ISBN 0-8061-2715-5

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Contents:

Series Editors’ Foreword (vii)

1. Introduction Marjorie Perloff 3
2. Do Postmodern Genres Exist? Ralph Cohen 11
3. From Opera to Postmodernity: On Genre, Style, Institutions Herbert Lindenberger 28
4. “The Pastime of Past Time”: Fiction, History, Historiographic Metafiction Linda Hutcheon 54
5. Palimtexts: Postmodern Poetry and the Material Text Michael Davidson 75
6. Gertrude Stein, cubism, and the Postmodern Book Renee Riese Hubert 96
7. Generating the Subject: The Images of cindy Sherman Frederick Garber 126
8. “Always Two Things Switching”: Laurie Anderson’s Alterity Jessica Prinz 150
9. Installation and Dislocation: The Example of Jonathan Borofsky Henry M. Sayre 175
10. Music for Words Perhaps: Reading/Hearing/Seeing John Cage’s Roaratorio Marjorie Perloff 193
11. The Stranger at the Door David Antin 229
12. Post-Scriptum–High-Modern Joan Retallack 248

Index 274

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German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism.

Erhard Bahr. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. xvii + 358. $39.95 (cloth).

Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University

Modernism/Modernity, 15, 2 (2008)

Unlike its New York counterpart, most of whose members soon began to assimilate into American life and became U.S. citizens, “Weimar on the Pacific,” as Erhhard Bahr euphemistically calls it, kept aloof from the indigenous culture of Los Angeles, a city they took to be the very emblem of the capitalism most of them despised. These émigrés had come to LA largely for practical reasons; no sooner was the war over, then Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt, Brecht to East Berlin, and Mann to a Switzerland he took to be more congenial than Pacific Palisades. Consequently, although there is no doubt that this important refugee circle had a transforming effect on Los Angeles culture, especially in the realm of experimental music, film noir, and Frankfurt school aesthetics and politics, the question remains whether their Los Angeles sojourn had any significant impact on their own cultural views.

Oddly, Bahr never asks this question. His wide-ranging and absorbing book is essentially an historical reconstruction of a fascinating chapter in exile history, in particular, a largely sympathetic exposition of some leading German émigré texts. He is particularly skillful at tracking the heated debates of 1943-44 on the future of a postwar Germany, with Mann and Brecht on opposite sides (Chapter 9), and in detailing the role both Adorno and Schoenberg played in the genesis and conception of Dr. Faustus (Chapter 10). Indeed, Bahr’s reading of Dr. Faustus as Mann’s final and definitive statement on the splendors and miseries of German history and culture is especially valuable.

But, as the subtitle of Bahr’s book suggests, his is a book with a thesis: namely, that the German émigré community in Los Angeles embodied “the crisis of modernism”:

Modernism had always been divided, although this division did not become apparent until 1933. Prior to that year most modernists had associated their movement and its goals with a general progressiveness, but the political events of 1933 made clear that a progressive modernism had failed and a totalitarian modernism had triumphed. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pablo Picasso, Ignazio Silone, and Brecht had supported communism, while Gabriele d’Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Ernst Jünger, and Gottfried Benn had moved toward fascism …. Los Angeles became the battlefield for the wars of German exile modernism in the 1940s. (11)

This passage is somewhat murky. For one thing, it assumes that 1933 is the key date, not only for Germany, but for the world. For another, even within the European frame, it conflates the utopian avant-garde of the pre-First World War period (Marinetti, Mayakovsky) with a later much more establishment “modernism” that had, by the 1940s, become something quite other. Mann’s 1947 novel Dr. Faustus, for example, has less in common with, say, Joyce’s Ulysses than with the mandarin, mid-century symbolism of Malraux’s Man’s Fate (the title itself is indicative); it deploys elaborately coded narrative and emblematic characters in the service of “big ideas.” In Dr. Faustus, each character stands for something, and each incident is allegorically charged, reflecting on the larger history, ethos, and politics of twentieth-century Germany. Consequently, Bahr’s account of the playing out of the culture wars between, on the one hand, the increasingly kitschy and conservative novels of Franz Werfel and the political allegories of Alfred Döblin, and, on the other, the Marxist-inflected poems and plays of Brecht and the films of Fritz Lang, is not much of a contest: we all know who produced the superior works. More important: however influential Frankfurt School theorems have proved to be in the contemporary academy, Adorno and Horkheimer brought these doctrines with them when they came; indeed, their collaboration on the Dialectic of Enlightenment would not have been appreciably different if they had lived in Cleveland–or even in Mexico City–rather than in Los Angeles. True, the “culture industries” were more developed–and hence riper for attack—in Hollywood than elsewhere, but the theoretical and critical thrust of the Dialectic was a European product. Bahr himself notes that, whereas Hamid Naficy’s study of Iranian exile formation in LA in the 1990s speaks of the “utopian and euphoric possibilities” of exile, such an idea “was absolutely alien to Adorno” (30). On the contrary, Adorno “resisted adjustment and socialization … as a methodology of research … he wanted to ‘alienate’ [American] phenomena so that they might reveal elements essential to them that were hidden to the American observers” (35). But so “alienated” did these phenomena become, that the real Los Angeles might as well not have existed.

The Dialecticof Enlightenment, which, as Bahr explains, gives his book its basic structure, is an extraordinarily pessimistic document. The actual fight against fascism on the part of Britain and the United States is wholly subordinated to the analysis of the deeper cause of fascism and war, which Horkheimer and Adorno take to be the inevitable failure of Enlightenment thought. Once fascism was understood as the “perversion of enlightenment,” it was easy for Adorno and Horkheimer to maintain that the German fascists were not anti-Semites, but rather “liberals who wanted to express their antiliberal opinions”–a statement that even Bahr takes to be “perverse” (52). But his critique of this and related Frankfurt School texts is largely muted, his being an exposition of an ethos he has largely internalized. Thus Horkheimer and Adorno are said to “clearly understand that films and radio are simply ‘business’ …. The products of the culture industry are subject to the same criteria as those of the automobile industry” (61). Even as these formulations were being codified, a few blocks away from d’Este Drive, where Horkheimer had his bungalow, a Schoenberg student named John Cage was beginning to produce some of his great and remarkable musical compositions. Where does this American exceptionalism fit into the dark picture of the “new barbarism”?

Then, too, when Bahr gives us a précis of a particular work, he often construes it, contra Adorno’s complex Aesthetic Theory, as a simple vehicle for ideas. He reads Brecht’s Galileo, for example, as if it were a political tract. “The play,” he writes, “was written to confront the audience with the conclusion that if Galileo had not given in to the Pope and the Inquisition, the modern world would have been spared the horror of the atomic bomb” (117). But the great feat of Galileo is precisely that it shows no such thing, that it provides no easy answers to the relation of science and politics at key moments in history. The dramatist’s attitude toward his protagonist has been hotly debated since the play’s inception; it is, in any case, much more than “the earliest and most thought-provoking literary protest against the nuclear age” (126).

The “crisis of modernism” thesis is also called into question by the discussion of modernist architecture in Chapter 6–a discussion largely (and openly) potted from Thomas Hines’s fine studies of Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler. These justly famous avant-gardists came to America as immigrants in the 1920s prompted by their admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright; the climate of Southern California provided a wonderful opportunity to produce new architectural forms, and both remained in Los Angeles the rest of their lives. Accordingly, when Bahr notes that, unlike Mann or Brecht, Neutra and Schindler “represented a modernism that was decidedly avant-garde and optimistic” (171), he is acknowledging that there was, two decades before “Weimar on the Pacific” came into being, a rich and productive Los Angeles modernism that had little in common with the “crisis” modernism of the 1940s and its obsession with the return of barbarism to Europe.
And therein lies the rub. For me, well-informed and richly textured as it is, and poignant as is its account of the difficulties the refugees dealt with, Weimar on the Pacific is finally flawed by its largely unquestioning acceptance of the perspective put forward in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, a study whose refusal to differentiate clearly between American democracy and German fascism makes its assessment of its adopted country less than useful. Indeed, it is Germany, with all its failures and problems, that remains, for Bahr as for his authors, the standard whereby modernity is to be judged.

Weimar on the Pacific thus has its own German problem. But Bahr is to be commended for uncovering a wonderful subject–one we will be discussing for years to come. His appendices, containing street addresses and chronology, are a special bonus. Myself a resident of Pacific Palisades, I was fascinated to learn that Vicki Baum, the author of the legendary Grand Hotel and one of the few women writers discussed by Bahr, once lived next door at 1461 Amalfi Drive: subsequent owners have included David Niven and, more recently, Whoopi Goldberg.

Pound, Duchamp and the Nominalist Ethos

Marjorie Perloff

Paideuma, 32, 1-3 (2003), 205-28. Also in Ezra Pound and Referentiality (Paris; Presses de l’UniversitÈ de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003): 191-210.

Jessica R. Feldman. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 261pp. $60.00.

Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff

These terms– artist, audience, work, and the reality to which the work refers–—are familiar to us from the classic studies of Roman Jakobson and, later, Meyer Abrams, carried out more than fifty years ago. For Jakobson, the four terms were the poles that efined the dominants of literary criticism: the relation of work to “reality” (the mimetic), of artist to work (the expressionist), artist to audience (the affective), and concentration on the work itself (the formalist). Why, then, should these poles be somehow peculiar to Victorian Modernism? It is a question Feldman never answers. She is sensitive to the fact that “a rich critical literature reading Modernism across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” already exists. But whereas most such studies define the Modernist work as a form of resistance to “spiritual crisis,” and “exile from the homeland of certainty,” resulting in an “autonomous art,” Feldman defines the link between the Victorians and Moderns as, on the contrary, their concern for “tenderness, pleasure, beauty, playfulness, fascination” (4).

Seek and ye shall find. By limiting herself to a highly particular set of Anglo-American authors and wholly ignoring the roots of Modernism as they took hold on the Continent, Feldman is able to come up with a coherent picture of an aesthetic-cultural complex that we might call the sentiment-cum-sublime camp in later nineteenth / earlier twentieth century Anglophone culture. In the Introduction, Feldman’s exemplar of this complex is—and here she does choose a European– Proust, evidently because he was a disciple of Ruskin’s. Proust’s great novel is so rich and varied that one can find in it almost any emotion or aesthetic trait one is looking for. Foregrounding the quite untypical third-person narrative of Un Amour de Swanns (less than a tenth of the novel), Feldman finds her four categories: sentiment (Swann’s sympathy for Vinteuil), aestheticism (Swann’s profound love of art), sublimity (Swann’s recognition of Vinteuil’s genius) and domesticity (the emergence of Vinteuil’s art from the “richness of daily life in Combray,” 14). To characterize Proust’s great phantasmagoric novel as domestic will strike most readers as more than a little strange, especially since the richness of Vinteuil’s daily life in Combray features the rather Gothic moment where Vinteuil’s sadistic daughter, trying to please her lesbian lover, spits on her father’s portrait. The young Marcel, passing the Vinteuil cottage on one of his daily strolls, improbably witnesses this scene, which takes place at the open window.

Feldman’s Introduction thus creates more problems than the later chapters can effective solve, and one wonders why she felt she had to classify her authors, works, and literary phenomena so neatly. Fortunately, the subsequent chapters are more successful, for when the author gets away from the need to define Victorian Modernism and gives new readings of specific works, she is often quite interesting. Her Ruskin emerges as less the Victorian moralist or proto-Modernist aesthete than as a writer who fuses the rhetorics of domesticity and sentiment. “For all his fascination with architectural structure, Ruskin loves watery mixtures of things more than solid constructions” (18). For him, it is “in the ordinary and the local [that] our salvation lies” (31). Even Ruskin’s paeans to the great Gothic cathedrals, Feldman argues, are always related to his interest in ordinary dwelling places; indeed, his “scene of writing” is first and foremost “home,” wherever home happened to be. The sublime, accordingly, is deeply rooted in sentiment, the aesthetic entwined with the ordinary, the public with the private. People and buildings, moreover, begin to share qualities: the external surfaces of buildings have human faces even as the human body is an architectural form.

Feldman’s Ruskin is thus less eccentric, more accessible than the Ruskin to whom we are accustomed. A similar revaluation occurs in the case of Rossetti. Both in his paintings and his poems, Feldman suggests, the key to Rossetti’s art is “richness of arrangement” (67); in Monna Rosa, for example, the hawthorn pot is related not only to the woman’s robe and peacock feathers within the painting but also to his own collections, as “arranged” in his house and studio, his placement of the art work within the domestic interior of his sitting room (69). What sometimes strikes readers as excessive ornamentation can thus be justified as a feature of Rossetti’s ‘domestic sublime,” his feminization, as in Ruskin’s case, of particular settings and occasions so as to intermingle the aesthetic and the everyday, the inside and the outside, the “real” rose plant and the painted decorative stylized cluster of roses.

This is an appealing reading of Rossetti, but it should be remarked that Modernism—at least Modernism in any usual sense of the term—has conveniently disappeared. For where are these feminized arrangements of interiors in the work of Joyce or Eliot, Pound or Stevens? Feldman sometimes alludes to the latter but she cannot quite make the austere poet of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” a proponent of domestic collage. The skewing of Modernism comes to a head in Chapter 4, the chapter on Augusta Evans. Here I must plead ignorance for I have never read Evans, but, whether or not she was a disciple of Ruskin, as Feldman claims, Evans’s novel St. Elmo, which is Feldman’s Exhibit A, is by her own account such an oddly written “hodgepodge,” that one wonders why it is being discussed at all in a book on the domesticized aesthetic and the sentimental sublime. Evans, we are told, “explores the significance of silence; the fascination of the grotesque, the deadly, the diseased, and the over-wrought; the mirroring of characters; the counterpointing of plots; and the intricacies of self-reflexive narratives” (127). Her novel sounds like an interesting example of a popular form of decadence but what has happened to Modernism? Feldman argues that, like Ruskin and Rossetti, Evans is interested in the arrangements of interiors, in the complications and disturbances of objects in relation (134). It is a valiant case, but not likely to put Evans in anyone’s Victorian Modernist pantheon.

The weakest of the four author chapters, however, is, to my mind, the one on William James. The familiar themes come up: the entanglement of domestic and sentimental in James’s letters and journals, the connection of philosophical and personal in James’s philosophical writings. But here the reader familiar with James can’t help wondering what has happened to his central ideas, his actual arguments. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, Feldman argues, James “conflates the domestic and the aesthetic through a sentimental performance that, reaching outward to seek sublimity as it is experienced by real people at the margins of their consciousness, enacts the very philosophical position it purports to present scientifically” (180). This may well be the case but it places the emphasis on context—“genteel domestic and popular culture” (192)– at the expense of content. Indeed, every writer of the period, including William’s brother Henry, can, at some level, be “placed” in the domestic space in which he functioned, but that doesn’t mean this domestic space is the central facet of his or her work as Feldman would have us believe.

Between the four author chapters, Feldman places four fairly short “Meditations” on her four topics. The least convincing of these is the first, “Aestheticism and Pragmatism.” Trying to refute fin-de-siècle Art for Art’s Sake on the one hand, and Marxist aesthetic on the other, Feldman comes up with little more than the “realm of beauty that both respects and defies dichotomies” (62). The meditation on Domesticity is more successful; here, one might say, to play on her own emphasis on domesticity, Feldman is much more at home; the feminization of culture, together with Sentimentality (Meditation 3)—these constitute her sphere of interest. Indeed, her case for a sentimentalism that differs, on the one hand, from the Age of Sensibility, and, on the other, transcends the usual concepts of Victorian kitsch, is convincing; for Feldman the sentimental always fuses feeling and moral value and can hence be very effective indeed. And,in this context, Sublimity (the fourth Meditation) becomes part and parcel of Sentiment.

In conclusion, then, one wishes that Feldman had made less grandiose claims for her theme and had written more fully and about her beloved late nineteenth-century authors, especially women authors, with regard to the domestic or sentimental sublime. Modernism seems to be curiously alien to her concerns. Indeed, a more historical treatment of her subject would have shown her how and why the domestic became a more contested “discourse” in the twentieth-century. Two World Wars intervened, wars that play virtually no role in Victorian Modernism. The spatial, which Feldman studies so assiduously, also governs her own analyses with their constant resort to triads and quartets. Individual readings are often acute and original, but Feldman’s rigid methodology cannot come to terms with issues of periodization, ethos, and the larger aesthetic climate of the later Victorian era.

Marjorie Perloff

“Art,” quips Hugh Kenner in A Homemade World (1975) “lifts the saying out of the zone of things said.”1  The reference is to William Carlos Williams’s poems, such as “The Red Wheelbarrow,” that don’t seem to “say” anything profound and yet are brilliantly articulated.  It is a notion close to Wittgenstein’s adage “that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.”2  Kenner’s emphasis on the how rather than the what has sometimes led critics to confuse him with the New Critics.  But Kenner, who studied at Yale under Cleanth Brooks, had little truck with New Critical doctrine, which was, for his taste, excessively thematic and figural.   The New Critic tracked a given poem’s unifying metaphor or paradox—for example, the comparison of lovers to saints in Donne’s “Canonization.” Kenner, by contrast, never focused on what Reuben Brower called the “key design” or “the aura around a bright clear centre”;3 he looked, not for centeredness but for difference.  What makes Beckett’s syntax unique and different from Joyce’s?   How did Pound’s annotation of Eliot’s Waste Land transform that particular poem?  How did the language of the turn of the century popular magazine Tit-Bits differ from the representation of Gerty McDowell’s seemingly similar maudlin kitsch language in Ulysses?

The ethos that animates such questions is hard to characterize.  You will not find Kenner’s name in the endless handbooks of literary theory and criticism that have sections on Formalism, Post-Structuralism, Feminism, Postcolonialism, and so on.  To be included, a given critic must be representative and must provide a model that students can follow. But one cannot, I think, perform a Kennerian reading of anything, for Kenner is himself a kind of poet-critic, whose books and essays place him among writers rather than among academic commentators.  Indeed, his eclectic methodology and firm emphasis on values places him closer to Samuel Johnson or Coleridge or T. S. Eliot than to such systematic theorists as Adorno or Foucault.   Hence the unusual status of The Pound Era, which, despite its immense learning and esoteric subject matter, has remained popular with general readers for over thirty years.

The Pound Era, along with Kenner’s studies of Joyce and Eliot, Williams and Beckett, represents what has often been called “the invention of modernism.”   Not everyone’s modernism:  highly selective in his enthusiasms, Kenner slighted women poets (especially Gertrude Stein) and minority writers.  Eclectic as is his methodology—a mix of philology, etymology, close attention to syntax, coupled with literary history, cultural study, and biographical information —his value system is as firm as Pound’s or Johnson’s—and often just as irritating.  But it is a good question for our time whether criticism can be as tolerant and value-free as we now want it to be.  In the age of cultural studies, when the literary text is regarded as primarily a symptom of its culture rather than as an individual success or failure, critics are reluctant to pronounce one work or group of works “better” than another.  Kenner’s, on the other hand, is advocacy criticism:  as the author of “firsts”—the first important  book on Pound, on Wyndham Lewis, on Joyce, on Beckett—and, for that matter, on Buckminster Fuller—his aim was to bring the reader round to his understanding of and appreciation for the author in question.

What, then, are the values that govern Kenner’s choices?  His  detractors stress what they take to be his conservative politics and accuse him of possibly sharing the Fascist values of Pound and Lewis.  But Joyce was hardly a Fascist, and Beckett, as an implacable enemy of the Nazis, actually risked his life in the Resistance. And what about Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, poets both Jewish and on the far Left, whom Kenner promoted, almost single-handedly, when they were barely known, just as he was a great supporter of their mentor William Carlos Williams and of Marianne Moore?

What do these Modernist poets have in common?  Kenner never spelled it out, but he demanded two things from Modernist literature.  One was accuracy of presentation—what Pound called “constatation of fact”–which was by no means mere facticity.  The other was a conjunction of literary innovation with that of the other arts, sciences, and technologies.  No Modernist writer, Kenner felt, could be impervious to Einsteinian physics or to such technological inventions as the X-Ray, the Marconi wireless, the airplane, and the typewriter.  In The Mechanical Muse (1987), Kenner studies the role the typewriter played in the invention of a new poetry with regard to lineation, stanza form, and page design.  Thus Yeats, Kenner shows, was still a poet of the handwritten page, Pound of the typed one.  And it was Kenner who established the chronology of the separate Waste Land manuscripts by studying the typewriters on which they were composed.

But perhaps the most important demand Kenner placed on the twentieth-century text–and this has not always been understood—is that it be International.  To write only for or about one’s countrymen was no longer enough.  Here the key Kenner text is A Sinking Island (1988), a book whose dismissive treatment of twentieth-century British writing caused consternation, especially in London but also in New York, where Bruce Bawer responded with “Hugh Kenner: A Sinking Oeuvre.”4  A Sinking Island argues that, unlike Continental Europe or the United States, Britain never underwent an avant-garde phase and hence its post-World War II writing was largely tame and regressive.  One can refute this argument readily; indeed, in recent years, British poetry and fiction have often been more adventurous than our own.  Still, Kenner is on to something important: that the rigid class structure of England, which lasted well into the ‘60s, was inimical to avant-garde innovation.

One key to understanding Kenner the critic is that he considered himself an outsider.  A Canadian of Scottish-Irish descent who lost most of his hearing in childhood as a result of influenza, a Catholic convert among Protestant Anglo-Canadians, Kenner was never at home at Yale, where his Toronto mentor Marshall McLuhan sent him for his Ph.D, and even less at home in England, whose residual Imperialism and Oxbridge snobbery he found irritatingly oppressive.  Not surprisingly, then, Kenner early on determined that the “real” British modernists were, with rare exceptions like D. H. Lawrence, who was working class, not English, but foreigners: James, Pound and Eliot (American), Conrad (Polis), Ford (German), and especially the Irish: Yeats (when not engaged in theosophical mumbo jumbo), Joyce, and Beckett.

Those who know their Pound, will recognize that Kenner’s Modernism was essentially Pound’s own:  “Poetry is news that STAYS news,” “Make it New!”, “Go in fear of abstractions,” “Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose,” “Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. . .”–these Poundian axioms were absorbed into Kenner’s vocabulary.  Like Pound, Kenner had an almost allergic reaction to what Wordsworth called Poetic Diction—to vagueness, muzziness, circumlocution, and stock phraseology.  Even more than Pound, he related modernist writing to new developments in the visual arts, especially Cubism, Futurism, and the technologies that gave us the readymades of Duchamp or the abstract corner-reliefs of Tatlin.

In this scheme of things, Kenner’s bête noire was, not surprisingly,  Bloomsbury.  For him, the Bloomsburies were not Modernists but late or post-Victorians whose innovations—including the rejection of conventional plot and characterization—masked perfectly traditional English values.  Bloomsbury, Kenner quips, was once defined as “a congeries of men and women all of whom were in love with Duncan Grant”5.  Theirs was the ultimate in-group, a state of affairs that irritated their Cambridge contemporary Wittgenstein, himself homosexual, as much as it did Kenner, the point being that, from the outsider’s perspective, the Bloomsburies were defined by their “acute class-consciousness” (163).  Privilege was all, and, as Woolf’s journals, letters, and even novels make clear, one didn’t consort with those who were not “one of us.”   Joyce is referred to in Woolf’s Diaries as “illiterate” and “underbred,” and when Harriet Weaver brought Joyce’s typescript to the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, Virginia wondered, “Why does [Joyce’s] filth seek exit from [Weaver’s] mouth?” (170).  Weaver, moreover, was said to have the table manners of “a well bred hen” (170).

Kenner has something more serious than gossip in mind.  Himself a materialist, if not a dialectical materalist critic, he wonders if the Arnold Bennett of Hilda Lessways, an Edwardian whom Woolf mocks for his emphasis on material goods and property as defining a given character’s consciousness, isn’t perhaps closer to Modernism than is Woolf herself, with her emphasis on fine shades of individual consciousness.  Kenner takes exception to Woolf’s remarks in both “Modern Fiction” (1919) and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924) 6.  In the class-conscious England of 1924, the important thing was that the educated, well-bred, and “clever” reader should have something to say over which fellow readers could chuckle as they read the anonymous (but stylistically identifiable) reviews in their TLS.  “To an Arnold Bennett,” remarks Kenner, “[Woolf] could condescend from her safe perch in the upper middle class, but innovation tormented her with jealousy” (176).  Indeed, in a 1922 Diary entry, Joyce is dismissed as  “a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples,” and Ulysses is “an illiterate, underbred book, . . . the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating” (176).

What does being a working-man have to do with it, not that Joyce, educated at a private Jesuit boarding school and then University College, Dublin, was one?  Here again, snobbery is coupled with inaccuracy, prompted, most likely, by the displacement onto class of Joyce’s status as Irish (and hence inherently déclassé) Catholic.  Modernism, in Kenner’s scheme of things, was precisely a revolt against these values of class, nationality, and ethnicity.  From Stein and Eliot, to the Futurist and Dada manifestos, to Pound and Williams, Kafka and Brecht, Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and beyond them to the Sam Beckett whom Kenner wrote about so brilliantly, the genteel English liberal agnosticism of Woolf and her circle was no match for the purposely ungainly, untidy writing in The Waste Land or The Cantos.  Whatever else Modernism was about, Kenner argues, revolution, or at least the myth of revolution– was at its center.

In what he calls Woolf’s best novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), a novel that elegizes the “idyllic” world before the Great War, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay (versions of Woolf’s father and mother) retain the cliché characteristics of Victorian males and females:  he is rational, she is intuitive, he compartmentalizes, she regards matter as fluid.  Thus Mrs. Ramsay recalls something her husband said at dinner, “about the square root of one thousand two hundred and fifty-three.  That was the number, it seemed, on his watch.”   “What did it all mean?”  Mrs. Ramsay wonders.  “To this day she had no notion.  A square root?  What was that?” (181).  To assume that such “thought” is a sign of “masculine intelligence,” as does Mrs. Ramsay (and perhaps her creator as well), that women don’t think about such cold mathematical trivia as square roots (and, to be accurate, does anyone really think about specific square roots?) is, Kenner argues, “a radical defect of imagination,“ an “unwillingness to conjure real plausibility” (182).  It is a harsh judgment.  But my point here is not whether Kenner is “right” or “wrong,” or whether his pantheon is excessively narrow and prejudicial.  Rather, I want to suggest that Kenner’s ostensibly quirky, eccentric criticism has a self-consistency we find only in the great critics—in, for example, Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes.

The issue is not, as Kenner’s critics sometimes claim, merely aesthetic.  For Kenner, as for Wittgenstein, ethics and aesthetics are one.   This means that the persistent differentiation between “Left” and “Right” modernism needs to be rethought.   Take the case of Ezra Pound.  The late great Brazilian Concrete poet Haroldo de Campos, himself active in Left politics, once told me that he thought Pound was a very “ethical” person.  Haroldo meant that, despite Pound’s reprehensible politics and offensive anti-Semitism, his poetry is “ethical” in its fidelity to its own principles.  It does not have a “palpable design” on the reader, as does, perhaps, To the Lighthouse, which purports not to make value judgments about its characters, but then sets up Mr. Ramsay as representative of “masculine” traits at odds with his wife’s “feminine” sensibility.  The solution, Hugh Kenner, like Haroldo, would have argued, is not to substitute “better” values but to make sure that, as Beckett says of Finnegans Wake, form is inseparable from content.  Value cannot be detached from language itself.

Thus, even as Kenner belonged to no “school” of criticism and adopted, in his writing, whatever methodology–whether biography, etymology, or digression about a particular cultural feature—might elucidate a particular textual conundrum—his insistence that there is no “content” separable from a poet’s language itself is as applicable today as it was fifty years ago when Kenner published The Poetry of Ezra Pound.  Louis Zukofsky comes to mind as an example in the wake of the recent Centenary conference.

Kenner greatly admired Zukofsky, but the current rather facile consensus that Zukofsky’s politics are ipso facto more admirable than Pound’s would no doubt have given him pause. A Lower East Side Jew, Zukofsky was a man of the Left who stood overtly for social change.  But Pound may have been the more ethical of the two.  For Pound’s absorption of the troubadours, of Dante and Cavalcanti, as of Confucius, the Noh theatre, or Propertius, was all of a piece with his sense of himself as a poet.  He became, in other words, his precursors.  We cannot say the same for Zukofsky, whose writing is littered with references to Courtly love codes, Chaucer and Spenser, to Bach and the early fugue, and yet places these allusions within the frame of a bourgeois family romance, wherein the poet and his wife Celia, his helpmeet and amanuensis, are dedicated to the ostensible genius of their only son, Paul.  What does it mean to juxtapose, as does “A”-12, this fixation on family with a set of allusions and esoteric images based on the Vita Nuova?  Where does the extreme artifice of Eighty Flowers stand vis-à-vis the more robust Modernism of Zukofsky’s other master, James Joyce?   When these questions are finally asked, it will be understood that Hugh Kenner, far from being the “conservative” formalist he is now often taken to be, was the great radical among Modernist critics.

MODERNISM NOW

Marjorie Perloff

The great revolution of the early twentieth century designated by the term Modernism—a term that refers not only to a period (roughly 1900-1930) but to an ethos—remains, at the beginning of our own century, incomplete and open to the future: modernism, it is now widely understood, is not yet finished, its momentum having been deferred by two world wars and the Cold War so that many of its principles are only now being brought to fruition.   But the recognition that we are still modernists has been slow in coming, for in the decades following World War II, the common wisdom was that the Modernism of the early century was tainted by its racism, sexism, and elitism–its retrograde politics, and «purist» aestheticism.   Modernist «genius theory» was mocked by critics of both Left and Right, as was the purported faith in Modernist autonomy and the primacy of poetic form.

But from the vantage point of the new century, the rejection of Modernism no longer makes much sense.  True, as many of the authors in this collection demonstrate, Modernist poems, novels, plays, and films reflect attitudes toward race, class, and gender that now strike us as unacceptable.   As  Frank Kermode argued, in his early critique The Sense of an Ending (1967),  the system-building and use of explanatory myth, characteristic of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis, led to «totalitarian theories of form [that were] matched or reflected by totalitarian politics.»  Indeed, Eliot’s celebrated cult of «tradition» could be seen, in this context, as a longing for «the continuity of imperial deposits,» a «persistent nostalgia for closed, immobile hierarchical societies.»

Kermode himself was not writing as a Marxist critic, but Marxist theory quickly picked up the thread, as critic after critic came to uncover what Robert Casillo called, vis-à-vis Pound, the «genealogy of demons.»  Pound’s Fascism and overt anti-Semitism, as expressed in his Rome broadcasts during World War II, which led to the poet’s decade-long incarceration in St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., were excoriated as somehow inherently Modernist.  Eliot, after all, also made overtly racist and anti-Semitic statements in his poetry, as when in «Gerontion,» we read:

My house is a decayed house,

And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. . . .

And although most Modernist poets did not go as far as Eliot or Pound, they were given, like Hart Crane, to talk of the «nigger-brass percussions» heard in nightclubs, or to refer, like William Carlos Williams in Paterson,  to a poor slum girl as «Beautiful Thing.»  Even Gertrude Stein, who, as a female, lesbian, and Jewish writer, seemed exempt from the prejudices of her day, recycled the racist concepts of her day in her «negro story» Melanctha,  and we now know that Stein translated—quite willingly– the speeches of the collaborationist Vichy government’s leader Maréchal Petain during World War II.   And—even more surprising—Bertrand Russell, known for his championship of radical causes, was given, in letters to friends and lovers, to racist and anti-Semitic slurs that make Eliot’s lines in Gerontion look almost tame.

But as the early twentieth century recedes in time, we are beginning to understand that  Modernist values cannot be understood outside their historical context.  The Modernist era was one in which a remarkable Utopian vision, of which more in a moment, culminated in two deadly World Wars (or, more properly, one long world war), and two even more deadily ideologies —Fascism and Communism.   In the course of the upheaval that resulted,  the Enlightenment faith in rationality and progress was destroyed once and for all.  Principles that had been taken for granted for centuries now came in for total transvaluation.

The literature that records this transvaluation is by no means «pretty»–it is merely fascinating and fabulous.  For one thing—and this is important to remember—there is no necessary connection between «good» literature and «good» politics.  On the contrary, great literature has more often than not been born of  struggle, opposition, and the need to rethink current pieties and accepted values.  Secondly, as Theodor Adorno argued  persuasively in his Aesthetic Theory (1970),  the Modernist emphasis on form is by no means retrograde, for poetic form functions to resist the ideological pressure it represses.   Indeed, resistance is the key to the successful artwork, which is thus of necessity dialectical: «the concrete historical situation, art’s other, is [its] condition.»  And it is the poetics of such resistance that continues to dazzle readers coming to Modernist works a century later.

From Rimbaud’s insistence in 1873, that «Il faut étre absolument moderne,» to Pound’s 1918 declaration that «no good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old» and his later declaration that «Poetry is news that STAYS news,» to D. H. Lawrence’s demand, in a 1923 manifesto by that name, for «Surgery for the Novel—or a Bomb,» to Williams’s account of the ways in which Marianne Moore’s «wiping soiled words  or cutting them clean out, removing the aureoles that have been pasted about them or taking them bodily from greasy contexts,» modernism perceived its own mission as a call for necessary rupture.  Even W. B. Yeats, that self-styled «last romantic,» declared in his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935:

The revolt against Victorianism meant to the young poet a revolt against irrelevant description of nature, the scientific and moral discursiveness of In Memoriam . . . the political eloquence of Swinburne, the psycholoigcal curiosity o Browning, and the poetical diction of everybody.

The radicalism of Modernist publication, moreover, is attested by its public reception.  In 1916, Lawrence’s great experimental novel The Rainbow was banned under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, thus setting the stage for Lawrence’s lifelong battle against censorship.  Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) could not be published in the United States until the landmark decision of Judge Woolsey in December 1933 cleared the novel of obscenity charges.  Poetry was less likely to be judged obscene than the fiction or drama of the period, but again, it helps to remember that Eliot’s «Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,» now a classroom and anthology classic, was dismissed, in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, as the senseless rambling of a confused mind, even as Williams’s Spring and All (1923), published in an edition of three-hundred copies in Dijon, France, was almost entirely overlooked.  «Nobody,» Williams later recalled, «ever saw it—it had no circulation at all.»  And Gertrude Stein’s «writing» was alternately lampooned and dismissed as «mere» automatic writing—which is to say, pure nonsense.

What was it that made the Modernist period, especially  in its early Utopian stages, so revolutionary?   The transformation of an agrarian world into an urbanized one, which went hand in hand with the astonishing inventions of the period—the internal combustion engine, diesel engine and steam turbine, the automobile, motor bus, tractor, and soon the airplane, the telegraph, telephone, and typewriter, the dissemination of electricity, and the creation of synthetic dyes, fibres, and plastics—all these contributed to what Modris Ecksteins in his Rites of Spring (1989) has characterized as the Flucht nach vorne—the flight forward.  The Einsteinian revolution, the «new» non-Euclidean geometries, the invention of the Roentgen X-Ray:  these heavily influenced the arts and poetries of the early century:  witness Marcel Duchamp’s found objects known as readymades, his non-semantic poetry, his use of chance and  «playful physics» in The Large Glass ( The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even). Consider, too, how the population of the capitals of Europe and New York multiplied.  To give just one example: in 1870 Germany, not yet a unified nation, had a population that was two-thirds rural; by 1914 that relationship had been reversed, and two thirds of all Germans lived in cities.  In New York, as in Paris, the advertising industry, mass entertainment, and popular journalism came to the fore and changed the dynamic of art reception.  So successful and wide-spread were the new networks of communication that contact between individual nations became, at once, much easier and yet fraught with the proximity and hence competition that led to World War I. The first flight across the English Channel, for example, which took place in July 1909, and was celebrated by Robert Delaunay in his painting Homage à Blériot, was followed, no more than six years later, by airplanes dropping bombs over Paris in World War I.

Indeed, the «Renaissance of 1910,» as Guy Davenport calls the pre-war period, came to an abrupt end with the onset of what was the most pointless of wars:

By 1916 this springtime was blighted by the World War, the tragic effects of which cannot be overestimated [and which extinguished European culture.  (Students reading Pound's 'eye deep in hell» automatically think it is an allusion to Dante until you tell them about trenches.)  Accuracy in such matters being impossible, we can say nevertheless that the brilliant experimental period in twentieth-century art was stopped short in 1916.  Charles Ives had written his best music by then; Picasso had become Picasso; Pound, Pound; Joyce, Joyce.  Except for individual talents, already in development beore 1916, moving on to full maturity, the century was over in its sixteenth year.  (The Geography of Imagination 314)

This is a radical view of a radical period but one which is actually quite plausible.   Davenport adds that the «collapse» of 1916 was less endgame than «interruption.»  Obviously there was to be important literature after the Great War, but what Davenport means is that the  revolutionary modes and techniques we associate with Modernism—and which have everything to do with the revolutionary changes in the culture itself-- were all in place by 1916.

What were these modes?  First and foremost, the demise of mimesis, of representation, as the accepted purpose of the literary construct.  For the Modernists, the role of poetry is not to represent the world outside language, but to create a linguistic field that has its own mode of being.  «Reality,» by this token, cannot, in any case, be known directly; it can be revealed only by the mediation of the Symbol:  one thinks of Hart Crane's long epic poem The Bridge, which presents its myth of spanning the American continent by means of the symbolism of Brooklyn Bridge and related circular forms.  The projected autonomy of art and its divorce from truth or morality puts heavy weight on the poet himself (herself)-- the heroic Modernist poet is the genius who can and must «Make it New.»  In this regard, Gertrude Stein is very much like the T. S. Eliot who was supposedly her enemy: she was a firm believer in genius and in art as the very center (and the opposite) of life.  Aesthetic work, for Stein, was the only «work» that really mattered, that made living worthwhile.  And although Marcel Duchamp pretended to total «aesthetic indifference» and claimed to prefer playing chess to art-making, there is no doubt that he too did everything in his power—including the avoidance of all military service and inconvenience in both World Wars and of marriage as tying the artist down to bourgeois living habits and the need to earn money—to be free to make his readymades, boxes, and the installation of the Large Glass.

The corollary of the anti-mimetic contract of Modernism is that the art work is autonomous, that it has a life of its own, independent of its possible «reflection» of reality or personal feeling.  «Poetry,» Eliot announced in «Tradition and the Individual Talent,» «is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,» although, he added somewhat coyly, «But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.».  The new autonomous poem, moreover, avoided the linearity of its Romantic and Victorian predecessors, exhibiting the  alogical form Joseph Frank dubbed «spatial form,» its parts relating less by causality or sequence than by the metonymic structure of juxtapositions that came to be known as collage.   Indeed, collage—literally a «pasting together,» originally applied to lovers—and the key art form for Picasso and Braque after1912, became one of the dominant forms of modernist poetry.  The Waste Land, Pound'sCantos, Williams's  Spring and All and later Paterson, Mina Loy's Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, Louis Zukofsky's «A»--these are collage-texts in which unlikely materials are juxtaposed so as to create a dense semantic structure.

That language, Modernist poetics held, had to be concrete.  From Eliot's objective correlative to Marianne Moore's «imaginary gardens with real toads in them,» to Ezra Pound's Imagist manifesto in «A Retrospect,» with its demand to «Go in fear of abstractions,» and his definition of the Image as «an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,» to Williams's «No ideas but in things,»  precision and what Pound called «constatation of fact» were the order of the day.  Yet precision did not necessarily mean «clear, visual images»--the term Eliot used to describe Dante's poetry in The Divine Comedy.  The term could also refer to precision of syntax—a syntax commensurate to the articulation of a complex set of ideas—as in Gertrude Stein or in Wallace Stevens, or, for that matter, to precision of sound, to the finding of the perfectly appropriate rhyme or rhythm, as in Langston Hughes or Jean Toomer.  In all these instances, poetry is regarded as an art of “verbivocovisual” (Joyce’s term) complexity and difficulty.  Whereas Victorian poetry and its American counterpart in the poetry, say, of Longfellow, was aimed at the larger reading public, Modernists demanded that the public would meet them more than halfway, would take the trouble to unravel what had taken the poets themselves so long to do.  One thinks of Joyce declaring that if it took him eight years to write Ulysses, readers ought to be willing to take the necessary time  to read it.

Other Modernist continuities are more thematic than formal.  Modernism attached much importance to the newly discovered Freudian unconscious, to dream work, and to the use of myth and archetypal narratives as organizing structures.  Thus The Waste Land takes its structural motive from the vegetation myths discussed in J. M. Frazer’s Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, even as Pound’s Cantos fuse Confucian historiography with Greek myth and the Homeric paradigm of the Odyssey.  Indeed, Guy Davenport has argued that the “renaissance” of the twentieth century “has been a renaissance of the archaic,” that the age defined itself by such discoveries as that of the prehistoric Lascaux caves and their amazing drawings, of the Kouroi or Archaic Greece, and the revival of the pre-Socratic philosophers, for whom “science and poetry are still the same thing.”  “[Buckminster] Fuller,” writes Davenport, “is our Pythagoras, Niels Bohr is our Democritus, Ludwig Wittgenstein is our Heraclitus.”

The appeal of the archaic goes hand in hand with the Modernist obsession with the meaning of exile: indeed, the diaspora literature of our own time begins in the early twentieth-century.  Most nineteenth-century poets and novelists, after all, lived all their lives in the country of their birth: think of Austen and Trollope, Wordsworth and Tennyson, Dickinson and Whitman.  But the 1910s and 20s witnessed the expatriation of Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris most of her adult life, T. S. Eliot (London), Ezra Pound (first London, then Paris, then Rapallo, Italy), and H.D. (London, Switzerland).  British writers – Lawrence, Ford, Joyce similarly went into exile.  Those Americans who stayed home like Williams. Moore, and Stevens, lived in exotic places in their imagination and introduced foreign words and phrases (mostly French) into their poems.  Again, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff were both born in the U.S. to immigrant Jewish parents, fleeing the Russian pogroms; Zukofsky’s first language was Yiddish.  Other poets, for example Langston Hughes, traveled widely—to Cuba and South America, to Russia and Japan.  Poetry thus became a more cosmopolitan, nomadic pursuit than it had been in the nineteenth century.  “Questions of travel,” to borrow Elizabeth Bishop’s title, were on everyone’s mind.

What, then, of Modernism’s later trajectory? .  “From the Modernism that you want,” the poet David Antin once quipped, “you get the Postmodernism you deserve.” In The Dismemberment of Orpheus (1982), Ihab Hassan drew up a chart, admittedly schematic, of the difference between the two.  Here, with some omissions, is Hassan’s schema:

Modernism                                                                                 Postmodernism

Romanticsm/Symbolism                                                     Pataphysics/Dadaism

Form (conjunctive, closed)                                                Antiform (disjunctive, open)

Purpose                                                                                       Play

Design                                                                                          Chance

Hierarchy                                                                                   Anarchy

Art Object/Finished Work                                      Process/Performance/Happening

Distance                                                                                      Participation

Presence                                                                                    Absence

Centering                                                                                  Dispersal

Metaphor                                                                                  Metonym

Lisible (readerly)                                                                  Scriptible (writerly)

Origin/Cause                                                                          Differance/Trace

Determinacy                                                                          Indeterminacy

Transcendence                                                                     Immanence

The difficulty with this chart—a difficulty not fully understood when Hassan first put forward this blueprint—is that, as the distance between the first appearance of “postmodernism” and the present has increased, we can see that most of the attributes in the right-hand column were already present in Modernism.  Can, we for example, talk of “Gerontion” as a “readerly” rather than “writerly” text?  Of determinacy in Crane’s Bridge or Williams’s Kora in Hell?  Of hierarchy in Stevens’sAuroras of Autumn?  Of “transcendence” in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons?  At every turn, the neat dichotomy between Modernism and Postmodernism is called into question.

But Antin’s reference to the “modernism that you want” raises further complications.  The first item in Hassan’s right-hand column is “Pataphysics/Dadaism.”   No doubt, what Hassan meant is that sixties’ poets and artists revived these earlier movements and produced such “neo-Dada” works as John’s Cage silent piano piece 4’33” or Jackson Mac Low’s The Pronouns.  But after all, Dada was chronologically a Modernist movement, and surely Duchamp, perhaps the most quintessential Modernist of all, was the purveyor par excellence of play, chance, anarchy, audience participation, and especially “Process/Performance/Happening.”  The Readymades, let’s remember, date from the mid-1910s, the Large Glass from 1922, and nothing produced in the “Postmodern” era has quite surpassed these works with respect to “Making It New.”

It may be countered, of course, that I am a blurring the well-known distinctions between the terms Modernist and Avant-Garde.   But if the past decade has taught us anything, it is that the opposition between the “established,” “conservative” Modernist artist and the “radical” avant-gardist no longer has much meaning.  Duchamp, in later life,paid homage to Eliot’s  “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Allen Ginsberg’s Howl!, presents itself overtly as an heir to Paterson and the Cantos, even as John Ashbery’s Litany harks back to Eliot’s Four Quartets.   As for the recent experiments of Language Poetry, such poets as Charles Bernstein and Steve McCaffery, Lyn Hejnian and Susan Howe can now be seen to come squarely out of the Modernist tradition, even as they carry play and indeterminacy, chance and dispersal much further.

To recapitulate: it was in the Modernist era, especially in its first utopian, radical, optimistic phase, that the great literary  inventions of our time—collage, simultaneity, free verse and verse-prose combinations, genre-mixing, indeterminacy of image and syntax—were born.   When, in the period entre deux guerres, Modernism was refigured, it became, of course, more socially and politically conscious, giving us the ethical concerns of the Objectivists, the poetics of Négritude of Aimé Cesaire and Leopold Senghor abroad as well as of the Harlem Renaissance at home.  After World War II, the landscape turned increasingly darker, even for a seemingly light-hearted and jaunty poet like Frank O’Hara, who declares, in a moment of despair recorded in “Ode (To Joseph LeSueur) on the Arrow that Flieth by Day” (1958):

for God’s sake fly the other way

leave me standing alone crumbling in the new sky of the Wide World

without passage, without breath

a spatial representative of emptiness

Yet even for a late Modernist like O’Hara, it is art that supplies redemption: “A Step Away from Them,” which mourns the death of such artist friends as Bunny Lang and John Latouche, as well as of Jackson Pollock, ends with the lines:

A glass of papaya juice

and back to work.  My heart is in my

pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

A tribute to a great Modernist precursor: perhaps this is still the poetic condition.

Marjorie Perloff

published in Modernist Cultures, Vol. 1: Issue 1, Spring 2005.

In a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” Andreas Huyssen writes:

In the context of social and cultural theory Benjamin conceptualized what Marcel Duchamp had already shown in 1919 in L.H.O.O.Q.  By iconoclastically altering a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and . . . by exhibiting a mass-produced urinal as a fountain sculpture, Duchamp succeeded in destroying what Benjamin called the traditional art work’s aura, that aura of authenticity and uniqueness that constituted the work’s distance from life and that required contemplation and immersion on the part of the spectator.”[1]

Duchamp against auratic art?  Against the unique art object?  He certainly professed to be.  But almost a century after Duchamp made Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q, these readymades are enshrined in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in a room of their own, where pilgrims from around the world may be found in quiet contemplation of the artist’s bold and unique conception.  Indeed, the countless  photographic reproductions, far from diminishing the aura of these originals, most of them not “originals” at all but Duchamp’s own later copies, seem only to have enhanced it.  Duchamp’s readymades now command sky-high prices, and when I recently applied for permission to reproduce these and related images in a scholarly book on modernism, I was charged more than $200 apiece.

Chronologically, Duchamp was, of course, an artist of the Modernist era, Fountain dating from 1917.  As a Modernist, he was part of a larger movement that is now undergoing an astonishing revival.  Duchamp exhibitions, conferences, websites, books, and articles are a boom industry. [2] But so is the “High” Modernism Duchamp ostensibly deconstructed in his experimental art.  Consider the following events of 2003-04 alone:

(1) The Library of America published Ezra Pound’s Poems & Translations, a volume of nearly 1400 pages that does not include the poet’s central work, The Cantos, presumably because it will get a volume of its own.  Its editor, Richard Sieburth, has also just brought out a superb annotated edition of The Pisan Cantos for New Directions.  No longer, evidently, will a Selected Cantos do; the Pisans, it is assumed, must and will be read whole in courses as well as by Pound readers at large.

(2) The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D.H. Lawrence, now running to some forty volumes, has published a 700-page edition of Studies in Classic American Literature, that supplements the short 1923 text most us first read in a small Viking paperback.  The Cambridge edition includes all the earlier versions of Studies, drafts, and very full notes and introductory material.

(3) The second volume of R. N. Foster’s magisterial biography of W. B. Yeats was published by Oxford, receiving many reviews like the following by John Banville in the New York Review of Books:  “W. B. Yeats: A Life is a great and important work, a triumph of scholarship, thought, and empathy such as one would hardly have thought possible in this age of disillusion.  It is an achievement wholly of a scale with its heroic subject.”[3]

(4) Gertrude Stein’s writings, long considered too eccentric and incomprehensible to discuss in detail, are the subject of Ulla Dydo’s 600-page study The Language that Rises (Northwestern), which examines “the process of making and remaking of Stein’s texts as they move from notepad to notebook to manuscript,” focusing on the single decade (1923-34). Dydo’s book lays to rest, once and for all, the myth, recently regurgitated in Janet Malcolm’s long New Yorker profile, [4] that Stein’s colorful persona deserves discussion but that, with the exception of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and one or two other prose texts, the work itself is unreadable.

(5) The University of Connecticut organized a large conference called “Celebrating Wallace Stevens” to be held in April 2004 and including poets as well as academics. A call for papers to supplement those by invited speakers produced, according to the organizer, Glen MacLeod, hundred of submissions from eager young Modernists.

(6) Joseph Roth’s The Radetsky March (1932), newly translated by Joachim Neugroschel for Overlook Press in 2002, has become, after decades of neglect, something of a best-seller.  In The New Yorker (19 January 2004, 81-86), Joan Acocella devoted a large portion of her essay “Rediscovering Joseph Roth” to this great novel on the decline of the Hapsburg empire, as seen through the eyes of its military, stationed in the small garrison border towns on the Eastern frontier.  What makes Roth’s so unusual—and no doubt accounts for his earlier neglect—is that this Jewish writer from Galicia was a fervent admirer of the monarchy, indeed of the Emperor Franz Joseph.

(7) In 2003, Viking published Lydia Davis’s new translation ofDu Côté de chez Swann, with the remaining volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu to come in translations by different authors.  Widely reviewed in newspapers and magazines, this, perhaps the most difficult of Modernist novels, is evidently selling astonishingly well to what is largely a new audience. In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past as it was called in the Scott Moncrieff translation, is the subject of sixty-nine customer reviews on amazon.com, of which more later.

(8) The journal Modernism/Modernity, now in its tenth year of publication, won this year’s Phoenix Award for significant editorial achievement.  M/M is the official journal of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA), which held its first annual convention in 1999 and is now a major fixture on the conference scene, having grown so large it can hardly accommodate all those who wish to attend its meeting and give papers.  In 2003, the MSA put out a call for papers for a special double issue on a topic that would have been declared reactionary a mere decade ago—namely the poetry and prose of T. S. Eliot.

These are just random examples of Modernist activity on the academic and publishing front today.  It can be argued, of course, that the great artists of the early century never disappeared, that what we are witnessing today is more accurately survival rather than revival.  Throughout the past century, there have always been scholars, poets, and even general readers committed to Yeats and Eliot, Pound and Stevens, Proust and Lawrence, and who were passionate about the avant-garde as represented by Duchamp or Stein.  But the fact is that from the 1960s well into the 90s, the word Modernism was a term of opprobrium, even as the avant-garde was pronounced a failure, given its inability, so Peter Bürger famously told us, to destroy “art” as a bourgeois institution.  The critique of Modernism, for that matter, came not only from the Left that questioned its elitist, patriarchal, imperialist, and colonialist tendencies, but could be found in such bourgeois venues as The New Yorker, where Cynthia Ozick first published her scathing piece on T. S. Eliot.  “We no longer live,” Ozick declared, “in the literary shadow” of Eliot, whom she dismissed as so much “false coinage”– an “autocratic, inhibited, depressed, rather narrow-minded, and considerably bigoted fake Englishman.”  “High art,” moreover, “is dead.  The passion for inheritance is dead.  Tradition is equated with obscurantism.  The wall that divided serious high culture from the popular arts is breached.”  In this context, “Eliot’s elegiac fragments appear too arcane, too aristocratic, and too difficult for contemporary ambition.”[5]

This essay appeared in 1989, a mere fifteen years ago.  Extreme as Ozick’s argument may seem today, its reservations about Eliot’s politics were voiced as early as 1967 by a critic who had himself written sympathetically on Eliot and edited his critical prose.  I am thinking of Frank Kermode, who observed, in The Sense of an Ending, that there was a “correlation between early modernist literature and authoritarian politics,” that “totalitarian theories of form,” which he found in such key texts as Yeats’s A Vision, Eliot’s critical essays, and everywhere in Pound’s writings, were “matched or reflected by a totalitarian politics”:

It appears in fact, that modernist radicalism in art—the breaking down of pseudo-traditions, the making new of a true understanding of the nature of the elements of art—this radicalism involves the creation of fictions which may be dangerous in the dispositions they breed towards the world. . . .  Instead of [a commonplace view of reality] there is to be order as the modernist artist understands it: rigid, out of flux, the spatial order of the modern critic or the closed authoritarian society. . . . [6]

And Kermode singled out Eliot as the most extreme case of this authoritarianism:

“He had a persistent nostalgia for closed, immobile hierarchical societies.  If tradition is, as he said in After Strange Gods . . . ‘the habitual actions, habits and customs’ which represent the kinship ‘of the same people living in the same place’ [shades of Bloom’s ineffectual definition of a nation in Ulysses!] it is clear that Jews do not have it, but also that practically nobody now does” (112).

This is certainly an accurate appraisal of After Strange Gods, the set of University of Virginia lectures Eliot published in 1938 (and then suppressed), but Kermode makes two assumptions that now seem questionable.  First, his “Modernism” here refers to the later 1930s; indeed, “Early Modernism” is Kermode’s term for the pre-World War II period as distinct from what he calls the “schismatic modernism” of the postwar era.   But from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we may note, as have recent critics like Tyrus Miller and Peter Nicholls, that Modernism was a phenomenon of the early century—indeed Nicholls follows Benjamin in taking the Modernist ethos back to the mid-nineteenth century of Baudelaire.[7] The totalitarianisms of the thirties—Communism as well as Fascism—worked to undermine the very foundations of Modernism, as we can see most clearly in the Soviet rejection of its own avant-garde, emblematized dramatically by the suicide of Mayakovsky in 1930.

Periodization is, of course, always open to debate, but what about Kermode’s other unstated assumption, which is that the “totalitarian” politics of much Anglo-American Modernist writing was matched by “totalitarian” form—the “rigid . . . spatial order” of a “closed authoritarian society”?  Do such strictures apply to the paratactic collage structure of Pound’s Cantos?  To the free-wheeling performative mode of Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature?  To the non-linear narratives of Stein’s Tender Buttons orStanzas in Meditation?   To the pseudo-closure of The Waste Land’s final line, “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih,” which succeeds only in reopening the larger question of what it might mean to fish “with the arid plain behind me”?

These are questions that seem vital enough to readers of Modernist texts today.  But in the antinomian climate of the 1960s, Kermode’s association of Modernism with reaction, authoritarianism, and proto-Fascism found a sympathetic audience.  The rescue operation performed by Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) had not yet begun; indeed, in the English-speaking world, the reception of this important text did not begin properly until at least 1984, when the first English translation of the book was published by Routledge. [8] For Adorno, Modernist art is characterized by its resistance to capitalist commodification, a resistance characterized by its opposition to a society that it nevertheless brings back into the artwork by means of indirect critique.  The true Modernist artwork, Adorno posits, refuses to engage in direct reflection of social surface; it does not “want to duplicate the façade of reality,” but “makes an uncompromising reprint of reality while at the same time avoiding being contaminated by it.”  This dialectic process is characterized by Adorno as negative mimesis.  Kafka’s work, for example, is great in its “negative sense of reality”; his image of bureaucracy is “the cryptogram of capitalism’s highly polished, glittering late phase, which he excludes in order to define it all the more precisely in its negative.”[9] Accordingly, fragmentation, dislocation, and difficulty are essential to Modernist art, which rigidly excludes the banalities of everyday life and rejects the specious productions of mass culture.

Marxist critics as dissimilar as Andreas Huyssen and Fredric Jameson have built on Adorno’s theory even as they have rejected its purism, its repudiation of all but self-evidently “high” art into the Modernist canon so that even jazz has been dismissed as merely populist.  In After the Great Divide (1986), Huyssen takes as his starting point Adorno’s characterization of Modernism as insisting on “the autonomy of the art work, its obsessive hostility to mass culture, its radical separation from the culture of everyday life, and its programmatic distance from political, economic, social concerns.”  But whereas Adorno considers such distance inevitable, Huyssen argues that the task of postmodernism has been precisely to challenge the “Great Divide” between high art and mass culture.  Examining a variety of postmodern art discourses, Huyssen notes that “The pedestal of high art and high culture no longer occupies the privileged space it used to. . . . Despite all its noble aspirations and achievements, we have come to recognize that the culture of enlightened modernity has also always (though by no means exclusively) been a culture of inner and outer imperialism”—an imperialism that no longer goes unchallenged.  “Whether these challenges,” Huyssen concludes, “will usher in a more habitable, less violent and more democratic world remains to be seen” (218-19).

Fredric Jameson’s critique of Adorno’s aesthetics is even more pessimistic.  For Jameson, Modernist resistance cannot, as Adorno posits, overcome the terrible alienation that defines the Modernist moment.  The increasing commodification of social relations, the degradation of language at the hands of advertising, the impersonality and anonymity of modern bureaucracy—these create a literature that is increasingly embattled.  The battle cry “Make It New!”, in this context, is no more than a doomed effort to resist capitalist reification.   The dislocation of modernist narrative, moreover, can be understood as a denial of historical change.  Postmodernism, which represents an even further stage of what is now global capitalism, cannot improve this state of affairs, but at least its admission that depth has given way to surface, parody to pastiche, emotion to a new blank affect, a centered discourse to one that is wholly decentered, exposes the limitations of Modernism.  Indeed, the seemingly “realist” fiction of emerging nations, old-fashioned as it may look to those with Modernist blinkers, manifests an authenticity lost in the Western World—an authenticity that comes from its allegorical treatment of its respective culture. [10]

Accordingly, so Jameson argues in the famous “Postmodernism” essay, “the high-modernist conception of a unique style, along with the accompanying collective ideals of an artistic or political vanguard or avant-garde, themselves stand or fall along with that older notion (or experience) of the so-called centered subject.” [11] And there is much talk, in the pages that follow, of the demise of the bourgeois ego, of the distinctive brush stroke, of “a self present to do the feeling” (15).  Modernism, it seems, can no longer speak to us.  Thus, in his “Conclusion,” Jameson raises questions like “Is T. S. Eliot recuperable?”  or “What ever happened to Thomas Mann and Andre Gide?”  “Frank Lentricchia,” he posits,  “has kept Wallace Stevens alive throughout this momentous climatological transformation, but Paul Valéry has vanished without a trace, and he was central to the modernist movement internationally”  (303).  Indeed, the “great modernist works” have “become reified . . . by becoming school classics.  Their distance from their readers as monuments and as the efforts of ‘genius’ tended also to paralyze form production in general, to endow the practice of all the high-cultural arts with an alienating specialist or expert qualification that blocked the creative mind with awkward self-consciousness and intimidated fresh production”  (317).

This was written, or rather published, in 1991, a short thirteen years ago.  All the more astonishing, therefore, how fully Jameson’s theory of Modernism has lost ground.  More recent cultural critics like Michael North, Jennifer Wicke, and Carrie Noland have been at pains to show that far from excluding all popular culture and the realm of everyday life, the “great” modernist works like Ulysses or avant-garde poems like Blaise Cendrars’s “Prose du Transsibérien” were permeated with the language of advertising and commerce, that the “great divide,” at any rate, was always more apparent than real.[12] In Reading 1922, North concludes that “Beginning with Wittgenstein,” whose Tractatus was published in England in 1922 along with Ulysses and The Waste Land, “the notion that truth is local and particular came into being as a reflex of the attempt to make it global and universal” (213).  Modernism, by this argument, was never accurately characterized by the autonomy and elitism attributed to it; it was always thoroughly contaminated  by its rapprochement with the discourses of everyday life.

Such reconsideration of Modernist texts—indeed, the whole complex discourse about the relation of twentieth-century art to mass culture—has done much to prompt a lively new discussion of Modernism in academic venues and scholarly journals.   But the revival of Modernism has also been promoted by another, and rather more unlikely, quarter: namely, the broader English-speaking public that communicates on the internet, particularly in such places as the Customer Review columns of amazon.com.  “Customer reviewers,” who may or may not give their names, in whole or in part, but do provide their locations—for example, “Adriana from Vigna del Mar, Chile” or “Tepi from Kyoto, Japan,” or “A reader from San Francisco”—and must have verifiable (though unpublished) email addresses—come from all over the world and remain largely anonymous with respect to age, race, business or profession, social class, and often, as in the case of “Tepi” above, even gender. They need not purchase the book in question and receive no reward other than that of finding their statements, ranging from a single sentence to a page or two, reproduced online, together with their rankings: from five stars (the top) to a mere one. What motivates customer reviewers, it would seem, is the invitation to make their voices and rankings heard by others.  Judging from their frequently faulty grammar and spelling, they are not likely to be professionals or even students, although they are generally well informed and highly literate.[13] Rather, they represent a situation Walter Benjamin anticipated when he remarked wistfully that, in the age of mechanical reproducibility, “at any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer”:

It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for ‘letters to the editor.”  And today there is hardly a gainfully occupied European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports. . . . Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. (Work of Art, 232).

These words have proved to be remarkably prophetic.  When Jameson asks “Is Eliot recuperable?” he is referring to the academic consensus of the 1980s and 90s, when the very intimation of anti-Semitism, racism, or colonialism was enough to keep a given author out of the literature classroom.  But there are signs that this consensus is breaking down.  In 1998, Signet Books published a mass market paperback of The Waste Land and Other Poems, with an introduction by Helen Vendler; in 2000, Norton published the Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land, edited by Michael North.  Together, these two editions have received about 30 customer reviews, almost all of them granting Eliot five stars, from which I quote the following:

What the thunder said , April 9, 2001

Reviewer: cailleachx from GA USA T.S. Eliot wrote “The Waste Land” against the backdrop of a world gone mad– searching for reason inside chaos, and striving to build an ark of words by which future generations could learn what had gone before, T.S. Eliot explores that greatest of human melancholy– disillusionment. This is a difficult poem, but one well-worth exploring to its fullest. The inherent rhythms of Eliot’s speech, the delightful, though sometimes obscure, allusions, and intricate word-craft, create an atmosphere of civilization on the edge– in danger of forgetting its past, and therefore repeating it. In the end, only the poet is left, to admonish the world to peace, to preserve the ruins of the old life, and to ensure that future generations benefit from the disillusions of the past. . . .

Buy this. You won’t regret it. If you’re an Eliot fan, you probably have it anyway. If you’re not, you will be when you put it down.

Search for your Soul, May 12, 2003

Reviewer: Angelo Ventura from Brescia, Lombardia Italy  He’s the one and only poet of modern man’s soul. All modern literature owes to him. Not only this, but he had great imagination and a wry sense of humour. Among his “minor” works sonnets like “The hippopotamus” is worth a poem of some modern writer. Read him to inspire your mind!

What it takes to write the greatest poem of the 20th century , December 20, 2001

Reviewer: iburiedpaul from Clearwater, FL USA Simply put, THE WASTE LAND is one of the strangest, most complicated, and interesting poems ever written. Try reading an unannotated version of the poem and you will see why even TS Eliot scholars need a little help with some of the images and literary references Eliot uses. This NORTON CRITICAL EDITION of THE WASTE LAND is an essential book for any Eliot fan, new or old. It provides you with practically every single piece of literature, history, and music that inspired Eliot to write his manifesto of the Lost Generation. If you have any questions concerning THE WASTE LAND, this is the book you need…this is the book you want. Buy it and realize how well-read you are not.

Great Poem, Great Edition, January 11, 2004

Reviewer: Erik Tennyson from Philadelphia, PA USA

Simply stated, the poem is one the true benchmarks for twentieth century literature. It is rather difficult in that it is highly allusive, some allusions fall on the rather obscure side (Middleton, Weston) but mostly they are rather well known (Augustine, Dante, the Bible, Baudelaire, Wagner). The experience will prove to be as didactic as well as expressive due to all these allusions in the text. As far as the poem itself goes, it has a definite effect on you when you read it. I remember the first time I read the lines, “I think we are in rats’ alley where the dead men lost their bones,” and although I couldn’t really understand what was going on just yet in the poem, that line as well as many other lines and images, had an affect on me. On the whole the emotional tone of the poem (not to do it injustice and say what it is about) is the spiritual alienation and degradation everyone felt after WWI. It’s a quest of sorts, taken on by a persona of Eliot to find meaning amidst “the stony rubbish” that is the world. It sets the philosophy of Buddha and Augustine side by side as it does with the Rig Veda and the Bible in a collage of different voices and arresting images.

I suppose Jameson might respond that these customer reviews testify to the thorough commodification of The Waste Land, what with their naïve enthusiasm and assessment of Eliot’s subject matter.  But I would argue that this sheer enthusiasm, on the part of non-academic readers who have nothing to gain from writing their commentaries tells us something very different.  When Erik Tennyson, for example, talks of the amazing emotional high he received from the lines, “I think we are in rat’s alley / where the dead men lost their bones,” he is saying, however naively, that poetry is first of all a use of sound and language.  At the same time, all the readers of North’s Norton Critical Edition testify to wanting to know more about this poem they already love.

North himself posits in Reading 1922 that The Waste Land shares a discourse radius with any number of other works produced in the same year—works in different genres like Anzia Yezierska’s Jewish immigrant novelSalome of the Tenements or Walter Lippmann’s essayPublic Opinion.  This is true if we are reading The Waste Land as an index to the culture and ideology that produced it.  But why do readers today, whose knowledge of and interest in post-World War I London as seen through the eyes of an American expatriate, are likely to be minimal, readers who, by their own admission, have never heard of most of the authors alluded to in The Waste Land, continue to find the poem so fascinating?  It seems that what readers look for is not the poem’s political unconscious but the charm of its distinctive rhythm and its deployment of a language that is somehow extraordinary.  It must, in short, give pleasure.

Take the case of the American Communist poet Edwin Rolfe (1909-54), who is allotted twelve pages in Cary Nelson’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford, 2000) and receives thorough treatment on the website that accompanies the volume.[14] Rolfe’s Trees Become Torches: Selected Poems, published in the American Poetry Recovery Series at the University of Illinois Press in 1994, followed by the Collected Poems in 1997, must now be special-ordered on amazon.com because its sales rank is too low, For Nelson and his fellow editors, Rolfe’s political poems, especially those prompted by the Spanish Civil War and later by McCarthyism are important as fiery denunciations of capitalism and class stratification.  But radical politics per se evidently has little appeal to the internet poetry audience.  The Rolfe volumes have not prompted a single customer review, whereas this poet’s exact contemporary George Oppen, himself a Communist in the pre-World War II years, receives comments like the following:

Neglected Classic , March 31, 2000 [review of the Collected Poems, New Directions, 1976) Reviewer: Aaron Peck from Vancouver, BC   Oppen is by far the most underrated poetic genius of the twentieth century. I know that sounds bold, but I think for the most part his work has been suppressed because of his un-apologetic affiliations with the communist party. His work, however, is not concerned with politics: it is some of the most honest, personal and striking poetry I've read in this language. His long poem "Of Being Numerous" is the greatest example: "Obsessed, bewildered / by the shipwreck / of the singular / we have chosen the meaning / of being numerous." Oppen is the great, forgotten elegist of the postwar era. These poems are, in a sense, about failure, about loss and how we perceive and react to the world. This book is not to be missed as it far too often is.

1969 Pulitzer Prize winner , December 5, 2000 (review of This in Which, New Directions, 1965)

Reviewer: elljay from Los Angeles   I don't know much about George Oppen--except to note in passing that he was among those victimized by the anti-Communist hysteria of the '50s--but he has just become one of my favorite poets for having produced this sleek little volume. The poems here are extremely terse and rock-like; every word is carefully chosen; and the result is verse of uncommon force and directness. Not many poets can say so much with so little (from the title poem): "You are the last/Who will know him/Nurse//Not know him,/He is an old man,/A patient,/How could one know him?//You are the last/Who will see him/Or touch him,/Nurse." If you're like me and have had your share of "chatty" or self-consciously clever wordsmiths, this is strong stuff. (As he writes elsewhere: "I have not and never did have any motive of poetry/But to achieve clarity.") Oppen's chilly, Spartan poetry sounds like it should be chiseled in stone, and he can be winning even when he departs from form, as proven by the prose sections in "Route." It's intense, haunting, and truly memorable (and I mean this last adjective literally: I can remember this stuff after I've put the book down, whereas most poetry disintegrates in my head almost instantly). This is the real thing, people, and you owe it to yourself to find a copy. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title

What makes these Oppen reviews, written before the 2002 publication of Michael Davidson’s New Collected Poems, remarkable is that the “customers” in question are calling attention to long since published or out of print books of poems—books that are here praised for their language, the integrity of their form, and their creation of a distinctive lyric speaker.

Amazon reviewers, in other words, instinctively look for works that strike them as unique—that have what Benjamin called aura. The response to Gertrude Stein is especially interesting in this regard.  For the past decade or so, academic criticism has emphasized Stein’s representativeness:  Stein the feminist (e.g. Harriet Chessman), the lesbian writer (Judy Grahn), expatriate (Shari Benstock), American immigrant (Priscilla Wald), trained scientist (Steven Meyer), collector-consumer (Michael Davidson), Jew (Maria Damon)—most recently, in Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker profile, Stein the proto-Fascist who wrote speeches for Marshall Pétain and protected the politically suspect Bernard Faÿ.[15] All these studies provide valuable insights into Stein’s work, but they also make apparent that hers is work that never quite fits the proposed category: in the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, for example, Nelson includes a single Stein work, “Patriarchal Poetry” so as to bring her into the feminist fold, but this long, linguistically dislocated poem can hardly live up to its fighting title.

The one thing that Stein inevitably was, however, both chronologically and geographically (an American in Paris) was a Modernist.  Ulla Dydo’s The Language that Rises, which documents Stein’s process of revision, her obsessive care for le mot juste, the “right” sentence, and the perfection of composition and formal structure, allies this Jamesian (both Henry and William were central influences) writer to such otherwise uncongenial Modernists as Eliot and Pound.  The amazon.com reviewers seem to recognize this.  The mass-market Dover edition (1997) of Tender Buttons, for example, elicited eight reviews, of which I quote four:

Modernist Classic That’s Fun to Read , October 9, 2002

Reviewer: michael helsem from Dallas, TX United States The playfulness & intellectual rigor of the best of the Modernist movement unite in this small book of exquisite prose poems that may be read, on one level at least, as an extended allegory of eroticism (e.g. “tender buttons” are nipples); & on another, as a manifesto of what was to become L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. But you don’t really need to be a scholar to appreciate the freshness & lovely rhythms of the poems. They are like nothing else that existed at the time they were written (not even the

great Victorian “nonsense” poets dared to be this non-referential) & though they have cast a long shadow across late 20c. PoMo, there really has been nothing quite like them since.

Sui Generis, January 17, 2002

Reviewer: mikhl from Ardmore, PA United States I gave this book to my six-year-old nephew when he was starting to read. BOY did he get annoyed- but he kept coming back to it. “These are not poems!” he would sputter. While Finnegans Wake is supposed to be difficult to comprehend, one can “diagram” Joyce’s sentences- the “grammar” is “normative,” only the words are peculiar. With Stein, the words themselves are “normal,” even banal, but the sentences are more Out There than a Zen Koan. Anyway, as the late lamented Beatle George supposedly said about a painting, “it’s either groovy or it isn’t.” Tender Buttons is.

Endlessly rereadable; the best prose poem of all time , October 22, 1999

Reviewer: A reader from Portland, OR United States I don’t have as much patience as some with Stein’s other work, but “Tender Buttons” is sublime. It leads the mind down paths it would never otherwise follow. I’m basically a philistine, and a populist, but this book never loses its splendour. Here (and here only, for me) Gertrude Stein had perfect pitch.

Pure utter geniusness. , March 19, 2000

Reviewer: Pauline from Brussels, Belgium My random poems have been said to be Stein-like. Now that I know more about G.S., a poem was inspired by her…

“Gertrude Stein Poeme O’Mijn”:

Images realize aspects throughout. Painting daunting solid reasonable feisty planes of aura felt. Pangs of fluid energy suffer thought. Remaining understood eras feel wrought over and through. Satisfied mental strain tally connective ways again. Palled sorts of slews o’mirage onslaught on papyrus.

Zen Koan, perfect pitch, freshness, lovely rhythms, and, as Pauline from Brussels puts it in her Stein poem, “feisty planes of aura felt.”   Let me now return  to that “aura felt” and try to sketch in why I think Modernism exerts such power over us today.

News that STAYS News

“Poetry,” Pound famously declared in theABC of Reading, “is news that STAYS news.” [16] It is a sobering reminder in the age of cell phones, email, blogs, and countless websites that make demands on our daily attention.  Nothing seems to last more than a split second, even the appearances of our favorite poets and artists.  We spot an Ashbery poem in TLS or The New York Review of Books; we tell ourselves we’ll catch it later when we have more time. and that, in any case, it will surely appear in the poet’s next collection.   But such “delay” is tricky, for by then, it may be a somewhat different poem.  In a recent essay, already in proof, I cited two new poetic texts by the British multimedia poet Caroline Bergvall, only to have the poet send me a newer version of the manuscript, whose changes I wish I could have incorporated in my citations.

Change, it would seem, is all, and those who succeed are those willing to reinvent themselves gracefully.  As little as two decades ago, when theorists like Michel Foucault or Paul De Man were holding sway, a given position could be counted on to have a life-span of at least six or seven years—roughly the time it took to complete one’s Ph.D.  Today, there is no such continuity:  those, for example, who “did” American Studies a decade ago when it was fashionable to produce books with titles like Constituting Americans (Priscilla Wald’s 1995 book, which I cited in connection with Stein above), have now moved on to globalization studies where Americans are now “constituted” in terms of a very different picture, and literary texts have become expendable.

Interdisciplinarity, the watchword of the moment, often means non rather than inter.  Consider our current political paradigm where the worst thing one can say about any Presidential candidate is that he is an “insider,” as if training—in political history and theory, constitutional law, economics, and just plain political practice—means nothing.  So the body builder turned film-star and producer Arnold Schwarzenegger and the physician Howard Dean boast that at least they’re not “insiders” like  Gray Davis or John Kerry.  The reverse is also the case: I recently read that Gray Davis is now acting in a film comedy, and although I don’t know of any politicians who have become physicians overnight, I predict this too will happen.  Certainly, Richard Dysart, who played the avuncular senior partner in the TV series L.A. Law, is known for the astute legal commentary he dispenses at cocktail parties.

Again, no one seems to think it odd that Slavoj Zizek would produce a new reading of Christianity ( The Puppet and the Dwarf, MIT Press, 2003) or that Giovanna Borradori’s interviews with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, on the occasion of 9/11, would generate a book called Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago, 2003).    What, one wonders, is the staying power of such books?  Are they designed to be read five years from now?  And if not, what is the difference between “philosophy” in the Habermas-Derrida title and journalism?

The situation in scholarship is not entirely different.  Consider Jerome McGann’s encyclopedic and brilliantly produced Dante Gabriel Rossetti hypertext archive, copyrighted in 1993 in its first incarnation and constructed in stages, the most recent installment dating from 2000.   The archive will soon need extensive reconstruction so as to be up to date as well as easier to access.  But even as this project is launched, a nagging question arises:  how many English departments at the present moment offer a course in Victorian Poetry, much less the Pre-Raphaelites?  How many Art History departments?   And how, in turn, will the Archive be able create its audience rather than respond to an existing one?

In this climate, the traditional genres—poem, painting, novel–inevitably take a back seat to such intentionally transient art forms as performance, installation, sound sculpture, and what I have called elsewhere “differential” text—which is to say a “text” that exists in various incarnations—say, print, digital, and art gallery display. [17] A Robert Smithson earthwork like the Spiral Jetty or a Fluxus performance like George Brecht’s famed Keyhole Event—these are now known, not in their original form, but through extensive documentation , photographic reproduction, and retrospective exhibition.  And “poems” like those collected in David Antin’s Talking at the Boundaries (1976) are know to younger audiences primarily through tape recordings, available in the various poetry sound archives.  An important intermedia artist like the Swedish Oyvind Fahlström, whose radio plays of the sixties are only now getting the attention they deserve, is known to English-speaking readers mainly through such scholarly texts as Teddy Hultberg’s Manipulating the World (1999), which contains the complete text of Birds in Sweden and The Holy Torsten Nillson, together with CDs, synopses, critical analyses, and the Concrete poetry versions of specific radio dialogues.  “Reading” thus increasingly gives way to a complex interactive process, involving various technologies.

It is in this context that Modernism casts such a long shadow. For even as contemporary texts enjoy an inevitable precariousness, the great texts of the early century are very much there, showing no signs of going away.  Indeed, all present indicators suggest that a hundred years from now, people will still be reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Joyce’sUlysses, Kafka’s The Trial, Mann’s Death in Venice, even as museums, or whatever large exhibition spaces will be called a hundred years from now, will still be showing Malevich’s paintings and Duchamp’s readymades.  The question is why.

Once, when I was talking to John Cage, I mentioned that I didn’t know how to approach the procedural texts of Jackson Mac Low, that I didn’t quite get their point.  “Oh,” Cage laughed. “Forget about their quality.  Think of their quantity!”  Nonsensical as this quip sounds, it says something important about the Modernists.  Theirs was the first—and perhaps the last—generation that combined a long life span and the production of voluminous works with the faith that, to cite Pound again, “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree,” that “poetry. . .is the most concentrated form of verbal expression” (ABCR 28, 36).

This is an unusual combination.  Victorian careers also tended to be long and produced great quantities of poetry and prose, but no one would pretend that Tennyson (1809-92) or Browning (1812-89) had loaded every rift with ore, to quote Keats who himself died at the age of  twenty-two.  But the Modernists took very seriously Keats’s pronouncement that “The excellence of every art is in its intensity.”  “It is all speech,” Yeats once praised a poem by his friend Dorothy Wellelsey, “carried to its highest by intensity of sound and meaning,” and he describes the “Daemonic Man” of Phase 17 in A Vision (Yeats’s own phase), as one who “seeks to deliver simplification through intensity, modified by simplicity.”[18] “Use no superfluous word, “ wrote Pound, “no adjective which does not reveal something,” and again, this time with the Victorians and Edwardians squarely in mind, “Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace.’ It dulls the image.” [19] “Dichten,” =condensare” (ABC 36).

Except for Hart Crane, who committed suicide when he was thirty-three, the major American Modernist poets had long careers: Robert Frost lived to be 84, Gertrude Stein 72, Wallace Stevens 76, William Carlos Williams, 75, Ezra Pound 87, H.D. 75, Marianne Moore 85, T. S. Eliot 77.  All of the above produced volume after volume of poetry—but unlike so many of their post-modern successors, the modernists were prolific in other forms of writing as well.  They were dramatists (Stein, Williams, Pound, Eliot), fiction writers (Stein, Williams, H.D.), critics (all of the above but especially Eliot and Pound), autobiographers (Stein, Williams, H.D.), translators, editors, essayists, and often, as in the case of such British modernists as Yeats, Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, brilliant letter writers.  Indeed, however complicated their love lives or, for Yeats and Pound, their misguided political actions, it is fair to say that writing is what these writers lived for.  And not just topical writing but the production of “news that STAYS news.”  Writing, by this account, inevitably involved contradiction as well as complexity: Yeats especially, but also the very different Williams used poetry as the site where contradictory views and emotions could be resolved—but only momentarily, making way for the production of the next poem.  Density, in this scheme of things, is all.

It is no coincidence, surely, that Wittgenstein, himself by no means sympathetic to his literary contemporaries in Britain, remarked in one of his Zettel, “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” [20] Nor is it a coincidence that the great Russian Modernist theorist Roman Jakobson, who began his career as a Futurist poet named Aljagrov and wrote his first book on the avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov, insisted on the distinction between the poetic and the referential functions of language–a distinction that has, of course, come under heavy fire from contemporary critics like Stanley Fish—critics who have “proved” that one cannot pinpoint a hard-and-fast difference between, say, the language of journalism and the language of poetry. But if there cannot and should not be a quantitative measure for such differentiation, any more than there is a “great divide” between high and low art, common sense–and this is where Pound is such a central poetician–tells us that “writing” that does not “stay news” is quickly expendable and replaceable by other writing. Only poetry, as he frequently put it, endures.

Gertrude Stein, as I have argued elsewhere, [21] held similar views.  In “What are Master-Pieces” (1935), she distinguishes between talking and writing, the former necessary for the creation of identity, the latter an act of creation. And she declares:

After all there is always the same subject there are the things you see and there are human beings and animal beings and everybody you might say since the beginning of time knows practically commencing at the beginning and going to the end everything about these things . . . it is not this knowledge that makes master-pieces.  Not at all not at all at all. [22]

Art, for Stein, has nothing to do with subject matter or psychology.  How Hamlet reacts to his father’s ghost, for instance, has nothing do with the nature of value of Hamlet the play, “That would be something anyone in any village would know they could talk about it endlessly but that would not make a master-piece.”  And the same holds true for painting:  “A picture exists for and in itself and the painter has to use objects landscapes and people as a way the only way that he is able to get the picture to exist” (357).

Here is the demand for autonomy regularly attributed to such High Modernists as Eliot and Pound but rarely to an avant-gardist like Stein.  “The poet,” Thornton Wilder recalls her saying, “has to work in the excitingness of pure being: he [ sic] has to get back that intensity into language.”  There’s that word intensity again, and Stein always coupled intensity with the notion of work, as when, in “Picasso,” she characterizes the painter as “one who was always working” whereas “others” were “following” him.  And as Wilder further recalls:

Miss Stein once said: Every masterpiece came into the world with a measure

of ugliness in it.  That ugliness is the sign of the creator’s struggle to say a new thing in a new way, for an artist can never repeat yesterday’s success.  And after every great creator there follows a second man who shows how it can be done easily.  Picasso struggled and made this new thing and then Braque came along and showed how it could be done without pain. [23]

Struggle, innovation, greatness, genius: like Pound, Stein distinguishes between the inventors and the diluters; like Pound or Williams, Malevich or Mayakovsky, she assumes that the artist’s duty is to Make It New.

“ Are these ideas right or wrong?” as the narrator asks in Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady.”  The question is irrelevant.  For surely the aura of Modernist art is that it was made by poets and painters, novelists and composers, who cared so much, that however questionable their politics, their ideology, their racism and sexism, they were nothing if not humble when it came to their own work.  It had to be right, and that meant constant struggle and revision.  Lawrence, who rewrote rather than revised most of his novels and short stories, wrote four versions of even as relatively minor a text as his essay on Whitman before he was satisfied with it.

The question for us, then, is what happens to the arts when they are no longer considered a Big Deal.  If there is no “great divide” between art and mass culture, between High and Low, if art discourse is just another discourse to be placed alongside some other cultural practice like advertising, if indeed a given poet no longer plans on a Collected Poems but seems content to replace each volume with another, newer one so as to produce a string of works that may or may not be valuable in toto (Clark Coolidge is a case in point), how does the audience process that poet’s oeuvre?  Do we read Coolidge wholesale?  Or select one of his thirty or forty small-press books and read it in the context of the jazz musicians who have inspired his work?

For Adorno, the production of art in an age of capitalist commodification could only be an act of negative mimesis, a form of resistance.  For more recent Left criticism, even such resistance is no longer possible, and hence it is high time to replace an aestheticist “litcrit” with a more useful and disinterested cultural history and theory, with the methodology of anthropology whereby artworks and literary texts can be seen as so many cultural phenomena.  But—and this is where those amazon.com reviews and related internet postings become telling—it seems that artworks refuse to go away.  The new century is now witnessing, even as it did at the dawn of the twentieth-century, a renewed sense thatart matters. “Poetry,” as Charles Bernstein quips in A Poetics, “should be at least as interesting as, and a whole lot more unexpected than, television.”  And he questions Jameson’s refusal to discriminate between the many possible responses to the productions of the present:

Failure to make such distinctions is similar to failing to distinguish between youth gangs, pacifist anarchists, weatherpeople, anti-Sandinista contras, Salvadoran guerillas, Islamic  terrorists, or U.S. state terrorists.  Perhaps all of thee groups are responding to the same stage of multinational capitalism.  But the crucial point is that the responses cannot be understood as the same, unified as various interrelated symptoms of late capitalism. [24]

The reception of art, in other words, must always factor in difference, as must its production.  The real interest of Modernist High Art, in this scheme of things, is not that it can be understood as one of many cultural discourses, but that its own discourse is so complex, varied – and intense. Let me conclude with some recent assessments of one Walter Benjamin’s own favorites, Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, now in the process of being retranslated.  There are currently sixty-nine readers’ reviews of Proust’s Recherche on amazon.com, almost all of them euphoric.  Here is an assessment posted on 21 January 2004 by a Swiss woman who read the Recherche in French but writes about it in English:

Masterpiece of masterpieces! ,

Reviewer: Carol Haemmerli from Switzerland I had been intrigued by Proust since early age, for one of my favourite books is Gold and Fizdale’s “Misia” and his name crops up all the time in it. I bought the Scott Moncrieff’s English version in Paris over ten years ago and I know that many soi-disant more authoritative versions have come out ever since. Yet, a few years ago I read the version in French as organized by Jean-Yves Tadié -possibly the best known pundit on Proust’s work to date- and I have to say Moncrieff’s translation doesn’t stray that far from the original. “A La Recherche” is to me the most important book in the history of literature. Compellingly philosophical, psychological, soul-searching and esthetic, no details of life go amiss. I am alternately moved, stirred and surprised at Proust’s dexterity in describing the wide range of human emotions and the complexity of human interactions. He talks about art, love, jealousy, nostalgia, ambition, social climbing, politics and you cannot fail to empathise with his prose or finding new moot questions with each new reading of his work. His book is as relevant to life as life itself.

To come to Proust via the duo-pianists Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, whose 1980 biography of the enticing Polish pianist and society figure Misia Sert–a close friend of Diaghilev, Cocteau and other artworld figures—was a charming but fairly ephemeral production, is nicely emblematic of the relation of High and Low in our time.  Carol Haemmerli first learns of Proust from Fizdale and Gold, whose affinity to Proust was surely not unrelated to their shared homosexuality,but once she actually reads the Recherche, she comes to find it “the most important book in the history of literature.”  Each new reading, Haemmerli suggests, raises new “moot” (unanswerable”?) questions.  Literature is news that STAYS news.  Indeed, it seems that a whole new generation of readers is poised to take on this and other Modernist novels and artworks.  Immediately following Haemmerli, the amazon site quotes Bob Riggs from Houston, Texas, writing on 4 December 2003.  “I just finished,” writes Riggs.  “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever read.”   The Modernist “masterpiece”—that term of opprobrium–seems to be reasserting its auratic claims upon us, even as Internet discourse, held, in some quarters, to be responsible for the loss of literary “quality,” is ironically reinforcing its presence.

Footnotes

MINA LOY’S  “ANGLO-MONGRELS AND THE ROSE”

Marjorie Perloff

published in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, ed. Maeera Schreiber and Keith Tuma (National Poetry Foundation, 1996), pp. 131-48. Rpt. in French translation in Après l’usure de toutes les routes: Retour sur l’épopée, Volumes 49-50 of in ‘hui, ed. Jacques Darras (Brussels, 1997): 127-145; trans. Dominque Goy-Blanquet

The U.S. stay lasted from October 1916 to January 1918–a little over a year–but it is during this year that the entire sequence Songs to Johannes  was published as a special issue of Others (April 1917) and brought Loy to the attention of Pound and Eliot.  In 1918 she followed Arthur Cravan to Mexico; a year later, after a long drawn-out idyll, Loy, penniless and pregnant, sailed for Europe to have her baby.  Cravan, who was to follow shortly, disappeared mysteriously;  his body was never recovered.   Their child Fabi was born in London in 1919.  Loy returned to Italy for two years and then settled with her two daughters (her son Giles had been kidnapped by her former husband and was to die soon thereafter) in Paris, where she lived from 1923 to 1936.  Her long poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” and her unfinished novel Insel date from this period.  It is only in 1936, at the age of 54 that Loy moved to the U.S. where she remained, first in Manhattan’s Bowery and then with her daughters in Aspen, Colorado until she died in 1966.  In these later American years, she published very little and all but disappeared from sight.

Loy would thus seem to be the prototype of the deracinated cosmopolite, the sort of expatriate figure Eliot (who praised her poetry in The Egoist)  must have had in mind when he had the Wasteland’s Marie say, “Binn gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.”   Fluent in French, Italian, and German as well as in her own late Victorian English, she lived in New York for only one of her first fifty-four years.    How, then, could Pound call her work a “distinctly national product”–an oeuvre that couldn’t “come out of any other country”?   And how is it that Virginia Kouidis would call her book on Loy (the only book-length critical study to date) Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet?

Kouidis herself gives three reasons.  First,  she argues, Loy was “aware that the subjects and structures of English poetry in 1910 were inadequate to experience” (VK 135), and that she must therefore, like her fellow-Americans, Eliot and Pound,  draw upon French models.  Second, Loy’s logopoeia (Pound’s term, of which more below) is characteristically American: “she employs a compressed diction that abandons the poetic commonplace. . . .this diction reflects modes of perception and utilizes the spoken language” (VK 136).   Here Kouidis is thinking of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and especially of Gertrude Stein.  And third, “Mina Loy is linked to the Americans by her translation into poetry of the techniques and structures of modern European painting, especially Futurism and Cubism” (VK 137).   Again, Stein and Moore, Stevens and Williams are cited as parallels.

Two of the three traits here cited are largely negative: Loy is judged to be “American” by her borrowings from French poetry (Laforgue) as well as French and Italian art forms (Cubism, Futurism).  As for the third, the purported adoption of an American speech idiom, the fact is, as we shall see, that Loy’s language is anything but direct, colloquial, or idiomatic–what Eliot called the “return to common speech,” or Ezra Pound, “direct treatment of the thing.”    All the same, Pound was on to something important when he declared that Loy’s poetry couldn’t come out of any other country but the U.S.   For what does make Loy, like her friend Gertrude Stein, so curiously “American,” I shall suggest here, is her invention of an intricately  polyglot language–a language that challenges the conventional national idiom of her British (as well as her French or Italian, or, paradoxically, even her American) contemporaries.

It is significant that, from the beginning, it was the United States, not England, whose little magazines– Camera Work, Trend, Rogue, Blind Man, Others, and Dial–were receptive to Mina Loy’s writing.   The first two installments of “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” came out, very appropriately as we shall see, in the “Exile” issue  (1923) of the Little Review ; the third, in Robert McAlmon’s Paris-based Contact Collection of Contemporary Verse (1925).   As an “Exile” in New York, Loy was linked to the Arensberg Circle and, later to the American expatriate circles in Paris.  When Alfred Kreymborg came to write his survey of American poetry called Our Singing Strength (1929),  he placed Loy in his chapter on “Originals and Eccentrics,” grouping her with Marianne Moore, Lola Ridge, and Adelaide Crapsey, as well as with Mardsen Hartley, Pitts Sanborn, Helen Hoyt, and Emmanuel Carnevali.   “During the war,” we read in Kreymborg, a  “curious woman, exotic and beautiful, came to New York from foreign shores: the English Jewess, Mina Loy, [whose]  clinical frankness and sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation grammar, syntax, and punctuation, horrified our gentry and drove our critics into furious despair.”  Her work as well as her personality, Kreymborg reports, “created a violent sensation.”

But in what sense, if any, is the “elliptical style” of this “English Jewess,” who spent so little time in America before her fifty-fourth year, identifiable as “American,” especially since, overtly, it has little in common with the “American” styles (and settings) of such of her contemporaries as Stevens and Williams?   To answer this question,  I propose to examine Loy’s remarkable long (and still almost unknown) poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1923-25).   For here, in this allegorical, parodic, often disjointed  pseudo-narrative of the poet’s ancestry, birth, childhood, and coming of age,  we have Loy’s most compelling representation of her “mongrelization”– the “crossbreeding” of the English and Hungarian-Jewish strains that produced, so the author herself seems to feel,  a form of mental and emotional gridlock that could be overcome, in life as in art, only by large doses of the transnational avant-gardism of the interwar period.

The Mongrel-Girl of Noman’s Land

What Pound rightly called logopoeia, “the dance of the intellect among words,” as he put it in “How to Read,” aptly characterizes Loy’s poetics.    Whereas melopoeic poetry is one in which “the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property,” and phanopoeia is “a casting of images upon the visual imagination,” logopoeia “employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the words, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play.”   Kenneth Rexroth seems to have these qualities in mind when, in a 1944 appreciation, he suggests that Loy’s neglect is probably “due to her extreme exceptionalism.  Erotic poetry is usually lyric.  Hers is elegiac and satirical.  it is usually fast paced.  Hers is slow and deliberately twisting.  If it is bitter and dissatisfied, it is at least passionate.  And Rexroth adds, “Her virtues are self-evident.  She is tough, forthright, very witty, atypical, anti-rhetorical, devoid of chi-chi.”

Now consider the opening section of “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” called “Exodus,” in which the impersonal narrator tells the tale (in the present-tense and in swift, cartoonish strokes) of her father’s childhood in “Buda Pest,” his coming to the “cancellated desert of the metropolis” which is Victorian London,  his youthful employment as “highest paid    tailor’s / cutter in the City,” his lonely boarding-house life and sexual fantasies, and his, to her mind, ill-fated meeting with the  “English Rose” who is to be Loy’s despised Protestant, virginal, bourgeois, cold and prudish mother.  Here is a passage about fifty lines into the narrative:

The arid gravid
intellect      of Jewish ancestors
the senile juvenile
calculating prodigies of Jehovah
crushed by the Occident ox
they scraped
the gold gold golden
muck from its hoofs

moves Exodus       to emigrate
coveting the alien
asylum      of voluntary military
service     paradise        of the pound-sterling
where the domestic Jew        in lieu                                             of knouts        is lashed with tongues

This passage makes an interesting contrast to the work of a poet closely linked to Loy– Williams, whose Spring and All was published by Contact the same year as “Anglo-Mongrels.”  Here is the opening of VIII:

The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished floor

is full of a song
inflated to
fifty pounds pressure

at the faucet of
June that rings
the triangle of the air

pulling at the
anemones in
Persephone’s cow pasture–

Williams’s verse is at once “free” (the lines range from three to seven syllables and from two to four primary stresses) and yet highly structured.  The lines are suspended, breaking at odd junctures, as in “a/ yellow plaque upon the / varnished floor.”  But visually  these lines are gathered into neat tercets of roughly equal size.  And the language of these tercets is concrete and particular, the poet’s response to the natural world being conveyed without commentary by means of image and metaphor.   The sharply visualized “yellow plaque” of sunlight on the “varnished floor” is described synaesthetically as a “song / inflated to / fifty pounds pressure / at the faucet of /June,” and then, in terms of myth, as “anemones” lighting up “Persephone’s cow pasture.”

In contrast, Loy’s “stanzas” are intentionally ungainly, syllable and stress count, line length, spacing, and stanza length being much more variable than Williams’s.   Indeed, Loy’s is not so much “free verse,” in the usual sense of the term, as it is a variant on skeltonics (so named for the Tudor poet John Skelton), that is, “a distinctive shortlined meter [in which] typically the lines carry only 2-3 stresses in 3-6 syllables (though longer lines are not uncommon), and there are frequent short runs of monorhyme called ‘leashes’ [and] parallelism is a major rhetorical device.”    In Loy’s version, these “leashes” often come within lines, as in “arid gravid,” “senile juvenile,” or “Occident ox.”  What holds these stanzas together is not a larger rhythmic contour or consistent image pattern as in Spring and All, but a network of elaborate rhyming, chiming, chanting, and punning, as in the sequence “Jewish–juvenile–prodigies–Jehovah,” where jew is found in every word, or in the rhyming and chiastic linkage between “Occident ox” and “Exodus.”  “Crushed by the Occident ox,” Exodus”  naturally “covet[s] the alien / asylum   of voluntary military service   paradise  of the pound-sterling.”  “Voluntary”–”military”:  doesn’t this sound like a contradiction in terms?  And what sort of “asylum” is “alien”?  Yet these tightly packed lines make perfectly good sense:  to join the British army voluntarily provides Exodus with the “alien” (to him) “asylum” of the “paradise of the pound-sterling.”  Once “domesticated,” in his new country, the Jew   in lieu / of knouts    is lashed with tongues.”  Not lashed with the whip as were his ancestors in Hungary, just lashed with tongues.”  And the rhyme “Jew” / “lieu” suggests that the Jew can never be more than a substitute in English society, a kind of simulacrum, in lieu of  the true blue Englishman.

Mina Loy’s debt to Futurism (as well as her critique of her male Futurist mentors) has been frequently discussed,   but what has gone unnoticed is that Loy’s very diction and syntax constitute a sharp critique of Marinetti’s famed parole in libertà.   In the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (1912),  Marinetti had defined poetry as “an uninterrupted sequence of new images” or rather image-bearing nouns in apposition.  “Every noun,” he declared, “should have its double; that is the noun should be followed, with no conjunction, by the noun to which it is related by analogy.  Example: man-torpedo-boat, woman-gulf, crowd-surf, piazza-funnel, door-faucet.”  At the same time “One must abolish the adjective, to allow the naked noun to preserve its essential color,” and again “One must abolish the adverb, old belt buckle that holds two words together.”  A sequence of naked nouns, tactile, concrete, imagistic, and often, as in Zang Tumb Tuum, onomatopoeic: here is the source of immaginazione senza fili (imagination without strings).

In “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” Loy turns this aesthetic on its head.  Her nouns are abstract, not concrete–intellect, ancestors, prodigies, asylum — and they are modified by adjectives that often overwhelm (and even contradict) her nouns as in “the senile juvenile / calculating prodigies,” or in “coveting the alien / asylum   of voluntary military service.”  Not parole in libertà but conceptual words and phrases (whatever the part of speech); not lyric sequences of analogies but schematic, parabolic narrative:

The cannibal God
shutters his lids of night     on the day’s gluttony
the partially     devoured humanity
warms its unblessed beds     with bare prostrations  (LLB 113)

Here is Loy’s version of late Victorian London, with its alien devouring Deity presiding over the sordid nighttime couplings (“bare prostrations”) in the “unblessed beds” of the dreary mass metropolis. If this passage brings to mind Eliot’s “Preludes” (“One thinks of all the hands / That are raising dingy shades / In a thousand furnished rooms”), Loy’s “unblessed beds” are purposely left unspecified, their occupants never quite materializing as actual human beings.

In this respect, Loy is much closer to Wyndham Lewis than to Eliot or Pound, Williams or Stevens,  or, for that matter, to Moore, to whom critics from Pound on down have linked her, evidently because of gender.   The de-particularization of “Exodus,” as of  “English Rose” in the next section, and of “Ova” (Mina Loy herself),  “Esau Penfold” (Stephen Haweis), and “Colossus” (Arthur Cravan), is symptomatic of Loy’s larger metaphysical perspective.  Whereas Marinetti (and the Imagists as well) put his faith in objects, lining up catalogues of concrete nouns (torpedo-boat-battleship-machine gun) and onomatopoeic sounds (“zang-tumb-tuum,”  “ta-ta-ta-ta”) for their immediate presentational value, Loy is a satirist, a diagnostician who is willing to regard her very own parents as nasty stereotypes, representative of a late Victorian Imperialist England in which the outsider, especially an Eastern European Jewish outsider (“Exodus”) could only gain a foothold by marrying an “English Rose,”, no matter how great the mismatch.

Indeed, in her portrait of her father Sigmund Löwy, Loy seems to accept all the anti-Semitic stereotypes of her time and place.  Exodus’s mother has “hair     long as the Talmud” and “tamarind eyes”  (LLB 111); his father stuffs him “with biblical Hebrew and the seeds of science   exhorting him/ to vindicate / his forefathers’ ambitions” (LLB 111-12).  In the passage I have cited above, “the senile juvenile / calculating prodigies of Jehovah” (senile because even as children they must push and shove and make their way) learn to “scrape / the gold gold golden muck” from the “hoofs” of the Occident (read “gentile”) ox.”   Arriving in London, Exodus is soon the “highest paid   tailor’s / cutter in the City,” masters “business English,” “stock exchange quotations / and conundrums of finance / to which unlettered immigrants are instantly initiate” (115).   His gift to his daughter,  we learn later, is none other than “The Jewish brain!” (132).  But the stereotype is not only of the shrewd, money-grubbing Jewish immigrant.   Loy endows her father with the reputed “Jewish” artistic bent (a Sunday painter (“Painting feeling his pulse. . . .Under his ivory hands / his sunflowers sunwards / glow”, 118), as well as with the powerful sex drive of dark “Eastern” males: “He / loaded with Mosaic / passions that amass / like money” (124), and again, “Exodus / Oriental / mad to melt / with something softer than himself” (126).

Inevitably, the union with his opposite, the cold, virginal “English Rose,” is bound to prove disasterous.   Loy’s portrait of her mother in Part 2 of “Anglo-Mongrels” contains some of her most devastating satire, satire in which, again, the language itself is as “mongrelized” as are the principals of her narrative.  Here is the opening:

Early English everlasting
quadrate Rose
paradox-Imperial
trimmed with some travestied flesh
tinted with bloodless duties         dewed
with Lipton’s teas
and grimed with crack-packed
herd-housing
petalling
the prim gilt
penetralia
of a luster-scioned
core-crown

Rose of arrested impulses
self-pruned
of the primordial attributes
a tepid heart         inhibiting
with tactful terrorism
the Blossom Populous
to mystic incest with its ancestry
establishing
by the divine right of self-assertion
the post-conceptional
virginity of Nature. . . .   (LLB 121)

Here Loy has produced a brilliant parody of Le Roman de La Rose, her skeltonic rhymes inverting the value of virginity in Machaut’s medieval romance so as to make it an absurd value, a cash commodity whereby the British empire plies its trade.  The opening “litany” might be interestingly compared to Eliot’s slightly later (1930) quite serious litany in “Ash Wednesday” (“Rose of Memory / Rose of forgetfulness /. . .  . The single Rose / Is now the Garden”).   Loy’s alliterating opening, “Early English everlasting” also echoes parodically Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable. . .” (from “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves”), while the reference to the four-petalled rose (“quadrate”) refers to the Rose of fin-de-siècle occultists, most notably Yeats’s “Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose.”

But what is entirely Loy’s own poetic signature is that her rose images, far from producing an imagist or symbolist landscape, jostle with conceptual nouns, puns, and aggressive rhymes, in a curious “mongrelization” of linguistic registers.  The poet’s rose is “paradox-Imperial” in that her vaunted purity and modesty can “work” on male suitors only because this “Blossom Populous” can bank on its “mystic incest with its ancestry,” its “divine right of self-assertion.”  Rose’s very “flesh” is “travestied” by its class origin, “tinted with bloodless duties,” and “dewed / with Lipton’s teas.”   Here not only do the suffixes match, but “dewed . . . teas” nicely puns on the “duties” this “pouting / pearl beyond price” has been trained to perform.  And a further pun relates those “teas” to the “tease” which “She / simpering in her / ideological pink” (124) turns out to be.   For what are those “petals” but the “prim gilt” (“guilt”) or fake “luster” covering the “penetralia” to Rose’s “core-crown”–crown” by virtue of the “divine right of self-assertion,” the assertion of her illustrious Imperial pedigree.  Even the lady at Exodus’s boarding-house dinner table, after all, excuses what are evidently her bad table manners by saying, “Our Dear Queen picks chicken bones / in her fingers” (115).   Why, then, should Exodus not pick a few chicken bones of his own?  Trained as he is to “scrape / the gold gold golden / muck” from the hoofs of the “Occident ox” (112),  why not a little “prim gilt” from the “luster-scioned / crown”?

The narrative of Exodus’s meeting with and courtship of “Alice the gentile” is high comedy:

While she
expecting the presented knee
of chivalry
repels
the sub-umbilical mystery
of his husbandry
hysterically

His passionate anticipation
of warming in his arms
his rose     to a maturer coloration
which was all of aspiration
the grating upon civilization
of his sensitive organism
had left him

splinters upon an adamsite
opposition
of nerves like stalactites

This dying chastity
had rendered up no soul
yet they pursued their conjugal
dilemmas        as is usual
with people
who know          not what they do
but know      that what they do
is not illegal                                    (LLB 126-27)

In the first stanza above, the six “leash” rhymes — “she” / “knee”/ “chivalry”/ “mystery”/ “husbandry”/ “hysterically”– concisely and bitingly define the misalliance of Exodus and his Rose.  To be brought up to expect the chivalry of the “presented knee,” only to be exposed to that “sub-umbilical mystery” of his “husbandry” (the phrase combines euphemism and pun to describe, from Rose’s perspective, the act that can’t be named) culminates in that free-floating adverb that destroys, in more ways than one, the decorum of the preceding noun sequence.  Hysterically  is what we’re left with.   The same effect is rendered in the next stanza by the rhyming of suffixes of abstract nouns–“anticipation”/ “coloration”/ “aspiration”/ “civilization”– where the last word “civilization” doesn’t belong semantically in the catalogue of mental states that precede it, the irony being that this “civilization” consists precisely of such foolish forms of flirtation.

Rose’s resistance to Exodus’s “passionate anticipation” is defined in terms of minerals: “adamsite”  (a greenish-black mica) and “nerves like stalactites.”  Again, the two geological terms rhyme.  “No soul,” it seems, in this “conjugal” union.  But–and now Loy switches to ordinary diction to make a fine point– these Victorians were “people/ who    know not what they do / but know   that what they do / is not illegal.”   The indictment of marriage as an institution could hardly be more scornful.

The logopoeia of these early sections of “Anglo-Mongrels” is extremely intricate.  Punning will often depend on foreign words or on breaking up words into their morphemes.  “Deep in the névrose night,” for example, enables Loy to embed her “rose” in the French word for “neurotic.” The “disciplining” of “the inofficial / ‘flesh and devil’ / to the ap     parent  impecca     bility / of the English,” plays on “parent” and sinning (i.e., “non peccavi”).  And perhaps most wittily, Loy uses personification and circumlocution to create burlesque scenes of virginal defensiveness:

For of this Rose
wherever it blows
it is certain
that an impenetrable pink curtain
hangs between it and itself
and in metaphysical vagrance
it passes beyond the ken
of men unless
possessed
of exorbitant incomes
And Then–
merely indicates its presence
by an exotic fragrance   (128)

The image of the hymenal “impenetrable pink curtain” hanging “between it and itself . . . in metaphysical vagrance” is wonderfully absurd, especially since the reference is embedded in the nursery-rhymes “Rose” / “blows”, “certain” / “curtain”, “unless”/ “possess”, and especially the crescendo of “ken” / “men”/ “And Then–”.  The only “presence” here, as the final pararhyme suggests, is not of a living body but only a teasing fragrance.  Withholding is all.

In the course of the poem,  Loy pulls out all the generic stops–allegory, mock epic, biography, realist narrative–so as to foreground the ironies inherent in her tale.      But it is the tone of the poem, the distance between its aloof narrator and her cartoonish characters,  that makes Loy’s work distinctive.  For who, after all, talks about her parents this way?  Who would characterize her own birth as the extraction from her mother’s loins of “A clotty bulk of bifurcate fat” (130), or describe her baby self as “feed[ing] / its mongrel heart on Berger’s food / for infants” (132)?   Is the poet too cruel to the memory of her parents?  Too intolerant and unforgiving?  Just plain nasty?

In the later sections of “Anglo-Mongrels,” the poet details Ova’s coming to consciousness, her gradual separation from “the heavy upholstered / stuffing” of the “netherbodies” of both mother and nurse (LLB139), whose presence can no longer stifle the child’s curiosity about words, for example “iarrhea,” which the two-year old toddler overhears and transforms into a kind of magic wand.  Yet neither her precocious love of language nor her later forging of her own version of Christianity,  can quite break the family tie:

Suburban children
of middle-class Britain
ejected from the home
are still connected
with the inseverable
navel-cord of the motherland
and
need never feel alone   (154)

This extract from “Ova among the Neighbors” lacks the punning, sound play, and high-spiritedness of the earlier satire:  indeed, Loy consistently seems less comfortable talking about herself than about her cold and hypocritical mother, her ineffectual father, and the series of  nursemaids and governesses who try to control her childhood activities.  In the course of the narrative, the emphasis remains squarely on the indictment of the imperial England of the poet’s childhood, with its “bland taboo / from the nursery to the cemetry” (156) and its “twilight turbulence / of routine in coma” (157).

But–and I want now to come back to Virginia Kouidis’s representation of the American Mina Loy–the poet does not, at least not in this poem, turn to French models;   she does not adopt natural speech rhythms (as do Eliot and Pound), and by no means is hers the Cubist aesthetic one associates with Gertrude Stein.  Cubism, after all, implies multiplicity of perspectives, the blurring of figure-ground relationships, and the indeterminacy or reference, the outlines of a wine glass doubling as the stick figure of a man, guitar strings as letters of the alphabet or body parts, and so on.  And further: unlike the Marinetti who invented parole in libertà, or the Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire, or the Eliot of the Waste Land and Pound of the Cantos, Loy was not a collagiste.  She does not paste together disparate verbal fragments, letting  their spatial juxtapositions create a complex network of meanings.    Rather, hers is a temporal mode,  a satiric narrative, however broken and self-interrupting, in which structures of voice and address take precedence over the “constatation of fact,” as Pound called it, of the Image.

Where, then,  does this logopoeaic mode come from?  Perhaps the first place to look is at the Yellow Nineties of Loy’s London childhood: the England of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, of Art Nouveau and her one-time art teacher Augustus John.  Like the calla lilly lamps she invented in the late twenties (see figure 1), her verbal compositions are highly stylized, intentionally artificial, extravagantly mannered.  As she herself put it in an unpublished homage to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Tipped off as it were by the poet I preferred, I at last began to function” (LLB 315).

At the same time, she infuses the language of the fin de siècle with solecisms, neologisms, foreign phrases (characterizations of Cravan, for example, seem to demand  French as in Loy’s designation of him as “un brute mystique” or “le dieu qui se conserve et le fou qui s’evade,”LLB 318-319), Jewish inflections, and realistic references to bodily functions that would not have been tolerated by the Rhymers’ Club or the Savoy.   Indeed, her curious polyglossia reflects her own “Anglo-mongrel” ancestry as well as the expatriation of her adult life.

“Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” written in Paris after the traumatic loss of Cravan — a loss from which, by her own account, Loy never recovered — thus represents a rupture with a lyrical tradition that parallels Gertrude Stein’s break with conventional narrative some ten years earlier.   Like Stein (or, for that matter, like Loy’s American expatriate friend Djuna Barnes), Loy maintains an  ironic distance to her materials.  The “Buda pest” of the Löwys was not, after all, a place she really knew but largely a mythic space she herself had invented.   And, compared to the “Unreal city” of Eliot’s Waste Land, published the year she began “Anglo-Mongrels,” her own London locales remain curiously abstract and schematic. The “isolate consciousness / projected   from back of time and space” that Loy explores in her narrative poem is not given to fantasies of shoring fragments against its ruins.   Rather, as Pound and Rexroth recognized, the poet’s sardonic wit and bitter acerbity find their outlet in the play of language itself, the logopoeia that finds satisfaction in discovering the paragrams and puns latent in any given vocabulary.

If this logopoeic poetry has finally come into its own, it may well be because our own “American” English has become so thoroughly mongrelized.   Interestingly, Loy herself predicted this turn of events. “It was inevitable,” she remarked in one of her rare critical essays “that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for purposes of communication at least, English–English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-inflection of many races. . . . Out of the welter of this unclassifiable speech, while professors of Harvard and Oxford labored to preserve, ‘God’s English,’ the muse of modern literature arose, and her tongue had been loosened in the melting pot.”

This was written in 1925, the same year “Anglo-Mongrels” was published.  At the end of the century, as “English” in the U.S. becomes increasingly other, no longer the language of the mother country but an amalgam of “névrose” locutions and syntactic structures taken from African, Latin American, and Asian as well as European cultures, Loy’s poetic language no longer appears especially eccentric.   Such neologisms as “increate altitudes” (LLB 169) or “the more formulate education” (LLB 152) no longer seem, as they did even to favorable critics like Rexroth, “lapses of skill” (see KR 69), and the campy artifice of her Exodus/Colossus narrative can now be understood as deploying verbal displacement and syntactic dislocation for essential satirical ends.

Roger Conover recounts an anecdote that is apropos in this regard:

[Loy] wrote under an elaborate system of anagrammatically and numerologically     derived pseudonyms.  Was she impersonating herself or did she have a double? . . .     .Was it her pseudomania, perhaps, which accounts for a rumour that was circulating     around Paris in the Twenties–that Mina Loy was in fact not a real person at all, but     a forged persona, a hoax-of-critics.  Upon hearing this, the story goes, Mina Loy     turned up at Natalie Barney’s salon in order to convince guests of her existence:

I assure you I am indeed a live being.  But it is necessary to stay very             unknown . . . To maintain my incognito the hazard I chose was–poet.  (LLB         xvii-xviii)
It is a nice parable of the grim advantages of what we might call negative identity.   Mina Loy’s “pseudonymity” may well have been the signature that gave her the “American” freedom to invent a verbal world of her own.  “I began,” she recalls, “to ‘furnish’ England with a small pattern, an incipient rhythm, a wisp of folklore” (LLB 315).  And again, in “Ladies in an Aviary,”  “It is so sweet this sugar, the sugar of fictitious values” (LLB 316).

FOOTNOTES

[1]  Ezra Pound, “A List of Books,” Little Review, March 1918; rpt. in Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909-1965, ed William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), pp. 424-25.

[2] The Haweises’ first child Oda was born in 1904 in Paris but died on her first birthday.  My biographical sketch is largely based on Roger Conover’s Introduction and Time-Table: see Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover with a Note by Jonathan Williams (Highlands, N.C.: The Jargon Society, 1982), pp. xv-lxxix.   Subsequently cited in the text as LLB.  Loy scholars have discovered that this edition is by no means definitive and Conover’s spacing of lines and stanzas does not always follow the originals, but for the moment, his is the best edition we have.  A small detail that deserves notice here:  Conover lists Loy’s father as Lowy, the Anglicized spelling of the German Löwy;  Löwy, in turn, would derive from Löwe (lion), Löwenthal, and so on.
Carolyn Burke’s long-awaited , forthcoming biography, to be published by Farrar, Straus in 1996, will no doubt fill in the picture much more fully.

[3] In the Egoist, V (1918): 70, T. S. Apteryx [Eliot’s pseydonym] called “The Effectual Marriage” (a thinly veiled account of her relationship with Papini) “extremely good.”   And year laster, Ezra Pound recalled “Effectual Marriage” as  one of the poems of the last thirty years which by virtue of its ‘individual character’ remained in his memory.  See Pound, Profile: An Anthology Collected in 1931 (Milan: John Scheiwiller, 1932): 13.

[4]  Virginia M. Kouidis, Mina Loy.  American Modernist Poet (Baton Rouge and London: Louisia State University Press, 1980); subsequently cited in the text as VK.   The American label is all but ubiquitous: see, for example, Jane Augustine, “Mina Loy: A Feminist Modernist Americanizes the Language of Futurism,” Mid-Hudson Language Studies 12.1 (1989): 89-101;  Carolyn Burke, “The New Poetry and the New Woman: Mina Loy,” in Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, eds. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985): 37-57;  Linda A. Kinnehan, Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

[5] Eliot, “The Music of Poetry” (1942), On Poetry and Poets (New York: Noonday Press,
1961), p. 23; Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. with an introduction by T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), p. 5

[6]  Alfred Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength, An Outline of American Poetry (1620-1930)  (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc. 1929), pp. 488-89.

[7]  Ezra Pound, “How to Read” (1928), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London:  Faber and Faber, 1954), p. 25.

[8] Kenneth Rexroth, “Les Lauriers Sont Coupés,” Circle 1.4 (1944): 69-70.

[9]  LLB 112-113.  Conover normalizes Loy’s dramatic spacing and omits her dashes, hyphens and other special punctuation devices.  In my citations, I reproduce the spacing of the original: for the passage cited here, see Little Review, 9 (Spring 1923): 11-12.

[10]  William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 109.

[11]  See T. V. F. Brogan, “Skeltonic,” in  The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 1154-55.    An example from Skelton’s “To Mistress Margaret Hussey” goes like this:
Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as falcon
Or hawk of the tower
With solace and gladness,
Much mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness;
So joyously,
So maidenly,
So womanly. . . .

[12]  See VK 49-59;  Carolyn Burke, “The New Poetry and the New Woman: Mina Loy,” 39-43;  Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “‘Seismic Orgasm’: Sexual Intercourse, Gender Narratives and Lyric Ideology in Mina Loy,” in Ralph Cohen (ed.), Studies in Historical Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), pp. 264-91; and especially Elizabeth Arnold, “Mina Loy and the Futurists,” Sagetrieb 8.1-2 (1989): 83-117.

[13]  F. T. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (1912), in Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, trans. R. W. Flint  (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1991), pp. 92-97.

[14] For a discussion of Loy’s brand of Christianity and Freudianism, see  Keith Tuma, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’,” Sagetrieb 11. 1&2 (1992): 207028.

[15]  Virginia Kouidis suggests Jules Laforgue as a model (see VK 91-94), but Laforgue is much lyrical than Loy, and, despite his ironic registers, much more concerned with self expression.

[16]  See, on this point, Chapter 2 of my Futurist Moment:  Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and my essay on  “Collage,” forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp.

[17]  In the final issue of the Little Review (1929), Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap gave their authors a questionnaire to fill out.  One question was:
What has been the happiest moment of your life?  The unhappiest? (if you care to tell).  Mina Loy responded: “Every moment I spent with Arthur Cravan.  The rest of the time.”  See LLB 305-306.  Cf. Loy’s apotheosis of her lover in “Arthur Cravan is Alive!”, LLB 317-22.

[18]  Mina Loy, “Modern Poetry,” Charm, 3, no. 3 (April 1925):  17.  I owe the discovery of this essay to Marisa Januzzi, who has uncovered so much important uncollected Loy material.