Williams emerged from their encounter, which were never published and remained unknown – ‘The Degradation of Life in America’, ‘The Letters & Poems of Alva NP Turner’ and ‘Alva N. Turner – preface to poems’ – chart

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 92

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 93

Williams’s transition from the locational poetics of Others to the Deweyan cultural localism of Contact. Williams once intended to publish them in little magazines, but probably realised that they were actually transitional documents in which he worked out his own problems of place rather than introduced the work of Turner. They are part of the archive which helps clarify the ways in which localist modernism could diverge from the affective literary nationalism of new regionalism, yet still maintain contact with overseas avant-gardes.73 For Williams, Turner provided a homegrown counterpart to the ‘modern European culture’ Carnevali had imported from Italy.74 Whereas Carnevali’s writing provided an exhilarating record of an immigrant’s new beginnings shaped by his sustained contact with America’s urban decay, Turner’s embodied the rural expression of America’s ‘degradation’ through the ‘purity of his isolation and his clarifying decay’.75 And where Carnevali’s work was the product of youthful effusion, Turner’s was the result of brutal revision, ‘an excoriating scrapping of almost everything he has done [. . .] in order to come at a stanza or a well turned line’.76 Yet, to Williams, Turner’s ‘uncompromising degeneracy’ is not a regressive or imitative mode of literary exoticism, but an incandescent expression of his locality which very occasionally broke through, lifting his poetry into conversation with his global contemporaries.77 Turner’s poetry was variable, and very often bad, but in the spare, imagistic ‘Lillian’ (a poem that apparently made him ‘famous in literary circles’ in Chicago), he approaches the compression, cadence and formal precision Others had once stood for.78 Williams’s interest in Turner’s work dovetailed seamlessly with a renewed debate about specifically ‘American’ writing that had taken shape in The Little Review during the decline of Others.79 The poet-painter Marsden Hartley rearticulated the importance of ‘the virile sense of place that underlies the work of modern poets, or at least the best of them’ and ‘the feeling for [their] own specific soil’.80 His emphasis on specificity appealed to Williams, who joined Hartley in his enthusiasm for the Maine-based poet Wallace Gould’s writing in ‘A Maker’.81 To Hartley and Williams, Gould’s poetry was predicated on a technically accomplished engagement with his locality which asserted a distinct sense of modernist selfhood. The discussion descended into petty banter between Williams, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson before it was resolved, but it encouraged the postOthers avant-garde to refine their tactics. Individual poets such as Gould, Carnevali and Turner had helped distinguish this group’s aesthetics from both the Midwestern new regionalists and the high modernist expatriates, but only by shoehorning them into more established journals. Clearly, organisational talents rather than attention-grabbing newcomers were

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 93

25/01/2013 15:53

94 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

needed to galvanise this nascent localist avant-garde in a magazine of its own. At exactly this time, two Midwesterners – Mitchell Dawson from Chicago and Robert McAlmon from Kansas (via California) – stepped in to reconfigure the localist avant-garde. Like Wallace Stevens, Mitchell Dawson was both a lawyer and a poet, but he remained on the margins of the modernist canon. However, Randy Ploog’s research has revealed that Dawson’s poetic, publishing and legal career placed him at the very centre of American modernism in the late 1910s and early 1920s.82 Dawson published poems in The Little Review, Others and The Double Dealer, and coedited TNT (as a ‘silent partner’) with Adolf Wolff, Man Ray and Henry S. Reynolds. He also went on to edit his own short-lived chapbook series Musterbook with Hi Symons in 1921. Alongside his key role in the Others Lecture Bureau, he engaged in a generous and revealing correspondence with Kreymborg, Williams and McAlmon following his meetings with them in May 1919.83 Not only do their exchanges reveal that Williams’s supposed assassination of Others had been overstated, but they also reveal that Dawson, like Coady before him, tried to resurrect the journal in another form: From 1919 through 1921, Dawson maintained correspondence with Kreymborg, Williams, and Ridge in his efforts to establish a new poetry magazine [and for] a time, Dawson envisioned [Carnevali] as a potential assistant editor [. . .] Dawson, for the title of his new magazine, proposed to call it Compromise, a reference to The Little Review’s slogan, ‘making no compromise with the public taste.’ Williams found little in the proposed title to embrace.84

Williams’s responses, shelved in the Dawson archives, reveal how close the proposed journal came to appearing. His essay ‘A New Weapon’ contains a post-post mortem of Others directly addressed to Kreymborg, which reflects on the arguments of ‘Belly Music’ whilst continuing Williams’s fervent focus on ‘the new’.85 The archive also reveals that Kreymborg and Williams were in fairly regular contact during the final phase of Others’ production and that, in their surprisingly conciliatory mood, each supported Dawson’s efforts to continue the magazine in some form. However, the three disagreed about how best to proceed with the venture. On 19 July 1919, Williams wrote to Kreymborg (who in turn sent the letter to Dawson at Williams’s request) to inform him that I don’t much care for the name COMPROMISE but then I didn’t like the name OTHERS at first. CESSPOOL might be a good name [. . .] YELLOW

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 94

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 95

might do. Best of all is OTHERS or else COMPROMISE, but damn it, are we not capable of evolving something new? Something that will generate its own title. Oh, call it THE NEW OTHERS and wait for why not RAIN or, for that matter, GLUE.86

Despite the extensive discussion and several title changes – in 1920, Williams and McAlmon began referring to it as New Moon – the magazine never emerged. However, the project potentially sheds some light on a longstanding mystery about a ‘post mortem’ issue of Others. In Troubadour, Kreymborg claimed that the ‘post-mortem on the part of Lola [Ridge]’ represented ‘still another number on top of the one [that Others subscribers] had been asked to accept as an obituary’.87 The Dawson correspondence indicates that Ridge was indeed involved in some of the Compromise/ New Moon discussions, and several manuscripts had been collected for it, including Williams’s manifestos and his short story ‘The Accident’ (which later appeared in Contact), and several mentions of works by Dawson, McAlmon, Carnevali and Turner crop up in their discussions.88 Kreymborg may have linked this project or some early prototype to this phantom issue, or his recollection may simply be wrong, since no evidence of a further Others issue has ever come to light.89 But as memories of Others’ spectacular exit faded, Carnevali’s mental and physical health deteriorated further, Turner and Gould failed to capture the little magazines’ attention, and the potential editorial syndicate of Dawson, Kreymborg and Williams stalled. Even the arrival of McAlmon from Los Angeles could not spark the ‘new Others’ into life. Nevertheless, McAlmon’s brief visit to Chicago in the spring of 1919 and subsequent relocation to New York in the summer of 1920 began a concerted debate about the shape and aesthetic locus of a post-Others avant-garde. Following a period of military service in 1917, McAlmon began writing poetry and editing the Californian aviation magazine The Ace before heading east. He and Dawson seem to have discussed the possibility of collaborating on Compromise/New Moon, but by June 1920 McAlmon decided to proceed alone.90 Even at this early stage of his career, McAlmon exhibited an undeniable talent for forging strategic allegiances. He had accurately discerned the fissures in the New York-St Louis-Chicago avant-garde poetry axis that precipitated the demise of Others, and he divided the modern American poetry scene along its regional(ist) lines. Like Williams, he believed that the key to a literary paradigm shift involved mobilising the ‘right sort of people’ to ‘analyze the soul of American institutions’.91 And he eventually met them at a party hosted by Lola Ridge in her Greenwich Village flat

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 95

25/01/2013 15:53

96 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

in the summer of 1920, after he had visited Carnevali and Dawson in Chicago. By this stage, McAlmon had already devised a plan for a specialised magazine which would have ‘1000 eight page copies of an issue in newspaper form, about half usual newspaper size’, produced by and distributed to ‘the right sort of people’.92 Dawson distanced himself from the scheme, but McAlmon eventually convinced Williams and they decided to launch a journal together in August 1920. The pair shared a sense of urgency because of the escalating influence of ‘foreign editors’, the rise of the dada movement in The Little Review and the emergence of The Dial as the dominant literary voice in New York following its takeover by Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson. Thayer and Watson bought the magazine in the autumn of 1919, dispensing with its political content and relocating it from Chicago to Greenwich Village.93 When McAlmon and Williams began their initial discussions for Contact in August 1920, McAlmon insisted that ‘the first issue [of the new magazine] ought to tear things up a bit, to start comment – the slavish spirit of the Dial, the odiferous exoticism of a lot of the L[ittle] R[eview]; the disciplined traditional politeness of Poetry’;94 to McAlmon and Williams, these journals were more concerned with audience reception than literary production, and both had ignored the new problems of place and location posed by the advent of dadaism. Drawing on the literary contacts that they had amassed throughout the previous decade, the editors initiated a new form of specialised ‘contact’ amongst the American avant-garde in the final months of 1920.95

The Edges of America: Localist Poetics in Contact In the liminal period between the end of Others and the launch of Contact, Williams and McAlmon forged their version of cultural localism. McAlmon conducted this process primarily through his correspondence, while Williams privately worked out the crucial difference between ‘the local’ and ‘local colour’ regionalism in his unpublished manuscripts about Turner. In ‘Alva N. Turner – preface to poems’, which was probably written in 1920, Williams charted some of the problems that the elastic terminology of place, space, region and nation posed for artists. He argued that ‘couleur locale is an exploded myth. It is the cult of the exotic under a new name.’96 This is because local colour writers fetishised the caricatures and stereotypes that necessarily resulted from pandering to nostalgic and escapist fantasies, ‘dressing up small town folk to dance in their novels’.97 Williams argued that there was ‘nothing local in these pieces of work’, because these genres were ‘confused with a patchwork, colors already fixed

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 96

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 97

and borrowed entire’.98 By contrast, localist art involved ‘a complete identification between the artist and the thing he is treating of’ and with which he is ‘engaged [. . .] to the last particle’.99 In this formulation, location becomes a matter of formal innovation, a cognitive exercise in which ‘the form is related to the matter and the matter to a place’, as well as an affective engagement with the subject. Location, in other words, had little to do with ‘place’ in the sense that it is used by Michel Foucault, where place represents something ‘dead’ and static – or, as Williams would phrase it, a site where ‘colours [are] already fixed and borrowed’.100 McAlmon had come to similar conclusions in his correspondence with Dawson. His phallocentric preoccupation with ‘ideas’, ‘perception’ and ‘hard’, ‘real’ aesthetics had been well established before Contact, and he defined them in opposition to the Midwestern new regionalists.101 Sandburg, Anderson and Lindsay, McAlmon felt, were simply ‘groping’ for a ‘Main [Street] cultural provincialism’, and he contended instead that a ‘calm, cold, intellectual machine, with a human viewpoint, can also produce something of value’.102 Like Williams, McAlmon derived his rough-hewn form of pragmatist aesthetics from Dewey’s articles in The New Republic and The Dial.103 In ‘Belly Music’, Williams had demanded that ‘John Dewey’ take control of the faltering Dial and ‘emplace an intelligence in his associates’.104 When that did not happen, and The Dial and The Little Review instead pursued a more conventional literary ‘exoticism’ (which included work produced at home as well as abroad), McAlmon and Williams agreed that attack was the best form of defence and launched Contact in December 1920. The first Contact editorials responded directly to a prediction by the new Foreign Editor of The Little Review, John Rodker, that in the summer of 1920 dada would ‘capture America like a prairie fire’.105 Since Contact wanted ‘above all things to speak for the present’, in his first editorial Williams asked what many of his specialised readership were thinking: ‘[w]hy not in that case have devoted ourselves to dadaism, that latest development of the french [sic] soul?’106 The answer derived from two editorial precepts set forth in the first issue: McAlmon’s declaration that ‘we will adopt no aggressive or inferior attitude toward “imported thought” or art’;107 and Williams’s ‘insistence’ on ‘the essential contact between words and the locality that breeds them’: ‘America is a bastard country where decomposition is the prevalent spectacle but the contour is not particularly dadaesque [. . .] We should be able to profit from this french [sic] orchid but only on condition that we have the local terms.’108 So the editors’ quarrel was not with foreign work per se – they called ‘attention, at the same time, and acknowledge[d] our debt to all importation of excellence from abroad’ – but rather with the level of deference shown towards

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 97

25/01/2013 15:53

98 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

‘imported art’ by editors of domestic little magazines, and their inability to foster specialised literary debate amongst practising writers in America.109 Williams’s thinly veiled attack on The Dial offered a case in point; paradoxically, their supposed cosmopolitanism was actually ‘provincial in the worse sense because’ it was ‘wholly derivative’.110 Contact’s response was to ‘limit our effort not only to give it force but to give it universality, that which cannot be bought by smearing a lick of borrowed culture over so many pages’.111 Yet Williams recognised that his terminology and policy – and, more broadly, the dialogic environment that he hoped to foster – was incipient, and that Contact had ‘nothing to show but a beginning’.112 In Contact 4, however, Williams refined his diagnosis to critique the ‘worst of the anthology method’ in ‘American periodic literature’, which ‘represent[ed] no position taken but which offer[ed] at best certain snippets in juxtaposition, implying that when one piece is like the other both are good’.113 Such strategies were problematic enough in The Soil, but in The Dial they meant that the journal was ‘innocent of local effects upon itself, [and] cannot possibly present foreign work in anything but a blurred light, on a constantly wavering screen’.114 And yet, The Dial was instrumental to Contact’s localist modernism, not least because it published Dewey’s seminal article on United States literature ‘Americanism and Localism’. In it, Dewey helped articulate a strategy for configuring an American avant-garde as well as his own poetics using a nodal, transactional model of geographical and textual locality. Dewey’s article was a response to Oppenheim’s essay ‘Poetry – Our First National Art’, which appeared in The Dial of February 1920. The articles carried over the debates about national literature conducted in the magazine before Thayer and Watson’s takeover, but the brief exchange catalysed Contact’s schematisation of the local, the national and the occasional in American literary discourse in opposition to the ‘mystical nationalism’ of The Seven Arts’ alumni.115 Oppenheim cited Dewey and other American public figures, who, when ‘tested by the acid of art’, ‘fail as national symbols’.116 But Dewey inverted Oppenheim’s arguments whilst agreeing with his basic thesis that in the United States, ‘[w]e are all this universal masked by Americanism’.117 Rather than adhere to the forced sense of unity described by Oppenheim, Dewey argued that ‘the locality is the only universal’ because it prioritised ‘discrete’ things and places and resisted the totalising patina of ‘national character’, which, in America, is especially insubstantial, because ‘the bigger and more diversified the country the thinner the net product’.118 Thus, if one ‘[takes] all the localities of the United States and extract[s] their common divisor’, then ‘the result is of necessity a crackling surface’.119 Localism, then, is quite distinct

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 98

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 99

from Americanism; but, Dewey argues, perhaps it shouldn’t be, because ‘[w]hen we explore our neighborhood, its forces and not just its characters and colors, we shall find what we sought’, revealing America’s ‘national character’ one locality at a time.120 The transactional ‘forces’ that Dewey mentions in ‘Americanism and Localism’ produced a contingent, nodal model of ‘the local’ that served as the basis for localist modernism. Read retrospectively against the geographical materialism of Edward Soja, Deweyan pragmatism helps to triangulate further the cultural localism of Contact. As Malcolm Cutchin observes, ‘the transactional view’ posits that the elements and energies of a given locality are ‘co-defining’ and ‘co-constitutive’.121 In this respect, ‘the Deweyan view of place’ is ‘constantly emergent or in flux’ and, as such, ‘the human and natural [environments] are continuously in transactive processes’.122 Soja describes these exchanges as expressions of ‘nodality’, a process which ‘twines together collective activities around other centred and relatively fixed settings’.123 Dewey’s emphasis on cultural and geographical transactions of this nature distinguishes his model of localism from the centripetal or centrifugal ideologies of place and nation typically expressed in regionalist and nationalist modernist writing. The localist modernism of Contact is predicated on the experiential, empirical ‘discovery’ of the local, and for Dewey that form of creative contact was best expressed in the American newspaper, ‘the only genuinely popular form of literature we have achieved [because it] hasn’t been ashamed of localism’.124 Williams and McAlmon shared Dewey’s estimation of periodical print culture, but were careful to distance their ‘local’ print culture from ‘Main Street’ parochialism and instead incorporate the nodal energies of their locality into their specialised avant-garde network. The little magazine format was in some ways inseparable from the tenets of localist modernism, and in some senses its precepts were best articulated in the production and by the reading of the magazine itself. Williams referred to this process as the ‘contact idea’, which stated that since ‘the artist is limited to the range of his contact with the objective world’, artists should pay ‘naked attention to the thing itself’, to turn to their ‘advantage the detail of [their] local contacts’.125 And the editors encoded this praxis on the cover of the little magazine itself.

‘The Impact of Experience’ In its first two issues, Contact was presented on unassuming leaves of cheap foolscap paper, giving it the rough-and-ready appearance of a lowcirculation trade journal – which of course it was, with no more than a few

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 99

25/01/2013 15:53

100 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

hundred copies produced for any given issue. Tan card wrappers covered unpaginated sheets of foolscap donated by Williams’s father-in-law, which were staple-bound with three-wire stitching.126 The pages of Contact’s first two numbers were multigraphed, not mimeographed, as Williams and his critics reported.127 Mimeographs force water-soluble or oil-soluble ink through perforations in the stencil onto most ordinary paper stocks, and thus could reproduce images (Contact 4 was produced using this method, while Contact 3 and 5 were professionally printed). By contrast, multigraphs were small printing machines that used cast type fitted in grooves on a rotating cylinder; as such, they could only reproduce type stocked or ordered by the multigrapher, not images or other designs.128 However, these limitations were appropriate to Williams’s own aesthetics, because they forced him to attend to the visual potential of ‘the word’ alone. On the first two covers, Contact’s editors combined a small and much larger font of the same Times New Roman typeface, and they bordered the title with two lines of text and ellipses. The design exploits blank space – indeed, the first number contains no editorial or distribution information on the front wrapper, only the title – and it artfully fuses typographical and syntactical design (see Fig. 3.1). As John Beck observes, ‘the epiphanic force of actual contact [is] graphically stated by the word’s large typeface, which swells out of the sentences, otherwise adrift with ellipses’.129 However, the ellipses also orientate Contact – the journal’s prominent title becomes a bold intercession in an unspecified trajectory of contemporary discussion of art hitherto compromised or displaced by ‘hypocrisy’. Thus, the second design finds ‘a place in abstraction’ for the editors’ policy of contact: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . adrift, finding a place in abstraction sensually realized through

Contact with his loose world. . . . . . . . . a vast discharge of energy forced by the impact of experience into form.130

The title design of Contact 2 is also a striking representation of the dialogue that the editors call for throughout the issue. Conjoined by ellipses, the two clauses in the second sentence combine a direct quotation from Virgil Jordan’s ‘Patterns’ – ‘a vast discharge of energy’ – and an amalgamation of McAlmon’s own contact theory, which Jordan reinterpreted in his article.131 By configuring contact as ‘a vast discharge of energy / forced by the impact of experience into form’, Williams combined Jordan’s

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 100

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 101

3.1 Front Cover, Contact 1 (December 1920). Image reproduced with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 101

25/01/2013 15:53

102 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

terms with a condensed version of a paragraph in McAlmon’s 1920 article ‘Essentials’ to illustrate both the concept and the nature of Contact’s collaborative enterprise.132 Williams extended this dialogic model when quoting Dewey’s axiom ‘The locality is the only universal’ at the end of his prose piece ‘A Matisse’, which explored how a language of place could mediate artistic perception.133 The impressionistic essay reimagines Matisse creating The Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra, which Williams viewed in the De Zayas Gallery at 500 Fifth Avenue in December 1920.134 ‘A Matisse’ creates a mobile of localities in transit, from the artist, his country and his subject to Williams, Williams’s country and Williams’s subject. The universal genius of the artist becomes embedded in the local ‘french [sic] grass’, the scene of the painting’s creation (which was actually in the Algerian province of Biskra, as the painting’s subtitle suggests). In his reconstruction, Williams recreates the painting’s elision of motion and stasis, of present, corporeal image and suggested or remembered poses, continually shifting tenses, from pluperfect, to past tense, to pluperfect, to present tense. Crucially, the countryside connects the Parisian metropolis with ‘a locomotive [that] could be heard whistling beyond the hill’, inscribing the scene with the modern urban locus that informs Matisse’s technique.135 The quotations that conclude the essay – Dewey’s axiom ‘the locality is the only universal’ and Maurice Vlaminck’s claim that ‘Intelligence is international, stupidity is national, art is local’ – reinforce Williams’s contention that local contingencies are the very currency of international art.136 In this sense, ‘A Matisse’ recreates the ‘cosmopolitan public sphere’ identified by Jahan Ramazani in A Transnational Poetics, where ‘translocal cosmopolitanisms intersect with national and subnational public spheres’.137 Williams’s and McAlmon’s innovation in Contact was to construct these intellectual transactions from the ground up, by setting its contributors a series of problems, possibilities and dialogic formats, rather than editorial prescriptions. These exchanges did not occur via editorial correspondence, as they had done in Poetry, The Little Review and the pre1920 Dial, but rather through a transactional poetic framework, which was a hybrid of formats used in Blast, Others and The Soil. With or without her consent, Williams and McAlmon based this ‘contact idea’ on the poetics of Marianne Moore. As early as the summer of 1920, McAlmon had already identified the balance Moore struck between ‘cold, clear intellect’ and ‘humour’.138 During the preparation for Contact 2, he was convinced that Moore epitomised the Contact ethos: ‘Marianne Moore has it – her version of Contact. She’s the most arrived in the country – God there is music in her words, and ascending force in

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 102

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 103

her thought to a knock out blow.’139 In an uncredited introduction to her poems in the January 1921 issue, McAlmon contested Moore’s reputation as a cold, analytical poet (as articulated by Pound, for example, in The Little Review).140 He argued that Moore’s poetry did not represent a lack of feeling, but rather a ‘complex, refined and proven emotion. In spite of a Whitman, windy-prairie tradition it is possible to rate a threshing machine lower than more delicate mechanisms.’141 This line of reasoning demonstrated that affective and cognitive mapping strategies were not mutually exclusive. In Deweyan terms, Moore’s ‘form’ of ‘structure and conveyance reveals a high type of discovery’, and to the editors, her work embodied a locality through detailed, highly experimental encounters with its minutiae, rather than by regurgitating placeless vistas with exhausted pioneer-speak.142 Although she did not contribute to the first number of Contact, Williams wrote a tribute to Moore’s poetics in ‘Marianne Moore’. He wrote, Will not some dozen sacks of rags observant of intelligence conspire from their outlandish cellar to evade the law?143

The poem sketches out the networked model of literary contact that Williams sought in his magazine. Its emphasis on the material text (the ‘rags’ are ‘stuffed up’ and eventually ‘save[d]’ in ‘a book’) emphasises her intellectual transactions with marginal textual locations – possibly the homespun little magazines in which their milieu first published.144 Her contact has a cleansing, redemptive effect, ultimately ‘saving’ them when they ‘return to the dark street’.145 Williams frames her ‘refined emotion’ as an expression of textual contact, in which austerity and critical detachment does not exclude affect, but rather channels it in specific ways (in ‘Marianne Moore’, for example, he alludes to her ‘warm’ conversation and intellectual generosity). Both Williams and McAlmon enlisted Moore’s contributions to help define their own conceptions of ‘contact’, and Moore eventually reciprocated, completing this cycle with her review of Williams’s Kora in Hell: Improvisations in the fourth issue of Contact.146 Although it was not an entirely positive assessment, her reactions delighted Williams, both her ‘good words’ and her ‘adverse view’ of his ‘violent method’, precisely because of the intellectual friction that they generated.147 In Contact 2, Moore applied her diagnostic instruments to the question of prosody. In ‘Those Various Scalpels’, Moore dissects words to redefine their limits, peering beneath the ‘tissues’ of ‘conventional’ usage to extend

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 103

25/01/2013 15:53

104 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

the boundaries of poetic language with ‘experiment’.148 The poem details the physical features, garments and accessories of a socialite who uses her ‘rich / instruments’ to ‘experiment’ with ‘the tissues of destiny’; however, the speaker cautions that surgery is not tentative: why dissect destiny with instruments which are more highly specialized than the tissues of destiny itself?149

Whilst the poem develops the ‘plea’ for the ‘precise technique’ that Williams detected in ‘Critics and Connoisseurs’, it also issues a similar caution against ostentation150 – in this case, using ‘specialized’ instruments for ornament rather than utility. As Victoria Bazin has noted, several Moore scholars have argued that ‘Those Various Scalpels’ may in fact be ‘a cubist portrait of the poet Mina Loy’.151 Drawing on Moore’s meticulous notebooks, Bazin argues that a brooch Loy wore for her 1916 performance of Kreymborg’s play Lima Beans (which starred both Loy and Williams) ‘reappears in the poem as “Florentine / Goldwork” ’ and, combined with other ‘component parts’, creates ‘a fractured image of the feminine whilst also recalling a conversation about the “hollowness” of fashion’.152 Thus, in ‘Those Various Scalpels’, Moore extended her critique of selfconsciously ‘other’ aesthetics, and implicitly denounced Loy’s sexualised poetics of contact, extending the matrix of creative tensions between the magazine’s contributors. Moore also tacitly reasserted the distinctions between her poetics and those of Loy, which in 1917 Pound had paired as uniquely ‘American’ examples of ‘logopoeia’, ‘a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and characters’.153 Loy also used Contact to rearticulate her poetic credo. Her fascination with the materiality of the text, adolescent sexuality and the intimate spheres of biological and literary contact formed the formally and thematically ‘American’ centre around which her submissions revolved (despite the fact that Loy was English).154 As with her earliest poems in Others, Loy’s references to sexuality, the printed word and society’s ‘others’ proliferate in ‘Summer Night in a Florentine Slum’ and ‘O Hell’. The prose piece is a cable from a foreign locality that draws on the disjunctive syntax and lineation of her poetry, which punctuates her stilted narrative with vivid details. The ‘dwarf news-vendor’ circulates ‘his surplus papers’ around the neighbourhood, and one resident, Sophia, treasures ‘a newspaper clipping from which she read, how her husband had hanged himself in a doorway

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 104

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 105

– cut down at the critical moment by the police’.155 Even in this marginal locality, then, the printed word enshrines the primal power of human contacts and affirms the identity of powerless people. And, as in ‘Love Song’ and ‘To You’, her early contributions to Others, Loy’s technique facilitates an intimate exchange between the author, the body and the printed word. In Contact, that intimacy extends to the physical locality of Florence: ‘I leaned out of the window - - looking at the summer-strewn street; late in heat - - lit with lamps, and mixed my breath with the tired dust.’156 Using the telegraphic dashes, Loy joins the narrator’s body with the smallest particles of place through the medium of breath, and ‘late in heat’ compounds her sexual union with the locality. Ironically, in Contact 1, Loy attempts to preserve her contacts with the Florentine slum that, at the time she composed her submissions, she was struggling to escape. Loy questions the possibility of new beginnings in environments littered with ‘our forebears’ excrements’, and the ironic fulcrum of her poem ‘O Hell’ – ‘Indeed’ – destabilises the effusions of its final strophes.157 Even as Loy reaches back to antiquity to sanctify and elevate adolescent sexuality, the poem’s ironic register indicates that she remains sceptical about poets’ ability to transcend the ‘tatters of tradition’ entirely, regardless of the places they find themselves in.158 Like Loy, Wallace Stevens also contends with the physical boundaries of place as an eroticised zone in Contact, and how these realms are negotiated by poetry and print culture. He is especially concerned with sites where the American mainland meets the sea and the sky, those areas that efface specificity and definitions, and where supposed certainties attached to mainland life are tested and remade. For example, in ‘Invective Against Swans’, the poet, subject and landscape commingle in an imaginative realm in ‘the skies’.159 While ‘Infanta Marina’ offers a more cohesive fusion of muse and landscape, a ‘creature of the evening’ ‘partaking of the sea’, it preserves a measure of the first poem’s detached, sardonic register.160 In Contact, Stevens’s poems provided a cautionary voice that militated against the other contributors’ (excepting Moore) interest in tactile, eroticised poetics of contact. What, then, is Stevens looking for in his American places? Lee Jenkins argues that In poems like ‘Infanta Marina’ [. . .] the romance with region has illicit, ‘venereal’ undertones – and as such offers a contrast with the way Williams unfolds his cultural localism as sexual parable [. . .] to emphasise the relationship between words and the locality which breeds them.161

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 105

25/01/2013 15:53

106 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Stevens calls ‘Infanta Marina’ a ‘creature of the evening’, perhaps one of the ‘Paphian caricatures’ that he mentions in ‘Invective Against Swans’.162 In this respect, ‘Invective Against Swans’ provides a counterpart to the sensual reverie that he sketches out in ‘Infanta Marina’: the poem is an ‘invective’ against a tarnished world that the literary imagination cannot redeem. Its lines are gilded evasions, ‘golden quirks’, rather than records of emotional or physical contact, and his imaginative flights befoul the landscape that he seeks to escape: ‘The crows anoint the statues with their dirt’, as ‘the soul [. . .] being lonely, flies’ detached from the polluted scene. In all of his Contact poems, Stevens configures imaginative, sensual and carnal contacts between his figures and landscapes, but, due to his deep suspicion of such encounters, he regulates them with references to economics and the methods and materials of literary production. Contact, then, is an elusive – and not necessarily desirable – process for Stevens; however, as his poems in Contact 3 suggest, it can hone the physiological mechanisms by which the psyche apprehends the physical world. During Stevens’s lifetime, the eccentric but revealing poems ‘Lulu Gay’ and ‘Lulu Morose’ appeared only in Contact, perhaps because they intervened in Contact’s localist discourse more conspicuously than his poems in Contact 2.163 ‘Lulu Gay’ deals with literary contact in a context of sexual ambiguity. Stevens’s subjects – ‘eunuchs’, ‘barbarians’ and the eponymous Lulu – are conspicuously fantastic, fictive characters who inhabit only literary landscapes, whilst the ‘Lulu’ persona embodies both poet and muse.164 The landscape destabilises the sexual identities of the subjects, but gestures towards a kind of performative communion in which Lulu causes the ‘eunuchs’ to ‘ululate’, her ‘orchidean’ (which in ancient Greek meant ‘testicle’ (OED)) presence restoring their masculinity.165 In ‘Lulu Morose’, Stevens also destabilises the subjects’ sexual identities, and similarly configures the human body as the medial point between fictional and physical place. In this landscape, ‘rough cliffs’ project from ‘maelstrom oceans’, and ‘a spear’ with a ‘sharp edge’ inflicts a ‘belly’ wound, while sharp tastes and spoiled food cause pain, illness and death.166 However, Stevens transfers the severity of this physical environment to the sustenance it yields (‘father nature’ is ‘full of butter’).167 By doing so, he stimulates the hyperawareness of personal space that pain – specifically sharp, stabbing pain – creates, and he discovers an unusual form of creative nourishment in the process. Together, ‘Lulu Gay’ and ‘Lulu Morose’ map out the terms with which Stevens negotiates the actual world and its aesthetic realms. As Paul Giles argues, ‘Stevens’s geographical locations tend always toward a condition of allegorization, even if the allegory appears partially obscure and the poem itself to resist a condition of complete lucidity’.168 So, unlike most

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 106

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 107

of Contact’s contributors, for Stevens, cerebral and theoretical engagement with place is not only possible but actually preferable to the potentially dubious physical engagements encountered in the public sphere. Nevertheless, those intellectual transactions are instigated by his acute awareness of the body’s capacity to mediate textual spaces and physical places. In the context of Contact, Stevens’s locational poetics are held in a state of creative tension with an interrelated matrix of literary emphases. And those tensions were pushed to breaking point in Contact 3.

‘Broken by the Contact’ On 14 February 1921, McAlmon married the British heiress Annie Winifred Ellerman (better known by her pen-name Bryher) at the New York City Municipal Building, and he departed for England shortly thereafter. For Williams, it was a painfully ironic conclusion to a literary partnership founded on a localist mandate; for McAlmon, it was an almost unbelievable (if eventually bittersweet) triumph which enabled him to pursue a career as a writer and publisher in Europe.169 McAlmon assumed the major editorial role for Contact 3, and the layout reflected his escalating ambitions in the field of publishing, which he first outlined in his letters to Dawson.170 He had switched the format from a mimeographed trade journal to a literary supplement-style magazine, professionally printed on newsprint stock. The lavish cover design featured a high-contrast halftone profile of Rex Slinkard (a deceased Californian painter whose letters were serialised by Marsden Hartley in the first three issues) and submissions by Bryher, Burke, H.D. and Stevens. The issue was his last periodical venture before he launched his fine press company Contact Editions in France in 1923. McAlmon intended to maintain his collaboration with Williams, but the basis of their shared poetics was crumbling even before his departure for Europe. Where McAlmon preferred the ‘young, blind religious instinct’ of Slinkard to the increasingly analytical work of his own contemporaries, Williams had been captivated by the young New Jersey poet and critic Kenneth Burke. In his seminal article ‘Yours, O Youth’, Williams identified Burke as a writer who had finally managed to articulate the translocal poetics of Contact which set down the materialist basis of its cultural localism. As Williams explained, Burke’s essay ‘The Armour of Jules Laforge [sic]’ ‘illustrate[s] what Bob and I mean by contact’: ‘the last paragraph, the quotation [by Laforgue], is a perfect exemplar of our attitude. Laforgue takes what he has and makes it THE THING.’171 As Burke pointed out, Laforgue ‘was determined to be contemporaneous. As much as he was

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 107

25/01/2013 15:53

108 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

inclined to dismiss Americans, he had our mania for the up to date.’172 This contact with time, this capacity ‘to belong to his age and even be in advance of his age’, necessitated a peculiar form of physical and psychic protection.173 Burke identified Laforgue’s preoccupation with the material transmission of literature as a form of poetic transmutation, a process whereby the word approaches the condition of ‘the thing’: The inexorable democracy of the intellect can shout its dithyrambs to the L trains of Vibrant With Life. Laforgue has answered imperturbably: Oh, fine linen! No one has sung of you. – To live this way or that, to be tragic or skeptical, to go here and there, to travel, to eternalise oneself in holes, to [. . .] think over one’s day on a pillow of some fine streaky material, between fine sheets – stiff muslin, like paper[.]174

The linens and papers with which Laforgue surrounded himself act as his ‘armour’, a textual materialism that mediated his intellectual transactions with both the physical world and the onset of modernity. Applied to the localist poetics of Contact, Burke’s insight was a ‘well nigh perfect example’ of the ‘American critical attitude’ because it showed how the transactional poetics of contact responded to foreign work without imitating it, and without losing its own identity – its ‘own mania for the up to date’.175 And as persistent comparisons between the French poet and the ‘logopoeia’ of Loy and Moore bore out, the armour of Jules Laforgue was worn by many of Contact’s poets.176 For McAlmon, however, Burke’s American critical attitude was merely ‘a means for evading experience’.177 In ‘Surf of the Dead Sea: Apotheosis to Extinction’, McAlmon complained that ‘[h]e much admired LaForgue [sic] / And Remy de Gourmont’, and his ‘admiration clung leachlike to him’.178 Although he did not name Burke, the New Jersey poet instantly knew McAlmon was referring to him.179 Nevertheless, behind the scenes, McAlmon admired Burke’s abilities and nominated him as his potential successor (an idea that Williams eventually rejected). In a statement sent to Williams just before he left, McAlmon announced that ‘I cease to give a damn about a local or even a contact insistence. Looking over recent writing I find no lack of contact or of locality, only lack of honesty [. . .], a lack of will to look – in an Xray manner – and understand.’180 Instead, when McAlmon settled in Europe, the editors conceived of two new issues of Contact: an ‘international number’ by McAlmon and an independent issue by Williams, which became the ‘Advertising Number’. McAlmon proposed that Contact would ‘show up “foreign” [art]’ with an ‘international number’.181 McAlmon sought the kind of work that

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 108

25/01/2013 15:53

‘Backgrounds and Extensions’

[ 109

would affirm his own theory of contact – yet by May 1921 those principles had altered to accommodate new opportunities. In Contact 2, for example, he wrote that ‘T. S. Eliot will never be a critic in any worthy sense [. . .] for he continually relates literature to literature, and largely overlooks the relation of literature to life – age, age qualities, and environment’.182 However, when he arrived in London, McAlmon met Eliot, and the two began a correspondence.183 Accordingly, McAlmon revised his position in Contact 4, and in ‘Contact and Genius’ argued that ‘it can be wished that [American writers] would read more, and include in their readings the works of some of the classics notable for their clarity of understanding’.184 Yet for the American avant-garde who knew through various channels of McAlmon’s contentious new affiliations – his marriage of convenience to Bryher (who was H.D.’s lover, and married McAlmon so that she and H.D. could live together and travel freely) and his newfound affinity for expatriate and European artists – an important threshold had been crossed. In May 1921, The Dial launched a scathing critique of McAlmon’s hypocrisy and ‘entangling alliances’ which had ‘made Contact swallow so many of its own propositions’.185 And, privately, Williams endorsed Thayer’s next salvo, a controversial article published in The Dial which satirised McAlmon’s marriage. Williams confided to Thayer, ‘perhaps I enjoy a bit of malice too in saying that I guess Bob and Bryher can stand it’.186 Their contact was temporarily suspended, to be carried on in different forms on either side of the Atlantic. Despite Williams’s announcement in Contact 4, McAlmon’s ‘international number’ was never completed, as McAlmon was working on his own material and in the process of founding his fine press publishing house Contact Editions.187 But Williams’s ‘Advertising Number’ was well in hand. Contact’s dialogic editorial policy had sustained the cultural localism of Dewey, the inchoate pragmatism of McAlmon, the Freudian theorising of Jordan and Williams’s own radical cultural localism. Galvanised by the visit of Albert Einstein and the publication of New York Dada in April 1921, Contact 4 signalled the localist avant-garde’s immersion in transatlantic print culture, and the impact of this encounter rippled through the transatlantic little magazines throughout the 1920s.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 109

25/01/2013 15:53

CHAPTER 4

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION: AMERICA, RELATIVITY AND ‘THE NEW SCIENCE OF ADVERTISING’

Introduction Professor Einstein does not realize how sensationally and cunningly he has been advertised. It is the necromancy of these strange theories, not their science, that catches the gaping crowd [. . .] We bestow upon him the keys of our cities because he has accorded us the freedom of the cosmos. He has quickened our imaginations so that we leap upon a ray of light, escaping time.1

In April 1921, millions of New Yorkers collectively held their breath as America prepared to welcome Albert Einstein for the first time. A frenzy of press coverage transformed Einstein into a national celebrity, a ‘Poet in Science’ who became a beacon of transatlantic enlightenment.2 Journalists connected the figure of Einstein to America’s appetite for innovation and wealth in all forms, and the poet and critic Gertrude Besse King immediately understood why: the theory of relativity represented both a magic lamp – whose genie, ‘Aladdin Einstein’, held out the promise of transforming reality, potentially granting any wish to the person who held it – and an Aladdin’s cave, a treasure-trove of valuable knowledge (which, rather ironically, had no commercial applications). William Carlos Williams, like King, celebrated Einstein’s liberating effect on the American imagination in his solo ‘Advertising Number’ of Contact and his occasional poem ‘St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’; however, rather than viewing the scientist’s visit as a key to ‘escaping time’, Williams presented the occasion as the localist avant-garde’s key to engaging with the contingent energies of modernity and the suppressed histories of the Americas head-on. Einstein’s ‘sensationally advertised’ visit set in motion an international

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 110

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 111

debate about science, economics and American identity. The Advertising Number captured these intersecting vectors and refracted them back into the specialised spheres of little magazines, which ‘quickened’ the ‘imaginations’ of the Americanist avant-gardes. The special issue helped to articulate the accelerating processes of ‘time-space compression’ under way during this pivotal cultural moment, in which a succession of ‘[technological] innovations dedicated to the removal of spatial barriers’ had arisen from and helped ‘to create the world market’.3 During the postwar period, this process intensified, and in America it became engrained in debates about immigration and national identity. As Einstein was a benevolent and revolutionary genius, as well as a leading Zionist, his ‘emigration’, however temporary, provided a sort of shorthand in the press for the themes of intellectual and political emancipation conjoined with the United States’ foundation narratives.4 As such, Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity were appropriated by various print cultures to express both enthusiasm for and anxieties about the cultural relativism and hybridisation that accompanied America’s rise to dominance on the world stage. Little magazines such as The Freeman, The Dial and Contact connected Einstein’s revolutionary ideas in the sciences to the revolution that writers sought in the arts, while across the Atlantic Broom and Secession responded to the conflations of commerce, technology and cultural hybridity which accompanied the rise of the Machine Age, and which – as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, the editors of New York Dada, and the dadaist impresario Else von Freytag-Loringhoven immediately grasped – had become inextricably linked with American culture. Yet inevitably, these thematic convergences also served as points of differentiation between modernists. Between 1921 and 1923, further articulations of, and responses to, literary nationalism, nativism and localism emerged within the transatlantic avantgardes, as identity also became a site of time-space compression.

Hook, Line and Sinker: ‘25¢ = Advertising Number’ On 10 August 1921, Williams declared in a letter to Kenneth Burke that Contact 4 would ‘be the best printed affair I have yet been identified with’.5 And, indeed, the Advertising Number is a document of explosive visual wit, a mini-archive of a crucial transitional moment in the history of New York’s avant-gardes that has been overlooked by modernist studies. Throughout the spring and summer of 1921, Williams worked on the Advertising Number of Contact, which (although the issue is undated) he almost certainly published in September 1921.6 When a flurry of literary gossip erupted in

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 111

25/01/2013 15:53

112 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

The Dial following Robert McAlmon’s departure for Europe earlier that year, Williams used the opportunity to reassess the magazine’s trajectory, and he chose to reject the ‘literary supplement’-style makeover that McAlmon had given Contact in its third issue. Instead, Williams reasserted the magazine’s formative production values, including the cheap foolscap paper used for Contact 1 and 2, but with one crucial twist: for the Advertising Number, he switched from multigraph printing, which could only print text, to a mimeographic print process, which could reproduce images. The new method allowed for more sophisticated graphic design work in the Advertising Number, which was crucial to its intervention in the mass cultural discourses that initially Contact had shunned. The centrepiece of Contact 4’s cover is its title, which appears in the usual Times New Roman font, conjoined to a mirror image of ‘Contact’, which appears upside-down at an oblique angle, giving the appearance of italics in reverse (Fig. 4.1). As well as adding emphasis, the design reflects the editors’ fractured partnership, suggesting that the localist ‘contact’ that they had initiated had perhaps become inverted following McAlmon’s uprooting – or that the journal’s efforts would now be mirrored in new localities. The strategic collage of ‘advertisements’ forms a visual poem, which examines artists’ relationships with the micro- and macroeconomic structures that mediated America’s cultural spheres. Williams laces his design – itself an advertisement for a new poetics of contact – with arithmetic: he intersperses prices and dates with mathematical symbols, whilst spatial relationships also designate equations. The stroke that bisects ‘READ CONTACT’ and ‘AMERICA IS REVEALED IN ITS REPLIES TO MY ARTICLES’ might act as a dividend; and in aggregate, the words and line resemble a percentage sign, or a scale. With these recontextualised (and seemingly unrelated) signifiers jostling for textual space, Williams’s cover design for Contact 4 resembles the multidirectional dadaist compositions that were published during the period.7 But tactically, Williams’s cover owes more to Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s New York Dada, which was published in April 1921 (when Williams began working on the Advertising Number).8 Duchamp’s transvestite alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, appeared on a perfume bottle as an ‘imitated rectified readymade’ on the magazine’s front cover. Duchamp transformed himself simultaneously into object and creator, product and marketer, producer and reproduction, male and female (Fig. 4.2).9 Duchamp’s satire on advertising is also an assertion of artists’ autonomy, which taps into the dadaists’ irreverent, selfreflexive humour. Williams had cited Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ practice in his ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell to exemplify the ‘novel’ methods that the American marketplace presented artists.10 In the Advertising Number, he

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 112

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 113

4.1 Front Cover, Contact 4 ([September] 1921). Image reproduced with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 113

25/01/2013 15:53

114 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

4.2 Front Cover, New York Dada, April 1921. Copyright © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012. Image reproduced courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 114

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 115

articulated his localist modernism with a sequence of textual dislocations and relocations to transmute an act of reproduction into one of innovation. Like Duchamp and Man Ray’s cover design for New York Dada, the words and phrases that Williams culls from US commercial culture for Contact 4 both satirise and reinforce the power of the marketplace over popular culture, and its expression in artistic praxis. In the Advertising Number, he continually adds new critical ‘value’ to his own ‘products’: for example, he promotes his recently published Kora in Hell: Improvisations by including Moore’s scintillating review of the book, and he self-consciously advertises his own wares throughout the issue, including in his ‘Announcement and Sample Poem: St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’ and his ‘Sample Prose Piece: The Three Letters’.11 But in the interest of balance he also adds a sarcastic typographical twist to a negative review of his book written by John Gould Fletcher, which he (re)titles ‘The Italics Are God’s’. Williams inverts Fletcher’s name, and italicises his assertion that literature ‘depends not on the kind but on the degree of statement’ to imply that Fletcher has unwittingly identified a precept of Williams’s localist modernism, which depends on the intensity of the artist’s contact with a place or literary method, rather than any conventional affiliation.12 The language of economics pervades the content, editorial methods and typographic designs of Contact 4. Williams’s unique strategy of persuasion by parataxis developed from the improvisational logic of Kora in Hell, and established a complex mis en page reminiscent of Wyndham Lewis’s methods in Blast. In this sense, Contact 4 is Williams’s riposte to The Dial’s ‘anthology method’.13 By contrast, ‘[b]y the technique of its manufacture’, the Advertising Number became ‘a novelty’, configuring geographical place and textual space according to the economic systems and visual cultures of the globalised American marketplace.14 Williams was not above poaching the dadaists’ techniques when it suited his purposes; nevertheless, his admiration for them remained tentative, even suspicious, and he continually sought ways to build on their methods and adapt them to his local environment.15 One feature that distinguishes Williams’s appropriations of print advertisements from the New York dadaists’ use of the same tactic is his attention to American economic history and the local contexts of the adverts’ production, which he evokes at the quotidian level with the cover of Contact 4. The ‘stale dates’ on the cover design – 1836 and 1849 – place the product (Babbitt’s Soap) and person (Hokusai) referred to in the past, which subverts the eternal present of market conditions that advertising seeks to influence. Instead, the dates in the upper left-hand corner emphasise a long-term historical context. Babbitt’s Soap was a ubiquitous product still being sold in 1921.16 Benjamin Talbot Babbitt,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 115

25/01/2013 15:53

116 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

its manufacturer, was a skilled tradesman and inventor with over one hundred patents. He became a multimillionaire, in part because of his marketing genius (he was, incidentally, a good friend of P. T. Barnum). Babbitt used his sites of production as a form of advertising: his original New York soap factory at Pier 6 on the North River was considered a landmark, and contained six enormous kettles which would have been especially visible to commuters (such as Williams) who ferried in from New Jersey.17 This manufacturing site grafted advertising graphics onto the urban landscape on an unprecedented scale. Appropriately, the slogan for ‘Babbitt’s Best Soap’ reflected American exceptionalism, proclaiming that this quintessentially American product was ‘A Soap For All Nations: Cleanliness is the Scale of Civilisation’.18 Williams’s reference to Babbitt’s Soap was his attempt to foreground the American mythology of benevolent big business: it is a useful thing created by an inventive mind attuned to personal profit, socially constructive enterprises and spreading American innovation throughout the world. Of course, the advert for ‘Babbitt’s Best Soap’ does not exist in isolation on the cover of the Advertising Number, any more than it would do in a commercial district or a magazine – and, in this textual field, Williams conspicuously rigs the system for his own purposes, applying the transactional forces of Deweyan localism in a rather literal sense to the economic systems explored in this issue. The proximity of Hokusai’s and Babbitt’s names on the cover of Contact 4 broadly links commercial and artistic genius, but the spatial relationship also signals the time-space compression generated by global capitalism, in which soap and artwork were traded fluidly as commodities whose values were set by the marketplace. By pairing Hokusai’s reputation and commercial success (his prints were immensely popular at the turn of the century) with nineteenth-century dates and prices, Williams evokes a golden age of American commerce, which included artists in its promise of endless growth and limitless opportunity. Of course, Williams’s design trumps such nostalgic ideas: the mise en page of the Advertising Number also draws attention to the pitfalls and abuses of American capitalism, embodied in its most basic commodities, even a bar of soap. With product and promise came all of the attendant benefits (namely sanitation and health at a price within reach of most individuals and families) and dilemmas (which include the imperialist doctrines behind the advertisement, and bolstering consumption by preying on the public’s fear of contagion) that cleanliness and ‘purity’ entail. Cryptically, Williams counterpoints Babbitt’s Soap with the laxative ‘Nujol’ in the opposite corner of Contact 4’s cover design. Williams’s local paper, The Rutherford Republican, launched an advertising campaign for

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 116

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 117

Nujol in 1920, which, after a six-month hiatus, resumed in April 1921, when he began work on Contact 4 (Fig. 4.3).19 He closely approximated the typeface of the advertisement, but he probably recreated its brand identity without compensation or permission, except that which he derived from his aesthetic credo. Thus, with a sly nod to both the ‘readymade’ aesthetic and the scatological humour favoured by the New York dadaists, Williams moved from external to internal cleansing, counterpointing the ‘belle haleine eau de voilette’ perfume advertised by Rrose Sélavy with more odious scents. In 1921, adverts extolled the laxative properties of Nujol in extensive physiological detail, but on the cover of Contact 4, the massive social arena of ‘civilisation’ suggested by the Babbitt’s Soap advert gives way to the private ‘natural laws’ governing human physiology; and here, the darker, secretive side of advertising and commercial culture emerges. The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey manufactured Nujol in the industrial town of Bayonne. Originally, the petroleum-derived patent medicine was sold by William Rockefeller as ‘Seneca Oil’, ‘Rock Oil’ and ‘American Medicinal Oil’, a ‘miracle cure’ for a staggering variety of ailments, from liver disease to cancer. Eventually, though, restrictions on patent medicines tightened, and Nujol (a portmanteau comprised of the words ‘new’ and ‘oil’) was found to have either a limited effect or, in some cases, a detrimental effect on the patient being treated (in some cases it leached certain fat-soluble nutrients from patients). As a doctor, Williams would have been aware of the product’s shady past and, likely, of the real motive for its repackaging as a cure for constipation: its astronomical profitability.20 Yet Standard Oil removed both its brand name and the manufacturing location from Nujol’s advertising campaigns in New Jersey, and, again, its tarnished reputation (and not just its product’s) may have motivated the decision. The corporation had been subjected to an antitrust ruling in 1911 to break up its monopoly of the American oil industry, and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey was formed to take advantage of New Jersey state law, which allowed resident corporations to own stock in other companies.21 The new incarnation of the company focused on mid-Atlantic marketing campaigns and created advertisements intended not only to promote its products, but also to restore its parent company’s image in newspapers. The Nujol campaign was just one example of Standard Oil’s continued efforts to dominate the commercial landscape using its new subsidiaries, which had now started to target local periodicals such as The Rutherford Republican as well as mass-market publications. Williams is at his most subversive, then, when he rejoins not only the name but also the New York City address of the Standard Oil Co. (New

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 117

25/01/2013 15:53

118 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

4.3 Nujol Advertisement, The Rutherford Republican, 2 April 1921, p. 12. Sourced from microfilm owned by author.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 118

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 119

Jersey) beneath the Nujol logo, reasserting its veiled provenance with a form of visual parataxis. In this way, Williams reconnects the increasingly globalised company to the products that it manufactured, and to the physical place that it occupied in New York City and the surrounding areas. Nujol, Standard Oil’s perennial snake oil, stands as a nadir of corporate greed and inveiglement on a mass scale, but it was manufactured and promoted at the local level, in both the visible fields of print culture and the invisible channels of radio, via the highest corridors of state power. Standard Oil regularly bribed politicians to win commercial advantage, and as a physician involved in community health programmes, Williams would have known that the company had effectively ‘bought’ Royal S. Copeland, the Health Commissioner of New York City from 1918 to 1923. Copeland became a senator in 1923, and was well known for his unqualified support of the Standard Oil Company, as well as for his daily radio broadcasts (which he also used to hawk Nujol).22 But he would have earned Williams’s enmity earlier than that: in 1918, as Williams and his fellow doctors struggled to cope with wave upon wave of influenza cases, and in the face of overwhelming evidence, Copeland denied that New York was in the grip of a flu pandemic.23 In his autobiography, Williams recalled his reactions during the post-war period to ‘the stupidity, the calculated viciousness of a money-grubbing society such as I knew and violently wrote against’, and yet his poetry of the period is not often cited as overly political.24 However, his sophisticated critique of the Standard Oil monopoly, which persisted in more insidious ways following its prosecution for antitrust crimes, suggests that the Advertising Number was one such ‘violent’ (albeit very cryptic to all but his milieu) protest. As Standard Oil and other major corporations’ advertisements began to outclass and displace local businesses in Williams’s local newspaper, it appeared that Dewey’s axiom – ‘we are discovering that the locality is the only universal’ – was also grasped by major corporations.25 One widespread advertisement in particular depicts this precept with eerie prescience, as the global reach of Standard Oil looms behind the cars it powers which also, endlessly, crowd Smalltown, USA, in a striking illustration of its power to profit from time-space compression (see Fig. 4.4).26 By August 1921, the automotive industry was poised to usurp its headlines – for example, the front cover of the second section of The Rutherford Republican styled a Buick advert as front-page news.27 Big business was not only manufacturing products, but also publicity in the guise of reporting, conflating civic interest and consumer interests. Williams’s critique of Standard

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 119

25/01/2013 15:53

120 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

4.4 Standard Oil Company Advertisement, The Rutherford Republican, 20 August 1921, p. 3. Sourced from microfilm owned by author.

Oil, Nujol and American big business in the Advertising Number is one example of how he could mobilise his literary milieu to undertake meaningful critiques addressed to a vast cultural and economic arena but grounded in specific localities, daring America ‘to Read Contact’ and ‘reveal’ itself in ‘its replies to [his] articles’.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 120

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 121

‘Don’t Imagine That I Think Economics Interesting’: Ezra Pound and the Actual World After Williams’s polemical cover, the opening gambit in the Advertising Number also took aim at transnational oil monopolies’ infiltration of both the American home and American foreign policy. In his manifesto-like review of C. H. Douglas and A. R. Orage’s Credit Power and Democracy, Pound asked the specialised readers of Contact, ‘pour la Patrie, comme tu veux, mais pour une société anonyme de Petrole: mourir! Pourquoi?’ [for our country, as you wish, but to die for an oil corporation! Why?].28 Here, Pound implies that corporate interests were responsible for fuelling the carnage of World War I. For Pound, Douglas’s economic theories presented a way for writers to cut through the ‘camouflage’ that ‘those who now hold credit power’ used to conceal their ‘flagrant’ abuses of the system. Credit Power and Democracy would become a foundational text for the social credit movement, and in it Douglas criticised the economic practices of the oil industry (among other targets). Pound had reviewed Douglas’s Economic Democracy for The Little Review following its serialisation in The New Age in the summer of 1919, and the book had a profound influence on his political and poetical development.29 In November 1920, Pound wrote to Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson to announce his plans to review Credit Power and Democracy for The Dial. 30 Thayer and Watson, however, remained ambivalent, despite Pound’s status as the magazine’s unofficial foreign editor and his conviction that Douglas was ‘possibly the only intelligent and honest economist in England, and one of very few people actively engaged in trying to stave off economic necessity for a next [World War]’.31 Pound’s letter to Thayer reveals that his only partially ironic paranoia about an economically induced post-war apocalypse had already taken shape, and that his view of the relationship between the literary avant-garde and the public sphere was beginning to shift. Perhaps hoping to reconnect with Williams’s milieu following Contact’s critiques of The Dial and The Little Review, the United States’ quintessential ‘exile’ used Williams and McAlmon’s journal to reach out to an audience of peers about their opportunities and responsibilities in the transatlantic age, and to reflect on the mutual inflections of economics and literature. Pound’s review makes a direct association between politics and literary technique when he suddenly switches from a discussion of socio-economic discourse to a critique of nineteenth-century symbolist writing. In his 1915 essay ‘Vorticism’, he criticised the symbolists’ overly specific language, which he felt ‘dealt in “association” ’ and ‘fixed values’.32 In his review of Credit Power and Democracy, however, he criticised the ‘symbolist position,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 121

25/01/2013 15:53

122 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

artistic aloofness from world affairs’ (my emphasis), which ‘may have assisted several people to write and work in the ’80s, but [was] not, in 1921, opportune or apposite’.33 As Leon Surette has argued, Pound’s declaration in this review ‘announces his abandonment of l’art pour l’art and his commitment to Douglas’s analysis’.34 One of the reasons that Pound respected Douglas’s work was because it was based on his first-hand involvement with actual systems of production, and expressed the inequities therein as a simple (and, as history would later bear out, simplistic) ‘A + B’ theorem.35 Richard Sieburth has suggested that Orage and Douglas’s attempt to ‘bridge the gap’ between ‘the number of available goods and the amount of available money or credit by distributing a mixture of subsidies to industry and national dividends to citizens’ has an analogue in Pound’s poetics.36 Economics provided Pound with another way to create contact between the poet and the actual world using an overarching system or theory that is never quite articulated, but is indelibly inscribed, on his literary theory. In the final section of Pound’s review in Contact, he creates a link between literary intelligence and the real world of getting and spending. He asserts that ‘in a world politically governed by imbeciles and knaves, there remain two classes of people responsible: the financial powers and the men who can think with some clarity’, before making his final parenthetical apostrophe directly to the readers of Contact: (Don’t imagine that I think economics interesting – not as Botticelli or Picasso is interesting. But at present they, as the reality under political camouflage, are interesting as a gun muzzle aimed at one’s head is ‘interesting’, when one can hardly see the face of the gun holder and is wholly uncertain as to his temperament and intentions.)37

Here, Pound implies that Douglas’s economic theories present a way for writers to cut through the ‘camouflage’ that ‘those who now hold credit power’ use to conceal their ‘flagrant’ abuses. Economics requires specialist discourse but, as he points out, it is a system of contact that exists between poets and ‘world affairs’ – between aesthetics and civic responsibility – and writers should therefore have some interest in deciphering its codes. The brevity, gravity and gallows humour of the review recalls Pound’s didactic literary manifestos in Blast, but its sardonic touch sidesteps the bombast of his vorticist prose. In Contact, his tone is more collusive, and he treats Credit Power and Democracy as a credible way for his American readers to establish a connection between the political world and the printed word. In this respect, Pound’s new attention to engaging artists politically made his review of Douglas’s book the perfect opening blast for Williams’s

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 122

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 123

Advertising Number: Pound’s manifesto of contact, in Contact, created a thematic exchange between the magazine’s contributors (especially Williams’s work) and its cover. The review called for a new beginning in American avant-garde poetics, and signalled a momentary theoretical drift that would enable Williams to enlist the exile in the localist cause, using the framework of global economics to facilitate a very different form of timespace compression – between specialised artists rather than mass markets – and to reappraise the trajectory of a specifically American poetics.

‘St. Francis Einstein’ in the ‘Sweet Land of Liberty’ The ‘Announcement’ that preceded the occasional poem that Williams wrote for Contact 4 offered his poems ‘for sale at a minimum price fixed by the author’, and instructed ‘prospective purchasers’ to ‘apply through CONTACT which at present is the sole agent’.38 The introduction echoes the sardonic register in Pound’s review, as does the translinguistic pun in the title of the Advertising Number: avertissement in French means ‘warning’. But when Williams styles Contact and his own writing as a commodity, he is being only partially ironic. As he exposes the insidious side of American economic history and advertising, he also acknowledges its power, its novelty and its potential for avant-garde poetics. Seizing King’s idea that Einstein had been ‘sensationally’ advertised, in the Advertising Number, ‘St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’ becomes a key broker of that intertextual dialogue.39 Williams rings the ‘yellowbells’ that grew ‘in the foreyard’ of Liberty Island to celebrate Einstein’s arrival, and the rebirth that it signified, whilst constantly referring to the climatic circumstances of the poem’s production.40 Hybrid flowers become botanical billboards and commercial endeavours merge with religious rites: ‘at the time in fashion / Einstein [had] come’ to America, and Williams greeted him, ‘shaking / pom-poms of green flowers’.41 Like the ‘wise’ New York newspapers, Contact became a cheerleader that heralded the arrival of ‘April Einstein’.42 Williams interrogated the sprawling arena of the American marketplace throughout Contact 4, and in ‘St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’ he fulfils his ambition to create a ‘patron saint’ for America and for his Franciscan model of the avant-garde, which he had been cultivating since Others. ‘St. Francis Einstein’ became a figure in which the inflated promises of advertising culture merged seamlessly with popular perceptions of relativity, the fractious energy of the transatlantic avant-gardes, and the hybridised, intensely conflicted national character of America.43 As Lisa Steinman has argued, ‘Einstein’s theories helped poetry claim it had a function specifically in the real world of American democracy and

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 123

25/01/2013 15:53

124 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

so enabled poets to feel rooted in their society’.44 Conversely, by making Einstein a ‘Poet in Science’, The New York Times and the ‘wise newspapers / that quote the great mathematician’ provided the avant-garde with a way to reassert the status of ‘revolutionary’ art as a socially constructive pursuit.45 The popular enthusiasm for relativity in the newspapers temporarily relaxed the borders between cultural spheres, even as barriers to American immigration were increasing, and helped blur distinctions between high- and low-circulation periodicals. But Einstein’s visit also showed that poetry still had a purchase on the popular imagination. In 1921, the little magazines felt that their specialisations might similarly engage the popular press. Along with King’s article in The Freeman, Thomas Jewell Craven declared in The Dial that ‘Professor Einstein’s revolutionary theory is the latest example of the eternal kinship between art and science’.46 Williams took these observations one step further by fusing that ‘kinship’ with the commercial language of advertising. The results pushed his localist methods into an extreme, almost absurd, iteration, but the poem remained lodged in his imagination long after its original composition. He published ‘St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’ seven times during his lifetime, at one point adding the prefix ‘An Occasional Poem’ to its title.47 In each successive version Williams ‘pruned’ it substantially to conform to his early imagist poetics, but the hermeneutic code of the original is an essential component of both Williams’s localist poetics and his pluralist politics. In its first incarnation, the vignettes are recursive and the pace hyperactive: the poem rejoices in its own futility, mocking and celebrating the extravagant language of periodical marketing campaigns simultaneously. In the ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell, Williams quoted Stevens’s complaint that ‘to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility’.48 ‘St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’ overstates Williams’s case to prove that ‘incessant new beginnings’ can also lead to superabundance and unpredictable, hybridised growth. He uses portmanteaus, neologisms and recurring present participles to fuse the language of advertising with the arrival of an international genius, who he hopes will resuscitate or uncover America’s own indigenous intellects and artists. The many linguistic compounds featured in the poem, which include ‘stonearms’, ‘Venusremembering’ and ‘pinkflowered / and coralflowered peachtrees’, also recall their more frequent appearance in other Germanic languages, and allude to Einstein’s German heritage as well as to the plasticity of American English.49 But primarily, the excesses and lexical hybridisations of ‘St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’ reflect the ‘new beginnings’ embedded in the foundation myths of America, and

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 124

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 125

the reality of its pluralist culture. Indeed, the poem capitalises on its own ephemerality and site-specificity to reassert the provisionality of American identity: At the time in fashion Einstein has come bringing April in his head up from the sea in Thomas March Jefferson’s black boat bringing freedom under the dead Statue of Liberty to free the daffodils in the water which sing: Einstein has remembered us Saviour of the daffodils!50

Like Duchamp’s persona Rrose Sélavy, in this strophe, Einstein arrives in New York in the guise of Venus-like hermaphrodite, ‘up from the sea’, upending the supposedly stable orders of gender, seasons, space and time: the ‘spring days’ are ‘swift and mutable’, their ‘wind blowing / four ways, hot and cold’.51 Williams merged Einstein and St Francis into an unabashedly compound figure, which also included Thomas Jefferson, Jesus Christ, Venus and Kore, the Roman goddess of spring. Each of these figures was associated with revolutionary ideas or transitional moments, and by presenting them as a representative ‘American’ patron saint, Williams’s compound ‘St. Francis Einstein’ challenges America to reopen its traditionally porous borders at a time when immigration laws such as the Immigration Act of 1921 were attempting to tighten them.52 Like the cover of the Advertising Number, ‘St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’ reminds us that the ‘Sweet Land of Liberty’ was founded on an economic system that undermined the virtues that the Union purported to enshrine, and that an author of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. Thus, drawing on popular accounts that conflated the theory of relativity with moral relativism, in ‘St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’, all men were only ‘relatively equal’, and Einstein must still ‘buy freedom for the daffodils’. When combined with his reference to ‘Thomas March Jefferson’s / black boat’, Williams creates a perversion of the Mayflower which, as Vainis Aleksa has remarked, is a reference to the slave trade.53 Thus, Williams reminds us that the transatlantic voyages that underpin the foundation narratives of the United States involve both flights to

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 125

25/01/2013 15:53

126 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

freedom and the systematic oppressions that its early economies relied on. Williams encodes references to the legacy of slavery in covert and sometimes rather bizarre ways throughout the poem. For example, he combines Einstein with the figure of ‘the old negro / with white hair’ who owns an orchard and uses ‘poisoned fish-heads’ to prevent ‘stray cats’ from prowling his ‘bare chickenyard’.54 Williams links those ‘poisoned fish-heads’ to the ‘Oldfashioned knowledge’, which now lies ‘dead under the blossoming peachtrees’, but where ‘stray cats’ still ‘find them – find them – find them’.55 The rediscovery of hidden, repressed or displaced ‘poisons’ (Williams’s translinguistic pun on the French word for fish, poisson) such as slavery, corporate crime and corrupt governance become inextricably linked to America’s social fabric in the Advertising Number. Williams’s purpose is to show how major cultural events filter down to the local level, and combine with other narratives to form unpredicted textual encounters. In ‘St. Francis Einstein’, Williams gives the culturally marginalised a more prominent voice than he does in his better-known works. Sergio Rizzo has convincingly argued that the iconic poem ‘XXII’ from Spring and All, also known as ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, ‘keep[s] a dark figure in the poem’s biographical history – Marshall, the red wheelbarrow’s African American owner – at the poem’s margins’.56 I agree with Rizzo that in Spring and All, ‘Williams’s commitment to a modern antipoetic “realism” reveals racial and sexual fantasies that provide their own problematic “cover” and “refuge” ’.57 Such tactics account for some of Williams’s treatments of race in the 1920s, which became increasingly prominent in his later work (especially his fiction). Williams’s primitivist fantasies will be revisited in Chapter 6, but it is worth pointing out that the ‘old negro’ of ‘St. Francis Einstein’ may be based on Marshall. Biographically, the ‘bare chickenyard’ and ‘poisoned fish-heads’ link the figure with Marshall, who was a fisherman who owned a small farm in Rutherford. Here, the question of race and identity is problematically and cryptically foregrounded in the poem, not driven to the sidelines. ‘The old negro / with white hair’ links Marshall with Einstein and creates a persona where the public and private spheres collapse, and where the laws that govern life, death and seasonal cycles invert and recombine. And it is precisely these indeterminacies that Williams believes will rejuvenate American culture. Williams’s hybrid muse and patron saint performs a kind of resurrection as the poem progresses, alluding to the subject of another occasional poem, which was eventually engraved on a plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. ‘The New Colossus’, a sonnet by Emma Lazarus written in 1883 as part of an effort to raise money for the statue’s base,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 126

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 127

contains the famous lines ‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’.58 Lazarus called her ‘New Colossus’ the ‘Mother of Exiles’, and Williams’s poem similarly extends a welcome to transatlantic travellers. This connection was particularly poignant given Einstein’s reception in New York at the time. When he was awarded the honours of ‘Freedom of the City’ and ‘Freedom of the State’ by the municipal and state governments, it provoked an unlikely controversy in the form of a populist and anti-Semitic backlash spearheaded by public figures such as the New York City Alderman Bruce Falconer.59 Falconer’s reactionary stance played into the nativist discourses surrounding the 1921 Immigration Act, and to a certain extent threatened to derail the transnational exchange of ideas that had excited the majority of New Yorkers.60 Perhaps alluding to this controversy, Williams suggests that it is America, and not the diaspora, who needed rescuing and revitalisation. ‘St. Francis Einstein’ revives ‘the dead / Statue of Liberty’, reminding his hosts of the ‘freedom’ they once promised visitors. In this respect, Williams’s ‘Announcement and Sample Poem’ illustrates the distinctive pluralist model used by localist modernists in contradistinction to the nativist approach outlined by Walter Benn Michaels in Our America.61 As Mark Morrisson argues in The Public Face of Modernism, Williams’s early project emphasises ‘the provisionality and multiplicity of identity, even national identity’.62 However, this process did not simply cease in the early 1920s. To align Williams’s project to ‘a pluralist nationalist vision’ which could in turn ‘be explicitly wedded to a kind of modernism in the little magazines – a nativist modernism [–]’ is therefore overly reductive, especially when applied to Contact’s project.63 The localist stance of Contact rarely conforms to nativist modernism’s ‘deep hostility to assimilation’.64 Beyond the appearance of the word ‘native’ in McAlmon’s inaugural Contact manifesto (which was used differently across a range of American modernisms), Morrisson’s pairing of the ‘materialist American aesthetic’ in Contact ‘with the broader political and cultural climate of 1920s nativism’ enumerated by Michaels is similarly problematic.65 In particular, Williams’s insistence on the porous, pliable quality of New World identities, which derived from his own heritage as well as from his cultural localism, was incompatible with nativist modernism. Against the backdrop of the 1921 Immigration Act, during the early 1920s ‘a cultural compulsion arose toward assimilation and “100% Americanism” ’, and, as Adam McKible notes, this trend coincided with an expanding notion of ‘whiteness as a very broad racial category’.66 However, ‘no matter how widely or narrowly whiteness was defined and thus privileged, blackness – any “drop” of it – was considered an

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 127

25/01/2013 15:53

128 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

uncrossable threshold (which was, of course, crossed all the time), and it was legislated and policed aggressively, violently, and persistently’.67 In ‘St. Francis Einstein’, Williams deliberately interrogates such binaries with his relentless hybridisations, which, in their sheer multiplicity, resist the reductive patina of ‘100% Americanism’ and foreground the heterogeneity of America’s populations. As a multilingual first-generation American and a member of the Puerto Rican diaspora, Williams was formed from precisely these cross-cultural contacts. However, as Lisa Sánchez González rightly points out, ‘[c]elebrating hybridity’ as ‘the American consciousness’ can be a ‘conceptual trap, since such discourses [. . .] tend to gloss over the actual caste and gendered inequalities with myths of racial democracy’.68 The ethical pitfalls of this position would remain a significant piece of unfinished business for the localist modernists, but in a climate of ‘100% Americanism’, their emphasis on hybridity extended beyond ‘racial democracy’ to open a space in which the culturally constructed bases of identity could be contested. The visual, ‘embodied’ language and formal hybridisations of Contact are perhaps the best articulation of the localist moment, which peaked when national, cultural and racial boundaries were becoming increasingly reductive, hierarchical and more oppressively policed. Williams’s guerilla attack on anti-immigration legislation in Contact 4 demonstrates his keen awareness of the costs that those policies involved, which applies as much to his own modernist project as to the cultural fabric of America in the 1920s. But, tellingly, the Advertising Number depends heavily on irony and visual puns, and consistently destabilises the referential authority of language – an authority that, as Michaels implies, is crucial to ‘nativist logic’, ‘the insistence that the word become the thing’.69 And whilst Contact 4 derives much of its energy from the juxtaposition of various racial, ethnic and national identities, it also relies on the hybridisations and flux, the unexpected attractions and repulsions, which emerge from cross-cultural encounters within American contact zones, to challenge such categorisations. In Contact, systems of identity, filiation, affiliation and culture become as volatile and contingent as the language that simultaneously expresses and transforms them – but they are neither forgotten nor cast aside. Nor are the political ramifications for those individuals who engage with these issues publicly. Figures such as Einstein offered an antidote to the prejudices that surface in the New World, which, as we have seen in responses such as Alderman Falconer’s to the scientist’s visit, threatened the cultural diversity and individual freedoms (broadly conceived) in America. Thus, in Williams’s occasional poem, ‘April Einstein’ signifies political rebirth as well as imaginative renewal: it is a ‘Yiddishe springtime of the mind’,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 128

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 129

where diaspora of all kinds find a new home in America, but also infuse and enrich its sense of national identity with new facets and possibilities.70

‘Jazz Opera Americano’: American Identity Abroad The centres of gravity in the modernist world were in constant flux, ricocheting between London, Paris and New York, and many other cities besides, as new periodical ventures formed in sympathy with or in opposition to the itinerant post-war avant-gardes. Following the tumultuous spring of 1921, Contact attempted to provide ‘foreign work a place to arrive’ in America, or, in the case of the United States’ literary expatriates (McAlmon being the most recent), perhaps a place to return home.71 But initially Williams and McAlmon’s experiments were met with a frosty reception across the Atlantic, especially in the pages of Broom, Harold Loeb and Alfred Kreymborg’s new international journal of the arts. The magazine appeared in the autumn of 1921 and was the brainchild of Loeb, co-owner of the Sunwise Turn Bookshop in Greenwich Village since 1917. Drawing on Kreymborg’s experience and contacts, he launched Broom to join the growing ranks of expatriates taking advantage of the favourable exchange rates in Europe. Initially based in Rome, Broom subsequently relocated to Berlin; London and New York offices were opened, but the magazine eventually consolidated its operations in New York for its swansong in 1923. By that stage, the magazine had become virtually synonymous with ‘cosmopolitan’ American modernism. Yet initially, the loosely defined policies of Broom became the final resting place for Kreymborg’s long-standing ambition for a well-funded ‘clearing house’ of modern verse (first hatched in his failed 1909 venture American Quarterly, and reprised in the failed post-Others Compromise/New Moon collaboration with Mitchell Dawson, Williams and McAlmon) rather than a new periodical paradigm.72 Broom’s inaugural manifesto assured readers that ‘the unknown, pathbreaking artist will have, when his material merits it, at least an equal chance with the artist of acknowledged reputation’.73 However, this compromise left all of its editors unsatisfied. Kreymborg’s involvement with the magazine was predictably short-lived. The official reason for his exit was given as ‘poor health and his own writing commitments’.74 The unofficial reason, according to Kreymborg, was Loeb’s reticence about publishing newer American writers, editorial differences, professional betrayal and, especially, financial problems.75 Inevitably, these personal squabbles dovetailed with broader debates about finance, affilation and modernist editing conducted in the little magazines. For instance, Scofield Thayer’s satire

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 129

25/01/2013 15:53

130 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

of McAlmon’s marriage of convenience to the wealthy heiress Bryher in The Dial and his subsequent expatriation in its May 1921 issue also drew parallels with Loeb’s estrangement from his wealthy wife, Marjorie Content, who had helped finance Broom.76 Invoking the old nickname of Others, Thayer (rather hypocritically, considering his own independent wealth) suggested that their Midas touch had transformed Kreymborg’s ‘little yellow dog’ into the ‘golden dog’.77 ‘Money always did breed like a rabbit’, Thayer quipped, ‘but Alfred’s pocket is some hutch’, and he linked McAlmon, Kreymborg and Loeb’s pursuit of cheap ‘printing abroad’ to a programme of exporting ‘Americanization’ and ‘breeding’ personal profit.78 Although sardonic, Thayer’s conflation of profit, printing, breeding, nationalism and science (he also poked fun at Williams’s medical background) in May 1921 was prescient, as it set the tenor for a transatlantic debate about American culture that carried on in modernist magazines throughout the 1920s.79 Loeb intended Broom to serve as an English-language review that would relay contemporary European writing to the United States in translation, and, in the spirit of reciprocity, the magazine would also introduce American writers to a new European audience. However, as if to establish its expatriate credentials from the outset, the first issue of Broom launched a double-barrelled attack on Contact. Emmy Veronica Sanders, a ‘cosmopolite, born in Amsterdam’ who practised law and lived in ‘New Amsterdam’ in the early 1920s,80 issued a stinging critique of ‘the extreme left wing of literary America – as represented e. g. by the Little Review and Contact’.81 While Sanders singled out Marianne Moore, Louis Untermeyer, a former member of The Seven Arts’ editorial board, parodied Williams’s tribute to Einstein in Contact 4 with a mock anthology entitled ‘Einstein and the Poets’. Sanders’s first attack on her adopted home was the more direct of the two, and, continuing her critique of puritanism and American obscenity law in the January–March 1921 issue of The Little Review, she condemned the society that she believed valued technical achievements over emotional and artistic development.82 For her part, she preferred the new regionalism of Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson to the country’s experimental poets. Responding directly to McAlmon’s appraisal of Moore in Contact 2 and Pound’s review of Moore and Mina Loy in The Little Review of March 1918, Sanders argued that ‘the manifestation of the American Machine – transforming itself, with all its attributes and characteristics, into [the] American Mind’ was mistaking ‘analytical acumen for [the] creative mind’; and when combined with ‘the arid lucidity, the precision, the knife-like flashing, the dainty skill and eternal badinage

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 130

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 131

of the French mind’, the result is a ‘trans-Atlantic type whose own strength (and weakness) lies along city-bred, machine-made, sophisticated electric lines’.83 Knives out, Sanders moves in for the kill: [I]f an ingeniously constructed, intricate little piece of machinery [. . .] should suddenly be given a human voice to pour its ‘soul’ into song – to transmute itself into a ‘poem’ – it would stand revealed as a bit of writing by Miss Moore [. . .] Relentless glistening scalpels are good for all diseased and dead and dying things, no doubt. But there is fog – fog of a certain kind – that makes things ‘come alive’[.]84

Here, Sanders transforms Moore’s poem ‘In the Days of Prismatic Color’ into a cautionary allegory warning Europeans about the technical excesses that she ascribes to the Yankee avant-garde, and the spiritual and affective tones that this emphasis apparently excludes.85 Of course, the exquisitely rendered minutiae of Moore’s poems resist the trap that Sanders sets in quoting ‘In the Days of Prismatic Color’, which appeared in Contact 2, out of form and out of context (and thus denying Moore’s writing the status of ‘poetry’ even at the typographical level). Despite, or perhaps because of, its hostility, however, Sanders’s review helped establish the localist avantgarde’s credentials as a ‘trans-Atlantic’ rather than parochial phenomenon, as Thayer had done earlier in The Dial.86 Joining Sanders in her mockery of Contact, and the American enthusiasm for science, technology and machinery more generally, Untermeyer produced his own mock anthology of poetic ‘tributes’ to Einstein. ‘Einstein and the Poets’ included a series of pastiches in the styles of Pound, Maxwell Bodenheim and Kreymborg, among others. With a mock gravity reminiscent of Williams’s ‘Announcement and Sample Poem’, Untermeyer proclaimed, And the binding subject, the leitmotif? Nothing less than the Einstein Theory of Relativity! The following excerpts are what Mr. Untermeyer believes might result if certain outstanding minnesingers were forced to record their reactions concerning the Weight of Light, Deflection of Solar rays, Non-Euclidean Time Warps.87

Apart from baiting his fellow American poets, Untermeyer’s more serious point in the first issue of Broom is that avant-garde poets’ engagements with science and technology ran the risk of undermining the primary business of modern poetry by confusing the ephemeral preoccupations of an avantgarde for earnest expressions of occasional poetry. Yet where Untermeyer

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 131

25/01/2013 15:53

132 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

(in his more light-hearted moments) treated ‘the extreme left wing of literary America’ as a foil for stimulating informed, creative debate amongst its various participants, Sanders merely increased her hostility.88 Following her attack on Moore and the localist avant-garde, in ‘Fourth of July Firecrackers’ Sanders poured scorn on the ‘American world’.89 Developing Waldo Frank’s contention that ‘the New Yorker of today [. . .] has been fathered by steel and broken by it’,90 she directs her vitriol against the very aspects of American culture that Williams praised in the Advertising Number. Sanders lambastes ‘the new “science”, the great “art” of advertising’, America’s ‘hybrid mixtures of a score of tongues’ and ‘the heterogeneous, the fluctuating, the promiscuous’ members of its population (however, she seems to have shared Williams’s suspicion of ‘laxatives’ and ‘patriotism’).91 When she announced her return to Europe in ‘New York, a Farewell’, Sanders’s winter departure transforms the Mother of Exiles into ‘a Witch’: [. . .] You sneer at race and lineage. Your hard eyes glitter at the world contemptuously. The flowers bordering your mangy grassplots are human beings . . . And printed papers are your butterflies.92

As Sanders’s boat leaves America, New York’s skyline recedes into the distance. The ‘printed papers’ that Sanders disparagingly substitutes for ‘butterflies’ reinforce their status as cultural detritus, a stark contrast from Williams’s treatment of the ‘wise newspapers’ that fanned the public’s desire for transatlantic knowledge in his efflorescent springtime of 1921. ‘New York, a Farewell’ contains neither irony nor anti-heroism. Where Williams was able to celebrate ‘America personified in the filth of its own imagination’ in his portrayal of the Baroness Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven in ‘The Three Letters’ – half European nobility and half New World opportunist, simultaneously uplifted and degraded by her aristocratic heritage93 – Sanders saw only an American ‘Witch’ who ‘sneer[s] at race and lineage’. In fact, the Baroness shared Sanders’s deep antipathy towards American culture, and similarly viewed the New World as a collection of deracinated hybrids living in material and cultural poverty. So although Williams’s depiction of Freytag-Loringhoven in Contact 4 was in some senses a genuine tribute, a reworking of the ‘marvellous old queen’ who had served as his Old World muse in ‘The Wanderer’, it was also a form of critique and retribution.94 Freytag-Loringhoven had launched a vitriolic attack on Williams and his Kora in Hell: Improvisations in her twopart prose poem (itself a kind of pastiche of the improvisations) ‘Thee I

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 132

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 133

Call Hamlet of the Wedding Ring’.95 The ‘review’ turns Williams’s own techniques against him, quoting without attribution and according to a metonymic logic, whilst punning relentlessly, and skewering his chauvinist pretensions with a radical feminist critique and a bawdy, sometimes brilliant, dadaist humour. But as McKible notes, critics tend to overlook ‘the virulent racism and anti-Semitism that fuel Freytag-Loringhoven’s analysis of Williams and Kora in Hell’, in which she equates ‘his personal and artistic failures’ with ‘America’s cultural inferiority and racial impoverishment’, which are in her mind ‘analogous to Jewish sterility and rootlessness’.96 Moreover, her pairing of the artist and the aristocrat was anathema to the democratic pragmatism of Contact’s editors. To Freytag-Loringhoven, the artist, like the ‘Aristocrat[,] is born’ into an ‘Uncontaminated [. . .] caste of culture’.97 In this formulation, Williams personally and America generally become an adolescent ‘Jew mixture’ of ‘castaway[s]’, who substitute ‘newness’, ‘materialism’ and ‘Demand of continuous individual happiness’ for ‘tradition’.98 In ‘The Three Letters’, Williams turns Freytag-Loringhoven’s anxieties about ethnic diversity and cultural ‘mixing’ in America back against her. As well as claiming her as an honorary American, he imagines their intellectual hybridisation over a shared meal. They stare at each other ‘across the Atlantic Ocean-white porcelain table’, both embodying and transcending their nationality, and ‘drawing Europe and America after them’.99 Matching her candidness, he nevertheless deflects her personal attacks and revelations about his personal life into the realm of the aesthetic by constantly referring to them as purely poetic performances (the practical reason for his ‘advertisements’ throughout the short story) before concluding with a sexist tirade against ‘La Baronne’. Yet he proudly acknowledges, as he had done in Contact 2, that ‘America [is] a bastard country’.100 Freytag-Loringhoven’s and Sanders’s attacks on New York’s heterogeneity, its ‘primitive’ energies and ‘unreasoning animal – desire’ and ‘vulgar – plebian’ cultural expressions, could equally have been a response to McAlmon’s ‘Jazz Opera Americano’ in Contact 3.101 In this experimental prose piece, an extract from his ‘Wind and Fire’ sequence, McAlmon celebrates the chaotic breakdown of racial boundaries in jazz clubs.102 Although Michael North is right to identify McAlmon’s racist depictions of African Americans in the story, the narrative is more than the sum of its primitivist caricatures.103 McAlmon asks, ‘what, sweet blood tattooed Jesus do we do with energy? Strong rushing red blood – whatt’hell’s to be done with it?’104 His own response is to express ‘it’ aesthetically in ‘a shivery tune’ that expresses an American ‘Reality’, merging ‘Jewish, Chinese,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 133

25/01/2013 15:53

134 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

East Indian’ and African American identities.105 McAlmon’s invocation of the jazz club’s chaotic rhythms admits, relies on and ultimately endorses existing stereotypes to advance his vignette; however, at least some of the narrative interest derived from his racialist discourse relies on the possibility of breaking down and intermingling those discrete bloodlines, which become, like his syncopated and syncretic language, ‘swirled and sung into the vermillion, the purple, swinging, swaying, bending tones’.106 Similarly, McAlmon’s ambivalence towards (and even dread of) America’s ethnic diversity combines with his enthusiasm for it. The commingling of ‘blood leaping to a syncopated rhythm’ within the prescribed boundaries of the nightclub temporarily ameliorates his anxieties. However, the poignant question that concludes his piece – ‘what comes after what comes after?’ – is left open ended, with familiar worries about the analogies between avant-garde formal experimentation and racial mixing vaguely reasserting themselves at the end: ‘the line’s diluted’.107 Clearly, McAlmon is more invested in exploring the sensual and creative possibilities of interracial and cross-cultural contact than in assuming responsibility for its socio-political realities in ‘Jazz Opera Americano’.108 However, he was more clear-cut about his views in his essay ‘Contact and Genius’. In the Advertising Number, he retreated into a position more closely aligned to the Baroness’s. He ceased attacking Young Americans and the ‘rhythm of the soil movement’ solely on the basis of their ‘mystical’ nationalism, and began targeting ‘the limitations of Waldo Frank on racial grounds’.109 Indeed, anti-Semitic comments simmer through the article – ironically, in a sense, because in it, McAlmon further distances his theory of aesthetic contact from concepts of ‘locality, race, or mere environment’.110 And yet, as Pound discerned in ‘To Bill Williams and Else von Johann Wolfgang Loringhoven y Fulano’ – a poem using the inimitable translinguistic pastiche technique usually found in his letters and published under the pseudonym Abel Sanders – these markers of identity would emerge as key points of debate amongst the transatlantic avant-gardes in the 1920s, just as they had done for Williams and Freytag-Loringhoven. And in the dadaist spirit that he had already grown weary of, Pound reprocessed the racist slang and the conflicts of previous decades (both geopolitical and interpersonal – he was perhaps seeking to rekindle his jibe at Williams, whom he called a ‘bloomin’ foreigner’ in a letter Williams reproduced in ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell) into a very bad joke:111 Bill dago resisting U.SAgo, Else ditto on the verb basis yunker, plus Kaiser Bill reading to goddarnd stupid wife anbrats works [. . .]

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 134

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 135

Bad case, bad as fake southern gentlemen tells you everymorn that he is gentleman, and that he is not black. Chinesemandarinorlaundryman takes forgranted youwillsee he is not BookerTWashington.112

Unlike Williams, then, Pound refuses to countenance the provisionality of identity, and seems to insist that rigid racial and class identities can be discerned and reinscribed by the poetic eye even through the blur of American popular culture and dadaist experimentation (which Pound takes to include Williams’s linguistic hybridisations and ethnically mixed heritage). Tellingly, Pound’s parodies of demotic American language, dadaist writing and improvisational prose included disorientating reams of numerals and fractions, which culminate in ‘Poem No. 2’ in a pun on the phrase ‘all for one’ – ‘41/41/41/’.113 By smuggling meaning and ‘values’ into what initially appears to be a generic dadaist cipher, and reducing one of its most heated debates about nationality and identity to a parody, Pound hoped to annul the movement’s detached and (by the early 1920s) outwardly apolitical credo, thereby turning the avant-garde’s attention to the pressing economic debates on which he based his review of Credit Power and Democracy. ‘What’, he asked, ‘is deader / than dada?’114 A great deal, as it turned out. Dada and other experimental French literary movements such as unanimisme were becoming increasingly popular amongst the American expatriates congregating in Paris, such as Malcolm Cowley and Matthew Josephson, who went on to become editors of Broom. This emerging avant-garde rejected prescriptive models of national identity in favour of more contingent and context-sensitive criteria; yet, like Pound, they conceived of expatriation as ‘a highly venerable form of “American identity” ’, rather than a rejection of it.115 In fact, given that America had become virtually synonymous with modernity and cultural hybridity, within the closed circuits of transatlantic magazines, the more deracinated and formally experimental one’s writing grew, the more ‘American’ it might become. Of course, whether that identity was a good thing or a bad thing depended upon how national filiations were interpolated in one’s milieu.

Conclusion: ‘But If It Ends/The Start Is Begun’ By the summer of 1922, as expatriates such as Sanders, FreytagLoringhoven and McAlmon began to sever their ties with New York, Broom’s editorial board grew more transfixed by this peculiar modernist ‘contact zone’. Despite its initially hostile reaction to Contact and localist iterations of American modernism, Broom eventually embraced the

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 135

25/01/2013 15:53

136 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

avant-garde circles that championed Moore, Williams and Stevens as ‘precursors of the latest movement’.116 Indeed, by the time the resolutely expatriate Broom returned to New York in the spring of 1923, its editorial board had rediscovered the American themes that had energised Contact 4 – science, technology, advertising, economics, jazz and cultural heterogeneity – but had largely stripped those themes of the dissenting politics and interrogative cultural localism that had motivated the now-disbanded Contact group. However, the return of Broom to the US coincided with Williams’s work on the fifth and final issue of Contact in its first incarnation, and it prompted some ambivalent responses from the editor. For instance, the populist ‘literary prize contest’ advertised in Broom’s March 1923 issue and judged by a panel of regionalist writers prompted Williams to quote Villon in Contact 5: ‘Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine [I die of thirst beside the fountain]’.117 Following the epoch-defining publication of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in 1922, and measured against The Dial, The Little Review and even Broom, what, precisely, had Contact achieved?118 And what more could it achieve in the current climate of runaway Eurocentric ‘cosmopolitanism’? Williams found his solution (or the closest he could muster) in the regenerative power of the avant-garde networks that had sustained him through the 1910s, and his discovery of Monroe Wheeler, a typographer and poet who had produced exquisite presentations of Williams’s and Moore’s work in his magazine Manikin, prompted him to issue Contact one last time. When he was planning Contact 5, Wheeler sent Williams ‘Men Like Birds’, a poem by Wheeler’s partner Glenway Wescott.119 Wescott’s display of ‘virtuosity’ set Williams’s mind reeling about the next phase of American poetry. Williams declared that ‘Men Like Birds’ ‘encourages me as nothing I have recently seen’, and that Wescott ‘has learned everything I could have thought to teach him’.120 However, his initial enthusiasm for Wescott’s work did not wholly transfer to the ‘Critical Note’ that he wrote for the young poet and Kay Boyle, Contact 5’s other discovery.121 Despite his emphasis on new beginnings, Contact 5 is implicitly a valediction, yet another breaking of the contact that he and McAlmon had inaugurated in the winter of 1920–1. Appropriately, in both typography and content, the design of Contact 5 is strikingly similar to the structure of the final number of Others, where Williams bookended the magazine with volatile treatises on American poetics. In ‘Glorious Weather’, Williams wrote that ‘CONTACT proposes – a few theoretical statements and notes, upon the art of writing’.122 Coupled with his other two contributions to Contact 5, ‘New England’ and ‘Critical Note’, the editorial acted as a fitting coda for the first incarnation of

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 136

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 137

Contact. The arrangement of these final pieces anticipates his tactics in Spring and All: the poem and prose are separated, but they operate in tandem, rooting each piece in its typographical, as well as its literary, environment. In his poem ‘New England’, he critiques the sense of futile borrowing that he feels blights American landscapes, but which he also feels can be diagnosed, critiqued and, ultimately, transfigured by the poetic imagination. A boy, frozen in a hackneyed newspaper snapshot, becomes a conspicuously anachronistic fixture, ‘Captured lonely cock atop / iron girders’, like a rusted weathervane on an antiques shop.123 The poem, which he later retitled ‘Down Town’, captures the transformative power of urban landscapes in America, but also its legacies of borrowed culture, its drift towards pastiche, and a creeping sense of cultural exhaustion.124 The Americanist avant-gardes that attempted to devolve Anglocentric authority by reinstating other hegemonies created an unstable cultural brink in the transatlantic little magazines upon which they continually balanced their milieus. In this sense, the final issue of Contact gestures towards the localist modernists’ drift towards the aesthetics of late modernism. As Tyrus Miller argues, ‘late modernist writing appears a distinctly selfconscious manifestation of the aging and decline of modernism’, resulting in a paradoxical ‘admixture of decadent and forward-looking elements’.125 In a way, localist modernism was both a delayed arrival in the modernist transatlantic and a precursor of the late modernist aesthetic. For Williams, the symbolic language of this drift registers in his obsession with roses in 1923. In Spring and All he declared that ‘The rose is obsolete / but each petal ends in / an edge’.126 In Contact 5, as in Spring and All, he connects that ‘edge’ to the process of cultural renewal that he demanded from successive generations of the American avant-garde. However, when Williams tries to discern an ‘edge’ in the objects he considers in the editorial, his text descends in self-conscious confusion: ‘– oh . . . oh, the edge, I mean, of that – what? – the scalloped edge of that African West Coast paddle, standing there, the whole cut from a tree’.127 Williams’s editorial reflects upon the time-space compressions that deliver a range of ‘traditional’ regional crafts from around the world for consumption by his own outwardly ‘rootless’ culture. This predicament culminates in an open-ended series of questions: What is poetry? What shall I say? What is their worth, these six poems in this issue judged absolutely – what? beside the cut of a West Coast nigger’s surf paddle or roses to the wrong girl in a play – after the original – that was never original anyway – once

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 137

25/01/2013 15:53

138 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes Men like birds, elaborate kites, descend into place ____________________________ – cutting through Became a symbol. I had lost the meaning Of progression. If I paused, she . . . leaning . . . White on the rushes, jade shielding marble, No wind blowing, no sound.

Who else prints anything?128

Williams’s bricolage of Wescott’s poem and Boyle’s ‘Shore’ abut two examples of ‘local’ art denoted by the ‘roses’ delivered ‘to the wrong girl in a play’ and ‘a West Coast nigger’s surf paddle’.129 As Robert Crawford notes, modernists working in ‘provincial’ outposts would often deploy primitivist tropes to destabilise cultural authority, but in Contact 5, the ‘aspects of [those] selected cultures’ merely record the collision of accident and context in a locally forged artwork.130 However, the sentimental and primitivist narratives embedded within the radically localist texts of Contact generate glaringly unresolved questions about where cultural authority actually resides. As North argues, ‘[b]oth editors romanticize “wild nigger’s work,” but in his contribution to Contact 3’ – the short story ‘Jazz Opera Americano’ – ‘McAlmon puts all the emphasis on the adjective’, and in Contact 5 Williams places it ‘on the noun’, and, problematically, ‘the derogatory possessive hovers in the middle as a kind of ambiguous cipher, looking both ways at once’.131 Like Duchamp’s readymades, the radical recontextualisations made possible by the accelerating flow of capital and commodities, and the rise of tourism and a globalised art market, created new comparative contexts in which to appraise objects with aesthetic value. But they also revealed deeply problematic by-products of those circulations. Despite Williams’s attempts to engage seriously with the object in question, his use of a racial epithet in ‘Critical Note’ disparages its creator. In the specialised debates conducted in the little magazines, these artefacts of aesthetic translocation often re-emerged as ethical aftershocks, to be appropriated or challenged by other avant-gardes. The juxtapositions that expressed and resulted from the phenomenon of time-space compression left indelible traces on the material texts that emerged from these transatlantic exchanges, which could radically challenge, or emphatically reinscribe, traditional markers of national and personal identity, often in

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 138

25/01/2013 15:53

Location, Location, Location

[ 139

unpredictable ways. As the next chapter will argue, it is a problem that localist modernists, as well as the Young American, American dada-secessionists and New Negro Renaissance writers, would repeatedly confront, but never surmount: no ‘edge / cuts without cutting’.132

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 139

25/01/2013 15:53

CHAPTER 5

SECESSIONS AND SYMPOSIA: AMERICAN IDENTITY AND TRANSATLANTIC COLOUR LINES IN MODERNIST MAGAZINES

Introduction The November 1922 issue of The Dial articulated a definitive moment in high modernism, introducing T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ to America alongside work by W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and several European modernists. Yet buried in this overtly transnational issue, a short review of Carl Sandburg’s and Conrad Aiken’s recent poems by the expatriate writer and editor Malcom Cowley issued a prescient statement about the nature of American identity. Cowley argued that to ‘write American’ is to write ‘a language, in fact, which never existed before’, a ‘fact’ which made ‘[t]he adjective American [. . .] less national than temporal’.1 In this observation, Cowley had identified modernity itself as a crucial underlying basis of American national identity – an identity which was metaphorically expressed as a linguistic construct, yet still represented something more than that, because ‘a poet may write in American and still not be an American poet’.2 The transatlantic journals of the early to mid-1920s conjoined American identity and post-industrial modernity insistently and legibly, in ways that would shape the American modernist canon for decades to come. Yet the vexed, open-ended question of how this ‘inchoate America’ might produce a distinctive national literature3 – how an American writer could ‘write American’ and be an ‘American’ writer – was at once deeply fascinating and a source of great anxiety to avant-gardes in America and overseas. The provisionality of the national canon was the subject of a vibrant contemporaneous debate, inflected by the immigration politics, nativist discourses and relatively segregated spheres of literary production of the early 1920s. In fact, the formal radicalism of the transatlantic avant-gardes

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 140

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 141

was often likened to the racial otherness of African American writers.4 Both were adopted as examples of American exceptionalism – of ‘writing American’ – whilst still never entirely being ‘American’. Nevertheless, writers such as Jean Toomer identified modernist poetics as a means of conjoining a new American language to the hybrid identities emerging within and between its geographical spaces. For instance, he explained in a letter to the editors of The Liberator in 1922 that ‘I am naturally and inevitably an American’ and ‘have striven for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling’.5 W. E. B. Du Bois famously contended that the central ‘problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line’6. But in the transatlantic journals of the early 1920s, especially those being produced by members of the New Negro Renaissance in Harlem, problems of the colour line frequently became interspersed with modernist problems of place. Moreover, these crises of identity also extended to class, aesthetic affiliation and location, and were confronted by a range of modernist writers on both sides of the Atlantic. From Gorham Munson’s Secession to Wallace Thurman’s Fire!!, and from Alain Locke’s ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’ special number of Survey Graphic to Norman Fitts’s S4N, this chapter explores how modernist writers and editors rediscovered the periodical codes of little magazines as a shared language, which allowed identity politics, modernist subjectivities and locational poetics to be correlated within a selfconsciously ‘temporal’ textual space. In a diverse range of little magazines and transatlantic locations, the cultural transactions that these writers and editors negotiated at street level could be encoded as material texts, using hybrid languages transfigured by local contingency, global migration patterns and multiple time-space compressions.

Closed Circuits and Missed Contacts: American Identities in Secession One of Munson’s most important achievements in Secession, launched in Vienna in the spring of 1922, was to articulate the ideological and aesthetic emphases that distinguished modernist avant-gardes from one another, in as close to real time as the postal networks allowed, and relay them back to America. Critiquing Munson’s polemical approach, John Brooks Wheelwright asked him, ‘what, o Secession, is there left to secede from?’7 Munson curtly replied that ‘there is emphatically something from which to secede: the American literary milieu of the past decade, a milieu which believed that literature was social dynamics and that its social significances were paramount’.8 Munson understood only too well that the distinctive ‘tangents’ of the Americanist avant-gardes – and, indeed, the

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 141

25/01/2013 15:53

142 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

more mainstream modernisms such as new regionalism – tended to merge into one ‘milieu’ in the eyes of non-specialists. Hence, a ‘secession’ from a broader national ‘milieu’ was essential because ‘a prompt deviation into immediate aesthetic concerns’ could, by implication, divert those ‘social dynamics’ from new regionalist models of social realism into a new avantgarde poetics (rather than vice versa).9 Thus, in Secession, he proposed that allegiances based on literary form would help disentangle his project from the many others which competed for space in the modernist transatlantic. If the title ‘Secession’ was a spatial metaphor for an avant-garde in formation, then Munson’s editorial ‘Interstice Between Scylla and Charybdis’ gave the group a sense of its destination. By configuring the leading journals in America’s transatlantic print culture as Homeric maritime hazards, he positioned Secession as a coherent ‘group organ’ seceding from other established models, such as the ‘personal’ Little Review (characterised as ‘a rudderless ship blown about in all directions by breezes from the left of Paris or London or Chicago’) and the ‘anthological’ type represented by Broom and The Dial.10 Rejecting the individualism and anti-‘ism-ism’ of Kreymborg’s journals, Munson distinguished his editorial programme with the explicitly partisan terms of its contributors’ and subscribers’ affiliations. And unlike Contact, in which the writers shared an interest in problems of nationality, locality and literary form but resisted a group identity, the emphasis in Secession was overtly affiliative and technical: Secession is forming a group of writers, hardly less important, a group of readers, a group concerned with the ends and aims of the other and, by a TECHNICAL JOURNAL, brought intimately into contact with their work in its EXPERIMENTAL PHASES [. . .] SECESSION speaks, not to a public meeting, but to a room-full of FRIENDS.11

The resulting policy retained Contact’s emphasis on specialised, technical debate conducted amongst a group of practitioners writing for one another and for a niche audience, with a shared emphasis on a range of interconnected, and unabashedly avant-garde, subjects. The original Secession group consisted of Munson, the Broom editors Cowley, Josephson and Slater Brown, Kenneth Burke and Mark Turbyfill. Cribbing from Broom, Munson aligned his journal with ‘the unknown, pathbreaking artist’, to whom Broom devoted only part of its journal space.12 And yet, exactly how ‘path-breaking’ was Munson’s stance? Groups in Munich, Vienna and Berlin had pioneered the strategy of artistic ‘secession’ in the final decade of the nineteenth century, and, as Munson confessed in his autobiography, Secession was named after the gallery of the same name in

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 142

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 143

Vienna.13 The term ‘secession’ entered the American lexicon primarily through Alfred Stieglitz and his ‘Photo-Secession’ movement, and the title of Munson’s magazine registers the transatlantic antecedents of his own avant-garde (and, as we shall see, through Stieglitz, formed the basis of his reconnection with the Young Americans). Thus, Munson self-consciously framed his own group’s literary ‘path-breaking’ as an extension of an existing route rather than a radical departure from it.14 Munson’s emphases may account for Secession’s reliance on satire as well as formal experimentation as means of delineating its group identity, since both rely on a shared knowledge of cultural norms. The poems of e. e. cummings distilled these tactics perfectly. Drawing on Munson’s partisan discourse of exclusion and critique in Secession 2, cummings wrote, [. . .] So this is Paris i will sit in the corner and drink thinks and think drinks in memory of the Grand and Old days: of Amy Sandburg of Algernon Carl Swinburned.15

Like Wyndham Lewis’s caricature of Algernon Swinburne in Blast 1, the point of cummings’s deliberate misnomers is to satirise an outmoded avantgarde (represented here by Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg) by creating parodic chains of association with the sentimental nineteenth-century poet.16 Like McAlmon and Williams’s poems in Contact, cummings’s poem suggests that avant-garde poetics described specific matrices of affiliation and differentiation generated within the context of a poem, as well as a spectrum of literary techniques. Munson, of course, anticipated cummings’s attack on the ‘old guard’: he derided Louis Untermeyer, Edgar Lee Masters, Paul Rosenfeld and, in particular, Sherwood Anderson, for their ‘sentimental[ity]’ and ‘imprecise’ techniques.17 The problem was that Munson could not stop. His overt declarations of allegiance and attack sometimes prompted awkward responses from his allies, who were often closely linked to his targets, especially the well-paying Dial, the influential Broom and Little Review, and the widely circulated New Republic and American Mercury, where many of Secession’s own contributors and editors also published.18 His multiple acts of editorial ‘secession’ eventually extended to his magazine’s editorial board, which produced a legacy of divisive in-fighting rather than a coherent movement. In January 1923, Munson joined Broom in relocating to New York, and throughout that year Secession sustained a tenuous coalition of American avant-gardes.19 The January 1923 issue of Broom has frequently been cast

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 143

25/01/2013 15:53

144 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

as an Americanist riposte to the Eliot-Pound-Yeats high modernist axis that had come to dominate The Dial, and a continuation of the transatlantic schism that had been fermenting since the ‘International Episode’ of 1918.20 However, the schisms emerging from within the Americanist avant-gardes proved far more important to the new generation of localists and expatriates who published in Broom, Secession and S4N than either Eliot or Pound at that stage. In particular, Waldo Frank’s introduction into the pages of Secession altered the trajectory of American modernism.21 Following the success of his 1919 study Our America, a major articulation of the Young Americans’ cultural pluralism,22 extracts from Frank’s new works of fiction, and especially City Block, began to appear in The Dial and Broom in 1922. Reprising Kreymborg’s attempts to reach out to the new regionalists, and signalling a change of tack, Munson was enthusiastic about the prospects of a new alliance that would alter ‘Secession’s course from experimental aestheticism to a kind of Stieglitz-Frank mysticism’.23 However, the localist Burke was not impressed with this convergence. In his review of Rahab and City Block for The Dial, Burke had criticised Frank for his technical failings and lack of specificity in his treatment of American localities, which proved ‘erroneous as a gauge of our environment’.24 Josephson went even further in Broom by dismissing City Block as an experimental but ‘mystical’ work, stymied by its ‘psychoanalytic formula’ and lack of precision. 25 Indeed, he placed Frank ‘with a group of American Impulsionists, [. . .] exponents of mystical or unconscious behaviour such as James Oppenheim and Sherwood Anderson’.26 Against this ‘Impulsionist’ aggregate of Young Americans and new regionalists, Josephson aligned the localist modernism and formal radicalism that he discerned ‘in William Carlos Williams, in E.E. Cummings, in Marianne Moore’, whose ‘rebellions’ and ‘speculations with syntax’ formed ‘the consummation of a long straight line whose inception lies in our traditional literature, and in the purest language forms’.27 Like Others before him, Munson persisted in attempting to bring these increasingly disparate groups into dialogue within the same journal. Unlike Kreymborg’s magazine, however, the editorials and mast-heads in each issue of Secession enabled readers to trace the shifting balance of power in its pages. In a November 1922 article for S4N, Munson located the ‘more instinctive and emotional though still very intelligent’ Frank ‘on the fringes of the Secession group’.28 By the end of its publication run, however, Munson had placed Frank at the core of his programme, and identified him as a writer who might join their secession (and, by implication, reject Cowley’s and Josephson’s growing enthusiasm for dadaism). He sought to ‘drive’ the journal ‘in a direction contained in the work of [Waldo] Frank,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 144

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 145

[Jean] Toomer, [Hart] Crane, and [Gorham] Munson’.29 Frank’s ‘For a Declaration of War’ began to articulate more forcefully not only this impulsion towards aesthetic unity, but also the nativist strain of his pluralist doctrine, which first surfaced in his 1919 work Our America.30 The manifesto repeatedly returned to the motif of America’s ethnic and cultural ‘chaos’, and framed criticism as an act of spiritual warfare that would help unify its divided peoples.31 His battle plan revolved around his major thesis, that ‘Unity is truth [. . .] [t]his is a universe, not a multiverse’.32 Moreover, his proposed solution remained a form of spiritual and affective synthesis based on religious ‘mystery’, with writers and artists becoming the high priests of this nationalist enterprise.33 This trend was reflected elsewhere in Secession, at the technical and spiritual level as well as the political.34 As Brian Trehearne rightly argues, the late imagism of Yvor Winters, as articulated in ‘The Testament of a Stone’, also evinced ‘a desperation for [aesthetic] unity at any cost’.35 Moreover, Hart Crane’s early work in Secession implemented Frank’s mystical nationalism at both thematic and formal levels, and attempted a ‘spiritual synthesis’ which pointed towards his major poem The Bridge. However, there was a crucial twist which distinguished Crane’s project from Frank’s unanimistic models, and which aligned him with the poetics of American dada. Like the American dadaists, Crane’s poem ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’ identified technology, jazz and advertising – in fact, all of the aspects of American culture that Munson and Toomer criticised Frank for overlooking in Our America36 – as fundamental components of American culture. For Crane, these aspects of New World experience could also act as mystical forces which had the potential to galvanise a new literary nationalism. In ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’, advertising culture, electric power and the cityscape facilitate both sexual union and a spiritual connection with the land, using ‘steel and soil to hold you endlessly’.37 However, as the ill-fated marriage of the title suggests, anxieties about missed contacts and severed connections also underpin Crane’s poem: the night’s arteries ‘turn dark’, and the commercial culture that pumps its ‘bartered blood’ through the city is offset against ‘the white wafer cheek of love’.38 Indeed, the racialist (and racist) trope linking ‘darkness’ with sexual desire (and its economic counterpart, consumer desire) and romantic love with whiteness plays out in the canopy above the city, where ‘moonlight on the eaves meets snow’, ‘[w]hile nigger cupids scour the stars’.39 The mechanical and economic infrastructures that broker the union of Faustus and Helen also create a profoundly unstable basis for that union. Ominously, a ‘religious gunman’ appears as an agent of death and moral retribution to threaten their unlikely ‘marriage’; however, this

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 145

25/01/2013 15:53

146 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

figure will also ‘faithfully, [. . .] fall too soon’, blown by the wind across ‘the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city’.40 Here, the foundations of both faith and the bridges are undermined by ‘thrift’, suggesting they are built with cheap, unstable materials. In short, these foundations become synecdoches for the all-pervasive free market and post-industrial landscapes of the city. Ultimately, they prove insufficiently robust to support the kinds of romantic, cultural and, ultimately, mystical unions that Crane envisaged. Crane’s anxieties in ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’ reflect those of many Secession contributors, whose enthusiasm for (and pastiches of) the instruments of time-space compression – shown in their constant references to travel, popular culture, economics and translocal aesthetics – often masked a deep anxiety for crossing boundaries. Crane himself remained vague about the consequences of the transgressions that he mapped out in Secession, in both ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’ and ‘Poster’, a poem reprising an advertisement warning swimmers that there was ‘a line / you must not cross nor ever trust beyond’.41 Others, however, were more direct: Slater Brown, Matthew Josephson and Jean Toomer all explored the problems of crossing the filiative and affiliative boundaries which circumscribed identity in America. Brown’s ‘Garden Party’ takes place in a New England suburb peopled by ‘the glistening thigh-fruit of millionaires’.42 However, Amos Haggerty, a small boy from a neighbouring area, sent by his mother as a kind of social emissary, was clearly fruit from a different vine. In the guise of a professional traveller, complete with travelling papers (a letter of introduction from his mother), Amos attempts to crash the birthday party of a young heiress. Mrs Haggerty’s awkward lexis in her letter and Amos’s quaint and immaculate costume immediately place his family in a lower socioeconomic class than the Smiths, the hosts. However, the extent of the boy’s transgression becomes clear from his nickname, ‘the little tar’, which was a common slang term for ‘sailor’ but also a ‘derogatory reference to someone of mixed black (or Indian, etc.) and white origin’ (OED).43 Both his nickname and costume link Amos to the ‘specially imported negroes in swallowtails and scarlet vests’ whom the hosts have hired to cater for the party.44 To these representatives of the New England elite, itinerancy, social inferiority and racial difference were nearly indistinguishable markers of otherness. Amos experiences this humiliation bodily rather than cognitively, as he blushes a ‘flaming scarlet’ (the same colour as the waiters’ vests) and loses control of his bladder; infantilised, emasculated and alienated, Amos is engulfed by a kind of travel sickness following his encounter with the privileged classes, as he is marched back home ‘across Mr. Smith’s expansive land on something like sea legs’.45 His family’s

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 146

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 147

attempt to gain entry into the Smiths’ social circle predictably ends in failure, reinscribing the boundaries that Amos had unwillingly attempted to cross, as he retreats back into his own territory. Similarly obsessed with cultural boundaries in America, Josephson’s satirical short story ‘The Oblate’ puts an Orientalist twist on the modernist trope of the exile at home. Rather than demarcating the clear boundaries that are ruthlessly patrolled in Brown’s waspish suburb, however, Josephson presents a radically defamiliarised version of New York’s East Side. Reconstructed from the expatriate’s vantage point in Paris, this imaginary contact zone is a case study in the limits of liminality, and the fruitless quest for cultural synthesis in America. The protagonist Hyacinth is an American ‘oblate’ – a lay person attached to a religious order, but not necessarily bound by its rules (OED) – repeatedly thwarted in his attempts at heterosexual conquest. His fascination with the ‘dark Oriental eyes’ and hypersexualised corporeality of Vadya, an Armenian dancer, sets up an awkward encounter between a self-consciously ‘intellectual’ Westerner and the perceived sensuality and imagined ‘collective barbarism’ of the East.46 The hybridised geography of the East Side, rendered in deliberately anachronistic and ornate language, tantalises Hyacinth with an imagined union with the East, as ‘parapets’ sit alongside ‘chewing-gum signs’.47 Nevertheless, Josephson makes it clear that no meaningful cross-cultural contact occurs here. Instead, he mines the avant-garde’s fascination with ‘other-ness’ to satirise egregious stereotypes whilst simultaneously exploiting their potential for literary impact. When Hyacinth’s ridiculous pursuit results in Vadya’s unintended disrobing during a dance, he declares, ‘Vadya, my ape woman. The barriers between us were destroyed by the intimacy of our common catastrophe.’48 Of course, Vadya does not reciprocate, and tactfully withdraws from the situation, while Hyacinth finally recognises his inability to comprehend, let alone transcend, the nature of their cultural barriers. Tellingly, Josephson registers this failure in the landscape, as the weakened symbolic capital of ‘two anaemic suns’ collapse into ‘one round slip of pink paper’.49 In American slang, a ‘pink slip’ referred to a dismissal from employment (OED), but here it becomes a token of Hyacinth’s multiple failures. Moreover, when confronted by an urban landscape drained of its traditional archive of pathetic fallacies, the only ‘union’ that has taken place is between the urban landscape and the economic forces that built it. However, Josephson’s pastiche of Orientalist stereotypes takes little interest in the ‘other’, which limits the breadth and effectiveness of his satire: in effect, the narrative colludes with the boundaries that its reductive caricatures serve to reinforce. Thus, ‘The Oblate’ becomes a cautionary parable

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 147

25/01/2013 15:53

148 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

about the perils of transgressing racial and social divisions, rather than an interrogation of the culturally constructed bases of those boundaries. Toomer shared Josephson and Brown’s fascination with this subject, and in fact he read ‘The Oblate’ in Secession intently during the fortnight that he worked in the Howard Theater in Washington, DC.50 He admired the ‘neat design’ of ‘The Oblate’, but he also found the story ‘flat’ because Josephson ‘is as incapable of penetrating his complete reality as Hyacinth is’.51 To Toomer, the boundaries that Josephson attempts to negotiate are inadequately detailed, because Josephson lacked the perceptual framework to understand what crossing them might mean; thus, ‘New York and the East Side do not come to life in him. There solidity is compressed to a point which traces its line upon his mind.’52 Josephson’s encounters with this contact zone encouraged ‘no overflow into mystery’ because, like most of Secession’s contributors, his engagement with both his subjects and the locations that they inhabited was so limited. The American dadaists lacked the unanimistic impulse towards mystical synthesis advanced by the Young Americans, and their language of urban culture served only aesthetic ends. Thus, according to Toomer, for this group there could be no ‘Growth’, only ‘Inbreeding’.53 Intriguingly, Toomer composed his own short story ‘Theater’ around the time that he was reading Secession 2, and he submitted it to Munson on 8 October 1922.54 Munson eventually rejected ‘Theater’, and the story was only ever published in Cane, where it preceded his poem ‘Her Lips Are Copper Wire’.55 Despite its non-appearance in Secession, however, ‘Theater’ clearly emerged from and engaged with the little magazine’s dialogic networks, and reinserting it back into them reveals telling convergences and tensions between Toomer’s aesthetics and the dada-secessionists’. The story traces the working life of the Howard Theater in staccato, detailed fragments, probing the divisions and demarcations of American social geography and African American double consciousness, as inscribed on the interior lives of its protagonists. John, a stage manager, and Dorris, a dancer, attempt to surmount their social backgrounds and form a relationship, but, like Hyacinth and Vadya, they are only able to unite in the realm of fantasy.56 Toomer explained to Munson that the ‘barrier between John and Dorris’ in ‘Theater’ emphasises divisions of class rather than race, as Munson had originally presumed, because ‘[John] is dictie (respectable) and stuck up, and will have nothing to do with [Dorris’s] set of show girls’.57 Given these social boundaries, it is only during her performance that ‘Dorris and John [can] unite in a sort of incorporeal animal ecstasy’, which, significantly, takes place in the rural South.58 Ironically, however, John achieves this ‘impossible contact’ by reasserting

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 148

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 149

traditional Southern hierarchies using a performance context unique to the industrialised North.59 John becomes the artist, and ‘Dorris, who has no eyes’, nevertheless ‘has eyes to understand him’ (emphasis added); in this heavily choreographed domestic sphere, the ‘flesh and blood of Dorris are its walls’.60 Toomer configures the scene so that geography and gender become domestic spaces writ large, standing in stark contradistinction to (and yet in John’s reverie also inseparable from) the commercial theatre in which Dorris dances for money. These fantasies of inversion torture both John and Dorris, and ‘rebound’ on John’s consciousness to the extent that they become legible on his body, transforming his face into ‘a dead thing which is in the shadow of his dream’.61 Dorris, for her part, experiences humiliations similar to those suffered by Brown’s and Josephson’s protagonists when the normative social boundaries are reinforced, as her boss Mame snaps, ‘I told you nothing doin’.62 However, through his spatialisation of subjectivity in ‘Theater’, Toomer achieved a unique but tenuous balance between the aesthetics of the expatriate secessionists and the site-specificity and formal experimentation of the localist avant-garde – between the ‘project of cultural synthesis’ advanced by the Young Americans,63 and the modernist reclamation of folk culture pioneered by the New Negro Renaissance. In fact, Cane performs this manoeuvre several times in pursuit of what Toomer called a ‘harmonious aggregate of realities’.64 This concept invariably played out across the colour lines of Sparta, Georgia and Washington, DC, but it was also in dialogue with the transatlantic vogue for unanimisme, the French literary movement inaugurated by Jules Romains which drew on ancient folk cultures to synergise urban environments.

‘Declension from Unanimity’: S4N and Unanimisme If Toomer’s short story ‘Theater’ described the social and geographical boundaries that divide individuals in the industrialised North, then his poem ‘Her Lips Are Copper Wire’, which follows ‘Theater’ in Cane, sketched out a basis for their reunification. As Mark Whalan notes, the poem offers ‘the only moment of mutually rewarding sexual communion and communication in Cane’.65 For Toomer, electricity acts metonymically, fusing biologically and mechanically generated electricity in a unanimistic grid. As the insulation of the addressee’s ‘wire’ lips is stripped away, the atmosphere itself becomes a conductor, as droplets of water in the ‘fog’ and on the addressee’s breath carry a current that illuminates all components of the poem. This ‘symbiotic connection between poet,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 149

25/01/2013 15:53

150 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

populace, and a technological, urban milieu’ suggests ‘Romains’s initial unanime’, a concept circulating in Broom and S4N at the time.66 Toomer, Frank, Munson and several other writers approached unanimisme not only as a provisional point of convergence between the Young Americans and their new Secession-ist allies, but as a potential method of surmounting the country’s sectionalism. To the Young Americans especially, unanimisme proved to be a remarkably resilient transatlantic model for infusing metropolitan populations with a pan-American sense of ‘mystical synthesis’. This vision increasingly enthused both Munson and Toomer, who by 1923 had joined the editorial board of the New Haven-based journal S4N. However, the tenuous expatriate avant-garde/Young American allegiance of S4N and Secession became divided over the issues of urban space, literary technique and, as ever, race, which shaped and framed these debates, just as it shaped America’s cities. Munson first studied unanimisme seriously when he translated Jean Epstein’s article ‘A Necessary and Sufficient Literature’ for the July 1922 issue of Broom.67 Epstein compared Romains’s project with the work of crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon, but, as Rosalind Williams notes, ‘Romains claimed that unanimes were not mere crowds’ but instead reflected a ‘self-conscious[ness], a “soul” ’ that emerged at crucial moments of convergence, particularly in urban settings.68 Thus, a unanime, properly experienced, articulated a moment in which an overarching schema unified the fragments of an industrialised urban centre. However, these synergising properties of technology and urban geography mark a crucial point of difference between Frank’s project and unanimiste thought. He portrayed industrialism and ‘the machine’ as ‘sucking monster[s]’ in Our America, and, like Emmy Veronica Sanders, considered their growth in America a logical extension of puritan materialism.69 And one crucial reason for Frank’s anxiety about unanimisme is that he did not believe that Americans possessed the depth of cultural and linguistic resources that the French did. As Casey Nelson Blake rightly argues, unanimisme relied on these heritages to achieve ‘the expression of French folk-consciousness in an urban-industrial setting’.70 Romains himself concluded that where the unanimistes had ‘a European tradition which is very strong’, he did ‘not feel there exists a purely American spirit’, implying that in the US, unanimes could only be weak simulacra of those in France.71 Frank had yet to locate these ‘native’ traditions outside of Jewish American culture in the US, and his attempts to mine African American dialect, as we shall see, brought him no closer. Nevertheless, when Munson assembled S4N’s ‘Homage to Waldo Frank’ in the winter of 1923–4, most writers most identified his work with

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 150

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 151

unanimisme, and portrayed his themes of sexual intercourse and climax as metaphors for unanimes.72 In Frank’s fiction, the momentary transcendence of difference during the sex act becomes an analogous merging with region. In Rahab, for instance, Frank develops Sherwood Anderson’s strategy in ‘Mid-American Prayer’, in which the protagonist configures a union with his Midwestern locality in sexual terms.73 Frank is far more graphic than Anderson, however, as he portrays his female protagonist on the ‘grass, roots thrusting up in erection, spilling in bud. Over: he. [. . .] One. [. . .] She was beyond distinctions.’74 Here, the locality becomes unsubtly fused with the male subject whilst the female orgasm encapsulates the unanime, which, Frank posits, can diffuse or erase the supposedly emasculating sense of America’s heterogeneity. As Sayn argued in ‘Waldo Frank and Unanimism’, ‘Frank was born’ into an America of ‘chaos and incoherence [which] stays impotent in spite of its factitious prosperity; it is a “mute” and “inarticulate” nation’, and he implied that Frank’s focus on sexuality was an attempt to compensate.75 Like Munson, Sayn also picked up on Frank’s difficulty with form, and hinted throughout that there were limits to the unanimistic project attempted in Rahab.76 But nowhere was this failure more evident than in Frank’s attempts to surmount the sectionalism and racial hierarchies of the South. In order to conduct research for his ‘race novel’ Holiday, Frank accompanied Toomer on his autumn 1922 journey to teach in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The ‘construction of “southernness” ’ that emerged from this trip, as Whalan argues, ultimately served to ‘collapse the boundaries between race, culture, and region’ for Frank.77 The critic John Crawford identified precisely this point in the S4N Waldo Frank number, albeit in this case unintentionally. Although he distorted Holiday’s naturalist critiques of the South, in ‘Declension from Unanimity’, Crawford argued that Frank’s ‘lynching’ narrative presented ‘the little, isolated community of Nazareth’ as a ‘polarized’ community, but it was ‘one, with that terrible, inconstant unity of imminent decomposition’.78 Although to Crawford the South represented a ‘land of “murky dissolutions” ’, its racial and gender hierarchies were intractable, and therefore – perversely – a source of cultural stability.79 Indeed, through their brutal articulation and preservation of difference, these divisions and hegemonies actually became the source of social harmony in the South for Crawford: It is a land of the Negro and the white. Contrast in color becomes antiphony of rhythm, which is heightened by the stark eliminations of a highly individualized subject [. . .] The lynching of [Holiday’s African American protagonist] John Cloud is a passionate and beautiful spectacle in itself; it is a perfect

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 151

25/01/2013 15:53

152 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

resolution of Waldo Frank’s symphony of the South [. . .] It is the conflict of opposing forces that has been soothed to rest.80

Although Crawford probably intended to emphasise the novel’s dramatic pathos in this review, his awkward conclusion is that the brutal actions of the white majority and the complicity of Cloud’s white lover Virginia Hade create a ‘soothing’ and ‘perfect resolution’ to the tragic narrative. Crawford’s interpretation of the text, however unintentionally, casually accepts both the racialist basis and violent policing of these hierarchies in the South. Frank’s title ‘Holiday’ underscored with bitter irony how transient any attempts to reconfigure the oppressive hierarchies in the Southern United States by either individuals or larger groups would be. This failure of unity also correlated with a failure of technique, each of which grew out of Frank’s mishandling of African American dialect. Despite having helped Frank with precisely this area during the peak of their intense friendship, in an unpublished review of Holiday 81 Toomer agreed with Crawford, who had taken issue with ‘Waldo Frank’s use of dialect’.82 Toomer believed that Frank was ‘too subtle’ to assign the quality of ‘repression’ to ‘the whites of the South’ and ‘a rigid symbolizing of blacks as expression’; he also noted that although ‘southern materials make up the body of this novel, the primary approach to it should not be sectional’.83 And yet, the structure that Toomer discerns in Holiday is scarcely more flexible. He concluded that ‘the Negro’ is ‘free within a very strict oppression’ while ‘the white’ is ‘respectably restricted [. . .] by an equally strict freedom’.84 Toomer’s hope that ‘whatever local or racial truth (or untruth) the work may contain, must be considered as a secondary factor’ was therefore hopelessly naïve.85 Having criticised Holiday’s structural ‘textures’, its inept use of dialect, its ‘clarity’ and its characterisation (the novel ‘forces one to accept the characters as essentially Franklinian in origin’), Toomer’s suggestion that it should be accepted as a ‘subjective design’ and purely an expression of ‘the artistic personality of Waldo Frank’ was equally facile.86 Following Frank’s trip to the South, his quest for unity became an active desperation for it. Unfortunately, this meant tacitly endorsing the essentialist, sectional hierarchies of the Southern states. By ‘eschewing geographical and naturalist fidelity’, Frank’s unanimiste project amounted to little more than a technical exercise in solipsistic nativism.87 Holiday turned his attention away from the ‘ethnic chaos’ emerging in the urban ‘multiverse’ and towards a stable social order in which rules were brutally enforced but clearly defined.88 That Crawford located a sense of cultural

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 152

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 153

harmony in Frank’s version of the agrarian South is both telling and troubling: to the reductive essentialism of the nativist gaze, the absence of clearly delineated borders meant that, for some, geography was not, as Heroclitus’s axiom stated, merely ‘fate’ – it was fatal. The multiple secessions and reconfigurations of the transatlantic avantgardes produced a growing sense of exhaustion and fractiousness amongst the Americanist avant-gardes in the mid-1920s, which was especially fierce when the points of contact between them appeared most logical and most intense. Toomer and Frank fell out over a tangle of interpersonal and cross-cultural disputes, whilst the dada-secessionists and Munson diverged over aesthetic differences and personality clashes.89 As Frank retreated into his own projects, Toomer and Munson pursued the mystic philosophy of Georges Gurdjieff, whilst the remaining secessionists busied themselves with perfecting a specifically American version of dada. Yet the impulse to discern a national literature within the country’s increasingly factional literary scene remained strong. In the October 1923 issue of Broom, now edited from New York, Josephson identified two ‘Great American Novels’, one of which was Cane. The logical pairing would have been Frank’s Holiday: both books were published by Boni & Liveright, and Toomer himself wrote an anonymous (but unpublished) self-publicising review of Cane and Frank’s novel in which ‘the juxtaposition of the white and black races so typical of southern life’ was modelled by two writers representing either side of ‘this racial contrast’ in America.90 But Josephson opted instead to compare Cane (an interconnected cycle of short fiction and poetry, which hardly made it a conventional novel) to Williams’s improvisational prose pastiche The Great American Novel (which was a deliberate travesty on the form). Josephson identified these two book-length attempts to impart literary structures on the diversity of American spaces and languages as ‘Great American Novels’, but his review spends no time on comparative analysis, only on developing interrelated themes. Josephson divides Toomer and Williams along geographic lines: Williams represents the white, technophiliac industrial North, ‘gaping at the outline of Manhattan from the factory laden meadows of New Jersey’, while Toomer stands for the ‘sensuous’, ‘fiercely emotional’ ‘Negro South’, ‘close to his soil’ and suffused with ‘folk-music and folk-poetry’.91 In this schema, Williams is the ‘terribly sincere’ linguistic strategist ‘obsessed by the word’, and Toomer the performative ‘American’ voice, an ‘expression’ of an ‘unconsciously gifted race’.92 Although Josephson vaguely (and somewhat patronisingly) credited Cane with having ‘been arranged with some attempt at architectural unity’, he confined Toomer’s expression to the usual range of troubling racialist clichés. Moreover, his praise also

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 153

25/01/2013 15:53

154 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

echoed critiques of Frank in S4N, with Josephson urging Toomer to revert to the ‘simple artistic forms which will contain his huge spouting pages of American prose’.93 The unfortunate implication was that Williams’s work was already ‘American’, whilst Toomer’s work was only ‘becoming’ American, and still encumbered by ‘his lessons in psychoanalysis and unanimisme’.94 By this stage, Toomer’s experiments with form had become almost entirely occluded by his affiliations with race, which were intensified by his geographical affiliation with the South (and, as we shall see, Toomer’s publishers and editors, including Alain Locke, were equally keen to maximise the latter).95 Thus, Josephson’s attempts to connect Toomer’s and Williams’s projects as ‘Great American Novels’ only served to reassert the disruptive potency of race in debates about national literature, and the shaky, divided ground upon which a highly provisional literature was being built. The succession of brokered alliances and broken contacts in Broom, S4N and Secession marked the beginning of the end of the ‘native’ modernism that its proponents originally meant to inculcate a unified American literature. The editorial syndicates of these magazines replicated Kreymborg’s failure in Others to find a common ground between the factions of America’s ‘indigenous’ modernisms, and the magazines themselves were not as resilient as Kreymborg’s. By 1924, the ‘group magazine’ Secession concluded with a solo number devoted to Yvor Winters, Broom had disbanded, and S4N was publishing only irregularly. The heady days of 1922, when Toomer had considered starting an ‘American’ magazine with Sherwood Anderson ‘concentrating on the significant contributions, or possible contributions of the Negro to the western world’, had faded into history.96 Toomer had also become increasingly ambivalent about his own racial identity, and had fallen out with Anderson and Frank over the issue. Nevertheless, the Young Americans’ pragmatist and pluralist impulses gelled with Toomer’s and Munson’s, and the spiritual frameworks (and, more specifically, the folk cultures in which they were embedded) of their mystical nationalism and unanimisme did encourage some of its proponents to forge provisional ties with the New Negro Renaissance emerging in Harlem. Toomer’s role in creating a tentative bridge between these strains of American modernism was fleeting but intense, and serves as an instructive point of entry into the magazines produced in and about Harlem in 1925–6. These projects of the New Negro Renaissance articulated the provisionality and plurality of the modernist projects that were converging in specific American localities during the mid-1920s, and ultimately served to critique and problematise even the most urgent attempts to locate a basis for cultural unity in its urban spaces.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 154

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 155

The New Negro Renaissance and the ‘Crucible’ of Harlem Although Frank and Toomer had parted ways by 1925, their publisher, Boni & Liveright, united them one last time in the advertising pages of Survey Graphic’s March 1925 special number ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’, guest edited by Alain Locke. The advert was for the African American novelist (and managing editor of The Crisis) Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There Is Confusion, Frank’s Holiday and Toomer’s Cane, and featured close-cropped portraits of Fauset and Toomer (see Fig. 5.1). The Survey Graphic advert used portraiture rather than testimonials to establish the race of Fauset and Toomer as authors, but the advert for Frank’s Holiday pointedly lacked one; its subject matter was suggested by the novel’s inclusion in the advert, but not by the blurbs, which merely praised Holiday as a work of individual ‘genius’.97 The advert is an awkward artefact. By the time of its publication, Toomer had largely distanced himself from both the Young American writers (most prominently Frank, but also Van Wyck Brooks and Paul Rosenfeld) and the New Negro modernists (including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay) with whom he rose to prominence in The Crisis and Opportunity. Indeed, according to Hughes, by 1925, Toomer’s only real connection to Harlem’s literary scene was as an emissary for Gurdjieff.98 But although Toomer and Frank’s affiliation had dissolved, the Boni & Liveright advertisement was appropriate. In establishing Harlem as the ‘Mecca of the New Negro’, Locke and the Survey Graphic aligned the district with a programme of spiritual and cultural renewal. Cane, Holiday and There Is Confusion also conjoined these issues to questions of geographical boundaries and crossings, and although the Young American-New Negro convergence suggested by the Boni & Liveright advert was anachronistic by 1926, it suggested some of their shared aspirations, pluralist politics, pragmatist philosophies and locational poetics. In the ‘Mecca of the New Negro’, Locke achieved one of the most successful incursions into mainstream print culture undertaken by an emerging American literary movement. The now-iconic special number of Survey Graphic combined the mis en page of higher-circulation journals of African American advocacy The Crisis and Opportunity with the paratactic and dialogic typographic designs often found in modernist journals to showcase the diversity of Harlem’s black communities. Indeed, the ‘New Negro’ identity evolved in tandem with Harlem’s own demographic profile, as the Great Migration brought 1.5 million African Americans from the rural South to cities in the Northern and Western States. In New York, Harlem registered this influx dramatically as its black population

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 155

25/01/2013 15:53

156 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

5.1 ‘Boni & Liveright: Good Books’ Advertisement, ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’, Special Number, ed. Alain Locke, Survey Graphic 6.6 (March 1925; rpt Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1980), p. 707. Image reproduced with permission of Black Classic Press.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 156

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 157

swelled from 50,000 in 1914 to 165,000 by 1930.99 For this reason, Locke branded Harlem America’s potential ‘race capital’, a focal point for building a ‘New Negro’ identity distinct from that of the ‘Old Negro’, which had been wedded to the regressive politics of Jim Crow America.100 Thus, as a site of cultural production, in the final analysis, Harlem is neither slum, ghetto, resort or colony, though it is in part all of them. It is – or promises to be – a race capital [. . .] [C]ulturally and spiritually it focuses a people. Negro life is not only founding new centers, but finding a new soul.101

In the Survey Graphic special number, Locke’s emphasis on a provisional notion of African American identity is expressed in his desire to discover within Harlem’s radius ‘a new soul’, and a new basis for cultural advancement. The issue conjured the exhilaration and danger lurking within the blaze of paradoxes, dualities, and the influx and efflux of diverse populations and cultural energies commingling in Harlem. As Peter Brooker has argued, this ‘stratified and permeable heteropolis [. . .] embod[ied] in its spatial relations the paradox and hope of being at once black and American’, the sense of ‘two-ness’ described as double consciousness by Du Bois.102 But as the ‘crucible’ of Harlem demonstrated, there were many different subdivisions emerging within this doubled sense of black identity, which presented both a problem and an opportunity for the New Negro movement. Locke joined other African American leaders who were attempting to establish a coordinated and inclusive civil rights movement in tandem with a coherent foundation for African American cultural production. The New Negro movement sought to challenge racialist and essentialist stereotypes whilst simultaneously cultivating solidarity amongst a range of African American communities. Rather than impart a forced sense of unity in Survey Graphic, Locke turned Harlem’s intense heterogeneity to his advantage. He argued that ‘[p]roscription and prejudice have thrown these dissimilar elements into a common area of contact and interaction [. . .] So what began in terms of segregation becomes more and more, as its elements mix and react, the laboratory of the great race-welding.’103 If, ‘from the racial standpoint, our Harlems are themselves crucibles’, then ‘the galvanizing shocks and reactions, which mark the social awakening and internal reorganization which are making a race out of its own disunited elements’, might well be a force for solidarity and cohesion.104 The reality and legacy of African Americans’ cultural mobility troubled Locke to a certain extent, however, and his elitist views (which were

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 157

25/01/2013 15:53

158 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

amplified in the The New Negro anthology that he developed from the Survey Graphic Harlem number) surfaced regularly in his articles. These ‘moving, half-awakened newcomers’ arriving in Harlem merely ‘provide[d] an exceptional seed-bed for the germinating contacts of the enlightened minority’.105 However, his crucial advantage over nativist and mystical nationalist projects of the mid-1920s and pan-African organisers such as Marcus Garvey was that by identifying the New Negro’s heterogeneity as a strength, he and contributors such as W. A. Domingo, Charles S. Johnson, Walter F. White and Elsie Johnson McDougald did not insist on an urgent doctrine of ‘unity at any cost’, which allowed space and time for its populations to forge their own identities and agendas. It had become clear that this quintessentially American sense of ‘newness’, regeneration and solidarity also suggested the potential for novel and multiple, or asyet-unrealised, hybrid identities to coalesce under the New Negro banner. As many critics have noted, Locke’s arguments are in dialogue with Boasian cultural relativism and Deweyan cultural pluralism. Mark Sanders, for example, has argued that ‘the celebration of the radically contingent nature of reality, aesthetic experience as the link between art and social progress, the promotion of inter-ethnic exchange and cultural plurality, and the dismantling of binaries in the service of democratic ideals’ emerged from and coalesced around both pragmatist and Young American/‘native modernist’ writing of the period.106 The notion that art and literature could play a central role in debating and fashioning these new identities was also important both to pragmatist thought and to the cultural politics of the New Negro Renaissance. Locke’s emphasis on contingency, provisionality and specialised literary debate probed the cultural, textual and geographical boundaries of Harlem to produce a locational editorial poetics that intersected with the tenets of Deweyan localism. Tellingly, in order to represent the heterogeneity of the New Negro movement with explicit reference to the physical geography of Harlem, Locke’s special ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’ number departed from the more conservative formats of other Survey Graphic issues and embraced the layout of little magazines such as Broom, Blast and The Liberator, as well as higher-circulating journals such as The Crisis and Opportunity. Illustrations by the Bavarian artist Winold Reiss and half-tone photographs appear in-text or as full-page spreads, and poems frequently appear, offset, in the midst of articles, creating textual fields where interrelational commentary is the rule rather than the exception. Like the French unanimistes, Locke envisaged folk culture operating as a spiritual fuel and lubricant for such exchanges, both on the page and off. His policies elevated ‘the stage of the pageant of contemporary Negro life’ to ‘a drama’ that showcased ‘its

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 158

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 159

new and progressive aspects’.107 However, the folk cultures imported to and emerging from Harlem were not always cohesive, and not always welcome; as Winthrop D. Lane argued in ‘Ambushed in the City: The Grim Side of Harlem’ (one of the few items omitted from The New Negro), the combination of traditional folk medicines, spiritualism and ‘witchcraft’ with unregulated free-market capitalism often produced disastrous effects on the health of working-class African Americans.108 But these divergences were precisely what made the Harlem Survey Graphic a textual ‘crucible’ that focalised the art, literature and politics of the New Negro movement modernists into a single textual space. For Locke, its unique typographical environment served as both a protective fortress and a combative arena within which to resolve the vexed issue of African American artists’ relationship to the increasingly hostile and nativist public sphere in the mid-1920s. Frequently, Locke juxtaposes content for the purpose of mutual commentary, exploiting the typographical resources of Survey Graphic’s format to contextualise – or, in the case of McKay’s lyrics ‘The Tropics in New York’ and ‘Subway Wind’, poignantly recontextualise – specific works. The West Indian author and journalist W. A. Domingo’s sociological article ‘The Tropics in New York’ shares its name with McKay’s poem, and the layout of the two-page spread in Survey Graphic arranges both poems, with borders, at the outside foot of the first two pages of Domingo’s article. As Anne Elizabeth Carroll notes, this layout suggests that McKay’s work somehow ‘illustrated’ Domingo’s lengthy piece.109 In this respect, McKay’s poems appear to take on a subordinate, supporting role, either as a response to, or ornamentation of, the prose article. As it turns out, however, the reverse was probably the case, and Domingo’s title was probably a tribute to McKay: ‘The Tropics in New York’ and ‘Subway Wind’ were collected in McKay’s Harlem Shadows in 1922, and the two poems were first published in The Liberator in 1920 and 1921 respectively.110 These poems address the effects of cultural dislocation experienced by the West Indian diaspora in New York. Locke’s decision to place all three pieces by McKay and Domingo together in the same textual framework creates a densely textured study of the translocation, migration and sense of cultural boundaries experienced by the ‘foreign-born Negro population of Harlem’, which numbered ‘about 35,000’ in 1925.111 McKay’s ‘The Tropics in New York’ and ‘Subway Wind’ form a diptych of cultural mourning, in which memories of the West Indies surface in New York’s economic zones or transportation networks. The speaker’s desire for both physical and spiritual nourishment in ‘The Tropics in New York’ is prompted by displaying tropical fruit in a market,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 159

25/01/2013 15:53

160 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

imported ‘Bananas ripe and green, and ginger root, / Cocoa in pods and alligator pears’.112 The encounter triggers a flight of lyrical imagination and an involuntary memory ‘Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills’.113 As the speaker’s lyrical response tantalises the memory with ‘dewy dawns’, ‘mystical blue skies’ and ‘nun-like hills’, the body becomes overwhelmed: My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze; A wave of longing through my body swept, And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.114

The ‘bow’ and weeping that concludes the poem is an affective response not only to a sense of nostalgia, but to the ever-expanding reach of global trade, which brings the ‘tropics’ to New York but increasingly displaces, distorts and manipulates the regionally inscribed cultural practices of the speaker’s homeland. Drawing on the poem’s original publication context in the Marxist magazine The Liberator, ‘The Tropics in New York’ reveals how free-market capitalism can manipulate consumers’ emotional responses to elicit almost religious behaviours (such as bowing and weeping). However, for McKay, the lyric ‘I’ also provides an insulating barrier against these emotional intrusions, which enables the speaker’s nostalgic response to surface, but also to be ‘turned aside’. Nevertheless, the conclusion is bleak, and consistent with McKay’s Marxist critiques: the transaction exacts tears from the speaker, but he still leaves ‘hungry’; and though briefly nourished by memory, he is still profoundly alienated from his past and his culture. In ‘Subway Wind’, McKay also established the lyric as a site in which, much like the subterranean space of the New York City subway system itself, the multiplicity of ethnicities, social strata and cultural memories converging in Harlem could be temporarily broken down and reconfigured. The central conceit of the poem correlates transportation and involuntary memory: ‘the gray train rushing bears the weary wind’ and creates a pale echo of the ‘fresh and free’ trade winds of the West Indies, which, in the mechanised underworld of the poem, become a ‘captive wind that moans for fields and seas’.115 Like ‘The Tropics in New York’, capitalist ‘trade’ is also on McKay’s mind here, as the trains’ fixed directions and destinations leave a ‘sick and heavy air behind’ its one-way wind. But in the realm of memory, and in the open spaces above the city, ‘the Trades blow fresh and free’.116 Again, McKay investigates how the metropolis oppresses and manipulates the psyches of its Afro-Caribbean diaspora in invisible but powerful ways. Nevertheless, he also suggests that there is

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 160

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 161

hope for the next generation, as even ‘Far down, down’ in ‘the city’s great gaunt gut’ the ‘pale-cheeked children seek the upper door / To give their summer jackets to the breeze’.117 The children’s defiant ‘laugh’ suggests a potential language of resistance, before it is ‘swallowed in the deafening roar / Of captive wind that moans for fields and seas’.118 ‘The Tropics in New York’ and ‘Subway Wind’ configure the lyric as a site of capitalist critique, but in ‘Subway Wind’ in particular McKay pauses to consider the risks that accompanied using the shared memories of the diaspora as the basis for that resistance. The ‘deafening roar’ of nostalgia was too easily co-opted by the forces it was meant to resist. Nevertheless, the sense of a displaced past created powerful bonds with African American migrants to Harlem, particularly those from the South, and spoke to the shared project of cultural recovery which crossed many sections of the New Negro Renaissance. Domingo’s ‘The Tropics in New York’ also addresses experiences of cultural disjunction in the Afro-Caribbean population of Harlem. ‘Here’, Domingo writes, this diverse group experience ‘their first contact with each other, with large numbers of American Negroes, and with the American brand of race prejudice’.119 Although they are ‘[d]ivided by tradition, culture, historical background and group perspective’, the geography and social pressures of Harlem nevertheless ‘[hammer] these diverse peoples [. . .] into a loose unit by the impersonal force of congested residential segregation’.120 Despite these shared pressures, unsurprisingly, this ‘loose unit’ is not necessarily cohesive, particularly because other black communities can fail to recognise the national and regional identities that Domingo argues distinguish the various groups within the West Indian diaspora: West Indians regard themselves as Antiguans or Jamaicans as the case might be, and a glance at the map will quickly reveal the physical obstacles that militate against homogeneity of population; separations of many sorts, geographical, political and cultural, tend everywhere to make and crystallize local characteristics.121

According to Domingo, those ‘local characteristics’ determine how AfroCaribbeans respond to the ‘color line’, not only as it is expressed outside of Harlem by white Americans, but also within it. As Walter F. White notes elsewhere in the Harlem Survey Graphic, ‘there are many color lines in America’.122 Using the ethnographic term ‘type’, common in Survey Graphic, White identified how these divisions and hierarchies combined with various socio-economic forces to complicate cultural

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 161

25/01/2013 15:53

162 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

and racial identities in Harlem. He argues that ‘those of lighter color could more often secure the better jobs’ and, as a result, a ‘wider chasm’ opens between ‘those with economic and cultural opportunity’ and ‘those whose skin has denied them opportunity’.123 Thus, for Domingo, race, class and regional distinctions had become co-constructing in Harlem, echoing Charles S. Johnson’s point (and reprising some of his essentialist stereotypes) that the ‘City creates its own types’.124 However, unlike Brown’s ‘Garden Party’ in Secession, for Johnson and Domingo markers of socioeconomic and racial otherness do not blur into a reductive binary aligning the rich, influential and white against everyone else. In fact, not only did the nuanced class, cultural and racial distinctions become crucial markers of the individual and group identities emerging in Harlem, but the roles that such distinctions played in establishing identity were neither settled nor consistent across the district’s communities. In some West Indian countries, for example, Domingo notes that ‘[c]olor plays a part but it is not the prime determinant of advancement; hence, the deep feeling of resentment when the “color line,” legal or customary, is met and found to be a barrier to individual progress’ in America.125 Thus, he argued that local contingencies and regional identities could test and inform the ‘universal’ movement for black enfranchisement in the New World. Even still, identifying a stable language of resistance that could negotiate these matrices of double consciousness in Harlem became a crucial project of the New Negro Renaissance. Thus, it is no surprise that Domingo concluded his article by quoting from McKay’s famous sonnet ‘If We Must Die’, which reconfigured a traditional poetic mode into a militant rallying cry: ‘We must meet the common foe; / Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave’.126 Locke counterpointed Domingo’s article with two of McKay’s most nostalgic poems, ‘The Tropics in New York’ and ‘Subway Wind’, to outline an affective as well as political basis for a shared language of resistance. Elsewhere in the Survey Graphic Harlem number, Locke balanced McKay’s protest poetry with his more spiritual lyrics and combined them with a poem by Toomer, the works arranged to reflect their content and show how African American and Afro-Caribbean experiences intertwined and converged in a single textual field. McKay’s ‘Like a Strong Tree’ and ‘Russian Cathedral’ appeared at the head of the page, and in aggregate the layout resembles both the top of a tree and the lateral beam of a crucifix, whilst ‘White Houses’ and Toomer’s ‘Song of the Sun’ form the trunk, or base.127 Thus, Locke uses the typographical constraints of the Survey Graphic to his advantage (though not necessarily to Toomer’s: the stanza breaks in his poem were omitted due to the restricted space, and his name appears

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 162

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 163

in smaller print than McKay’s). The ‘singing angelic host’ of McKay’s ‘Russian Cathedral’ emerges from the seeds of Toomer’s Southern folk culture, which ‘Caroling softly’ sing the ‘souls of slavery’.128 The reader is also encouraged to root McKay’s ‘Strong Tree’ in the ‘soil, red soil’ of Toomer’s bloody narrative, where ‘Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums’ are ‘Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air’.129 ‘White Houses’ – which Locke controversially changed from its original title, ‘The White House’, without McKay’s permission – mediates the multidirectional readings that emerge between McKay’s poems and Toomer’s. The speaker seeks ‘the superhuman power / To hold me to the letter of your law!’, and the strength to keep ‘my heart inviolate / Against the potent poison of your hate’.130 Both poems suggested how national legislation in Jim Crow America conspired to facilitate racist crime at the local level. In this sense, McKay’s ‘White Houses’ forms a dialogue with Kelly Miller’s argument elsewhere in the Survey Graphic special number that Harlem is ‘a fair specimen of the harvest of race prejudice in America’.131 As ‘the largest Negro community in the world’, it is ‘a part of, and yet apart from the general life of New York’.132 This tenuous relationship also played out in other urban centres of America; as ‘Negro communities [. . .] extend[ed] their boundaries’, conflicts erupted, such as in Chicago, where the ‘expanding boundary of the black belt precipitated the lamentable race riot’.133 Finding site-specific solutions was paramount if Harlem was to avoid repeating these issues on a similar scale, Miller argued, and he identified economics, business and the efforts of the Urban League as mechanisms and institutions with the potential to ameliorate these crises at the ‘local, urban, and industrial’ levels.134 He also stressed that ‘the state legislature and the national congress’ must help African Americans achieve ‘self determination’.135 To underscore the point, Locke embedded Langston Hughes’s iconic poem ‘I, Too’ at the heart of Miller’s article. Its speaker is ‘the darker brother’ whom ‘They send [. . .] to eat in the kitchen / When company comes’.136 Like McKay’s ‘White Houses’, Hughes traces a direct line between the artistic, domestic and political spheres: ‘I, too, sing America [. . .] I, too, am America’.137 Locke’s special number of Survey Graphic established Harlem as the ‘Mecca of the New Negro’ Renaissance, a site of convergence between local and national forces that underpinned not only Locke’s politics, but also his aesthetics. In his article on the ethnographically inflected illustrations of Reiss, Locke hints at how the Bavarian artist’s work gestures towards an interdisciplinary, pragmatist method of capturing local diversity as an expression of global diversity. For Locke, Reiss’s ‘revealing discovery’ is the ‘significance, human and artistic, of one of the great

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 163

25/01/2013 15:53

164 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

dialects of human physiognomy’: portraiture.138 Locke brings the dynamics between regional circumscription – ‘the racial and local’ – and ‘universality’ into dialogue by using the example of ‘painting, the most local of arts’, and, coincidentally, his emphasis on discovery and embodiment echoes Williams’s discussion of Matisse in Contact 2.139 Locke also cites the pre-modernist fauvism of Gauguin (the same figure Williams cited in his early attempts to articulate his theory of ‘contact’)140 to suggest a translocal model from which New Negro art might emerge. Thus, ‘[w]hat Gauguin and his followers have done for the Far East [. . .] seems about to be done for the Negro and Africa: in short, painting [. . .] in terms of its own limitations even, is achieving universality.141 Like Dewey and Williams, Locke paired the technical ‘limitations’ of painting (such as the physical edges of a canvas, the pigments on the palette and the temporal limits imposed by working with live subjects) with the geographical boundaries of specific regions. The forces and boundaries that created these regional identities were inseparable from artistic praxes, and Locke’s emphasis is reflected in the co-constructing textual fields that he created in the Harlem issue of Survey Graphic (which were, in turn, a reflection of the cross-cultural dialogues taking place among Harlem’s diverse neighbourhoods). In this respect, Locke’s methods, and the ends they served, dovetail with the localist modernists’ textual strategies, though with a far more clearly defined political programme and with higher stakes, particularly with respect to their expression in specific locations. However, Locke also argued that mobilising regional folk culture as an expression of artistic ‘universality’ should reflect an ethos of upward class mobility amongst African American artists, ‘a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern’.142 Thus, as Locke was ‘enlarging’ his purview from this ‘progressive Negro community’ to ‘a national and even international scope’, it was clear that his social interests were shifting too.143 As Martha Nadell argues, this shift registered typographically as the ‘documentary agenda of the Survey Graphic’ gave way ‘to a belles-lettres sensibility’ in the expanded and revised New Negro anthology.144 These changes, Hutchinson notes, reflected not only ‘Locke’s prejudices and elitism’, but also ‘audience and marketing considerations’, including promoting the anthology in colleges and addressing ‘the resistance of the black middle class to the cultural programme he wanted to push’, especially ‘his interest in Africanism and “the folk” ’.145 However, the innovative editorial poetics of the Harlem number of the Survey Graphic were sacrificed during this transition, along with depictions of the ‘grim side of Harlem’ (tellingly, Winthrop D. Lane’s article of the same name was one of the few omissions from The New Negro). Locke explained in the foreword to The New Negro that

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 164

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 165

the Harlem issue of Survey Graphic formed the ‘nucleus’ of the new anthology, but in sidelining the earlier engagements with the African American working class and the less ‘respectable’ elements of Harlem life, he created a niche for a new avant-garde to emerge in the New Negro Renaissance.146

Railroaded: The Spatial Poetics of Fire!! ‘Harlem: The Mecca of the New Negro’ had demonstrated that the potent intersection of documentary photography and modernist art could not only catalyse New Negro modernist writing, but also provide mechanisms for incorporating the social and political discourses that Locke believed were essential to African American expression in the 1920s. He had orchestrated an array of periodical codes that in aggregate presented a nuanced interplay of the voices emerging from the contingent spaces of Harlem. In the tradition of modernist periodical print culture, this textual locus served as both a point of consolidation and one of departure. Where Locke attempted to gentrify African American folk culture, McKay, as Mark Helbling notes, sought instead to ‘radicalize folk culture, to turn dialect into the language and consciousness of the proletariat’.147 By 1925, however, McKay was immersed in his expatriate years in Europe and North Africa, and a New Negro ‘secession’ had begun to take shape that picked up where he had left off.148 This new group addressed the working-class experiences in Northern cities that continued to preoccupy McKay, but also encompassed the folk cultures of the South, and expatriates’ encounters with the colour line overseas.149 Rather than making a clean break with the New Negro Renaissance, however, the group that converged in Wallace Thurman’s radical journal Fire!! maintained some of its connections to the more public face of the New Negro movement whilst attempting to veer off in its own trajectory. Following his extensive collaboration with Reiss, for example, Aaron Douglas provided the visual identity for both the New Negro anthology and Fire!! (he contributed the iconic ‘sphinx’ cover and three line-drawing caricatures for Thurman’s journal). In an unpublished manifesto for Fire!!, Douglas sketched out the terms of the contributors’ affiliation, a declaration of independence from the political programmes of Locke, Du Bois and Garvey in favour of individualist, aestheticist incursions into the margins of urban African American experience: ‘We are all under thirty. We have no get-rich-quick complex. We espouse no new theories of racial advancement, socially, economically, or politically. We have no axes to grind. We are group conscious. We are primarily and intensely devoted to art.’150 Despite Douglas’s conciliatory gestures, Fire!! was still polemical. As

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 165

25/01/2013 15:53

166 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Locke pointed out, the magazine represented a ‘rush toward modernism’ and ‘a driving push toward racial expression’, and he recoiled from its ‘strong sex radicalism’ and polemical emphasis on aesthetic autonomy.151 It seemed that Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent did in fact have ‘axes to grind’, and they consciously tapped into the tradition of avant-garde censor-baiting in order to attract publicity to the journal. For example, they conspired to get the magazine ‘banned in Boston’ by including writing ‘about prostitution or about homosexuality’.152 Nugent, Thurman and Gwendolyn Bennett all included narratives that prominently featured homosexuality, prostitution and interracial relationships.153 So when Locke argued that Fire!! was a journal of ‘left-wing literary modernism with deliberate intent’, and that ‘The Little Review, This Quarter, and the Quill are obvious artistic cousins’, he was not being entirely complimentary.154 He might also have included Secession in that list, because as Thurman pointed out, and as Douglas had reiterated in his unpublished manifesto, Fire!! was a deliberate attempt to distinguish a ‘group’ avant-garde aesthetic from a previous literary milieu using the resources of the little magazine format. As Thurman later noted, the contributors sought to represent the ‘proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie’, but unlike McKay they did not directly link literary production to class struggle.155 Fire!! promised to reclaim folk expression and simultaneously establish a counterpublic space for an African American avant-garde that would evolve beyond the prescriptive boundaries of upper- and middle-class intellectuals. The magazine’s manifesto declared that ‘FIRE’ would be both ‘a cry of conquest in the night’ and a ‘cackling chuckle of contempt’.156 Experimental texts such as Nugent’s ‘Smoke, Lilies, and Jade’ depicted homosexual encounters and bohemian lives lived on the margins of Harlem. With its connective tissues of ellipses and quotations from Thurman’s manifesto, Nugent’s narrative gestured towards an alternative space in which queer and black identities could interact with and inform more mainstream New Negro modernism. Thus, Nugent directly linked the intimate episodes in ‘Smoke, Lilies, and Jade’ to the literary network that produced Fire!! where ‘Wallie [Thurman]’, ‘Zora [Neale Hurston]’, ‘Langston [Hughes]’ and ‘Gwenny [Bennett]’ embodied the salon and after-hours culture of Harlem:157 everyone was there . . . fy-ah Lawd . . . Beauty’s body pressed close . . . close . . . fyah’s gonna burn my soul . . . let’s leave . . . have to meet some people at the New World . . . then to Augusta’s party . . . Harold . . . John . . . Bruce . . . Connie . . . Langston . . . ready . . . down one hundred thirty-fifth street . . . fyah . . .158

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 166

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 167

Nevertheless, Thurman and his associates found their investment in working-class and bohemian affiliations compromised due to their dependence on white patronage (Thurman advertised a list of patrons on the second page of Fire!!) and the cultural elite who both supported and contributed to Locke’s anthology.159 Thurman’s awkward defence of Carl Van Vechten’s deliberately controversial and divisive ‘race novel’ Nigger Heaven in his editorial ‘Fire Burns’ further complicated matters.160 As the poet Sterling Brown later argued, Van Vechten viewed the New Negro movement primarily as an expression of the ‘exotic primitive’, and he was ultimately a ‘voyeur’ with little political investment in the avant-gardes that he attached himself to.161 Despite these entangling allegiances and essentialist undercurrents, however, it would be a mistake to dismiss (as The Liberator’s editor Mike Gold once did) the analyses of class dynamics (and their racial inflections) undertaken by Fire!!’s contributors; as Kalaidjian rightly argues, Hughes’s ‘Elevator Boy’ presents ‘a worker’s tirade against alienated labor’, but one that refuses to ‘subordinate Harlem’s emergent black aesthetic to the discourse of class struggle’.162 Unlike the precious metals glittering in the Harlem cabaret of ‘Jazzonia’, which appeared opposite Reiss’s ‘Dawn in Harlem’ in Survey Graphic (Fig. 5.2), the urban grit and social critique of Hughes’s ‘Elevator Boy’ and ‘Railroad Avenue’ are thematically closer in tone to the vortex of tenements and towers depicted in Reiss’s illustration.163 But where Reiss envisages the tenements of Harlem as a point of departure for a new dawn of race consciousness, Hughes’s poems focus instead on how urban architecture delimits the opportunities of African American workers. In ‘Elevator Boy’, the subject’s job puts him in control of a piece of machinery, but it is clear that the position pays poorly and is low in prestige. Moreover, the elevator’s movements, ‘Goin’ up an’ down, / Up an’ down’, mirror the heavily circumscribed trajectories that the worker believes his life can take, and which his location reinforces daily.164 He is locked in an economic groove that simply swaps one dead end for another. Similarly, Hughes’s poem ‘Railroad Avenue’ confronts the forgotten urban landscapes that trail in the wake of America’s industrial and transportation infrastructure. ‘A box car some train / Has forgotten’ stands ‘In the middle of the block’, along with ‘A player piano’ and ‘A victrola’.165 The two discarded pieces of luxury audio technology, silenced by obsolescence and damage, accentuate not only the desolation of the ‘Dusk dark’ avenue, but also the sudden ‘laughter’ that erupts from ‘A passing girl / With purple powdered skin’.166 The ‘sudden laughter’ is charged with transformative power: ‘Neither truth nor lie’, it assumes the effects of a

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 167

25/01/2013 15:53

168 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

5.2 Winold Reiss, ‘Dawn in Harlem’, in ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’, Special Number, ed. Alain Locke, Survey Graphic 6.6 (March 1925; rpt Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1980), p. 664. Image reproduced with permission of Black Classic Press.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 168

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 169

passing train, ‘Shaking the lights in the fish joints’ and ‘Rolling white balls in the pool room’.167 The affective response also has the corollary effect of ‘Hardening the dusk dark evening’ of the desolate block, creating an environment which is at once protected and insular, but also alienating (it leaves ‘untouched the box car / Some train has forgotten’ and, presumably, the other detritus in the area).168 Hughes’s poem, like McKay’s, contrasts a hostile area with a hospitable one; both poets locate a certain amount of political power with the affective and aesthetic responses of their subjects, and both draw on the locomotive, connective properties of rail transportation to focus those energies. However, both Hughes and McKay emphasise the limitations of affective power. In McKay’s case, a diasporic sense of nostalgia and loss both motivated and militated against the oppressive architectures of urban life, whereas in ‘Railroad Avenue’, the instabilities that made the urban environment susceptible to the ‘sudden laughter’ are also inscribed on the subject’s identity. The girl’s ambiguous ‘purple powdered’ skin also suggests that the adjective ‘passing’ may not just describe her movements in relation to the ‘boy / Lounging on the corner’.169 The spontaneous laughter from the ambiguous female figure both causes and reflects the unpredictable responses emerging from an environment littered with the unforeseen by-products of industrialisation. In this respect, Hughes’s contributions to Fire!! are in dialogue with what Brooker calls ‘the compound “chronotope” ’ of Harlem’s night life and the multivalent New Negro identities represented in Locke’s special number of Survey Graphic.170 However, as Hughes insists in Fire!!, for the working classes living within the colour lines of Harlem, the doubled movements and complex paradoxes of identity circulating through America’s urban spaces were often reduced to tedious highs and lows by a brutally delimited existence at the bottom of the economic ladder. The drama of racial passing is both drained and accentuated by the heavily circumscribed opportunities presented to individuals and groups tangled within America’s intertwining class and colour lines. Elsewhere in Fire!!, Helene Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston reflected on the even greater challenges faced by African Americans living outside of the industrialised North. In her play Color Struck, for example, Hurston engaged in one of her earliest attempts to reclaim African American folk culture and dialect by exploring the systems of discrimination, gender conflicts and paranoid self-loathing that emerged within the colour line of the Deep South.171 However, the mis en page of Fire!! connects these disparate but similarly conflicted spaces using the conceit of transportation. For example, Hurston’s play begins in a ‘ “Jim Crow” railway coach’, whilst

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 169

25/01/2013 15:53

170 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Johnson’s ‘Southern Road’ terminates at ‘a tall predella’, in which ‘a dangling figure’ is ‘Swinging alone, / A solemn, tortured shadow in the air’.172 The Fire!! contributors did not restrict themselves to studying the effects of colour and class lines within the United States, however. Like Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett was both a writer and a skilled artist, and in 1923–5 she published regularly in The Crisis and Opportunity. She left her post teaching art at Howard University to study in France, but returned to Harlem in 1926 before the publication of Fire!!. Her short story ‘Wedding Day’ is set in Paris, and her translocation prompted her to analyse American race relations through the prism of the expatriate night life she experienced during her stay in France. The protagonist of ‘Wedding Day’, an African American boxer and jazz musician named Paul Watson, becomes engaged to Mary, a white American prostitute, after conducting a one-man ‘siege against the American white person who brings his native prejudices into the life of Paris’.173 He finds that he is unable to resist Mary after encountering her in the street, but even she eventually rejects him on their wedding day because she ‘ “just couldn’t go through with it,” white women just don’t marry colored men’.174 Indeed, throughout the narrative, Paul gravitates towards situations that reinstate the ‘native prejudices’ of his homeland: although he lives in a relatively tolerant and even welcoming area of Paris – ‘the district [of Montmartre] is the Harlem of Paris and rue Pigalle is its dusky Seventh Avenue’ – the transatlantic threat of the colour line obsesses him, and Bennett hints at its insidious mobility with frequent references to subway and electronic communications lines.175 This urban circuitry returns Paul incessantly to the fact of his own otherness, and his doubly alien role in Paris. In fact, for a story with a title emphasising a new union, and set in the birthplace of unanimisme, the story actually presents a series of anti-unanimes, where potential connections and cultural synergies are repeatedly missed or thwarted: ‘French telephones are such human faults,’ Paul muses, as he waits anxiously for a call from Mary that will never come.176 Later, the ‘shrill whistle that is typical of the French subway pierce[s] its way into his thoughts’ after a narrative ellipsis in which he travels aimlessly after Mary’s rejection: ‘why was he in the subway,’ he wonders, ‘he didn’t want to go any place’.177 Having temporarily subverted the racial hierarchies of his homeland, only to have them reinstated at the last minute in Paris, he becomes conscious of the transience of his engagement, and a sense of profound disorientation results as he tries ‘to get ahold of’ a thought ‘bumping around in his head – something he started to think about but couldn’t remember it somehow’.178 Ultimately, Paul reorients himself with the familiar undercurrents of

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 170

25/01/2013 15:53

Secessions and Symposia

[ 171

suspicion that he displayed earlier in the narrative, but with a new sense of detached irony borne of the futility of his situation, which he equates with having a ‘First class ticket in a second class coach’.179 For Bennett, as for Hughes and McKay, metropolitan rail networks are invested with a sense of entrapment and failure rather than liberation – the sense that the above-ground streetcar has been inverted and driven underground, and their routes and terminuses brutally defined and circumscribed. Like the dismissive ‘pink slip’ that Hyacinth received in Josephson’s story ‘The Oblate’, the ‘tiny pink ticket’ that Paul uses to travel becomes a transnational material pun on his dismissal and failure, an irony made all the more vicious because its meaning is dependent on colour.180 For the emerging generation of African American writers, the ‘invisible’ communications and transportation networks springing up in Western metropolises held out the meritocratic promise of industrial capitalism: universal travel and communications for all those who could pay. However, as the transatlantic avant-gardes were aware, historical cultural borders were relentlessly reasserted in urban space, and consequently the psychic division between the Parisian Metro and a Jim Crow railway coach becomes thinner than the pink slip of paper Paul handles.

Conclusion It is in some ways ironic to reflect that rail transport – a motif that African American modernists continually deployed when probing the matrices of double consciousness in urban environments – set the scene for Jean Toomer’s unanimiste-inflected epiphany at the 66th Street ‘L’ station in New York in 1926 in which he began to articulate the mystical systems that he hoped might transcend the prescriptions of race, and fold back into the socio-political sphere as merely ‘American’.181 But even though his writing drifted further from the formal innovations and bifurcated localities of Cane, he still remained preoccupied with geography.182 Nevertheless, throughout his career, Toomer sought to inscribe this state of fluidity upon his identity. However, after the mid-1920s, he did not configure his ‘new order’ of American identity as a challenge to the essentialist identity politics that calcified in the nativist period of the 1920s, but rather presented it as the by-product of a spiritual retreat – a ‘withdraw[al] from all things which emphasize or tend to emphasize racial or cultural divisions’.183 Nevertheless, it is useful to consider Toomer’s retreat in the context of other secessions from the aesthetic milieus of American modernism. Munson’s attempts to unify several strands of American modernism – the Young Americans, American dadaist expatriates and the localist

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 171

25/01/2013 15:53

172 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

avant-garde – and to reach out to the New Negro Renaissance via Toomer had been thwarted in Secession and had stalled in S4N, and even before they ceased production, the editors of Broom took only a fleeting interest in such a collaboration. Shortly after Toomer began his long retreat from literary life, Harold Loeb, Matthew Josephson and Malcolm Cowley eventually had their own literary careers subsumed by jobs in advertising and finance, industries which had ironically served as one of their major ‘American’ subjects during the final phases of their writing and editing work.184 Confronted with their practical trials and financial difficulties, Broom’s editors had acquiesced to the dominant culture uncritically. Fire!! also succumbed to the practicalities of print culture (albeit in a different way), when the bulk of its lavishly designed issues were destroyed in a house fire, a loss that almost bankrupted Thurman and dissuaded him from producing any further issues.185 Yet he too moved on to other projects, launching the anthology-style Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life in 1928 as a ‘clearing house for newer Negro literature’, following Locke’s trajectory by expanding his own original purview.186 Such retreats and reformations played out in numerous modernist groups throughout the 1920s. But the examples of Toomer and Fire!! indicate that although the ‘mechanics’ of the various literary secessions could be and often were similar across America’s transatlantic avantgardes, the individual and cultural stakes of those secessions altered radically depending upon one’s relationship with the colour line. In Fire!!, contributors such as Hughes and Bennett delved into what Du Bois called the ‘increasingly intricate world-embracing industrial machine’ and the identities it created, primarily (but not exclusively) on the margins of its urban centres.187 A densely textured print culture gave a material form to the variegated and liminal spaces that these modernist groups explored. Direct contact between the avant-gardes discussed in this chapter may ultimately have been fleeting, but the textual locations in which those engagements occurred remained mutually illuminating, if not necessarily co-constructing. Indeed, the radical subjectivities that lay at the core of these modernist projects remained the basis for their potential reconnections in little magazines during the advent of late modernism. However, as the next chapter discusses, dialogues involving race, ethnicity and nationality in the late modernist period often became derailed by the ethical aftershocks and unanswered questions left in the wake of the locational counter-narratives to high modernism.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 172

25/01/2013 15:53

CHAPTER 6

NEW LOCALISM, LATE MODERNISM AND AMERICA’S UNFINISHED SPACES

Introduction The localist avant-garde of William Carlos Williams, Robert McAlmon, Kenneth Burke, Marianne Moore and other Contact affiliates reached its peak cultural moment in 1921, but its afterlives, like those of vorticism and imagism, persisted in the transatlantic print cultures of the early to mid-1920s as a parallel, yet deeply (if sometimes scarcely perceptibly) embedded narrative. However, if localist modernism’s key moments of articulation were both elusive and laden with paradox, then its legacies, like its foundational narratives, were doubly so. Following the high modernist annus mirabilis of 1922, the transatlantic crosstalk generated by the localist and expatriate networks tended to express a pervasive sense of cultural exhaustion and dislocation. Nevertheless, several new journals converged in the mid- to late 1920s to provide the interstitial spaces in which a new localist counter-narrative could emerge in the transatlantic slipstream of the dominant strains of high modernism. This chapter identifies and gives shape to the continuing evolution of localist modernism in the interwar period. In particular, it examines problems of cultural difference raised but never resolved by the first generation of localists. Issues of form, race, class, gender, sexuality and power, concentrated by the material facts of geography and textual space, continued to gestate in journals such as Edwin Seaver’s 1924, Charles Henri Ford and Kathleen Tankersley Young’s Blues, Richard Johns’s Pagany and the relaunched version of Contact (edited by Williams, McAlmon and Nathanael West). Moreover, these questions had been imbued with additional urgency following the rise of the New Negro movement. Against

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 173

25/01/2013 15:53

174 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

the backdrop of late modernism, and in dialogue with transatlantic little magazines such as Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review, Ezra Pound’s The Exile and Eugene Jolas’s transition, these conversations eventually coalesced into a new form of localist modernism. This new praxis emerged in the late 1920s, and configured the temporal dimensions of place primarily as an accretion of ‘historical particulars’, moulded and semiotised by moments of socio-economic crisis.1 The new localism anticipated the objectivists’ emphasis on ‘the word’ as a locus and barometer of these convergences, and in many ways the new localism served as a staging ground for the objectivist movement (indeed, many key figures, such as Carl Rakosi, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky, contributed to both). But what distinguishes this earlier group of writers from the objectivist nexus is their frequent reliance on pastiche, an interest in updating social realism and naturalist methods (similarly tinged with the dissenting nationalisms of new regionalism), and their interdisciplinary, multimodal focus. The ‘newness’ of new localism, in other words, was paradoxically conjoined to its cultural lateness. Fredric Jameson’s and Tyrus Miller’s formulations of ‘late modernism’ apply in some respects to the original localist avant-garde. This group was among the first of the modernists to exploit ‘the empty spaces left by high modernism’s dissolution’ and to reassemble new, locally sourced ‘fragments into disfigured likenesses of modernist masterpieces’ in which ‘the vectors of despair and utopia, the compulsion to decline and the impulse to renewal, are not just related’ but ‘are practically indistinguishable’.2 Typically, America served as both the frontier and the focaliser for these emerging cultural energies, and once again the pliable, dialogic format of little magazines made them one of the key textual arenas in which the liminal aesthetics of late modernism (and, unsurprisingly, new localism) began to coagulate. Pitching between the first and second waves of American modernism, magazines like Blues, Pagany and the resurrected Contact mediated the long tail-end of imagist aestheticism, the rise of the objectivists movement, and the intensely partisan modernist writing that coalesced in the leftist reviews of the 1930s. Thus, in their efforts to renew the contact ‘between words and the locality that breeds them’, the new localists sought to harmonise regionally specific idioms and milieu-specific jargon – inherited modernist forms and emergent socialist politics – in response to the cultural crises brewing in late-1920s America.3 Driven by a sense of impending disaster rather than post-war optimism, the new localists chronicled their own self-defining praxes, as well as those which had come before. Although, like the first localists, this new grouping managed only a partial articulation of their programme, they retained a consistent

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 174

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 175

series of aesthetic and critical emphases that persisted into the final issues of Contact: An American Quarterly.4 Ultimately, the new localism marked a transitional moment in literary modernism in which several generations of American writers temporarily converged to address the unfinished business of the first localist avant-garde.

Localist and Dadaist Legacies, 1924 to 1928 Following the dissolution of Secession in the summer of 1924, Gorham Munson relocated to the artists’ colony of Woodstock, New York, where he met the Jewish American journalist, poet and political activist Edwin Seaver.5 Seaver had been impressed by the manner in which Secession sustained its emphasis on specialised aesthetic debate whilst maintaining an investment in the cultural life of America, and in this respect he had been particularly enthused by Waldo Frank’s contributions.6 However, based on the title he chose for his magazine, Seaver apparently agreed with Josephson’s claim that ‘the adjective American is less national than temporal’.7 Seaver’s periodical chronotope 1924 provided a space in which the lingering transatlantic debates generated by the first wave of expatriate journals could be channelled into a localised interdisciplinary sphere of artistic production. As a regular reviewer for both The New Republic and The Nation, Seaver also envisaged his own journal as a forum in which political commentary could co-exist with, and eventually inflect, both local and international artistic discourses.8 The magazine is best known for hosting the last public exchange between Frank and the American dadaists. At heart, this debate was a tug of war about the cultural locations of American identity, which encompassed each area that Seaver intended his journal to address. In 1924, Frank’s anxieties about the trajectory of the Americanist avant-garde shifted from the aggressive, didactic stance he took in the penultimate issue of Secession to near-vitriol where his racialist and degenerationist rhetoric was as conspicuous as it was anachronistic. His polemical salvo ‘Seriousness and Dada’ framed ‘the complex and defunct Dada movement’ as a ‘weakling [strain] of the European pose muddled with American incompetence and lost against the background of American bewilderment’:9 Dada spans Brooklyn Bridge; it spins round Columbus Circle; it struts with the Ku Klux Klan; it mixes with all brands of bootleg whiskey; it prances in our shows; it preaches in our churches; it tremulos at our political conventions [. . .] [O]ur brew of nigger-strut, of wailing Jew, of cantankerous celt, of nostalgic anglo-saxon is a brew of dada.10

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 175

25/01/2013 15:53

176 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Frank’s increasingly essentialist language actually echoes the sense of arrogance, entitlement and self-sufficiency that unites the extreme positions he enumerates above, which he links, syntactically and typographically, to the self-serving telos of America’s advertising culture and its telling analogues with nationalist propaganda: ‘DO YOUR DUTY: CHEW MIXLETS GUM. BE AN AMERICAN: THROW YOUR RUBBISH HERE.’11 To Frank, the cultural melanges facilitated by the marketplace (suggested by the ‘MIXLETS’ brand of gum) threatened to engulf America’s younger literary talents, who had become ‘slavish functions of the American mass which they profess[ed] to lead’.12 Thus, he demanded that ‘[t]he first step in the absorption and control of our dada multiverse is the achievement of a serious, of a literally religious temper’, which would reassemble the ‘young cut-up’ and place him ‘humbly in the rank-and-file’, subsuming the avant-garde into the mainstream of American culture.13 Unsurprisingly, Cowley, the self-professed ‘American dada’, insisted in 1924 that Frank’s invective was little more than ‘traditional mysticism’.14 Sidestepping the question of national affiliation, Cowley argued that dada’s ‘principles are international’ and, for the dadaists, ‘[t]here was nothing geographical in these discoveries’.15 Nevertheless, he accused Frank of hypocrisy, since Frank befriended ‘Romains and his little group’, and was ‘proud’ to associate with the ‘Unanimists of America’, suggesting that his literary techniques similarly derived from European sources.16 Yet, inevitably, such discussions of technique were inseparable from questions of affiliation and location. Thus, when Cowley defended the ‘associational processes of thought’ in dada, and insisted that this emphasis on parataxis and formal ‘bravado’ constituted ‘a discovery of new principles’, he was also defending the cultural heterogeneity that energised American dada.17 So it is ironic that the valedictory statement of the American dadaists, the multi-authored, multimodal sequence ‘New York: 1928, A Group Manifestation’, published in the summer 1928 ‘American Number’ of transition, actually replicated elements of the nativist logic that Cowley attacked in the work of Frank, but in a far more virulent form. ‘New York: 1928, A Group Manifestation’ reunited the former Secessionists Cowley, Josephson, Slater Brown and Burke, who were joined by the experimental novelist Robert M. Coates. Echoing John Rodker’s earlier prediction that dada would sweep America ‘like a prairie fire’,18 Cowley’s introduction to ‘New York: 1928’ depicts a dada ‘REVOLUTION’ in America.19 Yet the dada-utopia Cowley envisages amounts to little more than a primitivist orgy in which the state swaps roles with the private and voluntary sectors. Local infrastructures continue ‘TO FUNCTION THROUGH EXISTING AGENCIES’ (for example, ‘THE

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 176

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 177

ADVERTISING MEN’S BRANCH OF THE AMERICAN LEGION BECAME A COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY’), and artists perform a racial (and racist) masquerade in which ‘NIGGER ORCHESTRAS’ provide the soundtrack for the (presumably white) revolutionaries.20 It is possible that Cowley is critiquing the collusion between private and public sectors in the United States, or deflating the pretensions of propagandistic art. Yet in this manifesto, and throughout the sequence, artists are either destroyed by or collude with the marketplace and normative hegemonies, or they simply fiddle while Rome burns, ignoring the chaos and injustices erupting around them. In the absence of any countervailing interrogations of American culture, the marketplace rushes into the empty space created by the US dadaists, and reduces their ‘Group Manifestation’ to a disposable by-product of the capitalist system, sustaining longstanding iniquities and relegating artists to the sidelines of social debate. Despite its satirical intent, the manifesto revealed that the American dadaists’ programme of incessant pastiche, partisan attacks and literary responses to America’s cultural fragmentation revolved around an ethical vacuum, which ultimately was filled by nativist and late capitalist anxieties.21 In 1924, however, Seaver had projected quite a different fate for the Americanist avant-gardes. Although Frank’s ‘For a Declaration of War’ had initially attracted Seaver to Munson’s milieus, he had not overlooked Frank’s earlier distrust of industrialisation, and seemed to harbour suspicions about Frank’s calls for unity.22 In fact, in ‘Cultural Pluralism’, a review of the seminal Horace M. Kallen text Culture and Democracy in the United States, Seaver is quite specific about the sort of ‘unity’ that he is prepared to endorse.23 Paraphrasing Kallen’s formulation of cultural pluralism, Seaver presents its unifying tenet as an inseparable component of American democracy: ‘in manyness, variety, differentiation, lies the vitality of such oneness as [the United States] may compose. Cultural growth is founded upon Cultural Pluralism’; thus, the ‘alternative before Americans is Kultur Klux Klan or Cultural Pluralism’.24 In a direct challenge to the Young Americans (and developing a belief held by Toomer), in his explication of pluralism Seaver also identified mechanisation as a vital component of America’s unity and vitality, not a threat to it. He argued that ‘[n]ot in spite of our machines but because of them we shall yet evolve into a new humanism, a new culture, a new vision’.25 Here, Seaver equates mechanical components metaphorically or metonymically with the discrete societies that make up the industrialised and democratic social fabric of the United States – at least, in its urban areas. Unlike the unanimistes, who surmounted diversity with a unifying folk culture, Seaver imagined a social dynamo dependent upon specialised

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 177

25/01/2013 15:53

178 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

components, which served as a basis for an outward-looking, pluralist programme of Deweyan cultural localism. Of course, cultural pluralism is not incompatible with nativist ideology, and, indeed, ‘the preservation of difference’ underpins both pluralist and nativist logic.26 Moreover, as Daniel Green notes, during the rise of cultural pluralism, ‘the majority of critics were white [. . .] and conceived of a pluralist nation of immigrants descended from Europeans. It is in this realm that pluralism differs most obviously from multiculturalism.’27 This precept is evident in Seaver’s own work, and he, like many other modernists, also partook of the essentialist miasma that suffused many works of the period. For example, one of his poems in 1924, ‘Nocturne’, styled night as a predatory and sexualised ‘Ethiopian queen’ in a tired primitivist rehash.28 Like other pluralists, then, Seaver attacked extreme forms of racism and homogenising nationalisms whilst endorsing certain forms of essentialism. As localist modernists updated their programme in 1924, these ethical and political blind spots followed them into their period of mid-1920s dormancy. In the fourth and final issue of 1924, Williams responded to Seaver’s formulation of cultural pluralism, and similarly argued that the cultural and linguistic fragmentation that it spawned did not necessarily represent a form of ‘disillusion’.29 In his review of McAlmon’s The Portrait of a Generation, Williams reconnected the precepts of Contact with the concerns of an emerging but simultaneously fracturing Americanist avant-garde. Like his multimodal paracriticism in Contact 5, the review shifted seamlessly between poetry and prose, and between quoted and original content, its form responding to the heterogeneity that Williams detected in his subject’s work: In The Portrait of a Generation things and words knock against each other, the writing and the things, the generation, mixed chaotically, ice eyed hope standing at one side, looking on. The machine is tired . . declares a new beginning. Disjointed? No. It is a fresh juncture of a ‘thing’ jamming its way among broken up bits, [. . .] Things and words jostle – as kinds jostle in N.Y. (on the streets) – aligning themselves or not: they jostle and GO30

To Williams, the ‘chaos’ and contingency that McAlmon’s writing embodied was constructive, vibrant and modern, and rejected the sentimentality that a ‘mystic arrangement’ of its components might represent.31

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 178

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 179

Instead, Williams resisted the popular compulsion for defined historical narratives (linked by Foucault to ‘old schemas’ and stasis) and sought instead to engage with America’s spatial configurations.32 To Williams, McAlmon presented a dynamic nation ‘without tradition / or direction’ ‘but space’, expressed metonymically through poetic form and paired deliberately with the movement of heterogeneous crowds through urban geography.33 In this respect, Williams’s argument about the source of McAlmon’s literary strengths is an implicit critique of Frank’s ‘Seriousness and Dada’, which lamented America’s lack of social and literary cohesion. By contrast, ‘McAlmon keeps the essential brokenness of his subject in the disorder – often for emphasis – of his significantly loose lines’, thereby, paradoxically, reaffirming their integrity and cultural viability, not despite, but precisely because this new ‘generation’ of Americans had become ‘mixed chaotically’.34 Unlike the American dadaists, however, McAlmon’s ruptures produced for Williams a consilience, ‘a fresh juncture of a “thing” ’ upon which a substantive new poetics might be based.35 Of course, Williams ignores the potential ethical and political pitfalls of this position (particularly the ways in which narratives of cultural mixing often favoured dominant groups), and McAlmon’s poetry did not consistently live up to the billing. However, as a publisher and modernist impresario, McAlmon’s support for the modernist transatlantic’s emerging canon was indispensable, as it granted access to a shared material language inaugurated in Contact and sustained in both fine press editions and little magazines.

The Atlantic Canon: the transatlantic review and The Exile The niche initially carved out by transatlantic journals such as The Egoist and The Little Review was pushed into new prominence in the early 1920s by Broom, Secession and S4N, and in 1924 Ford Madox Ford’s little magazine the transatlantic review continued to develop this trajectory. Ford’s claim that ‘the birth of the transatlantic review’ was ‘in truth a rebirth’ can be applied not only to his prior editorship of The English Review, but more broadly to the transatlantic periodical publishing arena, in which the precepts that motivated the pioneering little magazines of the 1910s were adapted to new intellectual and practical pressures.36 As artists expatriated and repatriated themselves, crossing borders and generic boundaries in their writing and editing, in the late 1920s The Exile and transition emerged to rearticulate the transnational purview of literary modernism. Whilst The Exile remained a fairly exclusive club overseen by Pound, the inaugural issue of transition was radically inclusive. Jolas and his co-editor Elliot Paul wrote that ‘art

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 179

25/01/2013 15:53

180 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

joins distant continents in to a mysterious unit, long before the inhabitants are aware of the universality of their impulses’.37 Drawing on the example of James Joyce, McAlmon later described this ‘derationalize[d]’ and ‘flexible language’ as ‘an esperanto of the subconscious’ that emerged from the individual psyche to produce an unfettered communion between artists regardless of language or region.38 However, in the mid-1920s, such utopian proclamations remained in the background. In the transatlantic review, Ford and Pound resituated the little magazine as a half-way house for conspicuously ‘major’ works in progress, later to be produced by fine press limited edition printers. It is no surprise, then, that William Bird’s Three Mountains Press and McAlmon’s Contact Editions were involved in the production of Ford’s journal. During this intermediate phase of transatlantic modernism, a new emphasis was placed on the economics of printing and writing, subjects which became inextricably tied not only to Pound and Williams’s recursive engagement with America as a subject, but to the material languages of the new localism. As it had done in New York, 1924 also marked a year of new beginnings and renewed enterprises in France. As Pound began preparing his A Draft of XVI Cantos, he helped Ford to secure funding for the transatlantic review from the New York lawyer John Quinn, and helped broker the agreement that enabled Ford to use the premises of William Bird’s Three Mountains Press as an office. Although Pound’s involvement with the journal trailed off shortly after the publication of the first issue (with Ernest Hemingway picking up the slack), he contributed two early versions of what would become Cantos XII and XIII, printed in reverse order in that inaugural number.39 Taken together, these Cantos live up to their usual ‘cosmopolitan’ billing – Pound traverses ancient Chinese and Roman history, covering major figures such as Confucius (Kung Fu-tse) and Diocletian. But what is noteworthy in Canto XII (which in the transatlantic review was entitled ‘Another Canto’) is the new American emphasis of Pound’s project, which emerged in tandem with his renewed preoccupation with transatlantic migration and economics, particularly as it applied to US print culture. Williams’s crucial chapter ‘The Voyage of the Mayflower’ from In the American Grain was also published in the transatlantic review, which similarly examined the vexed interdependencies of identity, nationhood, material culture and geographic space.40 In the transatlantic review, Pound’s Canto XII outlines a business scheme set forth by the American businessman Francis S. Bacon, nicknamed ‘Baldy Bacon’, whom Pound met in New York during his 1910 visit to America.41 The Canto connects Bacon’s business to America’s colonial past, and alludes briefly to its risks, cruelty and systems of economic

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 180

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 181

exploitation. But the primary interest operating throughout the Canto is the business of transatlantic print culture: Bacon ‘returned to Manhattan, ultimately to Manhattan’ to resume the work of ‘job printing’, ‘distributing jobs to the printers’.42 The Canto’s appearance in the transatlantic review does not tell the whole story, however, as Pound deepened this material language in the poem’s deluxe presentation. Henry Strater, the expatriate American painter who frequently worked with Bird as an illustrator, interpolated the poem’s transatlantic context in A Draft of XVI Cantos.43 His illustration for Canto XII mediates the Statue of Liberty and metropolitan Manhattan skyline with the Atlantic Ocean, and in its mis en page Strater’s scarlet letter acts like a philosopher’s stone, transforming the tropical shells into coinage that pools at the ball-terminal of the ‘A’ (see Fig. 6.1).44 The illustration also alludes to Cuba, where Baldy Bacon made his fortune, and in this section of the poem his name is visually surrounded by money. The image conjoins Pound’s re-engagement with America to the risky business of printing, and transforming the written word into cold, hard cash began to obsess Pound as he launched his first little magazine. Pound actually suggested that John Price, The Exile’s American agent, enlist Bacon to help in the production of The Exile, noting that his New York offices could serve as practical headquarters for the magazine (Price apparently did not pursue this option).45 Edited from Italy but intended primarily for US readers, the first issue of The Exile was printed in Dijon by the Three Mountains Press, before production was shifted to Chicago, where the publisher Pascal Covici took over. Four issues appeared between 1927 and 1928, and Pound only published work that he personally endorsed, including pieces by McAlmon, Rodker, Williams, W. B. Yeats, Zukofsky and other male writers (Pound’s misogynistic editorial policy silently prohibited female contributions). However, in some ways, the journal is most notable for Pound’s editorials, in which he became increasingly preoccupied with the United States.46 His paranoid invectives focused on factors that impeded travel and communication between geographic locations, and railed against the practical and legal barriers that he faced producing the magazine. Import duties, customs officials and the exigencies of American copyright law surface frequently, prompting him to contemplate political solutions to these problems of location in various thought experiments. In the first issue, he describes ‘both Fascio and Russian revolution [as] interesting phenomena’, and argues that the capitalist imperialist state must not be judged only in comparison with unrealised utopias, but with past forms of the state; if it will not bear comparison with the feudal order; with the small city states both republican and

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 181

25/01/2013 15:53

182 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

6.1 Ezra Pound, ‘The Twelfth Canto’, originally published in A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound: for the Beginning of a Poem of Some Length (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925). Copyright ©1925 by Mary de Rachewiltz and Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York.

despotic; either as to its ‘social justice’ or as to its permanent products, art science, literature, the onus of proof goes against it.47

Here, Pound is interested in the idea of political revolution, but only insofar as it advances the production (and producers) of cultural capital.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 182

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 183

And despite his apparent emphasis on pragmatic Realpolitik in ‘The Exile’, his later editorials actually drifted towards the ‘unrealised utopias’ (though of futurist rather than medievalist origin) that he originally appeared to dismiss. For example, in the fourth and final issue of The Exile, ‘The City’ imagined a space in which all impediments to movement had been removed by civil engineering solutions and dramatically reduced government (an ironic stance, given Pound’s support of the heavily interventionist policies of social credit theory). He goes into an extraordinary level of detail as he imagines ‘towers’ forming ‘great L’s grouped at the apex of the city, sheer steel to some harmonious average, of 30 or 40 stories, with here and there a high tower. Incline-plane cellar parking throughout.’48 Here, Pound’s misty-eyed vision of a mechanised, micro-managed urban environment derives from his nostalgic explorations of ancient European cities in texts such as A Walking Tour and the Malatesta Cantos. For instance, he looks to ‘the old houses east of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence – they are in simple lines, all made for utility, and they attain extreme beauty’.49 Despite his insistence on the primacy of the artist’s interest, then, Pound’s sympathy with the burgeoning fascist state in Italy can be glimpsed in his utopian evocation of urban place. In his late-1920s writing, the conflicted energies of vorticism had given way to his desire for uncomplicated, ‘bold solutions’ to practical problems in order, as Leon Surette has argued, ‘to make it all cohere’.50 Thus, against the cultural fragmentation of the late modernist period, Pound buttressed the bold, clean lines of modern architecture. The Exile provided a forum in which his extreme politics inched closer to articulation. His futurist exercise in urban planning revealed a worrying glimpse of tangible fascist practice in the 1930s, and his quotation from Benito Mussolini in the second issue – ‘[w]e are tired of government in which there is no responsible person having a hind-name, a front name and an address’ – revealed his renewed emphasis on the geographical provenance of cultural and political authority.51 In his writing of the mid- to late 1920s, Williams began to sympathise with Pound’s urgent need for cultural order, and his interest in the contingent energies of place and the instability of identity began a rapid shift to more fixed locations, and to stable and predictable racial ground. In the transatlantic review, he sternly critiqued puritans’ lack of engagement with the indigenous peoples of the New World, and with America’s other immigrants. This failure of contact aligned with 1920s American nativist views, and Williams believed that such insularity represented a ‘perversion of emptiness’, ‘an atavism which thwarts and destroys’.52 Nevertheless, as argued in Chapter 4, Williams’s notions of cultural and racial hybridity created certain ethical pitfalls, which were hinted at in the ‘Advertising

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 183

25/01/2013 15:53

184 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Number’ of Contact. As Lisa Sánchez González argues, Williams frequently read American history as a system of violent and gendered interracial conflicts and (failed) contacts; moreover, as a member of the ethnically mixed Puerto Rican diaspora, his narratives are often inflected by ‘the Latin American paradigm of mestizage (racial miscegenation)’.53 As Sánchez González points out, In the American Grain ‘resorts to a paradigm that simultaneously celebrates Eurocentricity and whiteness (veiled in claims to voluntary cultural syncretism) and metaphorically exploits – even rapes – the engendering significance of the dead, anonymous indigenous woman’.54 In his analysis of American culture, Williams uses his own ambiguous subject position to ‘[complicate] aesthetic and ethical tensions that are usually narrated as a racial divide’;55 ultimately, this was a ‘conceptual trap’: Williams was a figure forced into the U.S. binarism of racial identifications that ironically made him the (nonwhite male) Other of the (Black male) Other. But instead of unravelling these contradictory subjective dialectics, Williams sublimates them by exploiting the (nonwhite female) Other of the (nonwhite male) Other, creating a subjective syntax that confounds rather than compounds the now commonsense Hegelian approach to subjectivity.56

Ironically, as I have argued in Chapter 4, these ‘conceptual traps’ were facilitated by the same diagnostic frameworks that supported his enthusiasm for cultural hybridity and what would now be called multiculturalism. But rather than confronting these blind spots, Williams frequently retreated into primitivist and essentialist fantasies instead of challenging the reductive binaries into which his fascination with cross-cultural contact continually led him. For instance, his almost wilfully naïve chapter ‘Advent of the Slaves’ from In the American Grain relies on nostalgia and stereotyping to create a personal sphere insulated from, rather than mobilised against, the brutal facts of slavery. In ‘Advent of the Slaves’, Williams argues that the defensive ‘poise’ struck by the African American slaves against their brutal treatment stems from their cultural ‘solidity, a racial irreducible minimum’.57 However, this quality almost certainly derived from Williams’s own experience, rather than that of the ‘colored men and women whom [he knew] intimately’.58 In fact, one of these men was Marshall, the African American owner of the famous ‘red wheelbarrow’ from Spring and All (and, as argued in Chapter 4, a probable point of reference for ‘St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’), along with his son, whom Williams refers to as ‘M.’ in ‘Advent’.59 He explains in the chapter how he distils his fondness for ‘the able fisherman’ into ‘several pages of notes’ which detail their ‘conversation[s]’, only to

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 184

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 185

confess that he later ‘lost them’.60 In this respect, Williams registers his sympathy for individual African Americans, but participates unwittingly in the erasure and appropriation of their cultural histories. Yet he also ignores his own inability to incorporate those narratives into In the American Grain. Thus, when he reports Marshall’s son’s assertion that ‘[w]hite blood and colored blood don’t mix’, he projects his own anxieties about (and enduring fascination with) mixed-race families onto the ‘other’.61 Such tactics led Lola Ridge to complain that Williams’s ‘treatment of the Negroes, a people who have given so much to America’s spiritual and aesthetic life, is singularly inadequate’ in In the American Grain.62 Ridge’s review does not describe Williams’s portrayal as ‘unsympathetic’, but as reductive and primitivist; he is merely a ‘spectator’ who is content for African Americans to remain ‘segregated and kept pure for his perpetual enjoyment’.63 Like Pound’s Canto XII, which depicts Baldy Bacon ‘sleeping with two buck niggers chained to him, / [. . .] To keep ’em from slipping off in the night’,64 Williams’s ‘Advent’ reduces slavery to a mere historical detail, ‘just men of a certain mettle who came to America in ships, like the rest’.65 Williams composed much of In the American Grain during his travels in Europe in 1924, and another transatlantic crossing from France to America in the autumn of 1927 prompted him to return to the issue of cross-cultural contact. In his 1928 sequence The Descent of Winter, which was first published in the final issue of The Exile, Williams began to engage with Jewish American culture.66 The anecdotes that he used to describe Jewish culture echoed his own critiques of puritan culture, ‘which reproduce[d] its own likeness, and no more’.67 Frank had made a similar connection in Our America, where he argued that ‘in their intense and isolated will the Puritan and Jew were kin. Also, in their function as American pioneers.’68 But Williams rarely represented anything beyond that sense of isolation. In his entry for ‘10/27’ in The Descent of Winter, Williams’s (probably reported) speaker opines that if ‘A Jew has a clothing store [then he] looks at you wondering what he can sell. And you feel he has these people sized up. A nasty feeling. Unattached.’69 As Brian Bremen notes, in these passages Williams performs a ‘kind of “splitting” ’ of self ‘between the implied “I” that identifies with Mrs. Pischak and the bigoted “you” of the reported speech’.70 Somewhat paradoxically, then, Williams’s localist critiques of cultural insularity often stimulate a reciprocal praxis of detachment. Because these observations are framed by his ironic register, and because Williams himself had Jewish ancestry, it is difficult to gauge the extent to which the instructions are endorsed, especially when, for Williams, the splitting, analysis and reconstruction of identity is a means not only of self-preservation, but of forging new aesthetic engagements in the New World.71

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 185

25/01/2013 15:53

186 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

The contingencies and specificities of site and culture embedded in these praxes challenged the clear-cut dichotomies of ‘Americanism’, nativism and other forms of cultural homogeneity or heavily prescriptive pluralism – but they also provided Williams and other localist modernists with a convenient escape route from their own prejudices. By identifying with the ‘other’ and, more broadly, with the disenfranchised, American modernists tended to ignore deeply embedded power differentials across society and, indeed, to ignore their own licensed position as artists. As Sergio Rizzo rightly argues, ‘[t]o his credit, Williams keeps his understanding of race and gender open to revision’ in his writing, and this observation can also be applied more broadly to other culturally localist perspectives.72 Nevertheless, those ‘revisions’ can work both ways: localist modernists could just as easily drift towards the ‘cover’ of essentialism, racialism and sexism as they could shift away from them. New magazines such as Blues, Pagany and Contact brought the ongoing debates about American identity conducted in the transatlantic review and The Exile back home, and in an ongoing dialogue with Jolas’s transition, these new journals configured the problem of American identity as a problem of late modernity.73 Unsurprisingly, deferred debates about class, race and gender consistently emerged through the aesthetic fractures of the writing the new localists produced in response, and with an escalating sense of urgency.

Blues and the Margins of Modernity In the June 1929 issue of transition, a year after its ‘American Number’, a manifesto-like advert appeared for a magazine which aimed to transcend rather than celebrate its American roots: ‘BLUES is a haven for the unorthodox in america and for those writers living abroad who through writing in english have decided that america and american environment are not hospitable to creative work.’74 Placed by the young editor and aspiring poet Charles Henri Ford, the advert tapped into transition’s resurgent interest in the phenomenon of expatriation and exile, which surfaced after the American dadaists’ ‘New York: 1928’ manifesto in the magazine’s American number.75 From his Southern outpost in Columbus, Mississippi, Ford had launched Blues in February 1929 as a forum for an emerging generation of modernists who felt exiled within America, and for those who had recently left. Unlike overtly Southern and Southwestern publications such as The Double Dealer and Morada, Blues pursued a programme of aggressive cosmopolitanism. Indeed, many of its contributors approached their cultural and geographical landscapes in affective rather than national, regional or sectional terms. As Parker Tyler, one of the

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 186

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 187

associate editors, pointed out, ‘[i]ndigenous culture is determined by the blood-beat and bloodbeat is personal-environmental’.76 Influenced by the New York dadaists’ tactics of pastiche and formal audacity, Blues provided a space in which cultural landscapes could be reconfigured by the contributors’ dissenting sexualities and avant-garde aesthetics. However, this tangled melange of late modernist praxes emerged in dialogue with a new strand of localist modernism, which paid close attention to the detail of America’s urban spaces. The new localism counterpointed the cosmopolitan decadence and affective projection favoured by Blues’s editors with a renewed emphasis on site-specificity. Both sets of contributors helped created Blues’s narrative of cultural mourning; yet, as Bernard Smith observed in transition, ‘with decay comes movement’, and Blues embodied this ethos with particular flair and poignancy.77 Assisted by the magazine’s English and French correspondents (Sidney Hunt in London and Kay Boyle and Tambour editor Harold J. Salemson in Paris) and Jolas, who served as contributing editor, Blues acted as a relay point between the emerging experimentalists who published in regional and national journals, the resurgent Greenwich Village literary scene of the late 1920s, the expatriate magazines transition, Tambour and Parnassus, and academic little magazines such as the Harvard-based Hound & Horn. Ford’s talents and charisma helped him negotiate these volatile literary networks, but he had considerable help from a little-known but influential figure. Almost forgotten by literary history, Kathleen Tankersley Young’s name appears like a cipher through little magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and in anthologies of Harlem Renaissance and American women’s poetry. Born on 13 August 1903, very few details about Young’s life exist beyond the brief biographical blurbs that appeared during her short career, which spanned roughly 1927–34.78 As Alexander Howard’s research has shown, the origins of Blues can be traced to Ford and Young’s first meeting in San Antonio, Texas. United by their frustration with what they perceived as Southwestern parochialism and their consequent hunger for bohemian life in major urban centres, Ford and Young began corresponding following their joint appearance in the First National Poetry Exhibition, convened in Greenwich Village by the Texas writer, editor and Village impresario Luther Widen, better known as Lew Ney.79 Ford was unable to attend that event, but he and Young eventually met in San Antonio, beginning their intense relationship and collaboration, and their broader engagement with the modernist transatlantic. Despite her enthusiasm for Blues, however, Young had some serious reservations about the venture:

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 187

25/01/2013 15:53

188 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

You have no idea how happy I was to find from your letter that there is to be another poetry magazine launched on this world of know
nothings . . and that I am to be connected with it . . now for facts. I think the name is pretty bad and so does everyone I’ve told about it. It leads one to think of a special Negro Rhythm . . Why not call it BLUE . . or something like MODERNS . . or think of something . .80

Young was no doubt aware that the transatlantic avant-gardes had already appropriated ‘special Negro Rhythm[s]’, and specifically jazz and blues, as synecdoches for American cultural expression in expatriate magazines since the early 1920s. Despite her own limitations, however, she was ahead of other avant-garde writers in recognising that these sorts of appropriations had become problematic. In her contributions to Opportunity, she despaired over the destructive effects of the colour line in the United States, and the poems that she published in the journal explored how the social pressures it exerted could seep into individual relationships.81 Thus, when she pointed out that ‘[blues] is a specialized word, new perhaps but with a limited meaning’, she was attempting to warn Ford that the magazine’s title risked perpetuating an insensitive racial masquerade.82 Instead, she advised Ford to ‘please study the TRANSITION closely . . I think you could make a go of something like this’.83 Whilst he had heeded her advice about following transition’s lead, Ford ignored Young’s repeated warnings and retained the name Blues. Perhaps he felt that it captured the ‘rhythms’ of malaise, barrenness and cultural exhaustion that were gripping American modernists during the build-up to the stock market crash of 1929. (Robert McAlmon had made a similar gesture when he collected several self-ironising and surprisingly sophisticated ‘Blues’-inflected poems in his 1929 work ‘Unfinished Poem’.)84 Ford may also have believed that the heterogeneous roots of blues music represented an ‘American’ response to the transnational circulations of culture and labour, which, along with its connections to popular culture, might help define its transatlantic niche. Regardless, when Williams and Young met to discuss Blues in the winter of 1928, he warned her about the general ‘pitfalls’ that Blues faced, but the name wasn’t one of them.85 In his quasi-editorial article ‘For a New Magazine’, Williams agreed that ‘Blues is a good name for it’, because the title suggested a popularised form of national mourning, a lament for ‘all the extant magazines in American [that were] thoroughly, totally, completely dead as far as anything new in literature among us is concerned’.86 Williams warned the contributors ‘[i]f it’s to make something new, something that will make the dumbness of our environment articulate, by its words, by its form, by the release it

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 188

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 189

gives to the insulated intelligence’ of its contributors, then ‘some breadth of understanding, some lightness of touch’ would have to release the latent potential of ‘American’ poetry.87 Indeed, many contributors attempted to make their ‘environment articulate’, but although formally audacious and bold in their challenges to sexual and social orthodoxies, their ‘light touches’ were sometimes excessively so, and their enthusiastic effusions sometimes dissolved into the inconsequential verbiage reminiscent of late American dada (whose final resting place was transition). However, what was especially unique about Blues was its channelling of the sub-Joycean ‘esperanto of the subconscious’ first exhibited in transition into an affective rather than locational poetics of mourning.88 Unlike her poems in Opportunity, which sought to record the monochromatic binaries imposed on the lyric voice by the external world with the aim of transcending them,89 Young’s publications in transition, Blues, Pagany and other modernist journals sought to inscribe on and merge with a landscape that matched the emotional spectra of her interior life. Her experimental prose piece ‘Fragment’ is an excerpt from an unpublished novel-in-progress that depicted a group of young women at an abortion clinic, which appeared in transition’s pivotal ‘Revolution of the Word’ number of June 1929. The darkness and redness of the landscape in the following passage functions both analeptically and proleptically, recalling a violent conception and anticipating a traumatic termination: The mountains were great and dark and had great massed rocks. The mountains had her. Then on such a day she sought a red gashed gullet and lay down under red birds and on the warm scarlet earth and thought a great deal about the blue oh God HOW blue blue dress. What are aesthetics and what are aesthetics?90

Throughout her oeuvre, Young’s ‘aesthetics’ were primarily concerned with modelling the trauma of loss and embodiment, and loosening the American landscape from its patriarchal moorings. Her work took its thematic cues from American naturalism but its stylistic ones from transition, projecting the physical and emotional traumas of her inner life onto the landscape, and reconfiguring them in a fairly standard spectrum of colours: reds for sexuality, violence and passion, blue for aesthetic or mystical transcendence, black for alienation, oppression and melancholy, and so on. The complexities in her work arise both in her biting, often bitterly ironic register, and when she manipulates the temporal or spatial contexts in which the colours appear. For example, in the inaugural issue of Blues,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 189

25/01/2013 15:53

190 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

the lyric ‘I’ in her ‘Six Poems’ oscillates between an empathic gaze and an empirical one: I could dissect you now that midnight has mended certain winds, And now that streets are sleeping, and the only minute things that are still crying are the last lips of little crimson leaves.91

Like her other contributions to Blues, she developed this conceit across a sequence in which the lyric ‘I’ is both a synaesthesic receptacle of environmental stimuli and an active author of the poetic landscape. In the poem ‘IV’, for example, the speaker reflects on the sonic and chromatic palate of the previous ‘midnight’, and the curative power of ‘spaced time: blue cold’.92 Clearly, Young agreed with Bernard Smith’s observation in transition that ‘the symphony of American life is orchestrated with tinny sobs’.93 In Blues, Young extended her affective geographies into the poems’ typographic environments to explore the effects of ‘spaced time’. In ‘spring poem’, for instance, she creates an inverted fertility cycle and places ‘in the old man’s mouth a s e e d’; when ‘spring came’, however, it had taken root but never flowered, and ‘rotted v e r y / sweet ly’.94 The spaces in these adjectives connect ‘spring poem’ to the second piece by anticipating the temporal dilations that will restore order to this wasteland, in which an isolated male presence has deformed and killed, rather than merely resisted, the natural cycles of fertility and growth. ‘poem 91’ restores that cycle by introducing an unidentified couple moving in concert with a nocturnal landscape. Rather than the foetid hothouse of ‘spring poem’, the second piece creates a hypnagogic region punctuated by spontaneous growth, where ‘night flowers’ bloom ‘darkly and suddenly’, and ‘thus s l o w l y’ restore the cycles of fertility disrupted in the first poem.95 But, like many of Young’s works, it also introduces spaces in which alternative sexualities might emerge – in which corporeal pleasure seeks out liminal zones for experimentation and reconfiguration. In his own contributions to Blues, Ford shared Young’s investment in embodied and overtly sexualised landscapes. His ‘Group’ replaced the abject terrain set out in the ‘foreword’ of ‘Optional’ with the ‘concrete lusts’ of its ‘poem’, and combined these environmental features in the ‘cankerous complexity of a city morning’ described in ‘Elegy’.96 Ford’s altered landscapes are mirrored in his formal pastiches. He undercuts his frequent hyperboles with cummings-eque omissions of capital letters, and the violent content of his poems playfully contrasts with their restrained titles (for instance, his ‘Elegy’ becomes a ‘threnody for broken bones’).97 As a

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 190

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 191

queer modernist, his manipulation of both form and register challenges the prescriptive hierarchies of gender that he encountered in American culture. However, within its shield of bitter irony, ‘poem’ mourned a repressive culture in which only the landscape itself could serve as a repository for sexual desire, a desperate situation that ultimately proved fatal: let only a tree be your lover take only sand for a marriagebed use sun for raiment and rain for a sacrament [. . .] rain pursues a vagrancy and is an impetus for death by drowning.98

Ford’s specific problem of place expressed Blues’s general one: its contributors, and especially its Southern writers, were painfully aware of their intensely sectional and located past, but they were determined to avoid being situated within it. Warren Taylor’s ‘The South in the Building of Our Nation’, which provides the journal’s sole reference to its Southern roots, is a good example of this problem, and of Blues contributors’ methods of dealing with it. Taylor’s poem reduces Southern plantation culture to a rhymed fairytale, punning playfully (and inconsequentially) on the triple meaning of ‘beans’ (which refers to money and minds as well as legumes in US slang (OED)) and on the coincidental slang words embedded in Native American place names, such as the word ‘hooch’ (meaning alcohol) in ‘Chattahoochee’.99 Ultimately, and perhaps appropriately, Taylor’s rhyming and punning amounts to a hill of ‘beans’ in the second issue of Blues, as the poem self-consciously fails to live up to the onerous task set forth in its title. ‘The South in the Building of Our Nation’ attempts to escape the crushing weight of its past, but Taylor’s conspicuous use of New York dada-style pastiche repeatedly announces his refusal (or inability) to come to terms with it, and, indeed, the futility of literary regionalism and nationalism in general. The new localist aesthetic adapted some of the strategies of pastiche and affective mapping exhibited in Blues, but it also began to assume the specialised, self-consciously technical vocabularies exhibited previously in Secession. For example, Louis Zukofsky’s ‘Three Poems’ bridged the affective projections and embodied landscapes of Young, the sardonic and alienated mourning of Ford, and the localist poetics of Williams.100 The three pieces from Blues evoke a domestic space in East Rockaway, Long Island, and position the body as the site of contact between the locality and the machinations of consciousness. These poems also sketch out a blueprint for the forthcoming objectivist programme, picking out the technical apparatus which fascinated the avant-garde of the American Machine Age, and combining it with Williams’s ‘tactus eruditis’, the learned

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 191

25/01/2013 15:53

192 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

and gentle touch which mediates human contact in the social, professional and poetic spheres.101 But Zukofsky’s early work in Blues also fits into a broader, pre-objectivist investment in technological conceits and technical jargon. For example, Kenneth Rexroth’s ‘Poem’ combines this approach with the pastiche-laden lyrical voice common in Blues. His speaker uses a ‘t-square’ and ‘compass’ in an attempt to ‘Question the subaltern’, charting and measuring the marginal realms of experience rather than projecting them on a new poetic landscape.102 ‘Cube twilight’ and ‘devolving arcs’ trace out a post-nationalist region in the poem, where ‘every roof’ holds an ‘empty flagpole thin tapering tipped with a / black ball’.103 The sense of an impending crisis also creeps into the intricate corners of Rexroth’s urban locality, as ‘the fire escapes go swiftly up and down and the / escaping firemen go swiftly up and down them’.104 His ‘Poem’ continually blurs the line between hyperbole and emergency throughout the social, geographical and emotional spaces it meticulously charts, simultaneously satirising and clinging to its technical apparatus. But despite its ambiguities, Rexroth’s poem distinctively marks a return to the local as it ‘interferes’ with national superstructures (indeed, one of its interlocutors ‘interrupts the sessions of congress’) and triangulates the contours of the New World.105 In the second volume of Blues, Williams offered his own early vision of a renewed localist modernism in ‘The Attic Which Is Desire’. The poem distilled the late imagist/proto-objectivist aesthetics of the new localism, but also adapted the confessional languages of cultural mourning favoured by Young, Tyler and Ford. In it, Williams positioned his speaker between the ‘bare beams’ of his attic study and the ‘sobbing and / whispering’ canopy of ‘storms’, which confess – Here from the street by *** S * * O * * D * * A * *

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 192

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 193

ringed with running lights the darkened pane exactly down the center is transfixed106

In a gesture reminiscent of Toomer’s unanimiste-inflected poems ‘Gum’ and ‘Her Lips Are Copper Wire’,107 Williams embeds the latent (bio-) electrical storms in the attic ‘Which Is Desire’ with those coursing through the streets of his suburban neighbourhood. Electricity emerges as an architectural feature within and beyond the poem, conflating ostentatious consumer desire with an equally flamboyant visual prosody, and using the skeleton of the family home as the insulating barrier which divides the two. Williams excised the ‘sobbing / and whispering’ confession from subsequent versions of the poem, no doubt in an attempt to reduce the onanistic overtones of the original. And yet, the Blues version dovetails neatly with Young’s affective projections into a naturalist landscape, reclaiming a secretive, confessional space powered and supported by the broader framework of late modernist poetics. Despite Williams’s initial enthusiasm for Blues at the start of its second volume, in its final two issues his opinion soured.108 In the final article published in the magazine in the autumn of 1930, he lamented that for ‘a number of the younger writers’, literary ‘experiment’ meant simply to ‘play tiddly-winks with the syllables’.109 Reprising a gentler version of the petulance that characterised his articles ‘Gloria!’ and ‘Belly Music’ (which signalled the end of Others), Williams also hinted to readers that transition, and not Blues, was the more important proponent of American avant-garde writing. Hound & Horn, where several Blues contributors also placed work, continued to eclipse Blues in the domestic ‘experimental’ little magazine niche, whilst Pagany and Young’s own Modern Editions Press gradually siphoned off many of its contributors. Although Ford and Tyler’s collaboration endured past Blues, their misogynistic review of Young’s Ten Poems (probably written by Tyler) in the final issue effectively announced her exile from the Blues milieu.110 But following her success with the Modern Editions Press, Young finally succumbed to her chronic

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 193

25/01/2013 15:53

194 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

illnesses in Torreón in Coahuila, Mexico. By this time, Ford and Tyler had left America for Europe, and Young was quickly forgotten. Blues had launched the careers of all of its founding editors, but if Ford and Tyler felt aggrieved by the ‘interior criticism’ levelled against them by Williams in its final issue, then perhaps they could celebrate a Pyrrhic victory of sorts: Pagany, the journal to which Williams switched his allegiance, published many writers who first appeared in Blues, and also appropriated some successful features introduced in Blues’s second volume, including the London and Paris Letters sections.111 Blues enabled the second wave of American modernists to sketch out new trajectories for their avant-garde poetics, and a core of its contributors would go on to test the revived localist aesthetic rehearsed in its pages against the Great Depression dawning in the early 1930s.

The Voyage to Pagany and the Rebirth of Localism As a contributor to journals such as Bozart, Casanova Jr.’s Tales and Greenwich Village, the aspiring editor Richard Johns shared Ford’s, Tyler’s and Young’s fascination with modernism’s marginal cultures. However, as the 1920s drew to a close, Johns identified a gap in the market for a literary miscellany that would ‘[fill] in the middle scene between the excellent conventional magazines and those which are entirely experimental in content’– one that would consider America’s localities as small and appraisable but interconnected units, while relying on the transatlantic perspectives of selected ‘outsiders’.112 Appropriated from Williams’s semiautobiographical travel novel A Voyage to Pagany,113 Johns’s title suggested a symposium that would frame the American experience as both domestic and ambassadorial. Johns also understood that his journal could act as a repository for and chronicle of a growing archive of American modernism, as well as a point of departure for new literary engagements. As Peter Nicholls has noted, this was a period in which writers ‘propose[d] a dissociation from “tradition” conceived in linear fashion and offer[ed] instead a sense of beginning not as some avant-garde fantasy of absolute newness but lodged within a history of beginnings’.114 Thus, in terms of its spatial and temporal orientations, Pagany fits into the broader trend of a late modernist moment burdened with the necessity for cultural renewal in a climate of crisis, yet despairing of the possibility of new beginnings. Williams detected this impulse in Johns’s project when the aspiring editor first contacted him:

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 194

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 195

I think I begin to see what you are at, ‘A Native Quarterly’ gives me the hint [. . .] You believe then that we must build up from what we have before we shall be able to do more [. . .] You would perhaps begin low, fasten to the native shale or sandstone or what have you. Splendid, I say – but full of danger.115

Williams pressed Johns further on how the editor’s policies might be guided by the ‘native theme’, and why he had chosen the name ‘Pagany’, an obscure term referring to a ‘place representing or holding ancient or alternative beliefs resembling those of paganism’ (OED) which Williams had used as a ‘pseudonym’ for ‘present day Europe’.116 In his editorial ‘Announcement’, Johns responded by explaining that he had extracted pagus, the speculated Latin root of pagan, ‘meaning any sort of collection of the smallest district to the country as an inclusive whole’ for his title.117 Then, ‘taking America as the pagus, any one of us as the paganus, the inhabitant, and our conceptions, our agreements and disagreements, our ideas, ideals, whatever we have to articulate is pagany, our expression’.118 By combining Williams’s nickname for Europe with the etymological root connecting place with cultural practice, which Johns then elides with literary expression, he identifies Pagany as a textual locus in which authors could discover how their ‘individual expressions’ might be considered in relation to their specific sites of production, and assess a range of American milieus with which they might align their projects.119 As Marjorie Perloff notes, it required some rather ingenious ‘sleight-of-hand’ on the part of Johns to articulate this catholic yet partisan policy in his ‘Announcement’.120 Nevertheless, these tactical gestures resulted in a finely tuned balance of periodical codes. Johns’s decision to ‘avoid any attempt to seek a standard’ or ‘formulate a policy’ was therefore understood as a tactical deferral rather than an evasion.121 Stephen Halpert notes that Pagany’s cover illustration accurately ‘[follows] Johns’ initial design concept’, and Virginia Lee Burton, a young graphic designer and friend of Johns, provided the art deco-influenced pen and ink drawing (Fig. 6.2).122 The tree and fruit allude to the tree of knowledge in Genesis, symbolically tempting the reader to partake of the journal’s taboo content, which could take the form of formally experimental poetry, tepid erotica or unflinching social realism. The substantial base of the tree calls attention to the soil from which it grows, whilst the graduated lines of the pedestal create a link with the horizontal strokes which border the list of contributors. In this respect, the fruit tree is connected (by its implied roots) to the ‘pagus’, the earth and bedrock, from which grows ‘pagany, our expression’.123 However, the first feature of Johns’s original

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 195

25/01/2013 15:53

196 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

6.2 Front Cover, Pagany 1.2 (April–June 1930). Sourced from material owned by author.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 196

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 197

design was its fence, or ‘enclosure’, which he sketched out in a letter to Williams in November 1929.124 Johns’s strategic cultivation of literary allegiances to established American avant-garde writers – especially the imagists and localist modernists – as well as to broader audiences involved exclusion as well as inclusion, and opposition as well as alliance. Williams’s emphasis on ‘the word, a meaning hardly distinguishable from that of place’ in the journal’s inaugural manifesto suggested that Pagany was rearticulating the localist praxis of Contact for future generations of American writers.125 Alongside the first wave of localists and expatriates, the proto-objectivists and most of Blues’s contributors, a spectrum of social realist writers also appeared in the journal. Erskine Caldwell, Edward Dahlberg and John Dos Passos were writing fiction in a tradition transfigured by the experimentalism exhibited elsewhere in Pagany. Continuing the transparently dialogic poetics of Contact, Secession and Blues, many contributions to Pagany responded to this intergenerational mix by engaging in gestures of tribute or satire. Rexroth did both in ‘Into the Shandy Westerness’, which he dedicated to Williams. Rexroth’s proto-objectivist aesthetics continued to develop the colloquial barbs and localist aesthetics that he first trialled in Blues, but his targets were more precise, and also included foreign avant-garde impresarios such as Wyndham Lewis and Marcel Duchamp. Rexroth’s absurdist tone befits the poem’s title and echoes Williams’s own reference to Thomas Sterne, who he claimed was ‘a direct forerunner’ to Gertrude Stein in the same issue of Pagany.126 The poem self-consciously shifts between technical discourses to identify strategic points of intersection between literary practices and other specialisations. For example, section ‘a’ of ‘Into the Shandy Westerness’ begins by using scientific terminology to suggest a form of poetic method or telos: Do you understand the managing? Mornings like scissors. Leaves of dying. Let event particle e. Point track m-n. Congruence. Yes? That’s what you thought it would be?127

Rexroth’s emphasis on specificity dovetails with Williams’s own, and also capitalises on Williams’s and Pound’s increasing animosity towards English modernists in a hyperbolic and mischievous tone, depicting Wyndham Lewis ‘dressed / only in his BVDS painfully extracting thorns from his chapped buttocks’.128 ‘Into the Shandy Westerness’ weds the absurdist allure of dada (which Rexroth conjures by imagining ‘Marcel Duchamp

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 197

25/01/2013 15:53

198 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

on Michigan boulevard / in a racoon coat’) to rural vignettes and regional vernacular, setting the tone for Pagany’s inaugural issue by plotting a new trajectory for American art whilst acknowledging its past innovations.129 The gesture towards ‘congruence’ was new, however, and Rexroth, like Pagany, left the possibility of an aesthetic convergence between various modernist methods and generations an open-ended question rather than a naïve hope. Rexroth’s poem also continued Johns’s undeclared policy of inviting new American writers to scrutinise the legacy of the older generation, sometimes in the form of tribute (for example, Charles Demuth’s illustrations for Henry James’s Turn of the Screw) and sometimes in the form of attack.130 In the latter case, Sherry Mangan (an Irish American writer who was to all intents and purposes Pagany’s unnamed co-editor) often acted as Johns’s agent provocateur. The second issue of the journal featured Mangan’s baroque critique of Eliot, whom he accused of exerting a ‘corrupting’ influence on young writers with his academic approach to poetry.131 Mangan also took aim at Eliot for his introduction to Pound’s Selected Poems, which he derided as simplistic and condescending. This critique prompted Pound to issue a response in an article that evaluated Pagany’s first year of publishing. Surprisingly, Pound replied by praising Pagany, and only defended Eliot’s introduction to his Selected Poems by explaining that it was intended for the British market, which Pound held in contempt. ‘The Bri’sh public is hardly our public,’ Pound concluded, and as if to drive the point home, he published the latest instalment of his The Cantos in the third issue of Pagany’s second volume.132 This poem announced the magazine’s overt engagement with the grand narrative of America’s modernist canon, but it also signalled its broader commitment to poems ‘including history’.133 Specifically, Cantos XXXI–XXXIII exhibit an intense interest in the economic history of the American Revolution. Given their subject, and Pound’s anti-British sentiment at the time, his choice of journal signifies his intention to publish these Cantos for a specifically American audience beyond the Eliot-dominated academy. Pound had published Cantos XXVII–XXX in the Harvard-based journal Hound & Horn, but his growing affinity for Johns’s politically engaged focus presented a useful interpretative context. In Cantos XXXI–XXXIII, Pound renewed his fascination with the founding fathers involved in the evolution of America’s economic policies and, above all, with Thomas Jefferson.134 Like his review of Douglas’s Credit Power and Democracy in Contact 4, these Cantos are haunted by the possibility of war precipitated by an economic or political crisis. Canto XXXII veers into America’s historical ‘entanglements’ with

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 198

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 199

Russia, and Pound’s reference to ‘shepherd dogs, true-bred’ lends a disturbing eugenic overtone to the sequence, particularly in the context of his escalating admiration for fascism and Mussolini.135 In the ‘native’ context of Pagany, Pound seems to be encouraging an ‘editorial’ intelligence (Jefferson and/or Mussolini?) to ‘breed’ desirable intellectual traits in the mind of the nation, and reclaim its revolutionary genius.136 And the role that print culture plays in facilitating Pound’s vision of a paternalistic social prophylactic against war is telling, shepherding, as it does, the reader’s eye from the task of breeding desirable intellectual traits in America, to the nuts and bolts of print culture: If you return to us, to bring a couple of pair Of shepherd dogs, truebred. . .much desired that war be avoided. type-founding to which antimony is essential, I therefore place Mr. Ronaldson in your hands. . . .be avoided if circumstances will admit. . .137

As Carroll F. Terrell notes, James R. Ronaldson (co-founder of the first permanent type foundry in America) and Jefferson hoped to reduce America’s dependence on British books and, at the same time, provide a solid material infrastructure to provide a secure foundation for the burgeoning cultural life of the nation.138 Pound delivers these lines with the collusive tone that characterised his review in Contact 4, a disjunctive, increasingly remote voice encouraging an audience of peers to revisit their own revolutionary history, and apply it with intellectual vigour to the political realities of the Great Depression. The majority of Pagany’s content explored issues of class, politics and labour in social realist fiction rather than poetry, and Williams’s serialised novel White Mule came closest to capturing Pagany’s elusive ‘native’ aesthetic. Its intimate insight into the lives of a family of first-generation European immigrants living in New York presented a localised snapshot of national economic forces inflecting the quotidian details of domestic life. In the novel, Williams traces the career of Joe Stecher, a character based on his father-in-law. Paul ‘Pa’ Herman, who had recently died of an accidental gunshot wound, worked in the printing business, and the novel is in some senses the record of an extended mourning.139 However, Stecher’s involvement with printing shops and union politics in America, in a way, becomes Williams’s historically and personally ‘local’ version

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 199

25/01/2013 15:53

200 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

of Ronaldson, the Scottish immigrant printer to whom Pound refers in Canto XXXII. In White Mule, as in Canto XXXII, the business of printing becomes fundamentally embedded in the national politics of Depressionera America. In keeping with the discord of the times, Chapters IX and X (which appeared in the final issue of Pagany) address a labour strike in the printing presses where Joe Stecher works as a manager, detailing the process by which the business of printing the news became the subject of headlines. Unfortunately, Pagany ceased production before Williams described the resolution of the strike, and Johns was only able to print the final issue with assistance from friends and contributors.140 Before it ceased production, however, Pagany had come further than any previous journal in negotiating a literary truce between the new localist avant-garde, the first wave of American modernists, and the social realists. Johns had successfully combined a heightened attention to issues of class with experimental writing, but he also returned to the localists’ unfinished business with regard to race and class. For example, Pauline Leader’s short story ‘Hired Girl’ features an African American maid, Nellie, who attempts to pass as white but whom ‘white people were always looking at with that understanding in their eyes’.141 Only her Polish suitor John ‘didn’t seem to understand that she was different’, and communicated with her ‘as one lonely human being talks to another’.142 The white narrator, a young girl when the bulk of the narrative takes place, punctuates the story with childish insults that affirm racial hierarchies and cultural difference, which John and Nellie’s courtship both disrupt and transcend. However, the narrator’s own preconceptions are challenged when she experiences sexual desire for Nellie’s brothers, who remain in town when their sister elopes with John: they become ‘Nigger god[s]’ who sow ‘confusion in a fifteen year old breast’, simultaneously destabilising, reaffirming and casting judgement upon the reductive binaries that John and Nellie seem to have escaped, but which the narrator cannot.143 Leader’s short story confronts the colour line at street level in a confrontational regional vernacular whilst reinforcing the sense of cultural mourning that inflects much of Pagany’s fiction. Yet by stripping the sentimental escapist exoticism from regionalist fiction, Leader’s tale of interracial relationships challenges its model of social realism. Nevertheless, in keeping with the magazine’s practice of looking forwards and backwards simultaneously, modernist primitivism remained alive and well in Pagany’s America. In this respect, Mina Loy’s ‘The Widow’s Jazz’ also makes race a component of mourning and desire, and her reappearance in Pagany dredged up the familiar blind spots of Contact’s cultural localism, whilst updating it with a late modernist poetics.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 200

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 201

Loy pairs race inextricably with sexuality and mortality, concocting a primitivist lament for her husband Arthur Cravan, who disappeared and was presumed dead in 1918. In ‘The Widow’s Jazz’, ‘white flesh quakes to the negro soul’, as Loy uses the racial other to evoke the alienating experience of mourning.144 Landscapes, both linguistic and atmospheric, reflect, resolve and occasionally reverse the binaries that Loy distributes through the poem. The ‘Husband’ turns the widow into a ‘cuckold [. . .] with death’, establishing mourning as a liminal period in which traditional gender roles and essentialist stereotypes (such as the ‘black brute-angels’) become inverted.145 The ceaseless ‘cajoling jazz’ captures and stimulates these paradoxical rituals of late modernist grieving.146 The speaker is alternately ‘haunted by wind instruments / in groves of grace’ and assailed by ‘an uninterpretable wail’ which makes the pruned contours dissolve in the brazen shallows of dissonance[.]147

Unlike her contributions to Contact, in ‘The Widow’s Jazz’ Loy uses performance culture and language rather than print culture to conjoin the body to this unstable landscape. Although Loy and Cravan met in New York, the distinctively American spaces in the poem represent a prior life and afterlife simultaneously, and yet, to the mourner, they are, like the jazz performance, inescapably present. Despite Loy’s fragmentary aesthetics, however, ‘The Widow’s Jazz’ is a linear narrative in which the speaker strains towards a synthesis ‘among the echos of the flesh’; it is ‘a synthesis / of racial caress’, a fleeting contact during which an ‘unerring esperanto / of the earth’ temporarily allows entities who might be conceived of as opposites – ‘The seraph and the ass’, ‘white flesh’ and ‘negro soul’, the living and the dead – to ‘converse’.148 So it is the land, and not (as McAlmon once suggested) the subconscious, in which Loy finds a language of perfect communion. As the speaker’s ‘desire’ recedes ‘to the distance of the dead’, she is left searching ‘the opaque silence / of unpeopled space’, a void or no-place defined only by that which is absent.149 Where Loy’s utopia of mourning derives its spatial synthesis from a temporary alignment of opposing elements, Jean Toomer’s ‘new America’ emerges from the mystical convergence of three races (First Nations, European and African) in the country’s ‘five regions’.150 And where Loy’s fragmentary America emerges from Chicago’s jazz scene, Toomer’s converges there, on its Magnificent Mile,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 201

25/01/2013 15:53

202 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

[. . .] where two directions intersect, At Michigan Avenue and Walton Place Parallel to my countrymen, Right-angled to the Universe.151

With the sweeping vistas and cosmic scales of ‘Brown River, Smile’ continually gesturing towards an identity that transcends the divisions of race, Toomer actually displaces the cultural synthesis that he envisages into the future, and distances the speaker from the society that he speaks for. ‘We are waiting for a new people’ (my emphasis), Toomer claims, and whilst his unanimiste epiphany in Chicago gestures towards a ‘new America’, the speaker remains ‘parallel to [his] countrymen’, separated from and dwarfed, even alienated, by the country’s vast spaces and cultural heterogeneity. But if ‘Brown River, Smile’ was in some respects a throwback to new regionalism, then its publishing context went some way towards justifying its self-consciously anachronistic poetics; Pagany sought, after all, to explore American spaces, from ‘its smallest district to the country as an inclusive whole’.152

‘Hand to Mouth, Eye to Brain Existence’: A Return to Contact Johns’s success with Pagany had inspired Williams to re-examine the localist tenets of the original Contact in the light of new economic realities. So when the opportunity arose to revive the Contact name for a new periodical venture backed by the leftist bookstore owners David Moss and Martin Kamin, Williams seized this chance to issue his own editorial pronouncements on the times. In the second incarnation of Contact – subtitled ‘An American Quarterly Review’ – he reaffirmed the methodologies by which he conjoined the inhabited world with the written word. Combining phrases from the cover design of the original Contact 2 and from his inaugural manifesto in Pagany, Williams felt that Contact’s emphasis on ‘words moulded by the impacts of experience’ was of more intrinsic cultural worth than a specific political programme, arguing that ‘good writing stands by humanity in its joys and sorrows because under all it is – and just because it is – so many words’.153 Williams’s policy of privileging literary practice over political activism resulted in an inconsistent (but by no means ‘inarticulate’, as one American critic, writing for the New English Weekly, charged)154 body of editorial prose in the second version of Contact, which punctuated his tangled, exasperated observations and postulations with scintillating articulations of new localist aesthetics. However, his primary motive in revisiting his first editorial venture was to develop the

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 202

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 203

literary contacts that he had made via Pagany, and to re-establish the more specialised editorial emphasis that he and McAlmon had pursued in their first little magazine. Joined by the recently repatriated McAlmon and the energetic novelist Nathanael West, Williams would also take the opportunity to attend to some unfinished business. Despite Williams’s characteristic emphasis on technique in his inaugural editorial, it is difficult to ignore the persistent emphasis on African American culture in the first issue of the new Contact. Perhaps with Ridge’s chastising review of In the American Grain still lodged in his memory, Williams’s first creative contribution to the revived American Quarterly was his short story ‘The Colored Girls of Passenack, Old and New’, which Nancy Cunard also included in her Negro anthology. However, if the story was meant to redress his oversights in In the American Grain, then the gesture was a failure. ‘The Colored Girls of Passenack, Old and New’ retreats into the same folksy domesticity that provided Williams his essentialist refuge in his earlier work. However, unlike the complex voicings that he deployed in The Great American Novel, The Descent of Winter and, to a lesser extent, In the American Grain, the short-story format leaves little room to evade the primitivist fantasies, crass stereotypes and empty sentimentality that undermine his efforts to broach the ‘taboo against the race’.155 Indeed, Carl Rakosi runs a similar risk with ‘African Theme, Needlework, Etc.’, published in Contact 1.3. However, although the poem relies on even more egregious stereotypes in its first section, in the second it critiques their reinforcement through commoditisation, through manufactured folk crafts to manufactured images, ‘bright / as the day [they] came from the factory’.156 The writer who came closest to confronting the ethical pitfalls of first wave localism was Charles Reznikoff, who sifted through the raw materials of American history by interrogating its legal system in ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’. Reznikoff trained as a lawyer, and he culled the prose vignettes, as the contributor’s biography explains, ‘from law reports and actual trial records’.157 ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ appeared serially in the first two issues of Contact, and Reznikoff collected the work in his expanded 1934 volume Testimony.158 In Contact 1.1, the first section details the lives of ‘Southerners and Slaves’, and constructs a narrative from scenes of domestic violence, theft, injury and illness, and debates over articles of faith. It concludes with a portrayal of a dying woman composing her will and, in doing so, tacitly announces its engagement with the legacies of slavery. ‘Cynthia Gage, whose true name was Sarah Ann’, and whose married name was Sarah Couch, decides to leave all of her property to her nephew Henry.159 That ‘property’ turns out to be ‘one negro girl, named

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 203

25/01/2013 15:53

204 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Violet, about twelve years of age, one negro boy, named Wiley, about ten years of age, also two cows, three calves’ and some furniture.160 Cynthia dictates the will, but when she attempts to sign it, she ‘threw down the pen or dropped it’, seemingly ‘careless about what she was doing’, and she can only sign it with assistance.161 Although the will seems to provide prima facie evidence of a legal transaction, its composition appears unstable, and it appears to have been improperly witnessed – a fact of which the illiterate slaves and slave owner would be equally unaware. Nevertheless, despite the instability of the document, and the ambiguities surrounding its composition, it is clear which parties the law would favour in the event of a dispute. As Michael Davidson notes, ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ identifies ‘the tension between history as lived and history as represented’.162 Reznikoff also draws attention to the grave consequences for those oppressed and silenced by the law, and the almost unconscious capriciousness of those who benefit from it, as well as the dubious legacies left in the wake of such disparities. In the first part of ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’, Reznikoff portrays the machinations of the law as a form of theatrical performance, declaring that ‘all the human race are actors on a stage’.163 Treading a careful line between pastiche and critique, the second instalment illustrates the point by including etchings of ‘oratorical and poetical gestures’ taken ‘from an old American volume on Rhetoric’, which were reproduced for Contact by Charles Sheeler (see Fig. 6.3).164 The first section of Part II juxtaposes a cartoon depicting ‘simple bodily pain’ with several narratives scrutinising slavery’s legacy of violence, murders and tangled sexual relationships.165 Certainly, Reznikoff’s sophisticated interplay of quotation, representation and gesture exposes America’s historical injustices, and its attempts to correct them. However, as Burke claimed in his introduction to Testimony, ‘[w]hatever individual standpoints [the vignettes] may represent, be they plaintiff or defendant, interested or disinterested witness, slave or slaveowner, brutal sea captain or recorders of his brutality, these bearers of testimony represent in the large the “law court point of view.” ’166 As such, ‘Mr. Reznikoff’s work embodies in miniature the problem of the “whole truth” ’ in such a vast and heterogeneous ‘civilization’.167 Moreover, the polyvalent structure of ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ continually draws attention to that which it excludes. Reznikoff’s ‘testimony’ attests to the American legal system’s ability to represent the marginalised and oppressed, but relentlessly problematises the extent to which it mediates the experience of those people, and, ultimately, how it sustains their marginality (a point which would have had added poignancy in the wake of the Scottsboro trial).168 In this way, he dramatises the exclusion of African

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 204

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 205

6.3 ‘Oratorical and Poetical Gestures’, in Charles Reznikoff, ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’, Contact 1.2 (May 1932), pp. 99–108 (p. 100). Sourced from material owned by author.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 205

25/01/2013 15:53

206 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

American narratives from the broader fabric of American history by revealing, as Burke notes, the ‘subjective’ machinations of an ostensibly ‘objective’ system.169 Thus, Reznikoff’s late modernist poetics of pastiche and quotation admit a degree of culpability in that system. Nevertheless, the ‘vein of sympathy that underlies his work’ is not only an attempt to recover specific experiences in specific localities in the knowledge that the task is impossible, it is an admission that the gathered ‘testimony’ will necessarily be partial and heavily mediated.170 Reznikoff did not contribute to the third issue of Contact, and, like Pagany, by the autumn of 1932 the foundations of Williams’s new journal had begun to falter. The ventures folded at roughly the same time – but whilst good will, generosity and perseverance ensured that the final issue of the ‘Native Quarterly’ was eventually published, the last issue of Contact’s first and only volume was doomed by a mixture of frustration and conflicting interests. As Williams explained in a letter to Johns, the journal collapsed because of ‘the disgust both West and I have experienced over the conditions surrounding Contact since its inception [. . .] In this mood, after repeated senseless delays over the printing of the 3d. issue, we decided to send all manuscripts back and call it a day.’171 The third and final issue of Contact was a disjointed miscellany of poetry and short fiction, and concluded with two defensive editorials by West and Williams that sought to diffuse criticism of Contact’s supposedly anti-political stance, and to justify the magazine’s emphasis (particularly as portrayed in Miss Lonelyhearts) on violence and transgression. Drawing on America’s journalist traditions, and echoing McAlmon’s mantra of unflinching ‘contact’ with social realities, West argued that American audiences were ‘neither shocked nor surprised if [writers] omit artistic excuses for familiar events’.172 Williams’s final editorial for Contact balanced West’s demotic impulse by reconnecting with his editorials in the first version of Contact. He recalled the democratic genius of St Francis, who developed his ministry by drawing ever more marginal groups to his cause. The example of his former patron saint Francis of Assisi reinforced Williams’s contention that poetry does not ‘[increase] in virtue as it is removed from contact with a vulgar world’.173 Harmonising his cultural localism with the objectivist programme, he sought to ‘reveal the object’, ‘the primitive and actual America’ that had become obscured by attempts to import European culture, or to pass off ‘Regionalism’ as representative American literature.174 In an exclamation issued in hope but underwritten with despair, Williams asked in 1932, ‘shall we never differentiate the regional in letters from the objective immediacy of our hand to mouth, eye to brain existence?’175 Contact (in both its forms) and Pagany attempted to stimulate

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 206

25/01/2013 15:53

New Localism, Late Modernism and America’s Unfinished Spaces

[ 207

what Williams had called ‘a re-awakened genius of place’.176 The critical epiphanies and coherent aesthetic programmes that the journals had hoped to cultivate remained only partially formed, but, as the avant-garde coalescing under the ‘objectivists’ banner demonstrated, these magazines, together with Blues, had at least fermented in America ‘a movement, first and last to clear the GROUND’.177

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 207

25/01/2013 15:53

EPILOGUE

With the passing of the 1930s Contact, and the transition from new localism to objectivism having been completed by the mid-1930s, the story of localist modernism would seem to be neatly concluded. However, there is compelling evidence that Williams attempted to concoct a closer correlation between objectivism and his new iteration of cultural localism in a fourth, unpublished issue of Contact: An American Quarterly.1 The conceptual framework of this effort stretches back to 1927, when Williams reimmersed himself in the modernist transatlantic, and argued that ‘[m]y position is not, as Ezra Pound speaks to me of it, a lighthouse on the frontier of culture’, but in an ‘irreducible “place” to be discovered, clarified, not changed in any way by knowledge – but clarified, made available and civilized by wider contacts: always that, always contacts’.2 In an unpublished editorial ‘Comment’ for Contact’s incomplete fourth issue, he resurrected this thread to rupture ‘the irreducible minimum’ towards which his project had drifted, reconfiguring a more provisional late modernist poetics in tune with the objectivists’ programme. As he explained in a letter to Zukofsky, Contact 4 would be ‘under the editorship of a “group” – proletarian in feeling’.3 This issue would be addressed to ‘such names as Stein, Joyce, Burke, Bob Brown in Prose – and some others in poetry [such as] Pound, Oppen, Zukofsky, Rexroth, and some of the very new ones’; and furthermore, addressed to the imagination, [and] to the non-informative play of the intelligence, a corrective, critical readjustment of the senses – in which nonsense has a masterful part / It moves through words as through colors, tactily, seeking disassociation, accuracies of impact rather than accretions of matter. It is a purely objective play of words.4

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 208

25/01/2013 15:53

Epilogue

[ 209

Williams clearly identified a self-consciously provisional, even ludic, poetics born in a moment of socio-political crisis in the ‘empty spaces’ left behind by the dissolution of high modernism.5 But as he also recognised, within the broader arc of localist modernism, the unstable locations created by cultural ‘lateness’ were simply a logical extension of the American sites mapped out in the first post-war localist moment. Appropriately, his response to this cultural moment remains half formed, shelved in an archive, sketching out an imagined poetics intended for an unfinished magazine for which Williams had relinquished the editorship.6 ‘[F]rom the very lack in its present condition’, he wrote, ‘the vacuum [of] our no-music has left behind’ a form of ‘modern poetry [which] has in its own nature moved into that place’.7 And indeed, as new localism faded into objectivism, Williams attempted one last critique of his understudy Zukofsky’s essay ‘Sincerity and Objectification’.8 For Williams, it is ‘not the “sincere” meaning of the words that so much counts, nor their quality of being “good” but it is the constellations that between them reveal a new relationship of meanings and qualities’.9 More than any individual’s work, those ‘constellations’, and the cultural transactions that sustained them, revealed the shape of American avant-garde poetry at these interstitial moments. The transatlantic crossings and connections facilitated by the little magazines helped consolidate the modernist canon, both within the public and counterpublic spheres enumerated by Mark Morrisson, and in the private investment cultures and patronage networks described by Lawrence Rainey. However, they also revealed how porous and indistinct the borders of modernist avant-gardes could appear during their ascent. Missed connections, rehearsals and failures of contact grew out of cultural moments that produced more auspicious affiliations, some of which have become almost unshakable in the canon of Anglo-American modernism. Returning to the starting point of this book, Pound’s advice to Robert Creeley did not, in the end, help the younger modernist establish ‘a programme’, let alone the little magazine that Creeley proposed to launch in rural New Hampshire, The Lititz Review.10 Nevertheless, Cid Corman’s little magazine Origin incorporated and built on some of Creeley’s editorial work for the earlier still-born journal, and Pound’s letters of encouragement subsequently emerged in Agenda as an impetus to new avant-gardes consolidating in 1965.11 It is precisely these sorts of deferred connections and recursive exchanges that led Williams to conclude in his autobiography that ‘the little magazine [. . .] is one magazine, not several. It is a continuous magazine.’12 However, the genre itself was not homogeneous, nor was its ‘succession of proprietorships’; rather, its key unifying feature

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 209

25/01/2013 15:53

210 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

was the ‘person who does it’, the editor(s) as artist, ‘a fallible person, subject to devotions and accidents’.13 Those ‘devotions and accidents’ describe the formation of avant-garde networks as well as individual editorial projects. As a rule, modernist avant-gardes have had their memberships consolidated (if not always necessarily agreed) ‘a posteriori’, and their inclusions and exclusions then, as now, remain disputed territory.14 Nevertheless, as archival evidence and the tangled exchanges that emerge in transatlantic magazines continually reveal, there remains a scholarly imperative to consider how their memberships, like the magazines that helped form them, were contingent, unstable and subject to constant revision. This is not merely a feature inscribed belatedly by literary critics, but a fundamental tenet of their avant-garde poetics. The journals explored in this book appeared over the course of two decades and formed the spine of a modernist transatlantic deeply invested in tackling, if not necessarily resolving, the problem of place described by J. Gerald Kennedy.15 As Mark Whalan has argued, ‘early readings of the cultural transatlantic were already couched in terms of its highly constructed nature. It was a self-reflexive gesture from the start, as modernists defined their activities as reliant on an imaginary of transatlantic circulation and exchange.’16 The textual spaces that resulted from such ‘circulation and exchange’ – like the geographic places that the modernists clustered in – served as self-consciously fabricated focal points, multimedia nodes which carried transnational aesthetic debates into and from specific communities, circulating internationally over vast distances, in relatively short periods of time. The localist modernists were acutely attuned to cultural crises which, to paraphrase Marcel Proust, gave a ‘shape’ to their ‘time’, distilling those seismic shifts into discrete, local units of appraisable text.17 The little magazines brought those local units into contact, and, by the impact of that experience, gave a form to the ragged, unfinished spaces of the modernist transatlantic.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 210

25/01/2013 15:53

NOTES

Prologue 1. Mark Morrisson discusses the reaction of ‘counterpublic spheres’ against the dominant ‘public sphere’ in relation to modernist little magazines in The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); see especially pp. 9–12. 2. Friedrich A. Kittler defines a ‘discourse network’ as an interconnected matrix of ‘technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and produce relevant data’; Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 369. 3. Ezra Pound, ‘Selections from Ezra Pound’s Letters to Robert Creeley March 1950 to October 1951’, in Robert Creeley, ‘A Note followed by a Selection of Letters from Ezra Pound’, Agenda 4.2 (October–November 1965), pp. 11–21 (p. 15). 4. Ezra Pound to William Carlos Williams, 11 September 1920, in Pound/ Williams, pp. 36–44 (p. 42). 5. Pound to Williams, 19 December 1913, in Pound/Williams, pp. 22–3 (p. 23). 6. Hélène Aji, ‘Pound and Williams: The Letters as Modernist Manifesto’, in Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry, ed. Viorica Patea and Paul Scott Derrick (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 53–72 (p. 53). 7. Mark Morrisson, ‘Nationalism and the Modern American Canon’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, ed. Walter Kalaidjian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 12–35 (p. 18). Also see Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); David Bennett, ‘Periodical Fragments and Organic Culture: Modernism, the Avant-Garde,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 211

25/01/2013 15:53

212 ]

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

Notes to pages 3–5 and the Little Magazine’, Contemporary Literature 30.4 (Winter 1989), pp. 480– 502; Jayne E. Marek, Women Editing Modernism: ‘Little’ Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Suzanne Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006). The Modernist Magazines Project is based at De Montfort University, the University of Nottingham and the University of Sussex, and was in the process of producing its three-volume resource The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, published by Oxford University Press, as this book was being written. The book was completed before the final publication of Volume II: North America. The Modernist Journals Project is hosted by Brown University and the University of Tulsa; see (accessed 8 April 2012). Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman have also contributed their pedagogically inflected book Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, ‘Introduction: What Is Transatlantic Literary Studies?’, in Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, ed. Manning and Taylor (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 1–13 (p. 4). See Daniel Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), and Anita Patterson, Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Manning and Taylor, ‘Introduction: What Is Transatlantic Literary Studies?’, p.  3. Manning and Taylor cite Rob Wilson’s Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 12. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Cultural Parataxis and Transnational Landscapes of Reading: Toward a Locational Modernist Studies’, in Modernism (Vol. 1), ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007), pp. 35–52 (p. 36). Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 43. Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene, p. 161. Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 141. See Michel Foucault, ‘Questions on Geography’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mephan and Kate Soper (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), pp. 63–77 (p. 70). See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 359. Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989) is the other key source text of geographic materialism, but is referred

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 212

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 5–8

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

[ 213

to less frequently in literary studies. Paul Giles’s Global Remapping and Hsuan L. Hsu’s Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) are two important investigations of literature and geographical materialism. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, p. 148. Also see Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 118–19. Giddens defines a ‘locale’ as a ‘physical region involved as part of the setting of interaction, having definite boundaries which help to concentrate interaction in one way or other’ (p. 375). Foucault, ‘Questions on Geography’, p. 70. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 117–18. Ibid. pp. 117–18. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 232. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’, in Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), pp. 6–18 (p. 6). Ezra Pound, ‘Small Magazines’, The English Journal 19.9 (November 1930), pp. 689–704 (p. 698). Ibid. pp. 702–3. Ibid. p. 698. Craig Saper, Networked Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); see pp. 130–1 for his discussion of little magazines, dadaism and futurism. See John J. White, Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Morrisson, ‘Nationalism and the Modern American Canon’, p. 12. Ibid. p. 12. Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene, p.  3. For two useful works that address Pound’s relationship with America, see Wendy S. Flory, The American Ezra Pound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), and Alec Marsh’s Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1998). Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene, p. 161. The Others ‘colonies’ in rural New Jersey (Ridgefield and Grantwood) are good examples of ‘provincial’ retreats acting as enclaves for poetic experimentation. Churchill gives a useful treatment of these locations in the first two chapters of The Little Magazine Others (pp. 1–60). David Bennett, ‘Defining the “American” Difference: Cultural Nationalism and the Modernist Poetics of William Carlos Williams’, Southern Review 20.3 (November 1987), pp. 271–80 (p. 273). William J. Maxwell, ‘Global Poetics and State-Sponsored Transnationalism: A Reply to Jahan Ramazani’, American Literary History 18.2 (Summer 2006), pp. 360–4 (pp. 362–3).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 213

25/01/2013 15:53

214 ]

Notes to pages 8–12

35. Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), pp. xvii–xviii. 36. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 128. 37. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 197. 38. William Carlos Williams, ‘Further Announcement’, C1, p. 10. 39. Robert McAlmon, Editorial, C1, p. 1; Williams, ‘Further Announcement’, C1, p. 10. 40. Kenner, A Homemade World, pp. xvii–xviii. 41. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, ‘Locating Modernisms: An Overview’, in Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, ed. Davis and Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 3–29 (pp. 20–1). 42. John Dewey, ‘Americanism and Localism’, The Dial 68.6 (June 1920), pp. 684–8. 43. Ibid. p. 687. 44. Patterson, Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernism, p. 1. 45. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 137. 46. Ibid. p. 137. 47. North, The Dialect of Modernism, p. 180. 48. Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene, p. 3. 49. Patterson, Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernism, p. 1. 50. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Price, Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 14. 51. John N. Duvall, ‘Regionalism in American Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, ed. Walter Kalaidjian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 242–60 (p. 243). 52. Donald Davidson, ‘Regionalism and Nationalism in American Literature’, American Review 5 (April 1935), pp. 48–61 (p. 53). 53. David Jordan, ‘Introduction’, Regionalism Reconsidered: New Approaches to the Field, ed. Jordan (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. ix–xix (pp. xii–xiii). 54. Duvall, ‘Regionalism in American Modernism’, p. 243. 55. Ibid. p. 249. 56. Alice Corbin Henderson, Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost all helped align regionalist expression with a distinctly nationalist literature in Poetry; I discuss the new regionalism of the Chicago Renaissance further in Chapter 3. 57. Jordan, ‘Introduction’, Regionalism Reconsidered, p. xi. 58. Malcolm P.  Cutchin, ‘John Dewey’s Metaphysical Ground-Map and Its Implications for Geographical Inquiry’, Geoforum 39 (July 2008), p. 1,555–69 (p. 1,565).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 214

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 12–14

[ 215

59. Lee M. Jenkins, ‘Wallace Stevens and America’, in Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 178–98 (p. 178). Curiously, Soja’s models of ‘the local’ and ‘locality’ have been largely overlooked in the recent wave of literary critical engagements with geographic materialism. 60. Ramazani provides a useful caveat concerning the evolution of American national identity in the context of transnational literary studies: ‘Americanist multiculturalism, while usefully pluralizing conceptions of American literature, likewise risks representing one nation’s literature as a self-sufficient macrocosm that effectively internalizes and thus effaces all others’; A Transnational Poetics, p.  37. And as John Beck notes, Williams sometimes exemplified this pitfall, and there are instances in his writing where ‘Williams’s locality is the only universal, his anywhere is everywhere’; Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 164. 61. The term ‘contact zone’ refers to ‘imperialist encounters [. . .] in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2008 [1992]), p. 8. 62. James Clifford, ‘Travelling Cultures’, in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 96–166 (p. 97). As Kaufman and Macpherson note, Clifford’s caveat is especially relevant to the contemporary discipline of transatlantic studies; see ‘Introduction: Transatlantic Studies: Conceptual Challenges’, in New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies, ed. Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson and Will Kaufman (Lanham, MA: University Press of America, 2000), pp.  ix–xxvi (p. xii). 63. William Carlos Williams, ‘Comment’, C2, pp. 11–12 (p. 12). 64. In a Contact manifesto, Williams wrote, ‘Only by slow growth, consciously fostered to the point of enthusiasm, will work of the quality of Marianne Moore’s best poetry come to the fore of intelligent attention’; ‘Comment’, C2, pp. 11–12 (p. 12). 65. Marianne Moore, ‘Poetry’ (first presentation), BMM, p. 205. 66. See Robin G. Schulze, ‘Others: A Publication Biography’, in BMM, pp. 466–78 (pp. 473–6). 67. Pound, ‘Small Magazines’, p. 692. 68. Hans Marcus Enzenburger, The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media, ed. and trans. Michael Roloff (New York: Continuum Books/ Seabury Press, 1974), p. 28. 69. See Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) and Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations:

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 215

25/01/2013 15:53

216 ]

70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Notes to pages 14–20 Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997); George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Robin Schulze’s introduction and ‘publication biographies’ of various modernist magazines in Becoming Marianne Moore; and Caroline Goeser, Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). McGann, The Textual Condition, p. 57. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, ‘General Introduction’, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880-1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–26 (p. 6). Schulze, ‘Introduction’, BMM, p. 12. Alfred Kreymborg, Troubadour, p. 222. J. Gerald Kennedy has argued that ‘the writing of place’ collided with the disjunctive aesthetics of modernism to create a ‘problem of place’; Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 36. Dewey, ‘Americanism and Localism’, p. 687. See North, The Dialect of Modernism, pp. 127–74. See Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999). Marjorie Perloff, ‘ “Barbed-Wire Entanglements”: The “New American Poetry” ’, Modernism/Modernity 2.1 (January 1995), pp. 145–75 (p. 147). William Carlos Williams, ‘The Advance Guard Magazine’, Contact 1.1 (February 1932), pp. 86–90 (p. 90). Chapter 1

1. Alfred Kreymborg, ‘Contra Mundum’, Others 1.1 (July 1915), p. 17. 2. Alfred Kreymborg, Troubadour, p. 235. 3. Many accounts of the Others ‘movement’ rely on Kreymborg’s Troubadour and William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951) (see pp.  134–42; 146–8; 152–62; and 170–3). Robin G. Schulze clarifies Kreymborg’s inaccurate recollections in Troubadour in The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 13–36, and ‘Others: A Publication Biography’, in BMM, pp. 466–78. Suzanne Churchill’s study The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006) builds on and refines the scrupulous work of Schulze as well as John Timberman Newcomb’s pioneering article ‘Others, Poetry, and Wallace Stevens: Little Magazines as Agents of Reputation’, Essays in Literature, 16.2 (Fall 1989), pp. 256–70. 4. Timothy D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 216

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 20–23

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

[ 217

Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 110. Ibid. p. 110. On the ‘pure expressions’ of the Others contributors, see Churchill, The Little Magazine Others, pp. 42–3. Williams developed his ‘Franciscan’ editorial strategies in Others, but, like Kreymborg, he did not articulate his own programme until much later. In Contact 2, Williams explained that ‘I should like to make St. Francis of Assisi the patron saint of the United States’, reasoning that, like Francis, avant-garde writers must position themselves continually on the fringes of society and at the cutting edge of contemporary poetics; ‘Comment’, C2, pp. 11–12 (p. 11). I discuss St Francis in relation to Williams’s localist poetics in Chapters 4–6. Williams’s caustic editorials ‘Gloria!’ (Others 5.6 (July 1919), pp.  3–4) and ‘Belly Music’ (pp. 25–32) effectively ‘killed’ the magazine – but, as I argue in Chapter 3, that was not necessarily the end of Others. Guido Bruno, ‘Others’, Greenwich Village 2.2 (15 July 1915), p. 66. The Glebe was edited primarily from Ridgefield and published by Charles and Albert Boni in Washington Square, while Others, originally edited from Ridgefield and printed by the Liberty Print Shop in the Bronx, moved its operations to the West Village in January 1916; see Kreymborg, Troubadour, p. 233, and Man Ray, Self Portrait (London: Andre Deutsch, 1963), pp. 29–49. Alfred Kreymborg, ‘The New Washington Square’, Morning Telegraph, 29 November and 6 December 1914; quoted in Luther S. Harris, Around Washington Square: An Illustrated History of Greenwich Village (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 191. Gerald W. McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898–1918 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), pp. 1–2. Kreymborg, ‘The New Washington Square’, in Harris, Around Washington Square, p. 191. Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), p. 194. See Rebecca Zurier, Art for The Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911–1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p.  45; pp.  59–61. Alfred Kreymborg, ‘Edna: The Girl of the Street’, Bruno Chap Books (special number, 1915). See Guido Bruno’s introduction to the second edition; ‘The Complete Story of the Arrest and Subsequent Trial of Guido Bruno’, in Edna: The Girl of the Street (New York: Guido Bruno, 1919 [1915]), pp. 4–8. Harris, Around Washington Square, p. 193. ‘Clara Tice Lights Guido Bruno Garret’, The New York Times, 11 May 1915. Guido Bruno, ‘My Garret’, Greenwich Village 2.1 (23 June 1915), pp.  16–17 (p. 16). Ibid. p. 17.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 217

25/01/2013 15:53

218 ]

Notes to pages 24–29

21. Djuna Barnes, ‘Seen from the “L” ’, in The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994 [1915]), pp. 23–4. 22. Ibid. p. 24. 23. Ibid. p. 24. 24. Djuna Barnes, ‘In General’ and ‘In Particular’, in The Book of Repulsive Women, p. 17. For Barnes’s sardonic articles on Greenwich Village in 1916, see Djuna Barnes, New York, ed. Alyce Barry (London: Virago Press, 1990 [1989]), pp. 218–52. 25. Kreymborg, Troubadour, p. 222. 26. Ibid. p. 139. Also see Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1947), pp. 44–51. 27. Ray, Self Portrait, pp. 34–5. 28. Ibid. pp. 34–5. 29. Churchill, The Little Magazine Others, p. 30. 30. See F. S. Flint, ‘Imagisme’, Poetry 1.6 (March 1913), pp. 198–200, and Ezra Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, pp. 200–6. 31. Alfred Kreymborg, [untitled editorial], The Glebe 1.2 (November 1914) [unpaginated]. 32. The Glebe 1.5 (February 1914); Des Imagistes, ed. Ezra Pound and Alfred Kreymborg (New York: Boni, 1914). 33. Kreymborg, [untitled editorial], The Glebe 1.2 [unpaginated]. 34. Richard Aldington, ‘The Imagists: Written for Greenwich Village’, Greenwich Village 2.2 (15 July 1915), pp. 54–7 (p. 56). 35. Ibid. p. 55. 36. See the ‘Imagist’ special number, The Egoist 2.5 (1 May 1915). Andrew Thacker comments that ‘Aldington noted how Egoist subscriptions increased after the special issue was published’; The Imagist Poets (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 2011), p. 35. 37. Kreymborg, Troubadour, p. 235. 38. Flint, ‘Imagisme’, p. 199. 39. Ibid. p. 235. 40. As Churchill has argued, Kreymborg ‘maintained a distance from the moral libertarianism associated with more radical Villagers’, but not always successfully; see The Little Magazine Others, p. 37. 41. In Troubadour, Kreymborg states that ‘before the second issue [of Others] came off the press, “the little yellow dog,” as someone hailed the paper, had earned a reputation bordering on infamy’ (p. 235), but he does not identify his source. 42. Adon Lacroix, ‘To HIM. . . .’, The Ridgefield Gazook No. 0 (31 March 1915), p. 4. 43. Kreymborg, Troubadour, p. 233. 44. Ibid. p. 222.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 218

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 29–36

[ 219

45. See Ellen Williams’s Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of Poetry, 1912–22 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). 46. This figure was supplied by Kreymborg in a statement to Charles Allen in August 1939; cited in Hoffman, Allen and Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography, p. 47. 47. Kreymborg, Troubadour, p. 287. 48. See Newcomb, ‘Others, Poetry, and Wallace Stevens’, p. 260. 49. Kreymborg, Troubadour, p.  235; Mina Loy, ‘Love Songs’, Others 1.1 (July 1915), pp. 6–8 (p. 6). 50. Churchill, The Little Magazine Others, pp. 42–3. 51. Kreymborg, Troubadour, p. 235. 52. Ibid. p. 235. 53. Peter Quartermain, ‘ “The Tattle of Tongueplay”: Mina Loy’s Love Songs’, in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, ed. Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation Press, 1998), pp. 75–85 (p. 80). 54. Loy, ‘Love Songs’, p. 8. 55. Alfred Kreymborg, ‘Overheard in an Asylum, Others 1.1 (July 1915), p. 18. 56. Review of Others, Springfield Republican, 11 June 1916, p.  17; quoted by Newcomb in ‘Others, Poetry, and Wallace Stevens’, p. 259. 57. Churchill identifies an extensive range of reviews portraying Others and its contributors as a ‘freak show’; see Suzanne Churchill, ‘Making Space for “Others”: A History of a Modernist Little Magazine’, Journal of Modern Literature 22.1 (Autumn 1998), pp. 47–67 (p. 62). 58. Kreymborg, ‘Overheard in an Asylum’, Rogue 2.1 (15 August 1915), p. 9. 59. I am grateful to Hannah Crawforth for discussing the ways in which Rogue parodied Vogue with me. Any errors in the readings are my own. 60. Mina Loy, ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’, Rogue 2.1 (15 August 1915), p. 10; Clara Tice, ‘Virgin Minus Muse’, p. 11. 61. Claudia Cranston, ‘Lines to Miss Vogue’, Vogue 45.9 (1 May 1915), p.  41. A review of Some Imagist Poets, ed. H.D. and Richard Aldington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), also appeared in Vogue, illustrating the two-way traffic that existed between free verse and national magazines during the period – as I discuss later, the trend was further developed in Others; ‘What They Read’, Vogue 46.1 (1 July 1915), pp. 68–72 (p. 68). 62. Loy, ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’, p. 10. 63. Alex Goody, Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 11. 64. Ibid. p. 11. 65. ‘In England Now’, Rogue 2.1 (15 August 1915), p. 11. 66. ‘In New York Now’, Rogue 2.1 (15 August 1915), p. 11. 67. Jay Bochner, ‘dAdAmAgs’, in Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York, ed. Francis M. Naumann, Beth Venn and Todd Alden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), pp. 214–21 (p. 216). 68. Djuna Barnes, ‘The Tragedian’, Rogue 2.1 (15 August 1915), p. 9.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 219

25/01/2013 15:53

220 ]

Notes to pages 36–40

69. Louise Norton, ‘Dame Rogue’, Rogue 2.1 (15 August 1915), p. 10. 70. ‘Rogue: The Cigarette of Literature’ [advertisement], Rogue 1.1 (15 March 1915), p. 14. The phrase ‘Rogue Trusts Everyone But Himself’ alluded to the Nortons’ strategy of accepting promissory notes for subscriptions. 71. Louise Norton, ‘Philosophic Fashions’, Rogue 3.2 (November 1916), p. 7. 72. Ibid. p. 7. 73. Padraic Colum, ‘Polonius and the Ballad Singers’, Poetry 6.4 (July 1915), pp. 161–5 (p. 161). 74. The expatriates were Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and John Gould Fletcher, the British poets included the ‘Choric School’, Richard Aldington, Mina Loy and Vail De Lencour (a pseudonym for Brigit Patmore), and the recent migrants included Adon Lacroix and Padraic Colum. 75. Ezra Pound, ‘Foreword to the Choric School’, Others 1.4 (October 1915). 76. Ibid. 77. Alfred Kreymborg, introduction to J. B. Kerfoot, Others 1.5 (November 1915). The original review appeared as J. B. Kerfoot, ‘The Latest Books’, Life, 66.1717 (23 September 1915), p. 568. 78. Marianne Moore noted that Kerfoot claimed ‘to know as little as possible about the people [he was] reviewing’ but she made it clear in her letters that the journalist knew Kreymborg and the Others group well; Marianne Moore to John Warner Moore, 19 December 1915, The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, ed. Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge and Cristanne Miller (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 110. 79. Kerfoot, ‘The Latest Books’, p. 568. 80. Richard Aldington, ‘In the Tube’, The Egoist 2.5 (1 May 1915), p.  74, and ‘Cinema Exit’, The Egoist 2.7 (1 July 1915), p. 113; the poems were reprinted in Others 1.5 (November 1915), pp. 82–3. 81. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism, pp. 98–9. 82. Aldington, ‘In the Tube’, Others 1.5, p. 82. 83. Ibid. p. 82. 84. Ezra Pound, ‘The Tea Shop’, ‘Phylidula’, ‘The Patterns’, ‘Shop Girl’, ‘Another Man’s Wife’ and ‘Coda’, Others 1.5 (November 1915), pp. 84–5. As I shall discuss in Chapter 2, this sequence develops the locational vorticist model that Pound attempted over the two numbers of Blast. 85. Helen Hoyt, ‘Homage’, Others 1.5 (November 1915), p. 78; ‘Park Going to Sleep’, p. 80. 86. Hoyt, ‘Park Going to Sleep’, p. 80. 87. Skipwith Cannell, ‘To England’, Others 1.2 (August 1915), p. 27. 88. Ibid. p. 27. 89. The first serious example of this ‘Aboriginal Poetry’ was by the Canadian poet Constance Lindsay Skinner, whose ‘Songs of the Coast Dwellers’ won Poetry’s Guarantor’s Prize; ‘Songs of the Coast Dwellers’, Poetry 5.1 (October 1914), pp. 1–19.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 220

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 40–45

[ 221

90. Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill, 2004), p. 163. 91. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 44. 92. John Gould Fletcher, ‘Invocation’, Others 1.3 (September 1915), pp. 42–3. 93. On the ‘sectional’ regionalism of the agrarians, see Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, ‘Locating Modernisms: An Overview’, in Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, ed. Davis and Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.  3–29 (pp. 20–1). 94. Kreymborg, Troubadour, p. 265. 95. Alfred Kreymborg, ‘Bulletin’, Others 2.5–6 (May–June 1916). 96. Isaac Goldmann Co., [bill to Alfred Kreymborg], 23 October 1916, Buffalo, G43. 97. Aldington, ‘The Imagists’, p. 55. 98. Edgar Lee Masters, ‘The Subway’, Others 2.5–6 (May–June 1916), pp. 236–9. Masters asserted an independent claim to copyright for this poem. 99. Conrad Aiken, ‘Meretrix: Ironic’, Others 2.5–6 (May–June 1916), pp. 251–4. 100. William Carlos Williams, ‘The Great Opportunity’, The Egoist 3.7 (September 1916), p. 137. 101. In his 18 May 1916 letter to Moore, Williams refers to ‘the prose bit at the end of that August issue which I am taking so seriously’; The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirwall (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957), p.  35. Also see Pound to Williams, [May–June] 1916, Pound/Williams, p. 26, which similarly suggests that the Competitive Number was expected in August rather than July. 102. Williams, ‘The Great Opportunity’, p. 137. 103. Williams to Moore, 9 May 1916, Selected Letters, pp. 34–5. 104. Williams to Moore, 18 May 1916, Selected Letters, p. 35. 105. Marianne Moore, ‘Critics and Connoisseurs’, Others 3.1 (July 1916), pp. 4–5 (p. 5). 106. Carl Sandburg, ‘Others’, Others 3.1 (July 1916), p. 3; Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (1917), ed. Alfred Kreymborg (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917), p. 102. 107. Sandburg, ‘Others’, p. 3. 108. Ibid. p. 3. 109. See Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, introduction and notes by Martin Gardner (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1960; rev. ed. 1970], pp. 218–32. 110. Sandburg, ‘Others’, p. 3. 111. Carl Sandburg, ‘Chicks’, Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1950), pp. 119–20 (p. 119). 112. Fiona Green, ‘Locating the Lyric: Moore and Bishop’, in Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 221

25/01/2013 15:53

222 ]

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

Notes to pages 45–51 Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 199–214 (pp. 199–200). Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 82. Ibid. p. 82. Maxwell Bodenheim, ‘The Cotton Picker’, Others 1.3 (September 1915), p. 50. Mina Loy, ‘To You’, Others 3.1 (July 1916), pp. 27–8 (p. 27). Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 33. Loy, ‘To You’, p. 27. Ibid. p. 27. Stewart Gillies and Pamela Taylor, Finchley & Friern Barnet: A Pictorial History (Chichester: Phillimore, 1992), fig. 141. Loy, ‘To You’, p. 27. Ibid. p. 27. Ibid. p. 28. Ibid. p. 28. Green, ‘Locating the Lyric’, p. 200. Loy, ‘To You’, pp. 27–8. Cristanne Miller, ‘Tongues “Loosened in the Melting Pot”: The Poets of Others and the Lower East Side’, Modernism/Modernity 14.3 (September 2007), pp. 455–76 (p. 469). Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, p. 23. Skipwith Cannell, ‘On a London Tennis Court’, Others 3.1 (July 1916), p. 9. William Carlos Williams, ‘Drink’, Others 3.1 (July 1916), p. 30. See Glen G. Macleod, Wallace Stevens and Company: The Harmonium Years, 1913–1923 (Epping: Bowker Publishing Company, 1981), p. 78. Williams, ‘The Great Opportunity’, p. 137. Chapter 2

1. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 262. 2. Ezra Pound, ‘Patria Mia X’, The New Age 12.1 (7 November 1912), p. 12. 3. Ibid. p. 12. 4. See A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and his Work, Vol. 1: The Young Genius 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 187–9. 5. Richard Sieburth’s introduction traces Pound’s precise route through Southern France, the palaeography of the texts, and their significance both to Pound’s early career and to his oeuvre; see AWT, pp.  vii–xxi. A. David Moody subsequently edited ‘The Missing Rochechouart Notebook of Pound’s 1912 Walking Tour’, restoring an important part of the journey to

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 222

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 51–56

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

[ 223

the text; A. David Moody, ‘ “The Walk There Is Good Poetry”: The Missing Rochechouart Notebook of Pound’s 1912 Walking Tour’, Paideuma 29.3 (Winter 2000), pp. 235–41 (‘Rochechouart’ hereafter). See Richard Sieburth’s introduction to AWT, pp.  xvi–xxi, and Peter Nicholls’s ‘Pound’s Places’ in Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 159–77. Ezra Pound, AWT, p. 7. J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 36. Ezra Pound, ‘Burgos: A Dream City of Old Castile’, Book News Monthly 25.2 (October 1906), pp. 91–4 (p. 91). Pound cited ‘My cid [who] rode up to Burgos’ in Ur-Canto II; Ezra Pound, ‘Three Cantos: II’, Poetry 10.4 (July 1917), pp. 180–8 (p. 184). Pound, ‘Burgos’, p. 91. The surviving fragments from Gironde are in AWT, pp. 122–3. Pound, AWT, p. 7. Nicholls, ‘Pound’s Places’, p. 159. Pound, AWT, p. 50. Ezra Pound, ‘Provincia Deserta’, Poetry 5.6 (March 1915), pp. 251–4 (p. 253). Pound, AWT, p. 7. Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. p. 7. Kennedy, Imagining Paris, p. 36. Ibid. p. 36. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), p. 11. Pound, ‘Rochechouart’, p. 241. Ibid. p. 241. Pound, AWT, p. 64. Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 36. Pound consulted Karl Baedeker, Southern France Including Corsica (Leipsic: Karl Baedeker, Publisher, 1907), and Justin H. Smith, The Troubadours at Home: Their Lives and Personalities, Their Songs and Their World, 2 vols (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899); see Sieburth, ‘Introduction’, AWT, p. viii, p. xi. Justin H. Smith, The Troubadours at Home, Vol. 1, p. 119. Pound, AWT, p. 67. Ibid. p. 64. Ibid. p. 64. Ezra Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, Poetry 1.6 (March 1913), pp. 200–6 (p. 200). Ibid. pp. 200–1. Ezra Pound, ‘Vorticism’, in Gaudier-Brzeska, pp. 81–94 (p. 89).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 223

25/01/2013 15:53

224 ]

Notes to pages 56–60

34. Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, Poetry 2.1 (April 1913), p. 12. 35. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 101. 36. Daniel Katz, ‘Travel’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 424–33 (p. 424). 37. Daniel Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 57. 38. Sieburth, ‘Introduction’, AWT, p. xiii. 39. Ezra Pound, ‘Poems’, Poetry 5.6 (March 1915), pp. 251–61. 40. Ezra Pound, ‘The Coming of War: Actaeon’, Poetry 5.6 (March 1915), pp. 255–6. 41. Ibid. pp. 255–6. 42. Pound, AWT, p. 64. 43. Poggi, Inventing Futurism, p. 49. 44. Pound, ‘Provincia Deserta’, p. 252. 45. Robert Nye, ‘Savage Crowds, Modernism, and Modern Politics’, in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 42–55 (p. 43). 46. Ezra Pound, ‘Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess (Theme for a Series of Pictures)’, B2, p. 19. 47. Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe, 31 January 1915, in Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters, ed. Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), pp. 179–80 (p. 180). 48. Sieburth, ‘Introduction’, AWT, p. xv. 49. Ezra Pound, ‘Dogmatic Statement Concerning the Game of Chess (Theme for a Series of Pictures)’, Poetry 5.6 (March 1915), p. 257. 50. Ezra Pound, ‘Near Perigord’, Poetry 7.3 (December 1915), pp. 111–19 (p. 112). 51. Ibid. p. 113. 52. See Ezra Pound, ‘Through Alien Eyes, II’, The New Age 12.12 (23 January 1913), pp. 275–6 (p. 275), and ‘Through Alien Eyes, III’, The New Age 12.13 (30 January 1913), pp. 300–1 (p. 300). 53. Pound, ‘Patria Mia X’, p. 12. 54. Ezra Pound, ‘Through Alien Eyes, I’, The New Age 12.11 (16 January 1913), p. 252. 55. Ibid. p. 252. 56. Ibid. p. 252. 57. Pound, AWT, p. 7. 58. Ezra Pound, ‘Patria Mia III’, The New Age 11.21 (19 September 1912), pp. 491–2 (p. 491). 59. Ibid. p. 491. 60. See Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), pp. 74–80. 61. See William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 23 July 1909, The

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 224

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 60–63

62.

63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

[ 225

Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, ed. Andrew J. Krivak (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), pp. 165–6. Mariani, A New World Naked, pp. 80–90. Williams discusses the trip in The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), pp. 109–24. William Carlos Williams to Florence Herman, 15 May 1910; quoted in Mariani, A New World Naked, p. 88. Patricia C. Willis, ‘William Carlos Williams: Poems (Introduction by Virginia M. Wright-Peterson)’ [review], William Carlos Williams Review 24.2 (Fall 2004), pp.  89–90 (p.  89). See ‘Notes on Texts’ for further details about ‘Tatters’ and the presentation of seven of its nine pages as an appendix in Poems, ed. Virginia M. Wright-Peterson (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002). As Willis points out, the excluded pages provide the title, ‘Tatters’, and contextualise the layout instructions on the third page to ‘ “(Print these tatters in smaller type)” ’; Willis, ‘William Carlos Williams: Poems’, p. 89. The bulk of the manuscript material was most likely completed when Williams returned to America between 1910 and 1912, with a final attempt to edit the sequence in 1916. William Carlos Williams, ‘The Wanderer: A Rococo Study’, The Egoist 1.6 (16 March 1914), pp. 109–11; CP1, pp. 27–36. Tatters. Williams discusses the emerging New York skyline in a letter to Edgar Irving Williams, 21 August 1911, in The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, pp.  272–3 (p.  272); Krivak identifies the buildings under discussion as the Singer Tower and the Metropolitan Life Tower (p. 369). William Carlos Williams, ‘[Hark Hilda!]’, in Tatters. William Carlos Williams, ‘To J.H.W.’, in Tatters. On John Wilson, see Mariani, A New World Naked, pp. 40–2. NFET. William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 11 August 1909, The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, p. 168. Ibid. p. 168. NFET. William Carlos Williams, ‘Modern Invocation’, NFET. Ibid. NFET. Roy Temple House, ‘A Mad Poet’, and [anonymous], ‘The Madman’s Death’, trans. Roy Temple House, The New York Times, 18 June 1911, p. 388. NFET. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 101. Ibid. p. 101. William Carlos Williams, ‘Fiume’, NFET. Williams, ‘The Wanderer: A Rococo Study’, CP1, pp. 27–8.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 225

25/01/2013 15:53

226 ]

Notes to pages 64–67

82. Williams, Autobiography, p. 60. 83. Ezra Pound, ‘Exhibition at the Goupil Gallery’, The Egoist 1.6 (16 March 1914), p. 109. 84. See Richard Aldington, ‘In the Tube’, The Egoist 2.5 (1 May 1915), p.  74; ‘Cinema Exit’, The Egoist 2.7 (1 July 1915), p. 113; see Chapter 1. On The Egoist and counterpublic spheres, see Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), pp. 104–5. 85. Williams, ‘The Wanderer’, CP1, p. 30. 86. Ibid. p. 30. 87. Ibid. p. 30. 88. Ibid. p. 31. 89. Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 1. Paul R. Cappucci explores Williams’s engagement with the strike and its connection to ‘The Wanderer’ in William Carlos Williams’ Poetic Response to the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002). 90. William Carlos Williams, ‘In Socialasia’, Tatters. 91. Williams, ‘The Wanderer’, CP1, p. 31. 92. Ibid. p. 31. 93. Ibid. p. 31. 94. Ibid. p. 34. 95. Nye, ‘Savage Crowds’, p. 45. 96. Mariani convincingly reasons that Williams made a few revisions to these manuscripts in 1918, since he recycled a section of Vortex WCWA in the ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell in 1918; see Mariani, A New World Naked, p. 787. 97. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, ‘Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska (Written from the Trenches)’, B2, pp. 33–4 (p. 34). 98. William Carlos Williams, Vortex WCWB. 99. See Mike Weaver, William Carlos Williams: The American Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 36. 100. Gaudier-Brzeska, ‘Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska’, p. 34. 101. Ibid. p. 34. 102. William Carlos Williams, Vortex WCWA. 103. Williams, Vortex WCWB. 104. Gaudier-Brzeska used Pound’s phrases ‘arrangement of planes, or by an arrangement of lines and colours’; Ezra Pound, ‘Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist’, The Egoist 1.16 (15 August 1914), pp. 306–7 (p. 306). 105. Williams, Vortex WCWA. 106. Williams, Vortex WCWB. 107. Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, pp. 200–1. 108. Pound, AWT, p. 7. 109. Williams, Vortex WCWA.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 226

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 67–73

[ 227

110. William Carlos Williams, ‘Aux Imagistes’, The Egoist 1.23 (1 December 1914), p. 444. 111. Ibid. p. 444. 112. On the composition of Kora in Hell, see Eric White, ‘Evolutions and Improvisations: Method and Materiality in Kora in Hell’, in The Legacy of William Carlos Williams: Points of Contact, ed. Ian Copestake (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), pp. 62–78. 113. William Carlos Williams, ‘Prologue: The Return of the Sun’, The Little Review 5.12 (April 1919), pp.  1–10, and ‘Prologue (Continued)’, The Little Review 6.1 (May 1919), pp. 74–80. 114. Williams, ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell: Improvisations, in Imaginations, pp. 6–28 (p. 16). 115. ‘Gladiators’, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Vol. 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), pp. 63–5 (p. 64). 116. I discuss the so-called ‘International Episode’ in Chapter 3. 117. William Carlos Williams, DLA; see Chapter 3 and ‘Abbreviations and Notes on Sources’ for further details about this manuscript. 118. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 117. 119. The only references to the word ‘Vortex’ appear in the first and final sections of Blast 1, which were added at the last minute of the magazine’s production, meaning that Lewis, Pound and the Rebel Art Centre became known as ‘vorticists’ only after the majority of Blast had been written; see Michael E. Leveridge, ‘The Printing of BLAST’, Wyndham Lewis Annual 7 (2000), pp. 20–31 (pp. 21–5). 120. Ezra Pound, ‘Affirmations II: Vorticism’, The New Age 16.11 (14 January 1915), pp. 277–8 (p. 278). 121. See Wyndham Lewis to Ezra Pound, April 1916, Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 33. 122. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Vortex No. 1’, B2, p. 91. 123. For further background on Lewis’s blasts and blesses, see William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), pp. 167–72; pp. 217–27. 124. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism, p. 131. 125. Wyndham Lewis, ‘A Review of Contemporary Art’, B2, pp. 38–47 (p. 47). 126. Paul Edwards notes this dual meaning in ‘ “You Must Speak with Two Tongues”: Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist Aesthetics and Literature’, Blast: Vorticism 1914–1918, ed. Paul Edwards (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2000), pp. 113–20 (p. 113). 127. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 117. 128. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, B1, pp. 59–85 (p. 76). 129. See especially Wyndham Lewis, ‘Manifesto I’, B1, pp. 11–28, and ‘Manifesto II’, B1, pp. 30–43. 130. See John J. White, Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant Garde (Oxford:

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 227

25/01/2013 15:53

228 ]

131.

132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

138. 139. 140.

141. 142. 143. 144.

145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153.

154. 155. 156. 157. 158.

Notes to pages 73–77 Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 6, and David Kadlec, ‘Pound, Blast, and Syndicalism’, ELH 60.4 (Winter 1993), pp. 1,015–31 (p. 1,018). F. T. Marinetti, ‘Destruction of Syntax – Imagination Without Strings – Words-In-Freedom 1913’, in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, trans. Robert Brain et al. (New York: Viking, 1970), pp. 95–106 (p. 105). Lewis, ‘Manifesto I’, p. 19. Edwards, ‘You Must Speak with Two Tongues’, p. 113. Richard Aldington, ‘Blast’, The Egoist 1.14 (15 July 1914), pp. 272–3 (p. 272). Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver: Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1876–1961 (New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 460. Lewis, ‘Manifesto I’, p. 15. Ibid. p.  18. For biographical details of Swinburne see Rikky Rooksby, ‘Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837–1909)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 53 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 483–92. Lewis, ‘Manifesto I’, pp. 18–19. Ibid. pp. 18–19. See for example Paul Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), who describes the nationalism of Blast as ‘dissenting patriotism’ (p. 97; p. 164). Ian Patterson, ‘Anarcho-imperialism, Modernism, Mystification and Muddle’, The Cambridge Quarterly 30.2 (June 2001), pp. 183–90 (p. 186). Lewis, ‘Manifesto I’, p. 11. Lewis, ‘Manifesto II’, p. 30. Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 11 August 1915, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 31–9 (p. 34). Wyndham Lewis, ‘Long Live the Vortex’, B1, pp. 7–8 (p. 7). Wyndham Lewis, ‘Notice to Public’, B2, p. 7. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Editorial’, B2, p. 5. See Wyndham Lewis, ‘Five Art Notes’, B2, pp. 70–83. Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Crowd Master’, B2, pp. 94–102 (p. 94). Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde, p. 110. See Nye, ‘Savage Crowds’, pp. 44–8. Lewis, ‘The Crowd Master’, p. 94. Lewis, ‘The Crowd Master’, p. 98. On Lewis and the eroticisation of the public sphere, see Peter Nicholls, ‘Apes and Familiars: Modernism, Mimesis and the Work of Wyndham Lewis’, Textual Practice 6.3 (1992), pp.  421–38 (p. 428). Lewis, ‘The Crowd Master’, p. 99. Ibid. p. 98. Wyndham Lewis, ‘A Review of Contemporary Art’, B2, pp. 38–47 (p. 42). Lewis, ‘The Crowd Master’, p. 100. Ibid. p. 100.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 228

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 77–83 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165.

166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172.

[ 229

Ibid. p. 100. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Notice to Public’, B2, p. 7. Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 13 July 1915, Selected Letters, p. 30. Wyndham Lewis to Ezra Pound, April 1916, Pound/Lewis, p. 33. See Ezra Pound, ‘The Death of Vorticism’, The Little Review 5.9 (January 1919), pp. 45–8. Ezra Pound, ‘Editorial’, The Little Review 4.1 (May 1917), pp. 3–6 (p. 5). Wyndham Lewis, ‘Cantleman’s Spring-Mate’, The Little Review 4.6 (October 1917), pp.  8–14. Anderson (possibly with Jane Heap) launched a robust defence of the story in the editorial ‘To Subscribers Who Did Not Receive their October Issue’, The Little Review 4.7 (November 1917), pp. 43–4. Wyndham Lewis, ‘A Soldier of Humour (Part I)’, The Little Review 4.8 (December 1917), pp. 32–46 (pp. 41–2). Wyndham Lewis, ‘A Soldier of Humour (Part II)’, The Little Review 4.9 (January 1918), pp. 35–51 (p. 45). Jamie Wood, ‘The Siamese Demon: Wyndham Lewis and America’, Modernism/Modernity 17.2 (April 2010), pp. 383–98 (p. 390). Pound, ‘The Death of Vorticism’, p. 48. Ibid. p. 48. Pound, ‘Editorial’, The Little Review, p. 6. Williams, Imaginations, p. 27. Chapter 3

1. Edgar Jepson, ‘The Western School’, The Little Review 5.5 (September 1918), pp.  4–9. The article was a truncated version of Jepson’s essay ‘Recent United States Poetry’, which had appeared in The English Review 26 (May 1918), pp. 419–28. Harriet Monroe responded by condemning Jepson in her articles ‘Comment: Mr. Jepson’s Slam’, Poetry 12.4 (July 1918), pp. 208–12, and ‘An International Episode’, Poetry 13.2 (November 1918), pp. 94–5. The two American numbers of The Little Review were 5.2 (June 1918) and 5.8 (December 1918). 2. Gorham Munson, The Awakening Twenties (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), p. 297. 3. Ibid. p.  301. On ‘translocal poetics’, see Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 17–18. 4. See Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and TwentiethCentury Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 128. 5. J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 36. 6. John Dewey, ‘Americanism and Localism’, The Dial 68.6 (June 1920), pp. 684–8 (p. 687). 7. ‘Americanism’ [advertisement for The Dial], Poetry 8.6 (September 1916).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 229

25/01/2013 15:53

230 ]

Notes to pages 83–85

8. Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 86–7. 9. James Oppenheim, ‘To the Friends of The Seven Arts’, The Seven Arts 2.6 (October 1917), pp. 671–4 (p. 672). 10. Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 2. 11. See Peter Dowell, ‘Van Wyck Brooks and the Progressive Frame of Mind’, American Studies 11.1 (Spring 1970), pp. 30–44 (pp. 30–1). 12. Van Wyck Brooks, ‘The Splinter of Ice’, The Seven Arts 2.3 (January 1917), pp. 270–80 (pp. 279–80). 13. James Oppenheim, [inaugural editorial], The Seven Arts 1.1 (November 1916), pp. 52–60 (p. 56). 14. See Louis Untermeyer, ‘Growth and Decay in Recent Verse’, The Seven Arts 1.6 (April 1917), pp. 668–71. Untermeyer identified Edgar Lee Masters, ‘Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Amy Lowell, Arturo Giovanni, James Oppenheim, Carl Sandburg, [and] Vachel Lindsay’ as poets who represented a ‘native solidity and strength’ which could surmount ‘the deficiency of personal impulse in America’ perpetuated by its avant-gardes and ‘local color’ writers; p. 671. 15. Van Wyck Brooks, ‘New Books: Sinclair Lewis and Others’, The Seven Arts 2.1 (May 1917), pp. 121–2 (p. 122). 16. Van Wyck Brooks, ‘The Culture of Industrialism’, The Seven Arts 1.6 (April 1917), pp. 655–66 (p. 659). 17. Waldo Frank, ‘Emerging Greatness’, The Seven Arts 1.1 (November 1916), pp. 73–8 (p. 74). 18. Ibid. p. 74. 19. Sherwood Anderson, ‘Mid-American Prayer’, The Seven Arts 2.2 (June 1917), pp. 190–2. 20. Eric Aronoff, ‘Anthropologists, Indians, and New Critics: Culture and/ as Poetic Form in Regional Modernism’, Modern Fiction Studies 55.1 (Spring 2009), pp. 92–118 (pp. 97–8). 21. Van Wyck Brooks, ‘Our Awakeners’, The Seven Arts 2.2 (June 1917), pp. 235–48 (pp. 237–8). 22. Hsuan L. Hsu, Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 17. 23. Ibid. p. 138. 24. Oppenheim, [inaugural editorial], The Seven Arts, p. 56. 25. Alice Corbin [Henderson], ‘Echoes of Childhood: A Folk-Medley’, The Seven Arts 2.5 (September 1917), pp. 598–601 (pp. 599–600). North notes that Henderson opportunistically appropriates dialect in these poems, but that elsewhere she hypocritically warned black poets against doing the same; North, The Dialect of Modernism, p. 136.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 230

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 86–90

[ 231

26. Barry Benefield, ‘Simply Sugar Pie’, The Seven Arts 1.1 (November 1916), pp. 3–14 (p. 3). 27. Ibid. p. 13. 28. Ibid. p. 13. 29. Ibid. p. 13. 30. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 96. 31. Harold Stearns, ‘A Poor Thing, But Our Own’, The Seven Arts 1.5 (March 1917), pp. 515–21 (p. 521). 32. Eli Edwards [Claude McKay], ‘Harlem Dancer’, The Seven Arts 1.5 (March 1917), p. 472. 33. Oppenheim, ‘To the Friends of The Seven Arts’, p. 671; Lajpat Rai, ‘Young India’, The Seven Arts 2.6 (October 1917), pp. 743–58; and Willard Huntington Wright, ‘Turgenev’, The Seven Arts 2.6 (October 1917), pp. 779–96. 34. Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919), p. 164. 35. Ibid. p. 135. 36. Ibid. p. 173. 37. Oppenheim, ‘To the Friends of The Seven Arts’, p. 672. 38. See Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp.  135–6. I discuss Frank in more detail in Chapter 5. 39. R. J. Coady, ‘American Art’, The Soil 1.1 (December 1916), pp. 3–4 (p. 4). 40. See Robert Alden Sanborn’s obituary, ‘A Champion in the Wilderness’, Broom 3.3 (October 1922), pp. 174–9; also see his attempt in Contact to stimulate interest in memorialising Coady by reissuing The Soil ‘in a fine volume’; William Carlos Williams, ‘Announcements’, C4, p. 19. 41. Munson, The Awakening Twenties, p. 40. For an analysis of The Soil’s engagement with commercial cultures, see Victoria Kingham, ‘Commerce, Little Magazines and Modernity: New York, 1915–1922’, unpublished PhD thesis, De Montfort University, 2009, pp. 118–52. 42. Ibid. pp. 41–3. 43. R. J. Coady, ‘The Book of Job’, The Soil 1.1 (December 1916), pp. 1–2. 44. Coady, ‘American Art’, p. 3. 45. R. J. Coady, ‘The Indeps’, The Soil 1.5 (July 1917), pp. 202–11 (p. 202). 46. William Carlos Williams, ‘America, Whitman, and the Art of Poetry’, The Poetry Journal 8.1 (November 1917), pp. 27–36 (pp. 33–5). 47. The company attracted notice in ‘The Other Players’, The New York Times, 17 March 1918, p. 61. 48. Dawson kept dozens of press clippings from Chicago dailies and other Midwestern journals related to the Others Lecture Bureau; see Mitchell Dawson Collection, Newberry, B.26 F.791a. Dawson’s connections with Carl Sandburg, who was a journalist with the Daily News, and Llewellyn Jones, the literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post, ensured regular press coverage for the Bureau’s activities.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 231

25/01/2013 15:53

232 ]

Notes to pages 90–93

49. Alfred Kreymborg, [untitled editorial], Others 5.1 (December 1918), p. 1. 50. Suzanne Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006), p. 58. 51. Vachel Lindsay, ‘The Daniel Jazz’, Others 5.2 (January 1919), pp. 5–7. 52. William Carlos Williams to Harriet Monroe, 17 July 1917, in Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters, ed. Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), pp. 129–30. 53. Ibid. p. 27. 54. Carl Sandburg, ‘The Liars’, The Liberator 2.5 (May 1919), p. 8. 55. Carl Sandburg, ‘Long Guns’, Others 5.4–5 (April–May 1919), p. 17. 56. William Carlos Williams, ‘Belly Music’, Others 5.6 (July 1919), pp. 25–32 (p. 28). 57. See Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle, Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930, rev. edn ed. Kay Boyle (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1968), p. 123. 58. Emanuel Carnevali, A Hurried Man (Paris: Contact Editions/Three Mountains Press, 1925), p. 258. 59. William Carlos Williams, ‘Gloria!’, Others 5.6 (July 1919), pp. 3–4 (p. 3). 60. Ibid. p. 3. 61. See McAlmon and Boyle, Being Geniuses Together, p. 137, and William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), p.  269; Emanuel Carnevali, ‘Bogey Man’, Others 5.6 (July 1919), pp. 22–3. 62. Williams, ‘Gloria!’, p. 3. 63. Williams, ‘Belly Music’, p. 27. 64. Ibid. p. 27. 65. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, p. 16. 66. Williams, ‘Gloria!’, p. 4. 67. Williams, ‘Belly Music’, p. 28. 68. Ibid. p. 27. 69. Mike Weaver, William Carlos Williams: The American Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 133. 70. William Carlos Williams to Alva N. Turner, 21 November 1919, Beinecke, Williams Correspondence 221, Box 1 (Early Life). 71. William Carlos Williams, ANTLP. 72. Alva N. Turner, ‘Hazel Dean’, Others 5.6 (July 1919), p. 10, ‘Lillian’ (p. 11) and ‘Dora Northern’ (p.  12); ‘To Two Motherless Kittens’, Contact 4 (August–September 1921), p. 14. Williams names Turner twice in The Great American Novel (Imaginations, p. 166 and pp. 192–3). 73. See ‘Abbreviations and Notes on Sources’ for further details about ANTLP, ANTPP and DLA. It is unlikely that Williams sent his introductions to The Little Review, but scattered throughout his correspondence there is evidence that he helped Turner place poems in some little magazines. 74. William Carlos Williams to Alva N. Turner, 11 July 1919, Beinecke, Williams Correspondence 221, Box 1 (Early Life). 75. William Carlos Williams, DLA.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 232

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 93–96

[ 233

76. Williams, ANTLP. 77. Williams, DLA. 78. Alva N. Turner, ‘Ex-Mayor of Spring Garden Writes’, The Ina Observer, 6 April 1922; news clipping attached to Turner’s letter to Mitchell Dawson, 12 April 1922, Newberry, B.7 F.437. 79. Marsden Hartley, ‘The Poet of Maine’, The Little Review 6.3 (July 1919), pp. 51–5. 80. Ibid. pp. 52–3. 81. William Carlos Williams, ‘A Maker’, The Little Review 6.4 (August 1919), pp. 37–9. 82. Randy Ploog, ‘The Double Life of Mitchell Dawson: Attorney and Poet’, Legal Studies Forum 29.1 (2005), pp. 187–208 (p. 191). 83. Ibid. p. 193. 84. Ibid. p. 193. 85. Ploog’s forthcoming article ‘A New Others: The Correspondence between William Carlos Williams and Mitchell Dawson’ will appear in the William Carlos Williams Review 30th Anniversary special number. The Williams manuscripts that Ploog discovered – ‘A New Weapon’, ‘Advancement of Learning’, ‘The Luciad’ and ‘A Good Morning’ – will be reproduced in the same issue. 86. William Carlos Williams to Alfred Kreymborg, 19 July 1919, quoted in Ploog, ‘The Double Life of Mitchell Dawson’, p. 194. 87. Alfred Kreymborg, Troubadour, p. 330. 88. See Williams and Dawson correspondence, Newberry, B.7 F.453, and McAlmon and Dawson correspondence, Newberry, B.6 F.377. 89. Lola Ridge’s role in the Compromise/New Moon project was never clarified. Williams cryptically promises to ‘get your dope for you about Lola at once’ in his 23 September 1919 letter to Dawson, and refers to ‘Lola’s letter’ in his 30 September 1919 letter, suggesting that Dawson send her money; Newberry, B.7 F.453. 90. Robert McAlmon to Mitchell Dawson, ‘June Sometime’ [1920], Newberry, B.6 F.377. 91. Robert McAlmon to Mitchell Dawson, [summer–autumn 1920], Newberry, B.6 F.377. 92. Ibid. 93. See Nicholas Joost, Scofield Thayer and The Dial: An Illustrated History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), pp. 2–12. 94. Robert McAlmon to William Carlos Williams, 5 August [1920], Za William Carlos Williams Correspondence, Beinecke. On the reception of The Dial and The Little Review, see Alan Golding, ‘The Dial, The Little Review, and the Dialogics of Modernism’, in Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches, ed. Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible, (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), pp. 67–81 (pp. 70–2). 95. Williams eventually informed Dawson that ‘McAlmon and I are starting [. . .] a very modest little magazine’, which he describes as ‘informal and

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 233

25/01/2013 15:53

234 ]

96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121.

122.

Notes to pages 96–99 presumptuous’; William Carlos Williams to Mitchell Dawson, 10 November 1920, Newberry, B.7 F.453. William Carlos Williams, ANTPP. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Michel Foucault, ‘Questions on Geography’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mephan and Kate Soper (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), pp. 63–77 (p. 70). Robert McAlmon to Mitchell Dawson, ‘June Sometime’ [1920], Newberry, B.6 F.377. Ibid. Weaver, William Carlos Williams: The American Background, p. 32. Williams, ‘Belly Music’, p. 32. John Rodker, ‘ “Dada” and Else von Freytag-Loringhoven’, The Little Review 7.2 (July–August 1920), pp. 33–6 (p. 36). William Carlos Williams, ‘Further Announcement’, C1, p. 10. Robert McAlmon, [untitled editorial], C1, p. 1. The editorial is uncredited but is almost certainly written by McAlmon. Williams, ‘Further Announcement’, p. 10. Ibid. p. 10. Ibid. p. 10. Ibid. p. 10. Ibid. p. 10. William Carlos Williams, ‘Comment’, C4, pp. 18–19 (p. 19). Ibid. p. 19. The Whitman Centenary issue of The Dial in particular discussed the direction of American literature and ‘Americanization’. See Carl C. Grabo, ‘Americanizing the Immigrants’, The Dial 66.11 (31 May 1919), pp. 539–41; Winifred Kirkland, ‘Americanization and Walt Whitman’, pp. 537–9; and Maxwell Bodenheim, ‘American Art?’, p. 544. James Oppenheim, ‘Poetry – Our First National Art’, The Dial 68.2 (February 1920), pp. 238–42 (p. 238). Ibid. p.  240. Also see John Beck, Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 82–3. Dewey, ‘Americanism and Localism’, p. 687. Ibid. p. 687. Ibid. p. 688. Malcolm P.  Cutchin, ‘John Dewey’s Metaphysical Ground-Map and Its Implications for Geographical Inquiry’, Geoforum 39 (July 2008), pp. 1,555– 69 (p. 1,563). Ibid. p. 1,565.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 234

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 99–104

[ 235

123. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), p. 151. 124. Dewey, ‘Americanism and Localism’, p. 686. 125. William Carlos Williams, ‘Yours, O Youth’, C3, pp.  14–16 (pp.  14–15). Williams first mentions the ‘Contact idea’ in Williams to Burke, 26 January 1921, in The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke, ed. James H. East (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 3–4 (p. 3). 126. See Williams, Autobiography, p. 175. 127. See William Carlos Williams, ‘The Contact Story’, Contact: The San Francisco Journal of New Writing, Art and Ideas 1.1 (1958), p. 75. 128. See Luis Nadeau, Encyclopedia of Printing, Photographic, and Photomechanical Processes (Fredericton: L. Nadeau, 1994), p. 337. 129. Beck, Writing the Radical Center, p. 81. 130. [Cover], C2. 131. Virgil Jordan, ‘Patterns’, C2, p.  5. Jordan was the husband of Williams’s close friend Viola Baxter Jordan. 132. See Robert McAlmon, ‘Essentials’, The Little Review 7.3 (September– December 1920), pp. 69–71 (p. 70). 133. William Carlos Williams, ‘A Matisse’, C2, p. 7. 134. Ibid. p.  10. See Dickran Tashjian, William Carlos Williams and the American Scene 1920–1940 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), pp. 30–1. 135. Williams, ‘A Matisse’, p. 10. 136. The Maurice Vlaminck quotation was recorded by Fritz Vanderpyl in ‘Maurice Vlaminck’, The Dial 69.6 (December 1920), pp. 590–1 (p. 591). 137. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, pp. 17–18. 138. Robert McAlmon to Mitchell Dawson, 31 January 1921, Newberry, B.6 F.377. 139. Ibid. 140. Ezra Pound, ‘A List of Books’, The Little Review 4.11 (March 1918), pp. 54–8 (pp. 56–7). 141. Robert McAlmon, [untitled introduction], C2, p. 1. 142. Ibid. p. 1. 143. William Carlos Williams, ‘Marianne Moore’, C1, p. 4. 144. Ibid. p. 4. 145. Ibid. p. 4. 146. Marianne Moore, ‘Kora in Hell, by William Carlos Williams’, C4, pp. 5–8. 147. See William Carlos Williams to Marianne Moore, 23 March 1921, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirwall (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), pp. 52–3. 148. Moore published an earlier, more conservative version of the poem in her college magazine; Marianne Moore, ‘Those Various Scalpels’, The Lantern 25 (Spring 1917), pp. 50–1; reprinted in Moore, BMM, pp. 261–2.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 235

25/01/2013 15:53

236 ]

Notes to pages 104–108

149. Marianne Moore, ‘Those Various Scalpels’, C2, pp. 1–2. 150. Williams to Moore, 18 May 1916, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, p. 35. 151. Victoria Bazin, Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010), p. 79. 152. Ibid. p. 80. 153. Ezra Pound, ‘A List of Books’, The Little Review 4.11 (March 1918), pp. 54–8 (pp.  56–7). Loy, of course, was English, not American. Bryher and John Rodker were the other two (willing) English contributors to Contact; Bryher, ‘Extract’, C3, p. 12; John Rodker, ‘Married’, C5, p. 7. 154. Loy wrote ‘Summer Night in a Florentine Slum’ and ‘O Hell’ in Florence prior to her return to New York in 1920; see Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), pp. 280–1. 155. Mina Loy, ‘Summer Night in a Florentine Slum’, C1, pp. 6–7 (p. 7). 156. Ibid. p. 6. 157. Mina Loy, ‘O Hell’, C1, p. 7. 158. Ibid. p. 7. 159. Wallace Stevens, ‘Invective Against Swans’, C2, p. 4. 160. Wallace Stevens, ‘Infanta Marina’, C2, p. 4. 161. Lee M. Jenkins, ‘Wallace Stevens and America’, in Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 178–98 (p. 179). 162. Stevens, ‘Infanta Marina’, p. 4. 163. Wallace Stevens, ‘Lulu Gay’ and ‘Lulu Morose’, C3, p. 8. The poems were eventually published in Opus Posthumous, Revised, Enlarged, and Corrected Edition, ed. Milton J. Bates (London: Faber and Faber, 1990 [1957]), p.  44 (‘Lulu Gay’) and p. 45 (‘Lulu Morose’). 164. Stevens, ‘Lulu Gay’, p. 8. 165. Ibid. p. 8. 166. Stevens, ‘Lulu Morose’, p. 8. 167. Ibid. p. 8. 168. Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 126. 169. See Robert McAlmon, McAlmon and the Lost Generation, ed. Robert E. Knoll (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), pp. 145–8. 170. See Robert McAlmon to Mitchell Dawson, [summer/autumn 1920], Newberry, B.6 F.377. 171. Williams, ‘Yours, O Youth’, p. 16. 172. Kenneth Burke, ‘The Armour of Jules Laforge [sic]’, C3, pp. 9–10 (p. 10). 173. Ibid. p. 10. 174. Ibid. p. 10. 175. Williams, ‘Yours, O Youth’, p. 16. 176. See Pound, ‘A List of Books’, pp. 56–7.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 236

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 108–112

[ 237

177. Robert McAlmon, NRM; see ‘Abbreviations and Notes on Sources’. 178. Robert McAlmon, ‘Surf of the Dead Sea: Apotheosis to Extinction’, C3, pp. 13–14 (p. 13). 179. See Kenneth Burke to William Carlos Williams, 21 March 1921, in The Humane Particulars, pp. 7–9 (p. 7). 180. The manuscript, which was included in a letter to William Carlos Williams, late January/early February 1921, closely follows the content of the fourpage handwritten letter, but replaces proper names with initials. 181. Robert McAlmon to William Carlos Williams, May 1921, Za Williams Correspondence, Beinecke. 182. Robert McAlmon, ‘Modern Artiques’, C2, pp. 9–10 (p. 10). 183. See McAlmon and Boyle, Being Geniuses Together, pp. 6–10. 184. Robert McAlmon, ‘Contact and Genius’, C4, pp. 16–17 (p. 17). 185. W. C. Blum [James Sibley Watson], ‘American Letter’, The Dial 70.5 (May 1921), pp. 562–8 (p. 566). 186. William Carlos Williams to Scofield Thayer, 13 April 1921, Beinecke, YCAL MSS 34, Box 44, Folder 1265a. Thayer attempted to contact McAlmon before he published the article, but received no reply; see Scofield Thayer, ‘Comment’, The Dial 71.1 (July 1921), pp. 123–6. 187. Williams, ‘Announcements’, p. 19. Chapter 4 1. Gertrude Besse King, ‘Aladdin Einstein’, The Freeman 3.59 (27 April 1921), pp. 153–4 (p. 153). 2. ‘Prof. Einstein Here, Explains Relativity’, The New York Times, 3 April 1921, p. 1; p. 13 (p. 1). 3. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p.  232. Harvey identifies the ‘crucial moment [. . .] between Einstein’s special theory of relativity of 1905 and the general theory of 1916’ as the ‘rapid phase of time-space compression [in which] the second great wave of modernist innovation in the aesthetic realm began’; ibid. pp. 265–6. 4. Thomas Glick notes that the Zionist Press Bureau placed articles about Einstein with American newspapers; see ‘Between Science and Zionism: Einstein in Brazil’, Episteme 9 (July–December 1999), pp. 101–20. 5. William Carlos Williams to Kenneth Burke, 10 August 1921, in The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke, ed. James H. East (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 16–17 (p. 16). 6. Ibid. p.  16. By 12 September, neither Burke nor Edmund Brown had received the new number, which probably appeared shortly thereafter; William Carlos Williams to Edmund Brown, 12 September 1921, Beinecke. 7. For example, the multi-authored manifesto ‘Dada Soulève Tout’ also

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 237

25/01/2013 15:53

238 ]

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

Notes to pages 112–117 contained diagonally aligned text, and used an aggregate of different typefaces, font sizes and capitalisation schemes to accentuate its contrarian polemic; Edgard Varèse, Trista Tzara et al., ‘Dada Soulève Tout’, The Little Review 7.4 (January–March 1921), pp. 62–3. [Front Cover], New York Dada (April 1921). See The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp: Revised and Expanded Edition, 2 vols, ed. Arturo Schwarz (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), pp.  214–18; pp. 686–9. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, p. 10. See Marianne Moore, ‘Kora in Hell by William Carlos Williams’, C4, pp. 5–8; William Carlos Williams, ‘Announcement and Sample Poem: St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’, C4, pp. 2–4 (SFE hereafter), and ‘Sample Prose Piece: The Three Letters’, C4, pp. 10–13. In the short story, Williams continuously ‘refers’ his readers to poems in Al Que Quiere (Boston: Four Seas Company, 1917) and his contributions to Pound’s Catholic Anthology (London: Elkin Matthews, 1915). Williams advertises Sour Grapes (Boston: Four Seas Company, 1921) in ‘Announcements’, C4, p. 19. John Gould Fletcher, ‘The Italics Are God’s’ [excerpt from a review of Kora in Hell: Improvisations, edited and retitled by William Carlos Williams], C4, p. 15. Fletcher’s review originally appeared in ‘Shorter Notices’, The Freeman 3.62 (18 May 1921), p. 238. William Carlos Williams, ‘Comment’, C4, pp. 18–19 (p. 19). Williams, Imaginations, p. 9. See William Carlos Williams, ‘Further Announcement’, C1, p. 10; Burke to Williams, 27 January 1921, in The Humane Particulars, pp. 4–5; and Williams to Burke [August 1921], ibid. p. 16. Babbitt did not begin manufacturing soap until the 1840s, however, so the 1836 date and price attribution is probably incorrect. See Harold Underwood Faulkner, Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. I, Part 1, ed. Allen Johnson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), pp. 455–6. Ibid. pp. 455–6. Cited in T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 111. Early advertisements for Babbitt’s Soap featured conspicuously American themes, especially from the American Revolution. The first advertisement of the campaign was in The Rutherford Republican, 2 April 1921, p. 12. According to some reports, it cost two dollars to manufacture 1,000 sixounce bottles of Nujol, and it achieved a profit margin almost a hundred times its manufacturing costs; see Morris Bealle, ‘What Nujol Started’, first chapter of The Drug Story (Washington, DC: Columbia Publishing Company, 1949), pp.  5–27. Bealle writes in the American liberal ‘muckraking’ tradition pioneered by Ida Minerva Tarbell in her exposé of the Standard Oil Company, The History of the Standard Oil Company Volume 1 and

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 238

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 117–123

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

[ 239

Volume 2, introduction by Morgan Witzel (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002 [1904]). On the company’s dissolution, see Bruce Bringhurst, Antitrust and the Oil Monopoly: The Standard Oil Cases, 1890–1911 (London: Greenwood Press, 1979), especially pp. 180–203. See Wayne Henderson and Scott Benjamin, Standard Oil: The First 125 Years (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1996), pp. 10–11. See Bealle, The Drug Story, pp. 5–6. See Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 29–32; p. 72; p. 176. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 158. See David Frail’s review of similar trends in The Rutherford Republican in The Early Politics and Poetics of William Carlos Williams (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), p. 151. Standard Oil Company [advertisement], The Rutherford Republican, 20 August 1921, p. 3. Bergen Auto Company Buick [advertisement], The Rutherford Republican, 6 August 1921, Second Section, p. 9. Ezra Pound, ‘Credit Power and Democracy, by Maj. C. H. Douglas and A. R. Orange [sic]’, C4, p. 1. Ezra Pound, ‘Economic Democracy’, The Little Review 6.11 (April 1920), pp. 39–42. See Ezra Pound to Scofield Thayer, 8 November 1920, in Pound, Thayer, Watson, and The Dial: A Story in Letters, ed. Walter Sutton (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), pp. 173–6. Pound to Thayer, 4 December 1920, in Pound, Thayer, Watson, and The Dial, pp. 187–8 (p. 187). Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 84. Pound, ‘Credit Power and Democracy’, p. 1. Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), p. 45. For a concise account of the A + B theorem, its significance in social credit theory, and the phenomenon of under-consumption, see Surette, ibid. pp. 29–30. Richard Sieburth, ‘In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/The Poetry of Economics’, Critical Inquiry 14 (Autumn 1987), pp. 142–72 (p. 159). Pound, ‘Credit Power and Democracy’, p. 1. Williams, SFE, p. 2. Williams contributed several articles to The Freeman in the early 1920s, and clearly read King’s ‘Aladdin Einstein’ with interest. Williams, SFE, p. 2. Ibid. pp. 2–3. Ibid. pp. 2–3. Williams, ‘Comment’, C2, pp. 11–12 (p. 11).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 239

25/01/2013 15:53

240 ]

Notes to pages 124–127

44. Lisa M. Steinman, Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 63. 45. Williams, SFE, p. 3. 46. Thomas Jewell Craven, ‘Art and Relativity’, The Dial 70.5 (May 1921), pp. 535–9 (p. 535). 47. William Carlos Williams, ‘An Occasional Poem: St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’, in Modern Things, ed. Parker Tyler (New York: Galleon Press, 1934), pp. 32–4. The restrained, more cohesive 1930s versions are consistent with Williams’s early imagist work, but they sacrifice much of the radical localism that he exhibits in the Contact poem; see A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (eds), CP1, p. 543. 48. Williams, Imaginations, p. 15. 49. Williams, SFE, pp. 2–3. 50. Ibid. p. 4. 51. Ibid. pp. 2–4. 52. The Immigration Act of 1921 set a precedent for the later, more restrictive acts by establishing a system of quotas, ‘with countries being allocated an immigration quota equivalent to 3 percent of the population of a given nationality’; Maura I. Toro-Morn and Marixsa Alicea, Migration and Immigration: A Global View (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), p. 220. As Walter Benn Michaels notes, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act ‘cut back the percentage of immigrants from 3 to 2 percent of each nationality’; Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 151. 53. Vainis Aleksa, ‘Mythic Resonance in the Contact version of “St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils” ’, William Carlos Williams Review 24.1 (Spring 1998), pp. 33–47 (p. 45). 54. Williams, SFE, p. 3. 55. Ibid. p. 3. 56. Sergio Rizzo, ‘Remembering Race: Extra-poetical Contexts and the Racial Other in “The Red Wheelbarrow” ’, Journal of Modern Literature 29.1 (Fall 2005), pp. 34–54 (p. 34). 57. Ibid. p. 45. 58. Emma Lazarus, ‘The New Colossus’, Poems of Emma Lazarus, 2 vols (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1888), Vol. 1, p. 202. 59. See for example ‘Holds Up Freedom of City to Einstein’, The New York Times, 6 April 1921, p. 1 and p. 11; ‘Einstein to Have Freedom of State’, The New York Times, 7 April 1921, p. 21. 60. Alderman Bruce Falconer objected to Einstein receiving the honour because he felt that ‘it should not be conferred on any one unless he were known to every person in the city’; ‘Freedom of City Given to Einstein’, The New York Times, 9 April 1921, p.  11. However, Falconer was also accused of being motivated by anti-Semitism, a factor that shadowed much of the publicity surrounding Einstein’s visit; see especially ‘Falconer is Denounced’, The New

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 240

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 127–131

61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

[ 241

York Times, 7 April 1921, p. 21. In 1920 it had been reported that unfavourable treatment of Einstein by ‘students and professors in Berlin’ was ‘said to be due to his being of Jewish blood’, which resulted in his decision to leave Germany; ‘Swiss Invite Einstein – Offer Him Chair at Berne, Where He Studied, or at Zurich’, The New York Times, 4 September 1920, p. 7. See my discussion of this distinction in the ‘Prologue’; Michaels, Our America, pp. 75–7, p. 90 and p. 101. Nativism is distinct from but related to the ‘native modernism’ of the Young Americans and new regionalists; see Chapter 3 and George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 96. Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), p. 188. Mark Morrisson, ‘Nationalism and the Modern American Canon’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, ed. Walter Kalaidjian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 12–35. Michaels, Our America, p. 136. Morrisson, ‘Nationalism and the Modern American Canon’, p. 20. Adam McKible, ‘ “Life Is Real and Life Is Earnest”: Mike Gold, Claude McKay, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’, American Periodicals 15.1 (2005), pp. 56–73 (p. 59). Ibid. p. 59. Lisa Sánchez González, Boricua Literature: A History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 52. Michaels, Our America, p. 3. Williams, SFE, p. 3. William Carlos Williams, ‘Comment’, C4, p. 19. [Alfred Kreymborg], ‘Manifesto I’, Broom 1.1 (November 1921), p. 97. Ibid. p. 97. Harold Loeb, ‘Comment’, Broom 1.4 (February 1922), pp. 375–84 (p. 384). Alfred Kreymborg, Troubadour, pp. 380–1. See Clarence Major, ‘Broom’, in American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century, ed. Edward E. Chielens (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 46–52. Scofield Thayer, ‘Comment’, The Dial 70.5 (May 1921), pp. 606–10 (p. 607). Ibid. p. 606. Ibid. p. 606. Biography of Emmy Veronica Sanders, Poetry 20.6 (September 1922), p. 349. Emmy Veronica Sanders, ‘America Invades Europe’, Broom 1.1 (November 1921), pp. 89–93 (p. 89). See Emmy Veronica Sanders, ‘Apropos Art and Its Trials Legal and Spiritual’, The Little Review 7.4 (January–March 1921), pp. 40–3. Sanders, ‘America Invades Europe’, pp.  89–90; Sanders adapts Pound’s phrase ‘arid clarity’ from ‘A List of Books’, The Little Review 4.11 (March 1918), pp. 54–8 (p. 57).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 241

25/01/2013 15:53

242 ] 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

113. 114.

Notes to pages 131–135 Sanders, ‘America Invades Europe’, pp. 91–2. Marianne Moore, ‘In the Days of Prismatic Color’, C2, p. 2. Thayer, ‘Comment’, p. 607. Louis Untermeyer, ‘Einstein and the Poets’, Broom 1.1 (November 1921), pp. 84–8 (p. 84). Sanders, ‘America Invades Europe’, p. 89. Emmy Veronica Sanders, ‘Fourth of July Firecrackers’, Broom 2.4 (July 1922), pp. 287–92 (p. 291). Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919), p. 74. Sanders, ‘Fourth of July Firecrackers’, pp. 288–9. Emmy Veronica Sanders, ‘New York, a Farewell’, Broom 1.4 (February 1922), pp. 301–4 (p. 301). ‘La Baronne’ was of course the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven; Williams, ‘Sample Prose Piece: The Three Letters’, pp. 12–13. William Carlos Williams, CP1, p. 30. Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, ‘Thee I Call Hamlet of the Wedding Ring [Part I]’, The Little Review 7.4 (January–March 1921), pp. 48–60, and ‘Thee I Call Hamlet of the Wedding Ring [Part II]’, The Little Review 8.1 (Autumn 1921), pp. 108–11. McKible, ‘Life Is Real and Life Is Earnest’, p. 64. Freytag-Loringhoven, ‘Thee I Call Hamlet [Part I]’, pp. 59–60. Ibid. p. 60. Williams, ‘The Three Letters’, p. 10. Ibid. pp. 10–11. Freytag-Loringhoven, ‘Thee I Call Hamlet’ [Part I]’, p. 54. Robert McAlmon, ‘Jazz Opera Americano’, in ‘Wind and Fire’, C3, pp. 16–18 (p. 17). See Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and TwentiethCentury Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 140. McAlmon, ‘Jazz Opera Americano’, p. 17. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. p. 17. Robert McAlmon, ‘Contact and Genius’, C4, pp. 16–7 (p. 17). Ibid. p. 16. Ezra Pound to William Carlos Williams, 10 November 1917, Pound/Williams, pp. 30–4 (p. 31); Williams, Imaginations, p. 11. [Ezra Pound], ‘The Poems of Abel Sanders: To Bill Williams and Else von Johan Wolfgang Loringhoven y Fulano’, The Little Review 8.1 (Autumn 1921), p. 111. [Ezra Pound], ‘The Poems of Abel Sanders: Poem No. 2’, The Little Review 8.1 (Autumn 1921), p. 111. Ibid. p. 111.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 242

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 135–141

[ 243

115. Daniel Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 3. 116. Harold Loeb, ‘Comment: Broom: 1921–1923’, Broom 5.1 (August 1923), pp. 55–8 (p. 56). 117. William Carlos Williams, ‘Glorious Weather’, C5, pp. 1–5 (p. 5). In this editorial, Williams quoted substantial sections from ‘THE NEW PEARSON’S $1500 LITERARY PRIZE CONTEST’ advert, which originally appeared in Broom 4.4 (March 1923). 118. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, The Dial 73.5 (November 1922), pp. 473–85. 119. Glenway Wescott, ‘Men Like Birds’, C5, pp. 8–9. 120. William Carlos Williams to Monroe Wheeler, April 1923, Beinecke, YCAL MSS 134, Box 110, Folder 1720. 121. William Carlos Williams, ‘Critical Note’, C5, p. 12. 122. Williams, ‘Glorious Weather’, p. 1. 123. William Carlos Williams, ‘New England’, C5, p. 11. 124. See Litz and MacGowan (eds), CP1, pp. 506–7. 125. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999), p. 7. 126. William Carlos Williams, ‘VII’, in Spring and All, CP1, pp. 175–236 (pp. 195–6). 127. Williams, ‘Critical Note’, p. 12. 128. Ibid. p. 12. 129. Kay Boyle, ‘Shore’, C5, p. 10. 130. Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 217. 131. North, The Dialect of Modernism, p. 140. 132. Williams, CP1, p. 195. Chapter 5 1. Malcolm Cowley, ‘Two American Poets [review of Carl Sandburg’s Slabs of the Sunburnt West and Conrad Aiken’s Priapus and the Pool]’, The Dial 73.5 (November 1922), pp. 563–7 (p. 566; p. 563). 2. Ibid. p. 566. 3. Ezra Pound, ‘Paris Letter’, The Dial 73.5 (November 1922), pp.  549–4 (p. 549). 4. Michael North has argued that ‘the debate between the academic establishment and the young writers of the 1920s linked language, literature, and race so closely together that aesthetic experimentation seemed racially alien to certain authorities even if it had nothing to do with race’; The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 131. 5. Jean Toomer to The Liberator, 19 August 1922, The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919–1924, ed. Mark Whalan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 70–1 (p. 70).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 243

25/01/2013 15:53

244 ]

Notes to pages 141–145

6. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Forethought’, in The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), p. v. 7. John Brooks Wheelwright, ‘Correspondence’, Secession 4 (January 1923), p. 29. 8. Gorham Munson, ‘Correspondence’, Secession 4 (January 1923), p. 30. 9. Ibid. p. 30. 10. Gorham Munson, ‘Interstice Between Scylla and Charybdis’, Secession 2 (July 1922), pp. 30–2. 11. Gorham Munson, ‘Secession’ [advertisement], Secession 5 (July 1923), p. 29. 12. [Alfred Kreymborg], ‘Manifesto I’, Broom 1.1 (November 1921), p. 97. 13. See Wassily Kandinsky and Adrienne Kochman, ‘Secession’, Critical Inquiry 23.4 (Summer 1997), pp.  729–37, and Gorham Munson, The Awakening Twenties (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), pp. 163–4. 14. See Alfred Stieglitz, Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Notes, ed. Richard Whelan (New York: Aperture Foundation, Inc., 2000), p. 111. 15. e. e. cummings, ‘Four Poems: iv’, Secession 2 (July 1922), pp. 1–4 (p. 4). 16. Secession 3 contained a similar gesture, with a pastiche of an Edna St. Vincent-Millay poem by ‘Saint Edna Millay’ concluding the issue; ‘The Passionate Singer’, Secession 3 (August 1922), p. 31. 17. Gorham Munson, ‘Exposé No. 1’, Secession 1 (Spring 1922), pp. 22–4 (p. 23). Also see Munson’s ‘A Bow to the Adventurous’, ibid. pp. 15–19. 18. See Gorham Munson, ‘Open Letter to The New Republic’, Secession 7 (Winter 1924), pp. 16–19, and ‘The American Murkury’, ibid. p. 32. 19. [Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson], ‘Comment’, The Dial 73.6 (December 1922), pp. 685–7 (p. 686). 20. See for example North, The Dialect of Modernism, pp. 127–30. American expatriate writers such as Kay Boyle, Cowley, Josephson and Gertrude Stein were well represented in the all-American issue of Broom 4.2 (January 1923). On the ‘International Episode’, see Chapter 3. 21. Waldo Frank, ‘Hope’, Secession 3 (August 1922), pp. 1–4; the story is a section of City Block, self-published by Frank in 1922. 22. Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919). 23. Munson, The Awakening Twenties, p. 175. 24. Kenneth Burke, ‘The Consequences of Idealism [review of Rahab and City Block by Waldo Frank]’, The Dial 73.4 (October 1922), pp. 449–52 (p. 450). 25. Matthew Josephson, ‘An Instant Note on Waldo Frank’, Broom 4.1 (December 1922), pp. 57–60 (pp. 59–60). 26. Ibid. pp. 59–60. 27. Ibid. p. 60. 28. Gorham B. Munson, ‘The Mechanics of a Literary Secession’, S4N 21 (November 1922). 29. Munson to Stieglitz, 24 November 1923, in The Awakening Twenties, pp. 175–6. 30. On Frank’s nativism, see Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism,

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 244

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 145–148

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

[ 245

Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 137. Waldo Frank, ‘For a Declaration of War’, Secession 7 (Winter 1924), pp. 5–14 (p. 6). Ibid. p. 8. Ibid. p. 14. See Gorham Munson, ‘Syrinx’, Secession 5 (July 1923), pp.  2–11, and Yvor Winters, ‘The Testament of a Stone, Being Notes on the Mechanics of the Poetic Image’, Secession 8 (1924), pp. 1–21. Brian Trehearne, The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 61. See Gorham Munson, ‘A Note on the Language of Waldo Frank’, S4N 30–1 (1923–4), and Jean Toomer, ‘The Critic of Waldo Frank [review of Gorham Munson, Waldo Frank: A Study]’, S4N 30–1 (1923–4). Hart Crane, ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’, Secession 7 (Winter 1924), pp. 1–4 (p. 2). Ibid. p. 2. Ibid. p. 2. Ibid. p. 3. Hart Crane, ‘Poster’, Secession 4 (January 1923), p. 20. Slater Brown, ‘Garden Party’, Secession 4 (January 1923), pp. 22–8 (p. 23). Ibid. p. 24. Ibid. p. 23. Ibid. p. 28. Matthew Josephson, ‘The Oblate’, Secession 2 (July 1922), pp. 21–9 (p. 27; p. 24). Ibid. p. 22. Ibid. p. 29. Ibid. p. 29. See Jean Toomer to Waldo Frank, 20 September 1922, The Letters of Jean Toomer, pp. 78–9. Ibid. p. 78. Ibid. p. 78. Ibid. p. 78. Jean Toomer to Gorham Munson, 8 October 1922, The Letters of Jean Toomer, pp. 83–4. Jean Toomer, ‘Theater’, in Cane: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 51–5 (p. 54); ‘Her Lips Are Copper Wire’, p.  55. Munson admitted in his autobiography that he ‘regretted’ that he ‘had nothing from Jean Toomer’ to publish in Secession, but fails to mention that he rejected it (The Awakening Twenties, p.  177). I discuss the grounds of that rejection shortly. Toomer, ‘Theater’, p. 54. Toomer to Munson, 31 October 1922, The Letters of Jean Toomer, pp.  90–1 (p. 91).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 245

25/01/2013 15:53

246 ] 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

Notes to pages 148–151 Ibid. p. 91. Ibid. p. 91. Toomer, ‘Theater’, p. 54. Ibid. p. 54. Ibid. p. 54. Mark Sanders, Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1999), p. 98. Jean Toomer, [1923 Journal], quoted in Charles Scruggs and Lee Vandemarr, Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 114. Mark Whalan, Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), p. 189. Ibid. p. 194. This was the same issue of Broom in which Emmy Veronica Sanders published an anti-American invective and Josephson attempted to rally Americans to the dada cause; see Jean Epstein, ‘A Necessary and Sufficient Literature’, trans. Gorham B. Munson, Broom 2.4 (July 1922), pp.  309–16; Matthew Josephson, ‘After and Beyond Dada’, pp.  346–50; and Emmy Veronica Sanders, ‘Fourth of July Firecrackers’, pp. 287–92. Rosalind Williams, ‘Jules Romains, Unanimisme, and the Poetics of Urban Systems’, in Literature and Technology: Research in Technology Volume 5, ed. Mark L. Greenberg and Lance Schachterle (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), pp. 177–205 (p. 194 ). Frank, Our America, p. 45; see my discussion of Sanders’s ‘America Invades Europe’ in Chapter 4. Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 84; also see p. 146. Jules Romains, in ‘Inquiry Among European Writers into the Spirit of America’, ed. Eugene Jolas, transition 13 (Summer 1928), pp. 243–70 (p. 254). The French academic Pierre Sayn notes that readers had encountered many of Frank’s ‘motifs’ before in the work of Romains; Sayn, ‘Waldo Frank and Unanimism’, S4N 30–1 (1923–4). Sherwood Anderson, ‘Mid-American Prayer’, The Seven Arts 2.2 (June 1917), pp. 190–2; see Chapter 3. Waldo Frank, Rahab (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922), p. 21. Sayn, ‘Waldo Frank and Unanimism’. Munson argued that ‘[Frank’s] forms consume the surface mobility of his prose into the satisfying cool and soundless immobility of enormous space and spirit’; Gorham B. Munson, ‘A Note on the Language of Waldo Frank’, S4N 30–1 (1923–4). Whalan, Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America, p. 144. John Crawford, ‘Declension from Unanimity’, S4N 30–1 (1923–4).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 246

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 151–157

[ 247

79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Jean Toomer, ‘Waldo Frank’s Holiday’, in Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, ed. Kathleen Pfeiffer (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press), pp. 172–5 (p. 175). 82. Crawford, ‘Declension from Unanimity’. 83. Toomer, ‘Waldo Frank’s Holiday’, p. 172. 84. Ibid. p. 172. 85. Ibid. p. 172. 86. Ibid. p. 175. 87. Ibid. p. 172. 88. Frank, Our America, p. 164. 89. Toomer’s autobiographical notes attribute his estrangement from Frank to Frank’s racialism. However, Pfeiffer has recently argued that Toomer’s apparent complicity in racialist characterisations of his work by Frank, others and even himself during the peak of their friendship complicate this version of events, and that the dissolution of their relationship is more directly related to his affair with Frank’s wife Margaret Naumburg; see Pfeiffer (ed.), Brother Mine, pp. 1–24 (pp.14–18). 90. Jean Toomer, ‘The South in Literature’, in Brother Mine, pp. 179–84 (p. 180). 91. Matthew Josephson, ‘Great American Novels [review of William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel and Jean Toomer, Cane]’, Broom 5.3 (October 1923), pp. 178–80 (pp. 178–9). 92. Ibid. pp. 178–9. 93. Ibid. p. 180. 94. Ibid. p. 180. 95. See Michael Soto, ‘Jean Toomer and Horace Liveright; or, A New Negro Gets “into the Swing of It” ’, in Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Michael Feith (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 162–87 (pp. 166–9). 96. Jean Toomer to Sherwood Anderson, 29 December 1922, The Letters of Jean Toomer, pp. 105–7 (p. 106). 97. ‘Boni & Liveright: Good Books’ [advertisement], SG, p. 707. 98. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York and London: A. A. Knopf, 1940), pp. 241–3. 99. See Marcy S. Sacks, Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City Before World War I (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 3. 100. Alain Locke, ‘Harlem’, SG, pp. 629–30 (p. 630). 101. Ibid. p. 630. 102. Peter Brooker, ‘Modernism Deferred: Langston Hughes, Harlem, and Jazz Montage’, in Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 231–47 (p. 234). 103. Locke, ‘Harlem’, p. 630.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 247

25/01/2013 15:53

248 ]

Notes to pages 157–153

104. Ibid. p. 630. 105. Ibid. p. 630. 106. Mark Sanders, ‘American Modernism and the New Negro Renaissance’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, ed. Walter Kalaidjian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 129–56 (p. 137). 107. Locke, ‘Harlem’, p. 630. Given Locke’s, Toomer’s, McKay’s and Hughes’s connections to France, and their shared emphasis on urban geography, unanimisme presents a tempting context in which to read the Survey Graphic Harlem number; however, there is little evidence to suggest that such contexts were explored beyond a general fascination with folk culture. 108. Winthrop D. Lane, ‘Ambushed in the City: The Grim Side of Harlem’, SG, pp. 692–4; pp. 714–15 (pp. 692–3). 109. Anne Elizabeth Carroll, Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 150. 110. Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922); ‘The Tropics in New York’, The Liberator 3.5 (May 1920), p.  48; ‘Subway Wind’, The Liberator 4.8 (August 1921), p.  10. These poems only appeared together in Survey Graphic. 111. W. A. Domingo, ‘The Tropics in New York’, SG, pp. 648–50 (p. 648). 112. Claude McKay, ‘The Tropics in New York’, SG, p. 648. 113. Ibid. p. 648. 114. Ibid. p. 648. 115. Claude McKay, ‘Subway Wind’, SG, p. 649. 116. Ibid. p. 649. 117. Ibid. p. 649. 118. Ibid. p. 649. 119. Domingo, ‘The Tropics in New York’, p. 648. 120. Ibid. p. 648. 121. Ibid. p. 648. 122. Walter F. White, ‘Color Lines’, SG, pp. 680–2 (p. 680). 123. Ibid. p. 682. 124. Charles S. Johnson, ‘Black Workers in the City’, SG, pp. 641–50; pp. 718–21 (p. 641). As Carroll notes, the language of ‘types’ in the Survey Graphic Harlem number ‘replicates some of the very hierarchies it critiques’, and, indeed, problems of ‘classism, sexism, and xenophobia had yet to be resolved’ by many of its contributors; Word, Image, and the New Negro, p. 155. 125. Domingo, ‘The Tropics in New York’, p. 650. 126. Ibid. p. 650. 127. Claude McKay, ‘Like a Strong Tree’, ‘Russian Cathedral’ and ‘White Houses’, SG, p. 662; Jean Toomer, ‘Song of the Son’, SG, p. 662. 128. McKay, ‘Russian Cathedral’, p. 662; Toomer, ‘Song of the Son’, p. 662. 129. Toomer, ‘Song of the Son’, p. 662. 130. McKay, ‘White Houses’, p. 662.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 248

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 163–166

[ 249

131. Kelly Miller, ‘The Harvest of Race Prejudice’, SG, pp.  682–3; pp.  711–12 (p. 683). 132. Ibid. p. 683. 133. Ibid. p. 683. 134. Ibid. p. 683. 135. Ibid. p. 682, p. 711. 136. Langston Hughes, ‘I, Too’, SG, p. 683. 137. Ibid. p. 683. 138. Alain Locke, ‘Harlem Types: Portraits by Winold Reiss’, SG, pp.  651–4 (p. 651). 139. William Carlos Williams, ‘A Matisse’, C2, p. 7; see Chapter 3. 140. Just as he drew on the work of Matisse to exemplify a localist method in Contact 2, in ‘Alva N. Turner – preface to poems’ William argues that Gauguin ‘became local by transplantation’; William Carlos Williams, ANTPP. 141. Locke, ‘Harlem Types’, p. 653. 142. Locke, ‘Harlem’, p. 630. 143. Alain Locke, ‘Foreword’, The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925), pp. ix–xi (p. x). 144. Martha Jane Nadell, Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 36. 145. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 396. 146. Locke, ‘Foreword’, The New Negro, p. x. 147. Mark Helbling, The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999), p. 102. 148. See for example Claude McKay, The Negroes in America, ed. Alan L. McLeod, trans. Robert J. Winter (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1979), p. 68. 149. See McKay, The Negroes in America. 150. Aaron Douglas, [statement on Fire!!], quoted in Amy Helene Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), pp. 87–8. 151. Alain Locke, ‘Fire: A Negro Magazine [review of Fire!!]’, Survey: Midmonthly Number 58.10–12 (15 August–15 September 1927), p. 563. 152. Charles Michael Smith, ‘Bruce Nugent: Bohemian of the Harlem Renaissance’, in In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, ed. Joseph Beam (Boston: Alyson, 1986), pp. 209–20 (p. 214). 153. Wallace Thurman, ‘Cordelia the Crude’, Fire!!, pp.  5–6; Richard Bruce Nugent, ‘Smoke, Lilies, and Jade’, Fire!!, pp. 33–9; and Gwendolyn Bennett, ‘Wedding Day’, Fire!!, pp. 25–8. 154. Locke, ‘Fire: A Negro Magazine’, p. 563. 155. Wallace Thurman, ‘Negro Artists and the Negro’, The New Republic 52 (31 August 1927), p. 37. 156. [Fire!! editorial board], ‘Foreword’, Fire!!, p. 1.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 249

25/01/2013 15:53

250 ] 157. 158. 159. 160. 161.

162. 163.

164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181.

182. 183. 184.

185. 186.

Notes to pages 166–172 Nugent, ‘Smoke, Lilies, and Jade’, p. 36. Nugent, ‘Smoke, Lilies, and Jade’, p. 38. The Board of Editors, ‘Fire’, Fire!!. Wallace Thurman, ‘Fire Burns: A Department of Comment’, Fire!!, pp. 47–8. Charles H. Rowell, ‘ “Let Me Be With Ole Jazzbo”: An Interview with Sterling A. Brown’, Callaloo 14.4 (Autumn 1991), pp.  795–815 (p.  805); see Sanders, Afro-Modernist Aesthetics, p. 10. Walter B. Kalaidjian, American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press 1993), p. 96. Langston Hughes, ‘Jazzonia’, SG, p. 665; Winold Reiss, ‘Dawn in Harlem’, SG, p.  664; Langston Hughes, ‘Elevator Boy’, Fire!!, p.  20, and ‘Railroad Avenue’, Fire!!, p. 21. Hughes, ‘Elevator Boy’, p. 20. Hughes, ‘Railroad Avenue’, p. 21. Ibid. p. 21. Ibid. p. 21. Ibid. p. 21. Ibid. p. 21. Brooker, ‘Modernism Deferred’, p. 239. Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Color Struck’, Fire!!, pp. 7–14. Ibid. p. 7; Helene Johnson, ‘A Southern Road’, Fire!!, p. 17. Gwendolyn Bennett, ‘Wedding Day’, Fire!!, pp. 25–8 (p. 25). Ibid. p. 28. Ibid. p. 26. Ibid. p. 27. Ibid. p. 28. Ibid. p. 28. Ibid. p. 28. Ibid. p. 28. See Jean Toomer, ‘The Experience’, in A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings, ed. Frederik L. Rusch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 31–76. See for example Jean Toomer, ‘To Move From Place to Place (20 Sept. 1929)’, from the ‘Paris’ notebook, in A Jean Toomer Reader, pp. 3–4. Jean Toomer to James Weldon Johnson, 11 July 1930, in A Jean Toomer Reader, pp. 105–6 (p. 106). See Michael North, ‘Transatlantic Transfer: Little Magazines and EuroAmerican Modernism’, keynote paper, 12 July 2007, Modernist Magazines Project Conference: The Modernist Atlantic, De Montfort University, (accessed 1 October 2008), pp. 20–1. See Nadell, Enter the New Negroes, p. 84. Wallace Thurman, ‘Editorial Essay: Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, November 1928’, in The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 250

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 172–176

[ 251

Renaissance Reader, ed. Amritjit Singh (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 216–18 (p. 218). 187. Du Bois, ‘The Negro Mind Reaches Out’, in The New Negro, pp.  385–414 (p. 385). Chapter 6 1. Louis Zukofsky, ‘Program: “Objectivists” 1931’, Poetry 37.5 (February 1931), pp. 268–72 (p. 268). 2. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999), p. 14. See also Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). 3. William Carlos Williams, ‘Further Announcement’, C1, p. 10. 4. Like the original localists, the new group resisted identifying themselves as a movement, unlike Zukofsky’s project of (admittedly reluctant) self-definition on behalf of the objectivist nexus of Rakosi, Reznikoff and George Oppen (as well as Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker and Williams), which played out in the special ‘Objectivists 1931’ number of Poetry; see especially Zukofsky’s ‘Program: “Objectivists” 1931’, pp. 268–72. 5. See Gorham Munson, The Awakening Twenties (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), pp. 291–6. 6. See Munson, The Awakening Twenties, p. 292. 7. Ibid. p. 563. 8. Louis Sheafer and Edwin Seaver, ‘Reminiscences of Edwin Seaver (1976)’, Columbia Centre for Oral History Collection, Columbia University, New York, pp. 25–6. Details about Seaver’s biography are from this transcribed interview. 9. Waldo Frank, ‘Seriousness and Dada’, 1924 3 ([Autumn] 1924), pp.  70–3 (p. 72). 10. Ibid. pp. 71–2. 11. Ibid. p. 71. 12. Ibid. p. 73. 13. Ibid. pp. 72–3. 14. Malcolm Cowley, ‘Communications on Seriousness and Dada’, 1924 4 (December 1924), pp. 140–2 (p. 142). 15. Ibid. pp. 140–1. 16. Ibid. p. 141. 17. Ibid. pp. 140–1. 18. John Rodker, ‘ “Dada” and Else von Freytag-Loringhoven’, The Little Review 7.2 (July–August 1920), pp. 33–6 (p. 36). 19. Malcolm Cowley, ‘Tablet’, in Cowley, Matthew Josephson et al., ‘New York: 1928, A Group Manifestation’, transition 13 (Summer 1928), pp. 83–102 (p. 85).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 251

25/01/2013 15:53

252 ]

Notes to pages 177–180

20. Ibid. p. 85. Cowley performed a similar masquerade in his doggerel poem ‘Tar Babies’, in ‘New York: 1928’, pp. 96–7. 21. Cowley, Josephson et al., ‘New York: 1928, A Group Manifestation’ [title page], p. 83. 22. Edwin Seaver, ‘First Principles’ [review of Waldo Frank, Salvos (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924)], 1924 1 (July 1924), p. 32. Seaver’s review of Salvos was generally positive, but it began with the significant qualification that ‘Waldo Frank is primarily an artist [. . .] and only secondarily is he philosopher [and] critic’. See Munson, The Awakening Twenties, p. 292, and Waldo Frank, ‘For a Declaration of War’, Secession 7 (Winter 1924), pp. 5–14. 23. Edwin Seaver, ‘Cultural Pluralism’ [review of Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924)], 1924 1 (July 1924), pp. 30–1 (p. 31). 24. Ibid. p. 31. 25. Ibid. p. 31. 26. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 137. 27. Daniel Green, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 9. 28. Edwin Seaver, ‘Nocturne’, 1924 1 (July 1924), p. 11. 29. See William Carlos Williams, ‘Portrait of a Generation’ [review of Robert McAlmon, The Portrait of a Generation (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1926)], 1924 4 (December 1924), pp. 143–5 (p. 143). Williams’s review was in fact a preview, since McAlmon’s book did not appear until 1926. 30. Ibid. p. 143. 31. Ibid. p. 144. 32. Michel Foucault, ‘Questions on Geography’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mephan and Kate Soper (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), pp. 63–77 (p. 70). 33. Williams, ‘Portrait of a Generation’, p. 144. 34. Ibid. p. 144. 35. Ibid. p. 144. 36. Ford Madox Ford, ‘Communications’, the transatlantic review 1.1 (January 1924), pp. 93–9 (p. 93). 37. Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul, ‘An Introduction’, transition 1 (April 1927), p. 136. 38. Robert McAlmon, ‘Mr. Joyce Directs an Irish Prose Ballet’, transition 15 (February 1929), pp. 126–34 (p. 130). 39. See Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (ed.), Pound/Ford, The Story of a Literary Friendship: The Correspondence Between Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and Their Writings About Each Other (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), pp. 73–5. 40. William Carlos Williams, ‘The Voyage of the Mayflower’, the transatlantic review 2.1 (August 1924), pp.  46–51; later published in In the American Grain

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 252

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 180–185

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

[ 253

(New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925; 2nd edn New Directions, 1956), pp. 63–8. See Ezra Pound, ‘Two Cantos’, the transatlantic review 1.1 (January 1924), pp. 10–14; ‘Canto XII’, in The Cantos, pp. 53–7 (p. 53). See Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1993 [1980]), p. 59. Pound, ‘Canto XII’, The Cantos, p. 53. See Olga Nicolova, ‘Ezra Pound’s Cantos De Luxe’, Modernism/Modernity 15.1 (January 2008), pp. 155–77 (p. 162). Ezra Pound, ‘The Twelfth Canto’, in A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound: for the Beginning of a Poem of Some Length (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925). See Ezra Pound to John Price, 20 January 1927, quoted in Barry S. Alpert, ‘Ezra Pound, John Price, and The Exile’, Paideuma 2.3 (Winter 1973), pp. 427–48 (p. 439). See Craig Monk, ‘The Price of Publishing Modernism: Ezra Pound and The Exile in America’, Canadian Review of American Studies 31.1 (2001), pp. 429–46 (pp. 437–8). Ezra Pound, ‘The Exile’, The Exile 1 (Spring 1927), pp. 88–92 (pp. 89–90). Ezra Pound, ‘The City’, The Exile 4 (Autumn 1928), pp. 24–9 (p. 26). Ibid. p. 27. Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), p. 11, p. 141. [Ezra Pound], ‘Modern Thought’, The Exile 2 (Autumn 1927), p. 117. William Carlos Williams, IAG, p. 68. Lisa Sánchez González, Boricua Literature: A History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 45. Ibid. p. 45. Ibid. p. 56. Ibid. pp. 52–3. Williams, IAG, pp. 208–9. Ibid. p. 208. This anecdote very closely resembles Williams’s description of Marshall in his 1954 article ‘Seventy Years Deep’; quoted in Sergio Rizzo, ‘Remembering Race: Extra-poetical Contexts and the Racial Other in “The Red Wheelbarrow” ’, Journal of Modern Literature 29.1 (Fall 2005), pp. 34–54 (p. 35). Williams, IAG, p. 211. Ibid. p. 210. Lola Ridge, ‘American Sagas’, The New Republic 48 (24 March 1926), pp. 148–9 (p. 149). See Sánchez Gonzalez, p. 53. Ibid. p. 149. Pound, ‘Canto XII’, The Cantos, p. 53. Williams, IAG, p. 108. William Carlos Williams, The Descent of Winter, in The Exile 4 (Autumn 1928), pp. 30–69; CP1, pp. 291–318.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 253

25/01/2013 15:53

254 ] 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78.

79.

80. 81.

82.

Notes to pages 185–188 Williams, IAG, p. 68. Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919), p. 79. Williams, CP1, p. 297. Brian A. Bremen, William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 73. On Williams’s Jewish ancestry, see Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), pp. 411–12. Rizzo, ‘Remembering Race’, p. 50. William Carlos Williams, ‘The Wanderer’, CP1, pp. 27–36 (p. 28). [Blues advertisement], transition 16–17 (June 1929). In the next issue after the American number, seventeen American expatriate writers responded to the ‘Group Manifestation’ as well as to Jolas’s general question ‘Why Do Americans Live in Europe?’; Gertrude Stein, Hilaire Hiler, Robert McAlmon et al., transition 14 (Fall 1928), pp. 97–119. Parker Tyler, ‘New York Notes’, Blues 7 (Fall 1929), pp. 41–2 (p. 41). Bernard Smith, ‘American Letter’, transition 13 (Summer 1928), pp.  245–7 (p. 246). ‘Notes on Contributors: Kathleen Tankersley Young’, The New American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature, ed. Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford and Paul Rosenfeld (New York: The Macauly Company, 1929), p. 465. I am grateful to Alexander Howard for sharing an early version of his forthcoming article on Charles Henri Ford and Blues with me, which discusses Ford and Young’s first meeting. Any errors in the present discussion are my own. Also see Alexander Howard, ‘Into the 1930s: Hound & Horn (1927–34), Troubadour (1928–32), Blues (1929–30), Smoke (1931–37), and Furioso (1939–53)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume II: North America 1894–1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 347–70. Kathleen Tankersley Young to Charles Henri Ford, 23 November 1928, HRC. Kathleen Tankersley Young to Countee Cullen, quoted in Countee Cullen, ‘The Dark Tower’, Opportunity 6.6 (June 1928), pp. 178–9 (p. 178); Young’s poem ‘Hunger (For Preston)’ was published in the same issue (p. 168). Cullen introduced ‘[f]rom San Antonio Texas, a young white woman, a poet of fine and sensitive feeling’, who wrote ‘out of her slow convalescence from a six weeks’ illness a note of sympathy and understanding’ (p. 178). Young was the ‘Associate Editor of Echo, in San Antonio Texas’ (‘Who’s Who’, Opportunity 6.6 (June 1928), p.  187), and her letters confirm that she suffered a recurrence of a chronic illness in the spring of 1928; Kathleen Tankersley Young, ‘Extracts from Letters Written by Kathleen Tankersley Young to Lew & Ruth’, Latin Quarter-ly 1.1 (September 1933), pp. 8–10 (p. 8). Kathleen Tankersley Young to Charles Henri Ford, [1928], Beinecke MSS 32.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 254

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 188–193

[ 255

83. Kathleen Tankersley Young to Charles Henri Ford, 8 December 1928, HRC. Ford adapted some of her phrases in this letter for the eventual advert in transition 16–17. 84. Robert McAlmon, ‘Unfinished Poem’, in North America: Continent of Conjecture (Paris: Contact Editions, 1929). The ‘Unfinished Poem’ encompassed the entire collection, and was subtitled with discrete poems such as ‘Historic Blues’ (pp. 4–5) and ‘Political Blues’ (pp. 7–8). 85. Kathleen Tankersley Young to Charles Henri Ford, 29 February 1929, HRC. 86. William Carlos Williams, ‘For a New Magazine’, Blues 1.2 (March 1929), pp. 30–2 (p. 30). 87. Ibid. p. 31. 88. McAlmon, ‘Mr. Joyce Directs an Irish Prose Ballet’, p. 130. 89. For example, ‘December Portrait’ depicts a clear division between ‘white’ and ‘black’ worlds, mediated by a ‘dark window’ that recalls Du Bois’s veil metaphor – however ‘her dreams [. . .] transcend’ this dichotomy; Kathleen Tankersley Young, ‘December Portrait’, Opportunity 8.12 (December 1930), p. 360. 90. Kathleen Tankersley Young, ‘Fragment’, transition 16–17 (June 1929), pp. 174–6 (p. 175). 91. Kathleen Tankersley Young, Poem ‘III’, in ‘Six Poems’, Blues 1.1 (February 1929), pp. 10–12 (p. 11). 92. Kathleen Tankersley Young, Poem ‘IV’, in ‘Six Poems’, p. 11. 93. Bernard Smith, ‘American Letter’, transition 13 (Summer 1928), pp.  245–7 (p. 246). 94. Kathleen Tankersley Young, ‘spring poem’, in ‘Two Poems’, Blues 1.2 (March 1929), p. 74. 95. Kathleen Tankersley Young, ‘poem 91’, in ‘Two Poems’, Blues 1.2 (March 1929), p. 74. 96. Charles Henri Ford, ‘Optional’ and ‘Elegy’, in ‘Group’, Blues 1.2 (March 1929), pp. 38–9. 97. Ibid. p. 39. 98. Charles Henri Ford, ‘poem’, in ‘Group’, Blues 1.2 (March 1929), pp. 38–9 (p. 38). 99. Warren Taylor, ‘The South in the Building of Our Nation’, Blues 1.2 (March 1929), pp. 40–2 (p. 40). 100. Louis Zukofsky, ‘Three Poems’, Blues 1.2 (March 1929), pp. 43–4. 101. William Carlos Williams, ‘Della Primavera Trasportata al Morale’, CP1, pp. 329–49 (p. 335). 102. Kenneth Rexroth, ‘Poem’, Blues 1.3 (April 1929), pp. 70–1 (p. 70). 103. Ibid. pp. 70–1. 104. Ibid. p. 71. 105. Ibid. p. 71. 106. William Carlos Williams, ‘The Attic Which is Desire’, Blues 2.2 (Spring 1930), p. 20.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 255

25/01/2013 15:53

256 ]

Notes to pages 193–198

107. Jean Toomer, ‘Gum’, The Chapbook 36 (April 1923), p.  22; ‘Her Lips Are Copper Wire’, in Cane: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), p. 55. 108. See William Carlos Williams, ‘Introduction to a Collection of Modern Writings’, Blues 2.1 (Fall 1929), p. 3. 109. William Carlos Williams, ‘Caviar and Bread Again: A Warning to the New Writer’, Blues 2.3 (Fall 1930), pp. 46–7 (p. 47). 110. Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, ‘Ten Poems by Kathleen Tankersley Young (Parnassus Press)’, in ‘Book Notices’, Blues 2.3 (Fall 1930), pp. 48–50 (p. 49). 111. ‘Notes on Contributors’, Blues 2.3 (Fall 1930), p. 52. 112. Richard Johns, ‘Announcing Pagany’, in A Return to Pagany: The History, Correspondence, and Selections from a Little Magazine 1929–1932, ed. Stephen Halpert and Richard Johns (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 40. 113. William Carlos Williams, A Voyage to Pagany (New York: New Directions, 1970 [1928]). 114. Peter Nicholls, ‘A Homemade World? America, Europe, and Objectivist Poetry’, in The Idea and the Thing in Modernist American Poetry, ed. Cristina Giorcelli (Palermo: Ila Palma, 2001), pp. 13–30 (p. 19). 115. William Carlos Williams to Richard Johns, 12 July 1929, in Halpert and Johns (eds), A Return to Pagany, p. 11. 116. Ibid. p. 12. 117. Richard Johns, ‘Announcement’, Pagany 1.1 (January–March 1930), p. 1. 118. Ibid. p. 1. 119. Ibid. p. 1. 120. Marjorie Perloff, ‘ “Barbed-Wire Entanglements”: The “New American Poetry” ’, Modernism/Modernity 2.1 (January 1995), p. 148. 121. Johns, ‘Announcement’, p. 1. 122. Halpert and Johns (eds), A Return to Pagany, p. 34. 123. Johns, ‘Announcement’, p. 1. 124. Richard Johns to William Carlos Williams, [October–November 1929], University of Delaware Library, Special Collections, Archive of Pagany, Box 10, Folder 248. 125. William Carlos Williams, ‘Manifesto’, Pagany 1.1 (January–March 1930), p. 1. 126. William Carlos Williams, ‘The Work of Gertrude Stein’, Pagany 1.1 (January– March 1930), pp. 41–6 (p. 42). 127. Kenneth Rexroth, ‘Into the Shandy Westerness’, Pagany 1.1 (January–March 1930), pp. 47–9 (p. 47). 128. Ibid. p. 48. 129. Ibid. p. 48. 130. Charles Demuth, ‘Illustrations for Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw” ’, Pagany 2.2 (April–June 1931). 131. Sherry Mangan, ‘A Note: on the Somewhat Premature Apotheosis of Thomas Stearns Eliot’, Pagany 1.2 (April–June 1930), pp. 23–36 (p. 30).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 256

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 198–203

[ 257

132. Ezra Pound, ‘The First Year of “Pagany” and the Possibility of Criteria’, Pagany 2.1 (January–March 1931), pp. 104–11 (p. 111). Also see Ezra Pound to William Carlos Williams, 22 March 1931, in Halpert and Johns (eds), A Return to Pagany, pp. 259–62. 133. Ezra Pound, ‘Date Line (1934)’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 86. 134. Ezra Pound, ‘Three Cantos: XXX [i.e. XXXI] – XXXIII’, Pagany 2.3 (July– September 1931), pp. 43–53. 135. Ezra Pound, ‘Canto XXXII’, ibid. pp. 47–9 (p. 48) . 136. Alec Marsh has argued that ‘Pound saw the modern artist as an editor of tendencies and texts’, in Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1998), p.  239. In Marsh’s reading, Pound configures political leaders in similar terms, so that ‘Mussolini, as Pound saw him, was “an EDITORIAL eye and ear – precisely – an editor, who will see through the bunkum” ’ (p. 239). 137. Pound, ‘Canto XXXII’, p. 48. 138. See Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos, p. 127. For a synopsis of the exchange between Ronaldson and Jefferson, see Charles Creesy, ‘Monticello: The History of a Typeface’, Printing History 25.1 (2006), pp. 3–19. 139. See The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 175. 140. See Halpert and Johns (eds), A Return to Pagany, pp. 476–9. 141. Pauline Leader, ‘Hired Girl’, Pagany 2.2 (April–June 1931), pp. 35–9 (p. 38). 142. Ibid. p. 39. 143. Ibid. p. 39. 144. Mina Loy, ‘The Widow’s Jazz’, Pagany 2.2 (April–June 1931), pp.  68–70 (pp. 68–9). 145. Ibid. p. 69. 146. Ibid. p. 69. 147. Ibid. p. 68. 148. Ibid. p. 69. 149. Ibid. p. 70. 150. Jean Toomer, ‘Brown River, Smile’, Pagany 3.1 (January–March 1932), pp. 29–33 (p. 30). 151. Ibid. p. 33. 152. Johns, ‘Announcement’, p. 1. 153. Cover, C2 (January 1921); William Carlos Williams, ‘Comment’, Contact 1.1 (February 1932), pp. 7–9 (p. 9). 154. Austin Warren, ‘Some Periodicals of the American Intelligentsia’, The New English Weekly 1.25 (6 October 1932), p. 597. 155. William Carlos Williams, ‘The Colored Girls of Passenack, Old and New’, Contact 1.1 (February 1932), pp. 55–63 (p. 60). 156. Carl Rakosi, ‘African Theme, Needlework, Etc.’, Contact 1.3 (October 1932), pp. 35–6 (p. 36).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 257

25/01/2013 15:53

258 ]

Notes to pages 203–208

157. William Carlos Williams and Nathanael West, ‘Contributors’, Contact 1.2 (May 1932), p. 125. 158. Charles Reznikoff, Testimony (New York: The Objectivist Press, 1934). This volume was never reprinted. Reznikoff used many but not all of the sections from ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ in the 1934 version, in some cases reordering and trimming the sections. He did not reproduce the images, making the Contact sequence a unique presentation of this material. 159. Charles Reznikoff, ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee [Part I]’, Contact 1.1 (February 1932), pp. 14–34 (p. 33). 160. Ibid. p. 33. 161. Ibid. p. 34. 162. Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 158. 163. Reznikoff, ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’, p. 32. 164. Williams and West, ‘Contributors’, p. 125. 165. Charles Reznikoff, ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee [Part II]’, Contact 1.2 (May 1932), pp. 99–108 (p.100). 166. Kenneth Burke, ‘Introduction: The Matter of the Document’, in Reznikoff, Testimony, pp. xi–xvi (p. xv). 167. Ibid. pp. xv–xvi. 168. On Testimony and the Scottsboro trial, see Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations, p. 158. 169. Burke, ‘Introduction: The Matter of the Document’, p. xv. 170. Ibid. p. xvi. 171. William Carlos Williams to Richard Johns, 25 October 1932, University of Delaware Library, Special Collections, Archive of Pagany, Box 10, Folder 251 (1932–1935). 172. Nathanael West, ‘Some Notes on Violence’, Contact 1.3 (October 1932), pp. 132–3. 173. William Carlos Williams, ‘Comment’, Contact 1.3 (October 1932), pp. 131–2 (p. 131). 174. Ibid. p.  131. Williams’s critical lexicon during this period owed much to Zukofsky’s ‘Program: “Objectivists” 1931’. 175. William Carlos Williams, ‘Comment’, Contact 1.2 (May 1932), pp.  109–19 (p. 109). 176. Williams, IAG, p. 216. 177. Ibid. p. 216. Epilogue 1. Williams informed Zukofsky that ‘after this year there will be no Contact’; William Carlos Williams to Louis Zukofsky, 1 August 1932, in The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), pp. 134–5 (p. 135).

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 258

25/01/2013 15:53

Notes to pages 208–210

[ 259

2. William Carlos Williams, ‘Now I Ask You’ [comment on Pound’s 1927 Dial award, c. 1927–8], Buffalo, C102. Williams used sections of this manuscript in ‘A Tentative Statement’ in the final issue of The Little Review, 12.3 (May 1929), pp. 95–8. 3. Williams to Zukofsky, 12 December 1932, in The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, p. 143. 4. William Carlos Williams, [untitled editorial], Buffalo, C2(C). 5. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999), p. 14. 6. By the winter of 1933, Moss and Kamin had ‘made [Norman] Macleod editor – with [Williams’s] full consent’; Williams to Zukofsky, 1 February 1933, in The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, p. 146. Of course, no further issues of Contact were published by Moss and Kamin. 7. William Carlos Williams, ‘Comment’, Buffalo, C2(D). 8. Louis Zukofsky, ‘Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff’, Poetry 37.5 (February 1931), pp. 272–84. 9. William Carlos Williams, ‘Comment’, Buffalo, C2(F). 10. See Ezra Pound, ‘Selections from Ezra Pound’s Letters to Robert Creeley March 1950 to October 1951’, in Robert Creeley, ‘A Note followed by a Selection of Letters from Ezra Pound’, Agenda 4.2 (October–November 1965), pp. 11–21 (p. 15). 11. See Jacob Reed, ‘Robert Creeley and The Lititz Review: A Recollection with Letters’, Journal of Modern Literature 5.2 (April 1976), pp. 243–59. 12. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 266. 13. Ibid. p. 266. 14. Hans Marcus Enzenburger, The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media, ed. and trans. Michael Roloff (New York: Continuum Books/ Seabury Press, 1974), p. 28. 15. J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 36. 16. Mark Whalan, ‘Introduction: New Perspectives on the Modernist Transatlantic’, European Journal of American Culture 28.2 (Summer 2009), pp. 101–7 (p. 101). 17. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. 3 (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954), p. 1,045.

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 259

25/01/2013 15:53

INDEX

Numbers in italics refer to illustrations. advertising, 110–24 and Djuna Barnes, 24 and Emmy Veronica Sanders, 132 and Guido Bruno, 23 and Hart Crane, 145, 146 in Others, 41 parodies of, 22, 112 in Survey Graphic, 155 in transition, 186 and Waldo Frank, 176 and Wyndham Lewis, 70–1, 73, 74–5, 76, 79 affective mapping, 84–5, 103, 186, 187, 190, 191, 193 African Americans, 126, 133–4, 141, 145–6, 151–4, 184–5, 200, 203–4, 206 dialects, 45, 85, 86–7, 150, 152, 165 see also New Negro Renaissance Afro-Caribbeans, 159–61, 162 Agenda, 209 agrarianism, 9, 11, 12, 40, 85, 88 Aiken, Conrad, 42, 45–6, 140 Aldington, Richard, 25–6, 38–9, 41–2, 64, 74 Aleksa, Vainis, 125

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 260

American art, 89 American Indians, 40, 84, 220n American Mercury, 143 American Revolution, 198, 238n Anderson, Margaret, 78, 93 Anderson, Sherwood, 12, 84, 86, 91, 97, 130, 143, 144, 151, 154 anti-Semitism, 59, 127, 133, 134, 240n Arensberg, Walter Conrad, 28, 29, 49 Arles, 54–5, 55, 56, 60, 67 Athanasius, St., 20 Austin, Mary, 40 avant-garde, 1–4, 8–15, 18, 20, 209–10 Babbitt’s Soap, 113, 115–16, 117, 238n Bacon, Francis S., 180–1, 185 Barnes, Djuna, 23–4, 34, 35–6, 35 Bazin, Victoria, 104 Beck, John, 100, 215n Benefield, Barry, 85–6 Bennett, David, 7, 9 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 166, 170–1, 172 Bergson, Henri, 53 bibliographic codes, 14–15 Bird, William, 180, 181 Blake, Casey Nelson, 150

25/01/2013 15:53

Index Blast, 36, 38, 50, 51, 52, 59, 65, 66, 69–80, 72, 102, 115, 122, 143, 158 The Blind Man, 89 Blues, 173, 174, 186–94, 197, 207 Boas, Franz, 158 Bochner, Jay, 34–5 Bodenheim, Maxwell, 46, 88, 131 bohemianism, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 166, 167, 187 Boni & Liveright, 153, 155, 156 Boni, Albert and Charles, 24 Born, Bertran de Born, 58, 59 Bornstein, George, 14 Bourne, Randolph, 83, 87 Boyle, Kay, 136, 138, 187 Bremen, Brian, 185 Brooker, Peter, 3, 15, 157, 169 Brooks, Van Wyck, 83, 84, 155 Broom, 90, 111, 129–32, 135–6, 142, 143–4, 150, 153, 154, 158, 172, 179 Brown, Robert Carlton (Bob), 22, 208 Brown, Slater, 142, 146–7, 149, 176 Brown, Sterling, 167 Bruno, Guido, 20, 21, 22–3, 24, 25, 26, 42, 49 Bryher, 107, 109, 130 Buick, 119 Burke, Kenneth, 107–8, 142, 144, 176, 204, 208 Burton, Virginia Lee, 195 Caldwell, Erskine, 197 Cannell, Skipwith, 39–40, 48 capitalism see free market capitalism Carnevali, Emanuel, 91–2, 93, 94, 95, 96 Carroll, Anne Elizabeth, 159, 248n Cather, Willa, 10, 12 censorship and obscenity laws, 22, 23, 26, 28, 42, 78, 130, 166 Certeau, Michel de, 6, 56–7, 63, 71 Chaplin, Charlie, 88 Chicago, 163, 201–2

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 261

[ 261

Chicago Renaissance, 83 Choric School, 37–8, 220n Churchill, Suzanne, 25, 30, 90, 218n class issues, 22, 24, 135, 141, 146–7, 148–9, 161–2, 164–5, 167, 169–71, 173, 186, 199, 200 Clifford, James, 13 Coady, Robert J., 82, 87–8, 88–9 Coates, Robert M., 176 Colum, Padraic, 37 Columbus, Christopher, 61 commercial culture, 21–4, 30, 38–9, 41, 46–7, 59, 64, 70, 88, 115–19, 145, 177; see also advertising; free market capitalism; print culture Comstock, Anthony, 28 Concord (Massachusetts), 25 Contact Advertising Number, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115–16, 117, 119–20, 122–3, 128, 129, 183–4 expatriate criticism of, 129, 130, 131–2, 132–3 and late modernism, 136–8 and localist modernism, 11, 13, 14, 82, 92, 93, 96–109, 101, 127, 128 and new localism, 173, 174, 175, 178–9, 186, 197, 202–4, 206–7, 208 contact zones, 12, 20, 48, 86, 128, 135, 147, 148, 215n Content, Marjorie, 130 Copeland, Royal S., 119 Corman, Cid, 209 cosmopolitanism, 1, 2, 11, 41, 84, 87, 98, 102, 129, 136, 180, 186, 187 Cournos, John, 25 Covici, Pascal, 181 Cowley, Malcolm, 135, 140, 142, 144, 172, 176–7 Crane, Hart, 145–6 Cranston, Claudia, 32, 219n Cravan, Arthur, 88, 201 Craven, Thomas Jewell, 124 Crawford, John, 151–2, 152–3

25/01/2013 15:53

262 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Crawford, Robert, 138 Creeley, Robert, 2, 209 The Crisis, 155, 158, 170 Criterion, 6 crowd dynamics, 52, 54, 55–9, 65, 69, 70, 76–7, 150, 179 cubism, 65, 104 Cullen, Countee, 155 cultural geography, 12 cultural localism and modernist avant-gardes, 2, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 82 and William Carlos Williams, 93, 96–7, 99, 105–6, 107–8, 109, 136, 200, 206, 208–9 cultural pluralism, 10–11, 12, 82, 83, 85, 144, 158, 177–8 Cummings, E.E., 143, 144, 190 Cunard, Nancy, 203 Cutchin, Malcolm, 99 dadaism, 2, 8, 82, 89, 96, 97, 111, 133 American dadaists, 145, 148, 153, 171 in Blues, 186, 187, 189, 191 and Ezra Pound, 134, 135 legacies of, 175–7, 179 in Pagany, 197–8 and William Carlos Williams, 112, 115, 117 see also Duchamp, Marcel; New York Dada Dahlberg, Edward, 197 Davidson, Donald, 11 Davidson, Michael, 14, 204 Davis, Alex, 9 Dawson, Mitchell, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 107, 129, 231n, 233n Dell, Floyd, 22 Demuth, Charles, 198 Dewey, John, 10, 12, 82, 93, 97, 98–9, 102, 103, 109, 116, 119, 158, 164, 177–8 The Dial, 82, 83, 96, 97, 98, 109, 111, 112, 115, 121, 124, 130, 131, 140, 142, 143, 144, 234n

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 262

dialects African American, 45, 85, 86–7, 150, 152, 165 working class, 45 discourse networks, 1, 2, 4, 82, 210, 211n Domingo, W.A., 159, 161, 162 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.), 62, 107, 109 Dos Passos, John, 197 Douglas, Aaron, 165, 166 Douglas, C.H., 121, 122–3, 198 Dreiser, Theodore, 84 Du Bois, W.E.B., 141, 157, 165, 172, 255n Duchamp, Marcel, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 125, 138, 197–8 Duvall, John, 11–12 Eastman, Max, 22 economics see advertising; free market capitalism editorial design see typography / typographic design Edwards, Eli see McKay, Claude Edwards, Paul, 73 The Egoist, 6, 25, 26, 38, 42, 50, 61, 64, 65, 66, 69, 74, 179, 218n Einstein, Albert, 109, 110–11, 123–6, 127, 128, 130, 131, 237n, 240n electricity, 70, 145, 149, 193 Eliot, T.S., 6, 8, 45, 68, 81, 109, 136, 140, 144, 198 Ellerman, Annie Winifred see Bryher empiricism, 50, 51, 52, 53, 99, 190 The English Review, 179 Enzenburger, Hans Marcus, 14 Epstein, Jean, 150 essentialism, 11, 152, 153, 157, 162, 167, 171, 176, 178, 184, 186, 201, 203 Europe see travel writing and the imagist problem of place of place exile, 7, 48, 57, 123, 147, 186 The Exile, 174, 179, 181–3, 185, 186 expatriation, 3–4, 7, 40, 130, 135, 186 exploitation, 24, 34, 64–5, 180–1; see also slavery

25/01/2013 15:53

Index Falconer, Alderman Bruce, 127, 128, 240n fascism, 181, 183, 199 fashion, 32, 70, 104 Faulkner, William, 10, 12 Fauset, Jessie Redmon, 155, 156 feminine, 54, 58, 63, 65, 76, 104 feminism, 32, 34, 36, 39 Fetterley, Judith, 11 Fire!!, 141, 165–70, 172 Fitts, Norman, 141 Fletcher, John Gould, 40–1, 115 Ford, Charles Henri, 173, 186, 187, 188, 190–1, 192, 193–4 Ford, Ford Madox, 174, 179, 180 Foucault, Michel, 5, 6, 97, 179 Frank, Waldo criticism of, 134, 144 on Dadaism, 175–6, 179 and Edwin Seaver, 177, 252n and Jean Toomer, 247n on Jewish and Puritan culture, 185 and nativism, 12, 83, 87, 132 and Secession, 144–5 and Survey Graphic, 155, 156 and unanimisme, 150–1, 152–3, 154, 246n free market capitalism, 21–4, 70, 159, 160 free verse movement, 1–2, 25–6, 29, 37, 40, 41, 42 The Freeman, 111, 124 Freud, Sigmund, 84, 85, 109 Freytag-Loringhoven, Else von, 111, 132–3, 134, 135 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 4 futurism, 6–7, 15, 57–8, 65, 73, 75, 77, 89, 183 Garvey, Marcus, 158, 165 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 66, 67, 75, 88, 226n Gauguin, Paul, 164, 249n gender inequalities, 32, 34, 128, 151, 171, 173, 184, 186, 191

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 263

[ 263

geographical materialism, 2, 5–6, 12, 54, 99 geometry and geomorphology, 52 Giddens, Anthony, 5, 213n Giles, Paul, 5, 106 The Glebe, 21, 24, 25, 26 Goeser, Caroline, 14 Gold, Mike, 167 Goody, Alex, 34 Gould, Wallace, 81, 93, 95 Green, Daniel, 178 Green, Fiona, 45 Greenwich Village, 21–4, 25, 28, 34, 48, 49, 64–5, 82, 87, 90, 129, 187 Greenwich Village, 25, 26, 37, 41–2, 194 Gregg, Frances, 39 Gurdjieff, Georges, 153, 155 Halpert, Samuel, 25 Halpert, Stephen, 195 Harlem see New Negro Renaissance Harris, Luther S., 22 Hart, Bernard, 56 Hartley, Marsden, 93, 107, 173 Harvey, David, 5, 6, 50, 237n H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 62, 107, 109 Heap, Jane, 93 Helbling, Mark, 165 Hemingway, Ernest, 180 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 40, 85, 214n, 230n high modernism, 4, 8, 81, 93, 140, 144, 173, 174, 209 Hokusai, Katsushika, 113, 115, 116 homosexuality, 166 Hound & Horn, 187, 193, 198 Howard, Alexander, 187 Hoyt, Helen, 39, 41, 89 Hsu, Husan L., 85 Hughes, Langston, 155, 163, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 248n Hunt, Sydney, 187 Hurston, Zora Neale, 166, 169–70 Hutchinson, George, 86, 164

25/01/2013 15:53

264 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Huyssen, Andreas, 6 hybridisation, 3, 11, 12, 13, 111, 128, 133, 135, 147, 183–4 identity, American and 1924, 175–6 and Albert Einstein’s visit to New York, 111, 123–9 and American Indians, 40 and expatriation, 40, 129–35 and Ezra Pound, 50–1, 59–60, 61 and John Dewey, 98–9 and Kreymborg, 21, 37 and modernism, 3, 7–8, 10–11, 12, 81, 186, 215n and the New Negro Renaissance, 155–72 and Others, 45–6 and Secession, 140–9 and The Severn Arts, 86–7 and Sherwood Anderson, 84 and Wyndham Lewis, 77 see also nationalism; nativism imagism, 20, 25–6, 37, 40, 41, 42, 173, 174, 197 and Ezra Pound, 51–2, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 69, 79 and William Carlos Williams, 60, 64, 65, 66, 67–8, 124, 192 and Yvor Winters, 145 immigration, 13, 45, 81, 87, 91, 93, 111, 124, 125, 127–8, 140, 178, 183, 199–200, 240n imperialism, 86, 116, 215n James, Henry, 198 Jameson, Fredric, 174 jazz, 133, 134, 136, 145, 170, 188, 201–2 Jefferson, Thomas March, 125, 198, 199 Jenkins, Lee M., 9, 12, 105 Jepson, Edgar, 68, 229n Jewish Americans, 175, 185 Jim Crow, 157, 163, 169, 171 Johns, Orrick, 90

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 264

Johns, Richard, 173, 194–5, 197, 198, 200, 202, 206 Johnson, Charles S., 158, 162 Johnson, Helene, 169, 170 Jolas, Eugene, 174, 179–80, 187 Jordan, David, 11 Jordan, Virgil, 100, 102, 109 Josephson, Matthew, 135, 142, 144, 146, 147–8, 149, 153–4, 171, 172, 175, 176, 246n Joyce, James, 8, 69, 180, 189, 208 Kalaidjian, Walter, 167 Kallen, Horace M., 177 Kamin, Martin, 202 Katz, Daniel, 4, 5, 7, 11, 57 Kennedy, J. Gerald, 53, 54, 210, 216n Kenner, Hugh, 8, 9 Kerfoot, J.B., 37, 38, 220n King, Gertrude Besse, 110, 123, 124 Kreymborg, Alfred and Broom, 129, 130, 131 ‘Contra Mundum’, 19 and exile, 7 and the Greenwich Village free trade nexus, 21–2, 24 and imagism, 24–5, 26 Lima Beans, 104 and localist modernism, 19–20 and Matthew Dawson, 94–5 and Mina Loy, 30 and Others, 26–31, 32, 36–9, 41, 42–3, 79, 88, 90, 94, 95, 154, 217n ‘Overheard in an Asylum’, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36 ‘Per Contra’, 19 Lacroix, Adon, 28 Laforgue, Jules, 107–8 landscapes, 50, 51, 52–4, 57, 58–9, 61–2, 105–6, 137, 146, 147, 167, 186, 189, 190–1, 193, 201 Lane, Winthrop D., 159, 164 late modernism, 137, 172, 173, 174, 187,

25/01/2013 15:53

Index 194, 200, 201, 206, 208; see also new localism Latham, Sean, 3 Lazarus, Emma, 126–7 Le Bon, Gustave, 54, 150 Leader, Pauline, 200 legal system, 203–4 Lewis, Wyndham, 2, 8, 50, 51, 66, 69–80, 115, 143, 197 The Liberator, 90, 141, 158, 159, 160, 167 Liberty Print Shop, 28–9 Life (magazine), 38 Lindsay, Vachel, 90, 97 The Lititz Review, 209 little magazines / modernist periodicals, 1–4, 14–15, 18, 20, 49, 209–10 The Little Review and Emmy Veronica Sanders, 130–1 and Ezra Pound, 121 and Gorham Munson, 142, 143 and localist modernism, 81, 82, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 102, 103, 179 and vorticism, 68, 70, 78–9 and Wallace Thurman, 166 ‘the local’, 5, 9, 13, 81, 96, 99, 215n localism, 1, 4, 9–10, 11, 12, 82, 203; see also cultural localism localist modernism, 2, 4, 5, 12–14, 15, 81–2, 115, 127, 128 and Alfred Kreymborg, 19–20 and Contact, 96–109, 137 and Matthew Josephson, 144 and The Seven Arts and new regionalism, 83–7 and The Soil and Others, 87–96 and Survey Graphic, 164 see also new localism locality, 9, 10, 12, 82, 98, 107, 119, 215n and Carl Sandburg, 91–2 and Marianne Moore, 43 and Mina Loy, 105 and the new localists, 174, 191, 192 and Robert McAlmon, 103, 108, 134 and Wallace Stevens, 105–6

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 265

[ 265

and Waldo Frank, 151 and William Carlos Williams, 49, 93, 97, 99, 102, 103 locational poetics, 4–9, 51, 60, 61, 66, 80, 82, 93, 107, 141, 155 Locke, Alain, 141, 154, 155, 157–9, 162–3, 163–5, 166, 167, 169, 172, 248n Loeb, Harold, 129, 130, 172 logopoeia, 104, 108 London, 38–9, 48, 60, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77 Lowell, Amy, 26, 40, 58, 68, 143 Loy, Mina, 48, 104–5, 108, 130 ‘Love Songs’, 29–31, 44 ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’, 32, 33, 34–5, 36 ‘The Widows Jazz’, 200–1 ‘To You’, 46–7 Mangan, Sherry, 198 Manikin, 136 Manning, Susan, 3, 4 Marek, Jayne, 3 Marinetti, F.T., 6–7, 73 Marsh, Alec, 257n Marshall, John, 41 Marxism, 160 The Masses, 22, 23, 25, 49, 64–5, 87 Masters, Edgar Lee, 42, 43, 45–6, 91, 130, 143, 214n, 221n Matisse, Henri, 102, 164 Maxwell, William J., 8 McAlmon, Robert and Contact, 95–6, 97–8, 99, 100, 102–3, 107, 108–9, 112, 127, 136, 138, 203, 206 and the demise of Others, 94, 95 ‘Jazz Opera Americano’, 129, 133–4 and localist modernism, 9, 81, 82, 94, 173 marriage, 107, 109, 129–30 and new localism, 180, 181, 188, 203 Williams review of The Portrait of a Generation, 178–9

25/01/2013 15:53

266 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

McDougald, Elise Johnson, 158 McFarland, Gerald W., 21 McGann, Jerome, 14, 15 McKay, Claude, 86–7, 155, 159–61, 162–3, 165, 166, 169, 171, 248n McKible, Adam, 127, 133 Michaels, Walter Benn, 10–11, 40, 127, 128, 240n Midwestern Regionalism, 43, 82–7, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 151 Miller, Cristianne, 47 Miller, Kelly, 163 Miller, Tyrus, 137, 174 mimeographs, 100, 107, 112 misogyny, 39, 181, 193–4 Modernist Journals Project, 3, 212n Modernist Magazines Project, 3, 212n modernist transatlantic, 2, 3, 5, 8–9, 11, 49, 68, 82, 137, 142, 179, 180, 187, 208, 210 Monroe, Harriet, 29, 58, 229n Moore, Marianne, 2, 7, 8, 11, 13, 22, 48, 108, 115, 136, 144, 173, 215n, 220n and Contact, 102–4 ‘Critics and Connoisseurs’, 43 and Emmy Veronica Sanders, 130, 131 ‘In Days of Prismatic Color’, 131 ‘Those Various Scalpels’, 103–4 Morgan, Anna, 89 Morrisson, Mark, 3, 7, 22, 38, 70, 127, 209 Moss, David, 202 mourning, cultural, 85, 86, 159, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 199, 200–2 multiculturalism, 12, 178, 184, 215n multigraphs, 100, 112 Multum, Brown Bryan, 77 Mumford, Lewis, 83 Munson, Gorham, 81, 88, 141–5, 148, 150–1, 153, 154, 171–2, 175, 177, 245n, 246n Mussolini, Benito, 183, 199, 257n mystical nationalism, 81, 83, 98, 134, 145–6, 150, 154, 158, 171, 201–2

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 266

Nadell, Martha, 164 nationalism, 11, 12, 70, 74–6, 79; see also mystical nationalism; nativism; regionalism native modernism, 86, 87, 150, 154, 158, 241n nativism, 8, 10–11, 12, 40, 127, 128, 177, 178, 183, 186 and Waldo Frank, 87, 145, 152, 153, 176 see also regionalism nativist modernism, 10–11, 127, 158, 159 naturalism, 11–12, 84, 85, 151, 152, 174, 189, 193 Nelson, Carey, 3 The New Age, 6, 121 new localism, 174–5, 180, 187, 192–3, 208, 209 New Negro Renaissance, 2, 13, 139, 141, 149, 154, 155–72 The New Republic, 9, 97, 143, 175 New York, 34, 36, 60, 61–2, 63–4, 132, 133, 181 East Side, 147–8, 171 Greenwich Village, 21–4, 25, 28, 34, 48, 49, 64–5, 82, 87, 90, 129, 187 Harlem, 155, 157, 159–61, 163 Statue of Liberty, 126–7 New York Dada, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117 New York Times, 23, 63, 124 Ney, Lew, 187 Nicene Creed, 20 Nicholls, Peter, 8–9, 51, 52, 194 1924, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178 Norris, Frank, 85 North, Michael, 8–9, 11, 16–17, 45, 133, 138, 230n, 243n Norton, Allen and Louise, 20, 32, 34, 36, 49, 220n Nugent, Richard Bruce, 166–7, 170 Nujol, 113, 116–17, 118, 119, 120, 238n Nye, Robert, 58, 65

25/01/2013 15:53

Index objectivism, 174, 191–2, 197, 206, 207, 208–9, 251n obscenity laws and censorship, 22, 23, 26, 28, 78, 130, 166 Oppen, George, 208 Oppenheim, James, 82, 83, 87, 98, 144 Opportunity, 155, 158, 170, 188, 189 Orage, A.R., 121, 122 Origin, 209 Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, 13–14, 19–21, 26–32, 27, 37–49, 66, 102, 136 demise of, 82, 88, 89, 90–9 Others Lecture Bureau, 89–90, 94, 231n Pagany, 11, 14, 173, 174, 186, 189, 193, 194–202, 196, 203, 206–7 Paris, 7, 102, 143, 170, 171 Paterson Silk Strike, 64–5 Patterson, Anita, 4, 10, 11 Patterson, Ian, 75 Paul, Elliot, 179–80 Peppis, Paul, 76, 228n Perloff, Marjorie, 17, 195 Pfeiffer, Kathleen, 247n place, 4, 5–6, 7–8, 12, 13–14, 174, 207 as eroticized zone, 105–6 modernist problem of, 50–80, 93, 96, 97, 99, 102, 141, 191, 210, 216n Ploog, Randy, 94 Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 12, 25, 29, 40, 43, 50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 65, 79, 81, 83, 96, 102 Poggi, Christine, 54, 57–8, 65 Pound, Ezra and American identity, 45, 50–1, 59–60, 134–5 and Blast and vorticism, 69, 70, 75, 77, 78, 79 The Cantos, 52, 180–1, 182, 185, 198–9, 200 and the Choric School, 37–8 and Edgar Jepson, 81 and The Exile, 179, 181–3

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 267

[ 267

on expatriation, 7 and Gaudier-Brzeska, 226n and imagism, 25, 26 ‘In a Station of the Metro’, 56–7 on Marianne Moore, 103, 104 ‘Near Perigord’, 57, 59 and Others, 38–9, 41 and Pagany, 198, 257n review of Credit Power and Democracy, 121–3 and transatlantic avant-gardes, 2–3, 6, 14, 209 and vorticism, 74 A Walking Tour in Southern France and the imagist problem of place of place, 50, 51–60, 183 and William Carlos Williams, 2–3, 66, 67–8, 208 pragmatism, 10, 12, 28, 52, 82, 85, 97, 99, 109, 133, 154, 155, 158, 163, 165, 183 Price, John, 181 Price, Marjorie, 11 print culture, 2, 9, 10, 18, 20, 24, 30–1, 91–2, 99, 104–5, 132, 180–1, 199–200 and Blast, 70, 76, 77 and Fire!!, 172 medieval, 52 and Others, 47–8 prostitution, 24, 42, 86, 166, 170 Proust, Marcel, 210 puritanism, 87, 150, 183, 185 Quartermain, Peter, 30 Quinn, John, 75, 78, 180 racism and race relations, 133–5, 151–2, 153–4, 157–8, 161–4, 243n, 247n and Blues, 188 and Contact, 203–4, 206 and cultural pluralism, 11, 12, 178 and Fire!!, 166, 167, 170–1 and Hart Crane, 145–8

25/01/2013 15:53

268 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

racism and race relations (cont.) and Malcolm Cowley, 177 and Pagany, 200–2 and The Seven Arts, 85–7 and Waldo Frank, 175 and William Carlos Williams, 126, 127–8, 138, 183–5, 185–6 see also hybridisation Rai, Lajpat, 87 rail transportation, 160, 167, 169–70, 171 Rainey, Lawrence, 3, 209 Rakosi, Carl, 174, 203 Ramazani, Jahan, 4–5, 46, 48, 102, 215n Rankine, Annette, 83 Ray, Man, 20, 25, 28, 94, 111, 112, 115 Rebel Art Centre, 64, 69, 227n regionalism, 41, 79, 191 and localism, 4, 9–10, 11–13 new regionalism, 43, 82–7, 90–2, 93–4, 96–7, 130, 142, 144, 151, 174, 202 see also agrarianism Reiss, Winold, 158, 163–4, 165, 167, 168 relativity see Einstein, Albert Rexroth, Kenneth, 174, 192, 197–8, 208 Reynolds, Henry S., 94 Reznikoff, Charles, 174, 203–4, 205, 206, 258n Ridge, Lola, 90, 91, 94, 95, 185, 203, 233n The Ridgefield Gazook, 21, 28 Ridgefield, New Jersey, 21, 25, 48, 90 Rizzo, Sergio, 126, 186 Rockefeller, William, 117 Rodker, John, 97, 176, 181 Rogue, 20, 29, 32, 33, 34–6, 35, 41, 83, 89 Romains, Jules, 149, 150, 176 Ronaldson, James R., 199, 200 Rosenberg, Harold, 7 Rosenfeld, Paul, 83, 143, 155 Russian Revolution, 181 The Rutherford Republic, 116–17, 118, 119, 120 S4N, 141, 144, 150, 151, 154, 172, 179 St. Athanasius, 20

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 268

Salemson, Harold J., 187 Sánchez González, Lisa, 128, 184 Sandburg, Carl, 12, 43–6, 48, 90–1, 97, 130, 140, 143 Sanders, Emmy Veronica, 78, 130–1, 132, 133, 135, 150 Sanders, Mark, 158 Saper, Craig, 6 Saphier, William, 41, 90 Sayn, Pierre, 151, 246n Scholes, Robert, 3 Schulze, Robin, 13–14, 15 science see Einstein, Albert; technology Seaver, Edwin, 173, 175, 177–8, 252n Secession, 8, 111, 141–3, 144–9, 150, 154, 162, 166, 172, 175, 179, 191, 197 Sélavy, Rrose see Duchamp, Marcel Seven Arts, 8, 12, 82, 83–7, 88, 89, 98, 130 sexism, 39, 133, 181, 193–4; see also gender inequalities sexuality, 39, 56, 59, 104–6, 126, 145, 147, 149, 151, 166, 173, 178, 187, 189, 190–1, 201 Sheeler, Charles, 204 Sieburth, Richard, 51, 57, 58, 122 slavery, 125–6, 163, 184–5, 203–4 Slinkard, Rex, 107 Smith, Bernard, 187, 190 Smith, Justin H., 55 social credit theory, 121, 183 social realism, 142, 174, 195, 200 socialism, 29, 174 The Soil, 82, 87–9, 98, 102 Soja, Edward, 5, 12, 54, 99, 215n Southern United States, 40, 85–6, 148–9, 151–4, 155, 161, 163, 165, 169–70, 186, 187, 191, 203–4; see also agrarianism space see time and space; urban spaces Standard Oil Company, 117, 119–20, 120; see also Nujol Stearns, Harold, 83, 86 Stein, Gertrude, 8, 34, 48, 88, 197, 208

25/01/2013 15:53

Index Steinman, Lisa, 123–4 Stephens, Henry Charles, 46 Sterne, Thomas, 197 Stevens, Wallace, 8, 44, 45, 49, 88, 94, 105–7, 124, 136 Stieglitz, Alfred, 38, 81, 143, 144 Strater, Henry, 181 Strobel, Marion, 90 Surette, Leon, 122, 183 Survey Graphic, 141, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161–2, 162–3, 164–5, 167, 168, 169, 248n Swinburne, Algernon, 74, 143 symbolism, 121–2 Symons, Hi, 94 Tambour, 187 Taylor, Andrew, 3, 4 Taylor, Warren, 191 technology, 6, 12, 24, 111, 131, 136, 145, 149, 150, 167, 172, 177, 192, 193; see also rail transportation temporality see time and space Terrell, Carroll F., 199 Thacker, Andrew, 3, 15, 217n Thayer, Scofield, 96, 98, 109, 121, 129–30 This Quarter, 166 Three Mountains Press, 180, 181, 182 Thurman, Wallace, 141, 165, 166, 167, 172 Tice, Clara, 28, 32, 33, 34–5, 36 time and space, 4, 5, 51, 54, 56, 67, 68, 190 time-space compression, 6, 111, 116, 119, 123, 125, 137, 138–9, 141, 146, 237n Toomer, Jean and American identity, 141, 145, 146, 201–2 ‘Brown River Smile’, 201–2 and Gorham Munson, 245n and Survey Graphic, 155, 156, 162–3 ‘Theater’, 148–9

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 269

[ 269

and unanimisme, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153–4, 171 and Waldo Frank, 247n tourism, literary, 22, 23, 24, 48, 73, 74, 138 Trachtenberg, Alan, 40 transatlantic review, 174, 179, 180–1, 183, 186 transatlantic studies, 2, 3, 4 transcendentalism, 25, 56, 60 transition, 174, 176, 179–80, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 193 translocal poetics, 4–5, 7, 107 translocation, 3, 5, 48, 138, 159, 170 transnational literary studies, 3, 8–9, 215n transnationalism, 1, 10, 86, 87, 179 travel writing and the imagist problem of place of place and Ezra Pound, 51–60 and William Carlos Williams, 60–9 Trehearne, Brian, 145 troubadour poets, 51, 58, 59 Turgenev, Ivan, 87 Turner, Alva Nola, 92–3, 95, 96, 232n Tyler, Parker, 186–7, 192, 193–4 typographical environments, 13, 43, 44, 69–71, 73, 137, 159, 190 typography / typographic design, 14–15 in Blast, 69–74 in The Cantos, 181 in Contact, 100–2, 112, 113, 115, 136–7, 237–8n in Others, 26, 28, 30, 44, 45 in Pagany, 195–7, 196 in Rogue, 32, 35 in Survey Graphic, 155, 159, 162–3, 164 unanimisme, 135, 149–54, 158, 170, 171, 176, 177, 193, 202, 248n Untermeyer, Louis, 83, 130, 131–2, 143, 230n Urban League, 163

25/01/2013 15:53

270 ]

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

urban spaces American, 60, 63–4, 88, 150, 160–1, 163, 167, 169, 187 European, 54–5, 55, 56, 70, 73, 183 utopianism, 174, 176, 180, 181, 183, 201 Van Vechten, Carl, 167 Vlaminck, Maurice, 102 Vogue, 32, 219n vorticism, 38, 41, 88, 89, 173, 183, 227n and Ezra Pound, 50–60 and William Carlos Williams, 60–9 and Wyndham Lewis, 69–80 war poetry, 31–2, 34, 35, 36, 57, 58–9, 75–7, 78–9, 90–1 Watson, James Sibley, 96, 98, 121 Weaver, Mike, 66, 92 Wescott, Glenway, 136, 138 West Indians, 159–61, 162 West, Nathanael, 173, 203, 206 Whalan, Mark, 149, 151, 210 Wheeler, Monroe, 136 Wheelwright, John Brookes, 141 White, Walter F., 158, 161–2 Whitman, Walt, 81, 83, 84, 85, 89, 103, 244n Widen, Luther see Ney, Lew Williams, Rosalind, 150 Williams, William Carlos and American identity, 61, 128, 132, 134–5, 153, 154, 180, 183–5, 186 ‘The Attic Which Is Desire’, 192–3 and Blues, 188–9, 191, 192–3, 194 and Contact, 96–8, 99, 100, 102–3, 107, 108, 109, 136–8, 164, 202–3, 207, 208–9, 233n and Contact ‘Advertising Number’, 110, 111, 112, 115–20, 122–9

WHITE 9780748645213 PRINT.indd 270

critics of, 130, 131, 132–3, 134 and Ezra Pound, 2–3, 66, 67–8, 208 Kora in Hell: Improvisations, 68, 79, 92, 103, 112, 115, 124, 132–3, 134 and localist modernism, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 20, 81, 82, 92–3, 105, 107, 108, 115, 127, 144, 173, 215n, 249n and Marianne Moore, 43, 103, 104, 215n and Others, 20, 41, 42–3, 44, 48–9, 90, 91–5, 217n and Pagany, 194–5, 197, 199–200, 206–7 review of McAlmon’s The Portrait of a Generation, 178–9 and The Rutherford Republic, 116–17, 119 on The Soil, 89 ‘St.Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’, 110, 124–6, 127, 128 travel writing and the imagist problem of place of place, 50, 51, 60–9, 79 ‘The Wanderer: A Rococo Study’, 61, 63–5, 76, 132 Wilson, John, 62 Wilson, Rob, 4 Winters, Yvor, 145, 154 Wolff, Adolf, 94 Woodstock, 175 working classes see class issues World War I, impact of, 34, 75–6, 79, 87, 121; see also war poetry Wright, Willard Huntington, 87 Yeats, W.B., 140, 144, 181 Young, Kathleen Tankersley, 173, 187–8, 189–90, 191, 192, 193–4, 254n, 255n Zukofsky, Louis, 174, 181, 191–2, 208, 209, 251n

25/01/2013 15:53