THE LITTLE REVIEW
THE MAGAZINE THAT IS READ BY THOSE
WHO WRITE THE OTHERS
Margaret Anderson, Publisher
OCTOBER, 1917
Poems of Po Chu-I translated by Arthur Waley
Cantelman’s Spring-Mate Wyndham Lewis
Imaginary Letters, V. Ezra Pound
Exasperations Margaret Anderson
Improvisations William Carlos Williams
Editorial on Solicitous Doubt Ezra Pound
Style and American Literature Maxwell Bodenheim
Barbara Roscorla’s Child Arthur Symons
The Reader Critic
Announcements
Copyright, 1917, by Margaret Anderson.
MARGARET ANDERSON, Editor
EZRA POUND, Foreign Editor
24 WEST SIXTEENTH STREET, NEW YORK
15 cents a copy $1.50 a year
Entered as second-class matter at P. O., New York, N. Y.
THE LITTLE REVIEW
VOL. IV. OCTOBER 1917 No. 6.
POEMS OF PO CHU-I
(772-846 a. d.)
Translated by Arthur Waley
The Harper of Chao
The singers have hushed their notes of clear song;
The red sleeves of the dancers are motionless.
Hugging his lute, the old harper of Chao
Rocks and sways as he touches the five chords.
The loud notes swell and scatter abroad:
“Sa, sa”, like wind blowing the rain.
The soft notes dying almost to nothing:
“Ch’ieh, ch’ieh”, like the voice of ghosts talking.
Now as glad as the magpie’s lucky song:
Again bitter as the gibbon’s ominous cry.
His ten fingers have no fixed note;
Up and down—“_kung_”, “_chih_” and “_yu_”.[1]
And those who sit and listen to the tune he plays
Of soul and body lose the mastery.
And those who pass that way as he plays the tune
Suddenly stop and cannot raise their feet.
Alas, alas that the ears of common men
Should love the modern and not love the old!
Thus it is that the harp in the green window
Day by day is covered deeper with dust.
On the Way to Hangchow: Anchored on the River at Night
Little sleeping and much grieving, the traveller
Rises at midnight and looks back toward home.
The sands are bright with moonlight that joins the shores;
The sail is white with dew that has covered the boat.
Nearing the sea, the river grows broader and broader:
Approaching autumn, the nights longer and longer
Thirty times we have slept amid mists and waves,
And still we have not reached Hangchow!
Immortality
Boundless, the great sea!
Straight down,—no bottom: sideways,—no border.
Of cloudy waves and misty billows down in the uttermost depths
Men have fabled, in the midst there stand three sacred hills.
On the hills thick growing,—herbs that banish death.
Wings grow on those who eat them and they turn into heavenly _hsien_.
The Lord of Ch’in[2] and Wu of Han[3] believed in these stories;
And magic-workers year by year were sent to gather the herbs.
The Blessed Islands, now and of old, what but an empty tale?
The misty waters spread before them and they knew not where to seek.
Boundless, the great sea!
Dauntless, the mighty wind!
Their eyes search but cannot see the shores of the Blessed Islands.
They cannot find the Blessed Isles and yet they dare not go back;
Youths and maidens that began the quest grew gray on board the boat.
They found that the writings of Hsü Fu were all boasts and lies;
To the Great Unity and Lofty Principle they had raised their prayers in
vain.
Do you not see
The graves on the top of Black Horse Hill and the tombs at Mo-ling?[4]
What is left but the sighing wind blowing in the tangled grass?
Yes, and what is more,
The Dark and Primal Master of Sagas in his five thousand words
Never spoke of herbs: never spoke of _hsien_,
Nor spoke of climbing in broad daylight up to the blue of heaven.
The Two Red Towers
(A Satire Against Clericalism)
The Two Red Towers
North and South rise facing each other.
I beg to ask, to whom do they belong?
To the two princes of the period Cheng Yüan.[5]
The two princes blew on their flutes and drew down fairies from the sky;
Who carried them off through the Five Clouds, soaring away to Heaven.
Their halls and houses, that they could not take with them,
Were turned into Temples, planted in the Dust of the World.
In the tiring-rooms and dancers’ towers all is silent and still;
Only the willows like dancers’ arms, and the pond like a mirror.
At twilight when the flowers are falling, when things are sad and
hushed,
One does not hear songs and flutes, but only chimes and bells.
The Imperial Patent on the Temple doors is written in letters of gold;
For nuns’ quarters and monks’ cells ample space is allowed.
For green moss and bright moonlight—plenty of room provided;
In a hovel opposite is a sick man who has hardly room to lie down!
I remember once when at P’ing-yang they were building a great man’s
house:
How it swallowed up the housing space of thousands of ordinary men.
The Immortals[6] are leaving us, two by two, and their houses are turned
into Temples;
I begin to fear that the whole world will become a vast convent!
On Board Ship: Reading Yuan Chen’s Poems
I take your poems in my hand and read them beside the candle;
The poems are finished: the candle is low: dawn not yet come.
With sore eyes by the guttering candle still I sit in the dark,
Listening to the waves that strike the ship driven by a head-wind.
Arriving at Hsün-Yang[7]
A bend of the river brings into view two triumphal arches;
This is the gate in the western wall of the suburbs of Hsün-yang.
I have still to travel in my solitary boat three or four leagues—
By misty waters and rainy sands, while the yellow dusk thickens.
We are almost come to Hsün-yang; how my thoughts are stirred
As we pass to the south of Yü-liang’s Tower and the east of P’en port.
The forest trees are leafless and withered,—after the mountain rain;
The roofs of the houses are hidden low among the river mists.
The horses, fed on water-grass, are too weak to carry their load;
The cottage walls of wattle and thatch let the wind blow on one’s bed.
In the distance I see red-wheeled coaches driving from the town-gate;
They have taken the trouble, these civil people to meet their new
Prefect!
After Getting Drunk, Becoming Sober in the Night
Our party scattered at yellow dusk and I came home to bed;
I woke at midnight and went for a walk, leaning heavily on a friend.
As I lay on my pillow my vinous complexion, soothed by sleep, grew
sober;
In front of the tower the ocean moon, accompanying the tide, had risen.
The swallows, about to return to the beams, went back to roost again;
The candle at my window, just going out, suddenly revived its light.
All the time till dawn came, still my thoughts were muddled;
And in my ears something sounded like the music of flutes and strings.
Last Poem
They have put my bed beside this unpainted screen;
They have shifted my stove in front of the blue curtain.
I listen to my grandchildren reading to me from a book;
I watch the servants heating up the soup.
I move my pencil, answering the poems of friends;
I feel in my pockets and pull out the medicine money.
When this superintendance of trifling affairs is done
I lie back on my pillows and sleep with my face to the South.
----------
[1] Notes of the scale.
[2] The ‘First Emperor’, B. C. 259-210.
[3] The Emperor Wu, B. C. 156-87.
[4] The burial places of these two Emperors.
[5] 785-805 A. D.
[6] The Emperor’s relatives.
[7] He was banished to this place in 815 with the rank of
Sub-prefect.
CANTELMAN’S SPRING-MATE
Wyndham Lewis
Cantelman walked in the strenuous fields, steam rising from them as
though from an exertion, dissecting the daisies specked in the small
wood, the primroses on the banks, the marshy lakes, and all God’s
creatures. The heat of a heavy premature Summer was cooking the little
narrow belt of earth-air, causing everything innocently to burst its
skin, bask abjectly and profoundly. Everything was enchanted with itself
and with everything else. The horses considered the mares immensely
appetising masses of quivering shiny flesh: was there not something of
“je ne sais quoi” about a mare, that no other beast’s better half
possessed? The birds with their little gnarled feet, and beaks made for
fishing worms out of the mould, or the river, would have considered
Shelley’s references to the skylark—or any other poet’s paeans to their
species—as lamentably inadequate to describe the beauty of birds! The
female bird, for her particular part, reflected that, in spite of the
ineptitude of her sweetheart’s latest song, which he insisted on
deafening her with, never seemed to tire of, and was so persuaded that
she liked as much as he did himself, and although outwardly she remained
strictly critical and vicious: that all the same and nevertheless,
chock, chock, peep, peep, he was a fluffy object from which certain
satisfaction could be derived! And both the male and the female
reflected together as they stood a foot or so apart looking at each
other with one eye, and at the landscape with the other, that of all
nourishment the red earthworm was the juiciest and sweetest! The sow, as
she watched her hog, with his splenetic energy, and guttural
articulation, a sound between content and complaint, not noticing the
untidy habits of both of them, gave a sharp grunt of sex-hunger, and
jerked rapidly towards him. The only jarring note in this vast mutual
admiration society was the fact that many of its members showed their
fondness for their neighbour in an embarrassing way: that is they killed
and ate them. But the weaker were so used to dying violent deaths and
being eaten that they worried very little about it.=The West was gushing
up a harmless volcano of fire, obviously intended as an immense dreamy
nightcap.
Cantelman in the midst of his cogitation on surrounding life, surprised
his faithless and unfriendly brain in the act of turning over an object
which humiliated his meditation. He found that he was wondering whether
at his return through the village lying between him and the Camp, he
would see the girl he had passed there three hours before. At that time
he had not begun his philosophizing, and without interference from
conscience, he had noticed the redness of her cheeks, the animal fulness
of the child-bearing hips, with an eye as innocent as the bird or the
beast. He laughed without shame or pleasure, lit his pipe and turned
back towards the village.=His fieldboots were covered with dust: his
head was wet with perspiration and he carried his cap, in unmilitary
fashion, in his hand. In a week he was leaving for the Front, for the
first time. So his thoughts and sensations all had, as a philosophic
background, the prospect of death. The Infantry, and his commission,
implied death or mutilation unless he were very lucky. He had not a high
opinion of his luck. He was pretty miserable at the thought, in a
deliberate, unemotional way. But as he realised this he again laughed, a
similar sound to that that the girl had caused.=For what was he unhappy
about? He wanted to remain amongst his fellow insects and beasts, which
were so beautiful, did he then: Well well! On the other hand, who was it
that told him to do anything else? After all, supposing the values they
attached to each other of “beautiful”, “interesting”, “divine”, were
unjustified in many cases on cooler observation:—nevertheless birds
_were_ more beautiful than pigs: and if pigs were absurd and ugly,
rather than handsome, and possibly chivalrous, as they imagined
themselves; then equally the odour of the violet was pleasant, and there
was nothing offensive about most trees. The newspapers were the things
that stank most on earth, and human beings anywhere were the most ugly
and offensive of the brutes because of the confusion caused by their
consciousness. Had it not been for that unmaterial gift that some
bungling or wild hand had bestowed, our sisters and brothers would be no
worse than dogs and sheep. That they could not reconcile their little
meagre stream of sublimity with the needs of animal life should not be
railed at. Well then, should not the sad human amalgam, all it did, all
it willed, all it demanded, be thrown over, for the fake and confusion
that it was, and should not such as possessed a greater quantity of that
wine of reason, retire, metaphorically, to the wilderness, and sit
forever in a formal and gentle elation, refusing to be disturbed?=Should
such allow himself to be disturbed by the quarrels of jews, the
desperate perplexities, resulting in desperate dice throws, of
politicians, the crack-jaw and unreasoning tumult?
On the other hand, Cantelman had a little more human, as well as a
little more divine, than those usually on his left and right, and he had
had, not so long ago, conspicuous hopes that such a conjuncture might
produce a new human chemistry. But he must repudiate the human entirely,
if that were to be brought off. His present occupation, the trampling
boots upon his feet, the belt that crossed his back and breast, was his
sacrifice, his compliment to, the animal.
He then began dissecting his laugh, comparing it to the pig’s grunt and
the bird’s cough. He laughed again several times in order to listen to
it.
At the village he met the girl, this time with a second girl. He stared
at her “in such a funny way” that she laughed. He once more laughed, the
same sound as before, and bid her good evening. She immediately became
civil. Enquiries about the village, and the best way back to camp across
the marsh, put in as nimble and at the same time rustic a form as he
could contrive, lay the first tentative brick of what might become the
dwelling of a friend, a sweetheart, a ghost, anything in the absurd
world! He asked her to come and show him a short cut she had indicated.
“I _couldn’t_! My mother’s waiting for _me_!” in a rush of expostulation
and semi-affected alarm. However, she concluded, in a minute or two,
that she could.
He wished that she had been some Anne Garland, the lady whose lips were
always flying open like a door with a defective latch. He had made
Anne’s acquaintance under distressing circumstances.
On his arrival at Gideon brook, the mighty brand-new camp on the edge of
the marsh, he found that his colleague in charge of the advance party
had got him a bed-space in a room with four officers of another
regiment. It had seemed impossible that there were any duller men than
those in the mess of his particular battalion: but it was a dullness he
had become accustomed to.
He saw his four new companions with a sinking of the heart, and steady
gnawing anger at such concentration of furious foolishness.
Cantelman did not know their names, and he hated them in order as
follows:
A. he hated because he found him a sturdy, shortish young man with a
bull-like stoop and energetic rush in his walk, with flat feet spread
out to left to right, and slightly bowed legs. This physique was
enhanced by his leggings: and not improved, though hidden, in his
slacks. He had a swarthy and vivacious face, with a sort of semitic
cunning and insolence painted on it. His cheeks had a broad carmine
flush on general sallowness. The mind painted on this face for the
perusal of whoever had the art of such lettering, was as vulgar stuff,
in Cantelman’s judgement, as could be found. To _see_ this face
constantly was like _hearing_ perpetually a cheap and foolish music. A.
was an officer, but naturally not a gentleman.
B. he disliked, because, being lean and fresh-coloured, with glasses, he
stank, to Cantelman’s peculiar nose, of Jack London, Summer Numbers of
magazines, bad flabby Suburban Tennis, flabby clerkship in inert, though
still prosperous, city offices. He brought a demoralizing dullness into
the room with him, with a brisk punctiliousness, several inches higher
from the ground than A.
C. he resented for the sullen stupidity with which he moved about, the
fat having settled at the bottom of his cheeks, and pulled the corners
of his mouth down, from sheer stagnation. His accent dragged the
listener through the larger slums of Scotland, harrowing him with the
bestial cheerlessness of morose religion and poverty. The man was
certainly, from every point of view, social prestige, character,
intelligence, far less suited to hold a commission than most of the
privates in his platoon.
D. reproduced the characteristics of the other three, in different
quantities: his only personal contribution being a senile sing-song
voice, from the North, and a blond beam, or partially toothless grin,
for a face.
This was the society into the midst of which Cantelman had been dropped
on his arrival at Gideon brook, ten days previous to this. They had all
looked up, (for it was always _all_, they having the inseparability of
their kind) with friendly welcome, as brother officers should. He
avoided their eyes, and sat amongst them for a few days, reading the
_Trumpet-Major_, belonging to B. He had even seemed to snatch Hardy away
from B. as though B. had no business to possess such books. Then they
avoided his eye as though an animal disguised as an officer and
gentleman like themselves had got into their room, for whom, therein,
the _Trumpet-Major_ and nothing else exercised fascination. He came
among them suddenly, and not appearing to see them, settled down into a
morbid intercourse with a romantic abstraction. The Trumpet-Major, it is
true, was a soldier, that is why he was there. But he was an imaginary
one, and imbedded in the passionate affairs of the village of a
mock-county, and distant time. Cantelman bit the flesh at the side of
his thumbs, as he surveyed the Yeomanry Cavalry revelling in the absent
farmer’s house, and the infantile Farnese Hercules, with the
boastfulness of the Red, explaining to his military companions the
condescensions of his infatuation. Anne Garland stood in the moonlight,
and Loveday hesitated to reveal his rival, weighing a rough chivalry
against self-interest.
Cantelman eventually decamped with the _Trumpet-Major_, taking him
across to Havre, and B. never saw his book again. Cantelman had also
tried to take a book away from A. (a book incompatible with A’s vulgar
physique). But A. had snatched it back, and mounted guard surlily and
cunningly over it.
In his present rustic encounter, then, he was influenced in his feelings
towards his first shepherdess by memories of Wessex heroines, and the
something more that being the daughter of a landscape-painter would
give. Anne, imbued with the delicacy of the Mill, filled his mind to the
injury of this crude marsh-plant. But he had his programme. Since he was
forced back, by his logic and body, among the madness of natural things,
he would live up to his part.
The young woman had, or had given herself, the unlikely name of Stella.
In the narrow road where they got away from the village, Cantelman put
his arm around Stella’s waist and immediately experienced all the
sensations that he had been divining in the creatures around him; the
horse, the bird and the pig. The way in which Stella’s hips stood out,
the solid blood-heated expanse on which his hand lay, had the amplitude
and flatness of a mare. Her lips had at once no practical significance,
but only the aesthetic blandishment of a bull-like flower. With the
gesture of a fabulous Faust he drew her against him, and kissed her with
a crafty gentleness.
Cantelman turned up that evening in his quarters in a state of baffling
good-humour. He took up the _Trumpet-Major_ and was soon surrounded by
the breathing and scratching of his roommates, reading and writing. He
chuckled somewhere where Hardy was funny. At this human noise the others
fixed their eyes on him in sour alarm. He gave another, this time
gratuitous, chuckle. They returned with disgust at his habits, his
peculiarity, to what he considered their maid-servant’s fiction and
correspondence. Oh Christ, what abysms! Oh Christ, what abysms!
Cantelman shook noisily in the wicker chair like a dog or a fly-blown
old gentleman.
Once more on the following evening he was out in the fields, and once
more his thoughts were engaged in recapitulations.=The miraculous
camouflage of Nature did not deceive this observer. He saw everywhere
the gun-pits and the “nests of death”. Each puff of green leaves he knew
was in some way as harmful as the burst of a shell. Decay and ruins, it
is true, were soon covered up, but there was yet that parallel, and the
sight of things smashed and corruption. In the factory town ten miles
away to the right, whose smoke could be seen, life was just as dangerous
for the poor, and as uncomfortable, as for the soldier in his trench.
The hypocrisy of Nature and the hypocrisy of War were the same. The only
safety in life was for the man with the soft job. But that fellow was
not conforming to life’s conditions. He was life’s paid man, and had the
mark of the sneak. He was making too much of life, and too much out of
it. He, Cantelman, did not want to owe anything to life, or enter into
league or understanding with her! The thing was either to go out of
existence: or, failing that, remain in it unreconciled, indifferent to
Nature’s threat, consorting openly with her enemies, making a war within
her war upon her servants. In short, the spectacle of the handsome
English spring produced nothing but ideas of defiance in Cantelman’s
mind.
As to Stella, she was a sort of Whizbang. With a treachery worthy of a
Hun, Nature tempted him towards her. He was drugged with delicious
appetites. Very well! He would hoist the unseen power with his own
petard. He would throw back Stella where she was discharged from (if it
were allowable, now, to change her into a bomb) first having relieved
himself of this humiliating gnawing and yearning in his blood.
As to Stella, considered as an unconscious agent, all women were
contaminated with Nature’s hostile power and might be treated as spies
or enemies. The only time they could be trusted, or were likely to stand
up to Nature and show their teeth, was as mothers. So he approached
Stella with as much falsity as he could master.
At their third meeting he brought her a ring. Her melting gratitude was
immediately ligotted with long arms, full of the contradictory and
offending fire of the spring. On the warm earth consent flowed up into
her body from all the veins of the landscape. The nightingale sang
ceaselessly in the small wood at the top of the field where they lay. He
grinned up towards it, and once more turned to the devouring of his
mate. He felt that he was raiding the bowels of Nature: not fecundating
the Aspasias of our flimsy flesh, or assuaging, or competing with, the
nightingale. Cantelman was proud that he could remain deliberate and
aloof, and gaze bravely, like a minute insect, up at the immense and
melancholy night, with all its mad nightingales, piously folded small
brown wings in a million nests, night-working stars, and misty useless
watchmen. They got up at last: she went furtively back to her home.
Cantelman on his way to camp had a smile of severe satisfaction on his
face. It did not occur to him that his action might be supremely
unimportant as far as Stella was concerned. He had not even asked
himself if, had he not been there that night, someone else might or
might not have been there in his place. He was also convinced that the
laurels were his, and that Nature had come off badly. He was still
convinced of this when he received six weeks afterwards, in France, a
long appeal from Stella, telling him that she was going to have a child.
She received no answer to that nor any subsequent letter. They came to
Cantelman with great regularity in the trenches; he read them all
through from beginning to end, without comment of any sort. And when he
beat a German’s brains out, it was with the same impartial malignity
that he had displayed in the English night with his Spring-mate. Only he
considered there too that he was in some way outwitting Nature; he had
no adequate realization of the extent to which, evidently, the death of
a Hun was to the advantage of the animal world.
IMAGINARY LETTERS
V
(Walter Villerant to Mrs. Bland Burn)
Ezra Pound
My Dear Lydia:
Russians! No. William is _matto_ over his Russians. They are all in the
beginning of _Fumée_—all the Russians. Turgenev has done it: a vaporous,
circumambient ideologue, inefficient, fundamentally and katachrestically
and unendingly futile set of barbarians. Old Goff says of savages: “I
like savages. They do nothing that is of the least use, they do nothing
the least intelligent, they do nothing of the least interest. They are
bored. They have ceremonies. The malice of boredom: the medicine man
makes them dance in a ring for hours in order to _degust_ their
stupidity, _per assagiarlo_, to bask in the spectacle of a vacuity worse
than his own.”
I mistrust this liking for Russians; having passed years in one
barbarous country I can not be expected to take interest in another. All
that is worth anything is the product of metropoles. Swill out these
nationalist movements. Ireland is a suburb of Liverpool. And Russia! The
aged Findell comes back in ecstasy, saying “It is just like America.”
That also bores me. They say Frankfurt-am-Main is just like America.
Paris is not like America. London is not like America. Venice is not
like America. Perugia is not like America. _They are not the least like
each other._ No place where the dew of civilization has fallen is “just
like” anywhere else. Verona and Pavia are different. Poictiers is
different. Arles is a place to itself.
Dostoevsky takes seven chapters to finish with an imbecile’s worries
about a boil on the end of his nose. Dostoevsky is an eminent writer.
Let us thank the gods he existed. I do not read Dostoevsky. Several
young writers have impressed me as men of genius, by reason of tricks
and qualities borrowed from Dostoevsky. At length when the craze is
over, I shall have to read Dostoevsky. And so on.... I have also read
Samuel Butler. And Poetry? As the eminently cultured female, Elis writes
me that her little cousin will have nothing to do with it. Rubbish! Her
little cousin will read Li Po, and listen to the rondels of Froissart. I
know, for I tried her.
Elis has imbibed a complete catalogue, with dates, names of authors,
chief works, “influence” of A, B, C, on M, N, O, etc., etc., with
biographies of the writers, and “periods”. Buncomb! Her cousin, who
knows “nothing at all”, is ten times better educated. No? She “doesn’t
like poetry”. _Anglice_: she doesn’t like Swinburne. It is not the least
the same thing. And she is worried by most of Dowson, etc.
Elis appeals to me as possessing “manner” or “prestige”, i. e.
professorial aspects, to coerce the rebellious infant.
She says I used to read Swinburne “so splendidly”. Damn it all! I
believe this to be true. The “first fine”, etc. “The hounds of swat are
on the wobbles wip wop”. Magnificent sound. Now as a matter of fact I
tried to read A. C. S. to the small cousin and broke down lamentably.
The constant influx of “wrong words” put me out of it altogether.
And Browning is full of jejune remarks about God. And only parts of
Landor are left us. And Elis says the girl will be no use to me
whatsoever. (Neither she may, perhaps. But who is any use to me? Hackett
I see once a month in a state of exhaustion, i. e. H. in a state of
exhaustion). He makes two negative but intelligent remarks, and departs
before the conversation develops. Your spouse is afar from us both. We
are surrounded by live stock.
I enjoy certain animal contacts ... without malice. I have a “nice
disposition”. I pat them like so many retrievers ... _ebbene?_ I live as
a man among herds ... for which I have a considerate, or at least
considerable, if misplaced, affection. “Herds” is possibly a misnomer. A
litter of pups that amuses me. I am not prey to William’s hostilities
... save that I dislike ill-natured animals.
As for poetry: : : how the devil _can_ anyone like it ... given, I mean,
the sort of thing usually purveyed under that label?
The girl asked me the only sane question I have ever had asked me about
it.
“But is there no one like Bach? No one where one can get all of it?”
That staves in my stratified culture.
The Odyssey? But she does not—naturally, she does not read greek. She is
“wholly uneducated”. That is to say I find her reading Voltaire and
Henry James with placidity.
And Dante? But she does not read italian. Nor latin. And besides, Dante!
One needs a whole apparatus criticus to sift out his good from his bad;
the appalling syntax from the magnificence of the passion. Miss Mitford
said “Dante is gothic.” Out of the mouths of prudes and imbeciles!
Gothic, involved, and magnificent, and a master of nearly all forms of
expression. And what, pray, is one to reply to a person who after having
read _Maison Tellier_, refuses to stand “The fifth chariot of the pole,
already upturning, when I who had etc., ... turning as Pyramus whom when
the mulberry had been tasted ... not otherwise than as etc.” The
quotation is inexact, but I can not be expected to carry english
translations of Dante about with me in a suit case. Dante is a sealed
book to our virgin, and likewise Catullus, and Villon is difficult
french ... and Sappho ... perhaps a little Swinburnian? _Ille mi par
esse_ ... is possibly better than the Aeolic original; harder in
outline. (If this bores you, give it to Elis). Chaucer writes in a
forgotten language. One must read earlier authors first if one is to run
through him with ease as with pleasure. What the devil is left us? What
argument for a person too sincere to give way to the current mania for
assenting to culture? The fanaticism of certain people who believe they
ought to “read poetry” and “be acquainted with” art. A person, I mean,
who has taken naturally to good prose; who is so little concerned with
appearing educated that she does not know whether Shelley is a dead poet
or still living, ditto, Keats. It is quite oriental. Ramdath told me a
tale from the Mahabharata, but it was only when I found it in the
Mahabharata that I discovered it had not happened to Ramdath’s
grandpapa. If people would forget a bit more, we might have a real love
of poetry. Imagine on what delightful terms the living would compete
with their forbears if the doriphory of death were once, for even a week
or so, removed from the “brows” or “works” of the “standard” authors. No
more Job and Stock’s “Works of the Poets”, series including Mrs. Hemans,
Proctor and Cowper 7/6, 5/, 2/6, hymn-book padded leather with gilding,
real cloth _with_ gilding, plain covers. The great Victorian age has
done even better. Culture, utility!! I found in lodgings a tin
biscuit-box, an adornment. It represented a bundle of books, of equal
size, bound in leather, a series, the spiritual legacy of an era,
education, popularity. The titles of the tin books were as follows:
History of England.
Pilgrim’s Progress.
Burns.
Pickwick Papers.
Robinson Crusoe.
Gulliver’s Travels.
Self-Help.
Shakespeare.
Is it any wonder we have Gosse cautioning us against De Maupassant’s
account of Swinburne, and saying that De M’s unbridled fancy gave great
offence when it reached the recluse at Putney. Or dribbling, i. e. Gosse
dribbling along about “events at the Art Club which were _widely
discussed at the time_” (italics mine) when he might have said simply
“Algernon got drunk and stove in all the hats in the cloak-room”.
Yours,
WALTER VILLERANT.
EXASPERATIONS
Margaret Anderson
Carl Van Vechten has an article about Mary Garden in _The Bellman_ which
he prefaces with the aesthetic discovery that in her art Mary Garden
leaves nothing to accident. Oh subtle critical mind!... Mr. Van Vechten
should write art notes for _The New York Times_,—which I believe he has
done. I remember once, in a discussion on music, I asked him furiously
whether he knew anything about the subject, only to learn that he had
been a _Times_ music critic for years—which is quite as it should be.
* * * * *
I understand that _The Seven Arts_ is about to suspend publication
because of the withdrawal of its chief patron, Mrs. Rankine, on account
of an irreconcilable disagreement between her and the editorial body
concerning a war policy. There are intelligent people, I hear, who are
prepared to defend her action. But there is no conceivably intelligent
defense for such an action. It is simply another case of the proverbial
and astounding American “nerve”. In the case of a magazine of the Arts
it is a truly colossal nerve. How dare Mrs. Rankine or any other patron
take the responsibility of the several thousand readers who subscribed
to _The Seven Arts_ because they wished to read what its editors had to
say? Whether they agreed or not with what was said has nothing to do
with it. It is even conceivable that some of them may have enjoyed
reading what they did not agree with, or that some of them (ghastly but
possible) approved of the _Seven Arts_ attitude toward the war. Only one
thing is certain: that none of those subscribers read the magazine
because of anything Mrs. Rankine contributed to its pages.
But a certain type of American mind is capable of anything. This moral
nation is now facing the issue of prohibition. If the prohibitionists
are successful great vineyards in California will be burned. To burn a
vineyard!—is it conceivable? A vineyard is a beautiful thing....
* * * * *
For months, everywhere I have looked for life I have found death—except
in two cases: once in the instance of death itself, and once in the
spectacle of an old woman.
The first was an “absurd and unmerited exile,” impossible to bear; and
it gave me forever, though I could not be there, the picture of a woman
with a high thin nose lying in a coffin,—part of that beauty which alone
is indestructible. The second was Sarah Bernhardt in an act of
_Camille_,—a thing immortal beyond any words that I can find.
IMPROVISATIONS
William Carlos Williams
I
Fools have big wombs. For the rest?—here is pennyroyal if one knows to
use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little
further: if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring
mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.
II
For what it’s worth: Jacob Louslinger, white haired, stinking, dirty
bearded, cross eyed, stammer tongued, broken voiced, bent backed, ball
kneed, cave bellied, mucous faced—deathling,—found lying in the weeds
“up there by the cemetery”. “Looks to me as if he’d been bumming around
the meadows for a couple of weeks”. Shoes twisted into incredible
lilies: out at toes, heels, tops, sides, soles. Meadow flower! ha,
mallow! at last I have you. (Rot dead marigolds—an acre at a time! Gold,
are you?) Ha, clouds will touch world’s edge and the great pink mallow
stand singly in the wet, topping reeds and—a closet full of clothes and
good shoes and my-thirty-year’s- master’s- daughter’s two cows for me to
care for and a winter room with a fire in it—. I would rather feed pigs
in Moonachie and chew calamus root and break crab’s claws at an open
fire: age’s lust loose!
III
Talk as you will, say: “No woman wants to bother with children in this
country”;—speak of your Amsterdam and the whitest aprons and brightest
door-knobs in Christendom. And I’ll answer you: “Gleaming door-knobs and
scrubbed entries have heard the songs of the housemaids at sun-up
and—housemaids are wishes. Whose? Ha! the dark canals are whistling,
whistling for who will cross to the other side. If I remain with hands
in pocket leaning upon my lamp-post—why,—I bring curses to a hag’s lips
and her daughter on her arm knows better than I can tell you; best to
blush and out with it than back beaten after.
EDITORIAL ON SOLICITOUS DOUBT
Ezra Pound
Various people have expressed certain doubts as to whether ... The
Little Review ... etc....
Good people, be at rest: the price of The Little Review will never be
raised for present subscribers or for those who subscribe before January
1, 1918. After that we can make no promises. The quality will not
decline; if we give “twice as much of it” the new readers will have to
pay more. If we had given you only Mr. Yeats’s fourteen poems we would
already have given you more literature than is to be found in the “four
big” magazines since the beginning of our present volume.
Next month you will have a whole play by Lady Gregory. Mr. Lewis, after
having been in some heavy fighting is now in hospital, and that leisure
has made sure the supply of his prose for some time. I have now at my
elbow the first eighty-eight pages of the best book Ford Madox Hueffer
has written. Why “the best book”? Five years ago Mr. Hueffer read me
this manuscript, an unfinished work for which there was presumably “no
market”. I read the typescript which was brought me last evening; so
familiar is the text that I can scarcely convince myself that it is five
years since I heard the even voice of the author pronouncing it. I do
not think my memory is particularly good, I think there must be some
quality in a man’s style and matter if it is to stay fresh in another
man’s mind for so long. Mr. Hueffer’s Women and Men will run in The
Little Review from January 1918 to May 1919 inclusive, unless interfered
with by force majeur. Perhaps it is not his best book.
Lest there be any confusion about Olivers, Madoxes, Madox Browns,
Francis Hueffers, etc. Ford Madox Hueffer is the author of various
novels, and of The Heart of the Country, The Soul of London, Ancient
Lights, Collected Poems, of On Heaven, the first successful long poem in
English vers libre, after Whitman. This poem appeared in Poetry for June
1914, and has certainly as much claim to permanence as, say, Meredith’s
Love in the Valley.
Beside his own achievement, Mr. Hueffer has done one definite service to
English letters. This service is unquestioned, and recognition of it
does not rest upon any personal liking or disliking of Mr. Hueffer’s
doctrines of writing. In 1908 he founded The English Review; for a year
and a half he edited that magazine and during that time he printed work
not only by the great men of letters, Anatole France, Thomas Hardy,
Swinburne, Henry James, not only by men of public reputation like Wells,
and Conrad and Bennett, but also by about all the younger men who have
since made good. For example by Lewis (in 1909), and by other now
well-known young men who have both made good and declined since that
date. His editorship of the review marks a very definite period; at the
end of it, as its glory was literary, not commercial, it was bought by
certain jews, who thought Mr. Hueffer a damn fool (possibly because of
his devotion to literature), and who gave the editorship into other
hands. Comparison of current numbers of The English Review with the
first numbers issued from 84 Holland Park Avenue, will give any thinking
person all the data he wants in deciding between the folly of Hueffer
and the folly of manufacturing, political hebrews. In fact, if a crime
against literature could bring any shame upon that class of person, this
family would go into penitence, which needless to say they will not. But
the careful historian of literature will record and remember their
shame. The files of the review being stored in the British Museum, the
data will continue available. There will be no faking the records.
The Little Review is now the first effort to do comparatively what The
English Review did during its first year and a half: that is, to
maintain the rights and position of literature, I do not say in contempt
of the public, but in spite of the curious system of trade and traders
which has grown up with the purpose or result of interposing itself
between literature and the public.
We act in spite of the public’s utter impotence to get good literature
for itself, and in despite of the efforts of the “trade” to satiate the
public with a substitute, to still their appetite for literature by
providing them, at a cheaper rate and more conveniently, with a
swallowable substitute.
Whereanent a very successful journalist has said to me: We, i. e. we
journalists, are like mediums. People go to a spiritist séance and hear
what they want to hear. It is the same with a leading article: we write
so that the reader will find what he wants to find.
That is the root of the matter; there is good journalism and bad
journalism, and journalism that “looks” like “literature” and literature
etc....
But the root of the difference is that in journalism the reader finds
what he is looking for, what he, the reader wants; whereas in literature
he must find at least a part of what the author intended.
That is why “the first impression of a work of genius” is “nearly always
disagreeable”, at least to the “average man”. The public loathe the
violence done to their self-conceit whenever an author conveys to them
an idea that is his, not their own.
This difference is lasting and profound. Even in the vaguest of poetry,
or the vaguest music, where in a sense the receiver may, or must, make
half the beauty he is to receive, there is always something of the
author or composer which must be transmitted.
In journalism, or the “bad art” which is but journalism thinly
disguised, there is no such strain on the public.
I am now at the end of my space. Of Remy de Gourmont’s feeling toward
such a magazine as we are now making I will write in the December
number.
STYLE AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
Maxwell Bodenheim
American literature is divided into three plaintive continents: clear
cold psychological data; sentimental unbeautiful lying; and social
propaganda. The first is a photograph; the second, a pretty vase; and
the third, a decorated sledge-hammer.
The American Writer earnestly strives to accomplish something; he starts
out with a fixed and lofty objective which ranges from a “portrayal of
the soul of the masses” and an exposure of the iniquities of the present
social system, to “an unfolding of the poetry that lies in simple
people”. He seizes upon ideas that have been current coin in Europe for
the past century, writes them much worse than they were originally
written, and is hailed as a genius. His characters are marvels of
realism—stop any milkman on the corner and he will talk exactly as
Dreiser’s Witla talks, and act just as ordinary human beings in the
“Arcadia Residence Hotel” or Winklehofer’s Alley would act. He writes on
the theory that human beings lack eyes and cannot see the conditions
about them, but must be carefully told in lengths of four hundred pages
that a grafting politician is looting a city, that a man can immerse
himself in moneymaking and lose his soul, that working-people are
unjustly treated, that women are asserting their economic independence,
and that society people drink and have gossamer-morals. If he is
striving to educate people who are inclined to argue pro and con about
these subtle matters, he could become a far more effective elementary
teacher by compiling with his fellow-writers an encyclopedia which could
be printed in serial form, or by having his work made into text books
for schools and colleges. Since his aim is really the spreading of
information about human beings, descriptive and psychological, his prose
style is always simple, strong and clear, as the phrase goes, and he
leaves imagination and beautiful word-mosaics to weak-kneed poets, who
believe in making lyrical, elaborate lies about human beings and life in
a desperate effort to escape the simple, strong and clear nightmares of
conditions and sights about them. But what am I saying? Modern American
poets have also become realistic in a different way. It has become a
rigid shibboleth among American poets of the present day, that writing
about a rose or a sunset inevitably proves that a man is a minor poet,
and that steam-cranes, shoe-string peddlars, farm-hands, the Panama
Canal, ice-wagon drivers and machinists are the only fit subjects for a
spirited poet. And so the most sincere of the present landslide of
American poets write about these subjects in a bold and true manner,
providing a sort of unadorned kindergarten which your soul is supposed
to attend. And the least sincere among them sing of realistic sights,
but seem a little ashamed of their content, hiding it with
picture-puzzle styles, which you piece together only to discover that
they lead to very simple meanings.
Then there is another class of contemporary American poets, who strive
hard to achieve subtle meanings, not realizing that only literary style
is subtle, and that meanings are all on about the same intangible level.
These poets write poems that seem experiments in differential calculus,
until you suddenly discover that they are in reality many simple
concepts mixed in a temporarily baffling fashion. In their plaintive
search for originality of thought and emotion American writers achieve
only twisted echoes of old-world literature, for the simple reason that
outside of scientific research and pure philosophy ideas are eunuchs
drained by centuries, and dressed in variations of old costumes. Any
modern writer with a little research can discover that some old Hindoo
or Chinaman or European said exactly what he is saying, and in a far
more imaginative and beautiful way. But literary style alone remains a
comparatively untouched region, because the great majority of writers,
since the beginning of the Christian era, have always been clutched by
some great burning message which they fancied the world needed or by
some new situation in which human beings would act differently than they
ever before acted, or by some important moral that required hundreds of
pages for illustration. When they abandoned these important kingships it
was either to lose themselves in aimless tears, to become vaguely
exuberant, or to shrewdly analyze the mob-desires of their days and
settle down to careful entertaining. In all of these aims, literary
style became chief-cook-and-bottle-washer—an obedient servant, who was
thoroughly whipped if he ever became rebellious, and achieved moments of
sheer word-beauty, which failed to illuminate the aim of the writer, or
which momentarily crystalized the writer’s formless rhapsodies.
Therefore absolutely new and beautiful word-designs are possible, since
words alone, unconnected with great messages or sentimental
self-portrayals, have been practically ignored by writers of the
Christian Era.
When American writers become thoroughly decadent, and are not ashamed to
frolic ardently with words, writing in a passionate surge in which
imagination becomes a tipsy priest, marrying words and meaning, and
waltzing arm in arm down the road with them, beauty in American
literature will have its inception. One critic claims that this
situation is impossible, because of the complacent democracy of this
country, in which every country bumpkin and rich man with a large
library considers himself an infallible judge of literary values, among
other questions of art. Because of this he believes that only those
writers who deal in elementary social instruction or sentimental
commonplaces, can secure a hearing. But even if a small aristocracy were
in control of the literary situation here, beautiful books would have to
be distributed free of charge and would gain very little in circulation,
because the average American is an unmellowed self-confident nondescript
who considers culture to be for sale at bargain-prices. Each European
country has had centuries in which to condense into that quiet
sophistication which demands in fiction and poetry other intangible food
than economic sermons or descriptions of the surface facts of its daily
life, or sentimental ecstasies, while the American is still a little
growing boy, interested only in literary marble-games. The American
political situation has nothing to do with this—if we changed to a
kingdom or an economic utopia tomorrow the American citizen would still
purchase tons of Gouverneur Morris and Edna Ferber, and would still
wistfully and wearily try to wade through occasional volumes from
writers who have been recommended to him as “highbrows”.
BARBARA ROSCORLA’S CHILD
A Play in One Act
Arthur Symons
CHARACTERS:
PETER ROSCORLA, aged 40
DR. TREVITHICK
SISTER AGATHA, a Nurse
ASENATH, an old woman who has been Peter Roscorla’s nurse.