THE LITTLE REVIEW
A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS
MAKING NO COMPROMISE WITH THE PUBLIC TASTE
Margaret C. Anderson
Publisher
JUNE, 1917
Chinese Poems
(translated from the Chinese of Li Po by Sasaki and
Maxwell Bodenheim)
Push-Face jh.
Improvisation Louis Gilmore
Poems: William Butler Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole
Presences
Men Improve with the Years
A Deep-Sworn Vow
The Collar-Bone of a Hare
Broken Dreams
In Memory
An Anachronism at Chinon Ezra Pound
Imaginary Letters, II. Wyndham Lewis
The Reader Critic
Published Monthly
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The Little Review
VOL. IV.
JUNE 1917
NO. 2
Copyright, 1917, by Margaret C. Anderson.
Chinese Poems
Translated from the Chinese of Li Po by Sasaki and Maxwell
Bodenheim
Gently-Drunk Woman
A breeze knelt upon the lotus-flowers
And their odor filled a water-palace.
I saw a king’s daughter
Upon the roof-garden of the water-palace.
She was half-drunk and she danced,
Her curling body killing her strength.
She grimaced languidly.
She smiled and drooped over the railing
Around the white, jewel-silenced floor.
Perfume—Remembrance
When you stayed, my house was filled with flowers.
When you left, all disappeared, except our bed.
I wrapped your embroidered clothes about me,
And could not sleep.
The perfume of your clothes has stayed three years.
It will always be with me.
But you will never come back.
While I think of you yellow leaves outside
Are dropping, and white dew-drops moisten the moss beneath them.
Drunk
When we fill each other’s cups with wine,
Many mountain flowers bloom.
One drink; another; and another—
I am drunk; I want to sleep,
So you had better go.
Come tomorrow morning, hugging your harp,
For then, I shall have something to tell you.
Mountain-Top Temple
Night, and rest in the mountain-top temple.
I lift my hands, and knock at the stars.
I dare not talk loudly,
For I fear to surprise the people in the sky.
Push-Face
jh.
I
It is a great thing to be living when an age passes. If you are born in
an age in which every impact of its expression is a pain, there is a
beautiful poetic vengeance in being permitted to watch that age destroy
itself.
What other age could have so offended? Instead of pursuing the real
business of life, which is to live, men have turned all their denials
and repressions into the accumulation of unessential knowledge and the
making of indiscriminate things. Other ages have taken out their
repressions in religious frenzies, but this age has taken everything out
in motion. It is an elementary fact of sex knowledge that rhythmic
motion is part of sex expression. Isn’t it ironical and immoral that
those nations which have prided themselves most on their virtue, and
have hugged tightest to themselves the puritanic ideal, are the ones
that have gone maddest over motion? America, being the most virtuous,
obviously has the least sense of humor and has exceeded herself. From
the cradle to the turbine engine, from the rocking-chair to the
spinnings and whirlings of a Coney Island, she has become a national
mechanical perpetual whirling Dervish.
The wheels became rollers which have rolled life out thin and flat.
Then Art cried out with all her voices. In the last few years we have
had a return to the beginnings of all the Arts. If there ever comes a
time in the world when men will give their attention to the life of Art
and understand its movement, they will find it alert and inevitable.
Life would follow it trustingly if it were not for the intrusions and
hindrances of men. The Thing had happened: Life had made its protest
through Art. But this consciousness never reached the unendowed mind. It
(the unendowed mind) forced Life to avenge itself by flying into war.
II
“I pray God,” said President Wilson, “that the outcome of this
struggle may be that every element of difference amongst us will
be obliterated—The spirit of this people is already united, and
when suffering and sacrifice have completed this union, men will
no longer speak of any lines either of race or association
cutting athwart the great body of this nation.”
But the Anarchists, who are never agreeable or content in any country,
no matter how perfect, arranged a non-conscription meeting in a hall in
Bronx Park the night before registration. So “united was the spirit of
this people” that no one attended this non-conscription meeting except
the 5,000 who crowded the hall and the 50,000 who stood outside in the
streets for several hours.
There were squads of the usual police and dozens of rough raw fellows in
soldiers’ uniforms to hold back the crowd and keep it in order,—a crowd
that scarcely moved and seldom spoke except in low tones or in foreign
languages; a crowd too full for speech, because of this last numbing
disappointment in America. The only demonstration it made was to applaud
when an echo of the applause inside the hall reached it. Any attempt to
get nearer the hall was met with clubs and the fists of soldiers in your
face. Nasty little Fords with powerful search-lights raced up and down
and about the hollow square. A huge auto truck hung with red lights
acted as a mower at the edges. Word went about that it was mounted with
a machine gun.
As I was pushed about in the crowd I overheard always the same
conversations:
“Is she there”?
“Over there where the light is”?
“Yes, on the second floor.”
“Are there any people inside”?
“Oh it’s full since seven o’clock.”
“Oh!?”
“Will they let her speak?”
“Who? Her”?
Silence.
“Will they get her, do you think”?
“Will the police take her”?
A thin pale Russian Jew, standing on a rock looking over the heads of
the crowd, was spoken to by a stranger. “They’ll get her tonight all
right.” The Russian looked over to the lighted windows of the hall and
said in revolutionary voice: “She’s a fine woman, Emma Goldman.”
Suddenly in the densest part of the crowd a woman’s voice rang out:
“Down with conscription! Down with the war!” Several other women took it
up. The police charged into the crowd. The crowd made a slight stand.
The soldiers joined the police, and with raised clubs, teeth bared and
snarling, they drove the crowd backward over itself, beating and
pushing. Three times the crowd stood. Three times they were charged.
Women were beaten down and run over. Men were clubbed in the face and
escaped, staggering and bleeding.
How much of this treatment will it take to obliterate every element of
individuality amongst us?
III
In the same week the plutocrats and artists held an Alley Festa for the
Red Cross. At a cost of $10,000 they turned the stables of MacDougal
Alley into a replica of an Italian street, draped it with much color,
daubed it with much paint, hung it with many lights. I hope there were
pluts there; the artists we saw were not artists. You can easily pick
out the pluts: they look like figures from the wax-works; but the
“artists” looked like Greenwich Village. It was a bastard performance, a
bastard street, a bastard hilarity, bastard plutocrats and bastard
artists, with bastard soldiers guarding the scene.
Between the acts they all congregated in the Brevoort to have drinks.
The pluts foregathered,—women in up-town clothes, looking like Mrs.
Potter Palmer, with grey marcelled hair and broad stiff black hats,
holding the hands and looking neurotically into the eyes of young men
who resembled bank clerks. Groups of artists came in, costumed like
people fleeing from a fire. I believe they thought they were Neopolitans
or something. They all settled clamourously at one table and fell
amourously upon each other’s necks. There was nothing personal, nothing
unique, nothing imaginative about any of their costumes. One woman sat
in the embrasure of a man’s arm, sharing his chair with him. She had
short hempy hair, she was dressed in street-gamin clothes, she was at
least forty, and her cheek bones were on a line with her nostrils. No
human head should be made that way; it’s intolerable except in fish,
frogs, or snakes.
The greatest American dancer came in, followed by a little girl and a
train of men—_bummel-zug dritte classe_. She had draped about her a
green plush toga, thrown over her shoulder in a fat knot—not apple
green, nor emerald green, nor sap green, but a green and texture sacred
to railroads. The only other perfect example I have seen of that color
and texture was on the great chairs in the station at Mons. She was
too-young-looking—a type much admired in my childhood when China dolls
lived, with painted China hair undulating above pink and white China
faces. When she looked up in conversation her profile made almost a flat
line, the chin retiring into the neck as if it had no opinions on the
subject, the eyes rolling up but no expression of the face moving up
with them. Oh beautiful people, oh beautiful fête!
The music and lights drew the children out of the slums back of
Washington Square: fathers holding babies in their arms, and strings of
little children trimming the edges of the sidewalks at a respectful
distance around the back entrance, were pushed in the face and told to
get out, to move on, by policemen and some more rough fellows in
khaki—because ... this was a fête for humanity. And it’s all right, this
game of push-face: every one plays it. When you’re little children you
play it and call it push-face; nations call it government; the “people”
are playing it now in Russia and call it revolution.
Improvisation
Louis Gilmore
Your hands are perfumes
That haunt the yellow hangings
Of a room.
Your hands are melodies
That rise and fall
In silver basins.
Your hands are silks
That soothe the purple eyelids
Of the sick.
Your hands are ghosts
That trouble the blue shadows
Of a garden.
Your hands are poppies
For which my lips are hungry
And athirst.
Poems
William Butler Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole
The trees are in their autumn beauty
The woodland paths are dry
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count.
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build;
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
I have looked upon these brilliant creatures
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight
The first time on this shore
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old,
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
October, 1916.
Presences
This night has been so strange that it seemed
As if the hair stood up on my head.
From going down of the sun I have dreamed
That women laughing, or timid or wild,
In rustle of lace or silken stuff,
Climbed up my creaking stair. They had read
All I have rhymed of that monstrous thing
Returned and yet unrequited love.
They stood in the door and stood between
My great wood lectern and the fire
Till I could hear their hearts beating:
One is a harlot, and one a child
That never looked upon man with desire,
And one, it may be, a queen.
November, 1915.
Men Improve With the Years
I am worn out with dreams;
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams:
And all day long I look
Upon this lady’s beauty
As though I had found in book
A pictured beauty;
Pleased to have filled the eyes
Or the discerning ears,
Delighted to be but wise:
For men improve with the years.
And yet and yet
Is this my dream or the truth?
O would that we had met
When I had my burning youth;
But I grow old among dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams.
July 19, 1916.
A Deep-Sworn Vow
Others, because you did not keep
That deep sworn vow, have been friends of mine,
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.
October 17, 1915.
The Collar-Bone of a Hare
Would I could cast a sail on the water,
Where many a king has gone
And many a king’s daughter,
And alight at the comely trees and the lawn,
The playing upon pipes and the dancing,
And learn that the best thing is
To change my loves while dancing
And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
I would find by the edge of that water
The collar-bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of water;
And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare
At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
And laugh, over the untroubled water,
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.
July 5, 1915.
Broken Dreams
There is grey in your hair.
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing;
But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing
Because it was your prayer
Recovered him upon the bed of death,
But for your sake—that all heart’s ache have known,
And given to others all heart’s ache,
From meagre girlhoods putting on
Burdensome beauty—but for your sake
Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,
So great her portion in that peace you make
By merely walking in a room.
Your beauty can but leave among us
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
A young man when the old men are done talking
Will say to an old man “tell me of that lady
The poet stubborn with his passion sang us
When age might well have chilled his blood.”
Vague memories, nothing but memories,
But in the grave all all shall be renewed.
The certainty that I shall see that lady
Leaning or standing or walking,
In the first loveliness of womanhood
And with the fervour of my youthful eyes,
Has set me muttering like a fool.
You were more beautiful than any one
And yet your body had a flaw:
Your small hands were not beautiful.
I am afraid that you will run
And paddle to the wrist
In that mysterious, always brimming lake
Where those that have obeyed the holy law
Paddle and are perfect: leave unchanged
The hands that I have kissed
For old sake’s sake.
The last stroke of midnight dies
All day in the one chair
From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged
In rambling talk with an image of air:
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
November, 1915.
In Memory
Five and twenty years have gone
Since old William Pollexfen
Laid his strong bones in death
By his wife Elizabeth
In the grey stone tomb he made;
And after twenty years they laid
In that tomb, by him and her,
His son George the astrologer
And masons drove from miles away
To scatter the acacia spray
Upon a melancholy man
Who had ended where his breath began.
Many a son and daughter lies
Far from the customary skies,
The Mall, and Eadés Grammar School,
In London or in Liverpool,
But where is laid the sailor John
That so many lands had known,
Quiet lands or unquiet seas
Where the Indians trade or Japanese;
He never found his rest ashore
Moping for one voyage more:
Where have they laid the sailor John?
And yesterday the youngest son,
A humorous unambitious man,
Was buried near the astrologer;
And are we now in the tenth year?
Since he who had been contented long,
A nobody in a great throng,
Decided he would journey home,
Now that his fiftieth year had come,
And “Mr. Alfred” be again
Upon the lips of common men
Who carried in their memory
His childhood and his family.
At all these deathbeds women heard
A visionary white sea bird
Lamenting that a man should die,
And with that cry I have raised my cry.
An Anachronism at Chinon
Ezra Pound
Behind them rose the hill with its grey octagonal castle, to the west a
street with good houses, gardens occasionally enclosed and well to do,
before them the slightly crooked lane, old worm-eaten fronts low and
uneven, booths with their glass front-frames open, slid aside or hung
back, the flaccid bottle-green of the panes reflecting odd lights from
the provender and cheap crockery; a few peasant women with baskets of
eggs and of fowls, while just before them an old peasant with one hen in
his basket alternately stroked its head and then smacked it to make it
go down under the strings.
The couple leaned upon one of the tin tables in the moderately clear
space by the inn, the elder, grey, with thick hair, square of forehead,
square bearded, yet with a face showing curiously long and oval in spite
of this quadrature; in the eyes a sort of friendly, companionable
melancholy, now intent, now with a certain blankness, like that of a
child cruelly interrupted, or of an old man, surprised and
self-conscious in some act too young for his years, the head from the
neck to the crown in almost brutal contrast with the girth and great
belly: the head of Don Quixote, and the corpus of Sancho Panza,
animality mounting into the lines of the throat and lending energy to
the intellect.
His companion obviously an American student.
Student: I came here in hopes of this meeting yet, since you are here at
all, you must have changed many opinions.
The Elder: Some. Which do you mean?
Student: Since you are here, personal and persisting?
Rabelais: All that I believed or believe you will find in _De
Senectute_: “... that being so active, so swift in thought; that
treasures up in memory such multitudes and varieties of things past, and
comes likewise upon new things ... can be of no mortal nature.”
Student: And yet I do not quite understand. Your outline is not always
distinct. Your voice however is deep, clear and not squeaky.
Rabelais: I was more interested in words than in my exterior aspect, I
am therefore vocal rather than spatial.
Student: I came here in hopes of this meeting, yet I confess I can
scarcely read you. I admire and close the book, as not infrequently
happens with “classics.”
Rabelais: I am the last person to censure you, and your admiration is
perhaps due to a fault in your taste. I should have paid more heed to
DeBellay, young Joachim.
Student: You do not find him a prig?
Rabelais: I find no man a prig who takes serious thought for the
language.
Student: And your own? Even Voltaire called it an amassment of ordure.
Rabelais: And later changed his opinion.
Student: Others have blamed your age, saying you had to half-bury your
wisdom in filth to make it acceptable.
Rabelais: And you would put this blame on my age? And take the full
blame for your writing?
Student: My writing?
Rabelais: Yes, a quatrain, without which I should scarcely have come
here.
Sweet C.... in h... spew up some....
(pardon me for intruding my own name at this point, but even Dante has
done the like, with a remark that he found it unfitting)—to proceed
then:
......some Rabelais
To ..... and ..... and to define today
In fitting fashion, and her monument
Heap up to her in fadeless ex .....
Student: My license in those lines is exceptional.
Rabelais: And you have written on journalists, or rather an imaginary
plaint of the journalists: Where s......, s.... and p..... on jews
conspire, and editorial maggots .... about, we gather .... smeared
bread, or drive a snout still deeper in the swim-brown of the mire.
Where s....., s..... and p..... on jews conspire,
And editorial maggots .... about,
We gather .... -smeared bread, or drive a snout
Still deeper in the swim-brown of the mire.
O .... O ..... O b...... b...... b....
O c..., ........ O .... O ......’s attire
Smeared with ...........................
Really I can not continue, no printer would pass it.
Student: Quite out of my usual ......
Rabelais: There is still another on publishers, or rather on _la vie
litteraire_, a sestina almost wholly in asterisks, and a short strophe
on the American president.
Student: Can you blame ...
Rabelais: I am scarcely ....... eh.....
Student: Beside, these are but a few scattered outbursts, you kept up
your flow through whole volumes.
Rabelais: You have spent six years in your college and university, and a
few more in struggles with editors; I had had thirty years in that sink
of a cloister, is it likely that your disgusts would need such
voluminous purging? Consider, when I was nine years of age they put me
in that louse-breeding abomination. I was forty before I broke loose.
Student: Why at that particular moment?
Rabelais: They had taken away my books. Brother Amy got hold of a
Virgil. We opened it, _sortes_, the first line:
_Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge litus avarum_
We read that line and departed. You may thank God your age is different.
You may thank God your life has been different. Thirty years mewed up
with monks! After that can you blame me my style? Have you any accurate
gauge of stupidities?
Student: I have, as you admit, passed some years in my university. I
have seen some opposition to learning.
Rabelais: No one in your day has sworn to annihilate the cult of greek
letters; they have not separated you from your books; they have not rung
bells expressly to keep you from reading.
Student: Bells! later. There is a pasty-faced vicar in Kensington who
had his dam’d bells rung over my head for four consecutive winters,
L’Ile Sonnante transferred to the middle of London! They have tried to
smother the good ones with bad ones. Books I mean, God knows the chime
was a musicless abomination. They have smothered good books with bad
ones.
Rabelais: This will never fool a true poet; for the rest, it does not
matter whether they drone masses or lectures. They observe their fasts
with the intellect. Have they actually sequestered your books?
Student: No. But I have a friend, of your order, a monk. They took away
his book for two years. I admit they set him to hearing confessions; to
going about in the world. It may have broadened his outlook, or
benefited his eyesight. I do not think it wholly irrational, though it
must have been extremely annoying.
Rabelais: Where was it?
Student: In Spain.
Rabelais: You are driven south of the Pyrenees to find your confuting
example. Would you find the like in this country?
Student: I doubt it. The Orders are banished.
Rabelais: Or in your own?
Student: Never.
Rabelais: And you were enraged with your university?
Student: I thought some of the customs quite stupid.
Rabelais: Can you conceive a life so infernally and abysmally stupid
that the air of an university was wine and excitement beside it?
Student: You speak of a time when scholarship was new, when humanism had
not given way to philology. We have no one like Henry Stephen, no one
comparable to Helia Andrea. The role of your monastery is now assumed by
the “institutions of learning,” the spirit of your class-room is found
among a few scattered enthusiasts, men half ignorant in the present
“scholarly” sense, but alive with the spirit of learning, avid of truth,
avid of beauty, avid of strange and out of the way bits of knowledge. Do
you like this scrap of Pratinas?
Rabelais (reads)
’Εμὸς ἐμὸς ὁ Βρομίος Εμὲ δεῖ κελαδεῖν
Εμὶ δεῖ παταγεῖν ’Αν ὀρεα εσσάμενον
Μετὰ Ναἲδων Οἷα τε κύκνον ἄγοντα
Ποικιλόπτερον μέλος Τᾶv ἀοιδᾶν....
Student: The movement is interesting. I am “educated,” I am considerably
more than a “graduate.” I confess that I can not translate it.
Rabelais: What in God’s name have they taught you?!!
Student: I hope they have taught me nothing. I managed to read many
books despite their attempts at suppression, or rather perversion.
Rabelais: I think you speak in a passion; that you magnify petty
annoyances. Since then, you have been in the world for some years, you
have been able to move at your freedom.
Student: I speak in no passion when I say that the whole aim, or at
least the drive, of modern philology is to make a man stupid; to turn
his mind from the fire of genius and smother him with things
unessential. Germany has so stultified her savants that they have had no
present perception, the men who should have perceived were all imbedded
in “scholarship.” And as for freedom, no man is free who has not the
modicum of an income. If I had but fifty francs weekly....
Rabelais: Weekly? C..... J....!
Student: You forget that the value of money has very considerably
altered.
Rabelais: Admitted.
Student: Well?
Rabelais: Well, who has constrained you? The press in your day is free.
Student: C..... J....!
Rabelais: But the press in your day is free.
Student: There is not a book goes to the press in my country, or in
England, but a society of ....... in one, or in the other a pie-headed
ignorant printer paws over it to decide how much is indecent.
Rabelais: But they print my works in translation.
Student: Your work is a classic. They also print Trimalcio’s _Supper_,
and the tales of Suetonius, and red-headed virgins annotate the writings
of Martial, but let a novelist mention a privy, or a poet the rear side
of a woman, and the whole town reeks with an uproar. In England a
scientific work was recently censored. A great discovery was kept secret
three years. For the rest, I do not speak of obscenity. Obscene books
are sold in the rubber shops, they are doled out with quack medicines,
societies for the Suppression of Vice go into all details, and thereby
attain circulation. Masterpieces are decked out with lewd covers to
entoil one part of the public, but let an unknown man write clear and
clean realism; let a poet use the speech of his predecessors, either
being as antiseptic as the instruments of a surgeon, and out of the most
debased and ignorant classes they choose him his sieve and his censor.
Rabelais: But surely these things are avoidable?
Student: The popular novelist, the teaser and tickler, casts what they
call a veil, or caul, over his language. He pimps with suggestion. The
printer sees only one word at a time, and tons of such books are passed
yearly, the members of the Royal Automobile Club and of the Isthmian and
Fly Fishers are not concerned with the question of morals.
Rabelais: You mistake me, I did not mean this sort of evasion, I did not
mean that a man should ruin his writing or join the ranks of procurers.
Student: Well?
Rabelais: Other means. There is what is called private printing.
Student: I have had a printer refuse to print lines “in any form”
private or public, perfectly innocent lines, lines refused thus in
London, which appeared and caused no blush in Chicago; and vice-versa,
lines refused in Chicago and printed by a fat-headed prude—Oh, most
fat-headed—in London, a man who will have no ruffling of anyone’s
skirts, and who will not let you say that some children do not enjoy the
proximity of their parents.
Rabelais: At least you are free from theology.
Student: If you pinch the old whore by the toes you will find a press
clique against you; you will come up against “boycott”; people will rush
into your publisher’s office with threats. Have you ever heard of “the
libraries?”
Rabelais: I have heard the name, but not associated with strange forms
of blackmail.
Student: I admit they do not affect serious writers.
Rabelais: But you think your age as stupid as mine.
Student: Humanity is a herd, eaten by perpetual follies. A few in each
age escape, the rest remain savages, “That deyed the Arbia crimson.”
Were the shores of Gallipoli paler, that showed red to the airmen flying
thousands of feet above them?
Rabelais: Airmen. Intercommunication is civilization. Your life is full
of convenience.
Student: And men as stupid as ever. We have no one like Henry Stephen.
Have you ever read Galdos’ _Dona Perfecta_? In every country you will
find such nests of provincials. Change but a few names and customs. Each
Klein-Stadt has its local gods and will kill those who offend them. In
one place it is religion, in another some crank theory of hygiene or
morals, or even of prudery which takes no moral concern.
Rabelais: Yet all peoples act the same way. The same so-called “vices”
are everywhere present, unless your nation has invented some new ones.
Student: Greed and hypocrisy, there is little novelty to be got out of
either. At present there is a new tone, a new _timbre_ of lying, a sort
of habit, almost a faculty for refraining from connecting words with a
fact. An inconception of their interrelations.
Rabelais: Let us keep out of politics.
Student: Damn it, have you ever met presbyterians?
Rabelais: You forget that I lived in the time of John Calvin.
Student: Let us leave this and talk of your books.
Rabelais: My book has the fault of most books, there are too many words
in it. I was tainted with monkish habits, with the marasmus of allegory,
of putting one thing for another: the clumsiest method of satire. I
doubt if any modern will read me.
Student: I knew a man read you for joy of the words, for the opulence of
your vocabulary.
Rabelais: Which would do him no good unless he could keep all the words
on his tongue. Tell me, can you read them, they are often merely piled
up in heaps.
Student: I confess that I can not. I take a page and then stop.
Rabelais: Allegory, all damnable allegory! And can you read Brantôme?
Student: I can read a fair chunk of Brantôme. The repetition is wearing.
Rabelais: And you think your age is as stupid as mine? Even letters are
better, a critical sense is developed.
Student: We lack the old vigour.
Rabelais: A phrase you have got from professors! Vigour was not lacking
in Stendhal, I doubt if it is lacking in your day. And as for the world
being as stupid, are your friends tied to the stake, as was Etienne
Dolet, with an “Ave” wrung out of him to get him strangled instead of
roasted. Do you have to stand making professions like Budé?!!
Vivens vidensque gloria mea frui
Volo: nihil juvat mortuum
Quod vel diserte scripserit vel fecerit
Animose.
Student: What is that?
Rabelais: Some verses of Dolet’s. And are you starved like Desperiers,
Bonaventura, and driven to suicide?
Student: The last auto-da-fe was in 1759. The inquisition reestablished
in 1824.
Rabelais: Spain again! I was speaking of....
Student: We are not yet out of the wood. There is no end to this
warfare. You talk of freedom. Have you heard of the Hammersmith borough
council, or the society to suppress all brothels in “Rangoon and other
stations in Burmah?” If it is not creed it is morals. Your life and
works would not be possible nowadays. To put it mildly, you would be
docked your professorship.
Rabelais: I should find other forms of freedom. As for personal morals:
There are certain so-called “sins” of which no man ever repented. There
are certain contraventions of hygiene which always prove inconvenient.
None but superstitious and ignorant people can ever confuse these two
issues. And as hygiene is always changing; as it alters with our
knowledge of physick, intelligent men will keep pace with it. There can
be no permanent boundaries to morals.
Student: The droits du seigneur were doubtless, at one time, religious.
When ecclesiastics enjoyed them, they did so, in order to take the
vengeance of the spirit-world upon their own shoulders, thereby
shielding and sparing the husband.
Rabelais: Indeed you are far past these things. Your age no longer
accepts them.
Student: My age is beset with cranks of all forms and sizes. They will
not allow a man wine. They will not allow him changes of women. This
glass....
Rabelais: There is still some in the last bottle. DeThou has paid it a
compliment:
Aussi Bacchus....
Jusqu’en l’autre monde m’envoye De quoi dissiper mon chagrin,
Car de ma Maison paternelle Il vient de faire un Cabaret
Où le plaisir se renouvelle Entre le blanc et le clairet...
On n’y porte plus sa pensée Qu’aux douceurs d’un Vin frais et net.
Que si Pluton, que rien ne tente, Vouloit se payer de raison,
Et permettre à mon Ombre errante De faire un tour à ma Maison;
Quelque prix que j’en puisse attendre, Ce seroit mon premier souhait
De la louer ou de la vendre, Pour l’usage que l’on en fait.
Student: There are states where a man’s tobacco is not safe from
invasion. Bishops, novelists, decrepit and aged generals, purveyors of
tales of detectives....
Rabelais: Have they ever interfered with your pleasures?
Student: Damn well let them try it!!!
Rabelais: I am afraid you would have been burned in my century.
END OF THE FIRST DIALOGUE
Imaginary Letters
(Six Letters of William Bland Burn to his Wife)
Wyndham Lewis
Petrograd, February, 1917.
My dear Lydia:
Once more to the charge= In your answer to my letter I feel the new
touch of an independent attack. Villerant comes in, but I feel this time
that you have set your own dear person up for a rebuff. You have not
sent me any Aunt Sally, but my Grecian wife. I will take two things and
answer them.=First, you object to my treatment of the Gentleman, because
you sharply maintain, more or less, that I by no means object to being a
gentleman myself.=On that point, my dear girl, you have _not got_ me.
For many purposes, on occasion I should not hesitate to emphasize the
fact that I was not born in the gutter. If, for instance, I was applying
for a post where such a qualification was necessary, Harrow would not be
forgotten. The Gutter generally spoils a man’s complexion in childhood.
He grows up with sores around his mouth and a constantly dirty skin. His
eyes, unless he has them well in hand, become wolfish and hard, etc. Who
would not be better pleased that he was born on the sunny side of the
wall? All that has nothing to do with my argument. Those things are in
themselves nothing to linger round, although the opposite, squalor and
meanness, it is more excusable to remember and lament.
But in your last letter you reveal an idea that seems chiefly to have
struck you, and which is at the bottom of your present obstinacy. In
your letter of last month you kept it in the background, or did not
state it in so many words.
(In once more reading through your present letter, I find you have not
even stated it _there_. But I see, I believe, the notion that has found
favour with you.) I will give you my opinion on it in the form of a
criticism of an article I read yesterday in an English paper (one of
those you sent me).
A Russian war-novel is discussed. The writer of the article “does not
care much for Russian books,” he finds that “the Englishman begins where
the Russian leaves off.” The Russian book seems to deal with the inner
conflict of a Russian grocer on the outbreak of War. The Russian grocer
is confused and annoyed. He asks what all this bloody trouble has to do
with _him_—the small grocer. He cogitates on the causes of such
upheavals, and is not convinced that there is anything in them calling
for his participation. But eventually he realizes that there is a great
and moving abstraction called Russia=the _old_ abstraction in fact, the
old Pied Piper whistling his mournful airs, and waving towards a
snow-bound horizon. And—_le voilà_ in khaki=or the Russian equivalent.
At this point he becomes “noble,” and of interest to the writer of the
article—But there, alas, the book ends.= Now, (of course the writer of
the article continues) _we_ in England do not do things in that way. We
do not portray the boring and hardly respectable conflict. No Englishman
(all Englishmen having the instincts of gentlemen) admits the
possibility of such a conflict. _We_ are _accomplished_ beings, _des
hommes, ou plutôt des gentlemen faits_! We should begin with the English
grocer already in khaki, quite calm, (he would probably be described as
a little “grim” withal) in the midst of his military training on
Salisbury Plain. A Kiplingesque picture of that: Revetting would come
in, and bomb-throwing at night. He next would be in the trenches. The
writer would show, without the cunning, hardly respectable, disguise of
any art, how the Balham grocer of to-day was the same soldier, really,
that won at Waterloo= You would not get a person or a fact, but a piece
of patriotic propaganda (the writer of course being meanwhile a shrewd
fellow, highly approved and well-paid).
Now glance at Tolstoi for a moment, that arch Russian bore, and at his
book of Sebastopol sketches. He was an hereditary noble, and it is
rather difficult to say that an hereditary noble is not a gentleman. But
can the English journalist in his “_fort interieur_” admit that Tolstoi
was a gentleman, all things considered? These foreign “nobles” are a
funny sort of gentlemen, anyway. For let us see how Tolstoi writes of
the Russians at Sebastopol.= He arrives at the town of Sebastopol. He
has read in the Moscow newspapers of the “heroic defenders of
Sebastopol.” His first impression is one of astonishment and
disappointment of a sort. For there is nothing noticeably heroic about
the demeanour of the soldiers working at the quays or walking in the
streets. They are not even heroic by reason of the ineffable
“cheeriness” of the British Tommy—(No journalist would be tolerated for
a moment who did not, once in every twenty lines, remark on this
ineffable national heroism of humour.)=Tolstoi, that is, does not _want_
to see heroes, but men under given conditions and, that is, sure enough,
what he sees. He also, being an hereditary noble and so on, does not
want to make his living. One more opportunity of truth and clearness!
Next, when Tolstoi gets up to the bastions, he again sees no heroes with
any ineffable national cachet. The “heroes” of his sketches and tales,
in fact, stoop and scurry along behind parapets in lonely sectors, and
when they see another man coming straighten themselves out, and clank
their spurs. They kill people in nightmares, and pray pessimistically to
their God. You cannot at the end apply _any_ labels to them. Tolstoi’s
account of their sensations and genuine exploits would not strike terror
in the heart of future enemies of the Russian race; it is not an
advertisement, or the ordinary mawkish bluff thrown over a reality. He
had the sense to see human beings and not Russians. And _Russians_ are
chiefly redoubtable, and admirable, because of this capacity of
impersonal seeing and feeling. Where they are least Russian in fact.
The discriminating enemy in reading these sketches, would fear that more
than he would any unreal or interested gush.
There always remains the question as to whether, by gush and bluff and
painting a pretty picture of a man, you cannot make him _become_ that
picture=and whether, politically, it may not be desirable to manufacture
illusions of that description. But what have we got to do with
politicians?
Again, I am not saying that Russians have not a national gush. Tolstoi
himself indulges in it. Everybody indulges in such things. It is a
question only of the scale of such indulgence; of the absence per head
in a population of the reverse.
So then, what the paper-writer’s point amounted to was that only
_gentlemen_ (or, sententiously, _men_) were worth writing about=or only
at the moment when a man becomes a “gentleman” is he interesting, worth
noticing, or suitable for portrayal. We all, however, know the simple
rules and manifestations of this ideal figure. There is not much left to
say on the subject. Ah yes, but there is such and such a one’s ineffable
_way_ of being a gentleman!—
In London you will meet few educated people who really are willing or
able to give Russian books their due. Dostoevsky is a sort of epileptic
bore, Tolstoi a wrong-headed old altruistic bore, Gorky a Tramp-stunt
bore, Turgenev, even, although in another category, in some way
disappointing.—All Russian writers insist on discovering America,
opening discussions on matters that our institutions, our position in
society, our Franco-English intelligence preclude any consideration of.
There is something permanently transcendental and disconcerting about
the Slav infant, and he pours his words out and argues interminably, and
is such an inveterate drunkard,—as though his natural powers of
indecorum and earnestness were not already enough.
What really could be said of the Russian is this=Shakespeare is
evidently better than any Russian novelist, or more permanently
valuable. But the little Russian Grocer could rival Hamlet in
vacillation; or any Russian, Shakespeare, in his portrayal of the
_machinery_ of the mind. Dostoevsky is not more dark and furious than
Shakespeare’s pessimistic figures, Lear, Macbeth, etc. _But we are not
Englishmen of Shakespeare’s days._
We are very pleased that in the time of Elizabeth such a national
ornament existed. But Shakespeare would be an anachronism to-day.
Dostoevsky and Co. were anachronisms as contemporaries of Tennyson and
Napoleon III. _Had they been embedded two centuries back in Sixteenth
Century Russia_, they would not be read, but would not cause annoyance
and be called epileptic bores. Epilepsy would have been all right in
those distances.—There is nothing dévoué about epilepsy to-day, any more
than there is about a King!
I think I have been lucid, if rather long-winded=
How I look on these Christian Demi-Gods of the Steppes you know. I like
them immensely. For a single brandyish whiff from one of Dostovesky’s
mouths, at some vivid angle of turpitude I would give all English
literature back to Shelley’s songs. Turgenev’s _Sportsman’s Sketches_
enchant me. They are so sober, delicate and nonchalant; I can think of
nothing like them. Gogol’s Tchichikoff is back with Cervantes, Sterne
and the others who have not any peers in these days.
_Today_=the requirements of the little man, especially of this day, are
a similar thing to the _Russian_, the _Englishman_, etc. We must
disembarrass ourselves of this fetish or gush, as of that other.—I want
to live with Shakespeare and Cervantes=and I have gone to war for good
with all things that would oppose a return to those realities.
I feel you, in my absence, becoming enmeshed in environing
respectability and its amiable notions. I feel that this letter may
require another fervour to drive home, or excuse, its own=_A coup de
poing_ is the best method of enforcing an idea (or a shell)=the mouth is
similarly a more satisfactory aperture than the ear for introducing a
philosophy into another body. Yorke is the embodiment of my philosophy.
I love Yorke in exactly the way that I love a character in Molière or
Turgenev. Yorke is the only _living thing except yourself_, that I know
or find alive to the same extent.
I shall stick here a little longer, and see what comes of my new
venture. There have been lots of delays and difficulties which I will
recite to you when we meet. I can, I am afraid, say absolutely nothing
definite about my return. But I will write to you in a few days and tell
you more certainly. Meantime, much love, my dear girl. I wish you were
here with me. But on seeing how active the Germans are, it is out of the
question your crossing the North Sea.
I am looking forward to your next letter. Much love.
Yours,
W. B. Burn.
(_Next letter of series will appear in July number._)
The Reader Critic
From James Joyce
James Joyce, Zurich, Switzerland:
I am very glad to hear about the new plans for _The Little Review_ and
that you have got together so many good writers as contributors. I hope
to send you something very soon—as soon, in fact, as my health allows me
to resume work. I am much better however, though I am still under care
of the doctor. I wish _The Little Review_ every success.
Approval
Alice Groff, Philadelphia:
Never has _The Little Review_ pleased me, from cover to cover, as in the
May number. I cannot imagine finding any one to express me for myself,
but Mr. Ezra Pound in his editorial comes the nearest possible to doing
this, as far as he goes.
What he says about the Christian religion is delicious in its gentle
tolerance; about organized religions, is the last word; about “the
formation of thought in clear speech for the use of humanity,” a
religion in itself. He utters my whole voice on “codes of propriety” in
asserting that “they have no place in the arts.” I would add “nor in
life, other than as subject matter.”
His rallying cry to _The Egoist_ stirs my egoist soul to its depth. Ever
since I have known this journal I have felt it to be the finest, freest,
frankest, bravest avenue of expression in English ever opened to the
creative literary mind, in all its variety of faculty, without having
the least bias or prejudice as to any one variety. That _The Little
Review_ should respond to this rallying cry would add a still deeper and
stronger point to my already deep and strong interest in this brave
little (?) magazine.
Fear Not
Mrs. O. D. J.:
I have great faith in the artistic life of America and I don’t think
Ezra Pound’s notions of it are very healthy. I sincerely hope the trend
of it will not emulate the “smart” or dissipated literature which seems
to please London and which can hardly come under the head of “good
letters.” America must not necessarily be content with jejune flows of
words. Really the only half interesting articles that appeared in the
May number were Eliot’s and Pound’s—the former because it was about as
good as _The Smart Set_ and the latter on account of auld lang syne. My
harshness is really flattering because it shows that I expect better
things from the “cultured” English.
[We will take this opportunity of answering all those who have verbally
or in letters expressed the fear that _The Little Review_ will entirely
change its nature and be influenced in the future by its Foreign Editor.
I do not want to be flippant, but indeed little faith is shown in us by
all those who have known our struggle to be what we believe, and our
financial struggle to be at all. Fear not, dear ones. We have learned to
be penny wise; we will not be Pound foolish. We agree with Pound in the
spirit; if we don’t always agree with him in the letter be sure we will
mention it. And Pound didn’t slip up on us unaware. A mutual misery over
the situation brought us together.
And you, dear Mrs. O. D. J., what made you think that Ezra Pound and T.
S. Eliot were “cultured” English? Because geese are white and float upon
water they are not necessarily swans. Pound too seems to have enough
faith in “good letters” to spare a little for America and share
“cultured” English with her. Healthy? The unhealth is in the artistic
life of America; and whatever the ailment, bitter and acid medicine
seems necessary to cure it. America must not be content for a great
while with the stuff produced here—jejune flows of words about
popularizing art, home-town poets and great American novelists, and
never-been-abroad painters. This seems to content it well enough now.
But I congratulate you on being able to read _The Smart Set_ as
literature. Maybe the audience will after all produce the art. I
wonder....]
A Poet’s Opinion
Maxwell Bodenheim, New York:
Ezra Pound writes in his editorial which headed your last number that
“the two novels by Joyce and Lewis, and Mr. Eliot’s poems, are not only
the most important contributions to English literature of the past three
years, but are practically the only works of the time in which the
creative element is present, which in any way show invention, or a
progress beyond precedent work.”
It is easy to make statements of this kind, but, having made them, a
critic should tell us on what he bases his dictum. The trouble with
criticism of art, today, is that it isn’t criticism. The critic writes
statements of untempered liking or disliking, and does not trouble to
support them with detailed reasons. We are simply supposed to take the
critic’s word for the matter. I haven’t sufficient belief in the
infallibility of Ezra Pound’s mind to require no substantiation of his
statements. I have several faults to find with his methods of
criticising poetry. He’s a bit too easily swayed by his personal
emotions, in that regard. I happen to know that in an article of his,
which appeared in _Poetry_, some time ago he omitted the name of a very
good modern American poet, from the “American-Team” he was mentioning,
merely because he has a personal dislike for that poet.
He has also, too great a longing to separate poets into arbitrary teams,
of best and worst. Poets are either black or white to him—never grey.