THE LITTLE REVIEW
A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS
MAKING NO COMPROMISE WITH THE PUBLIC TASTE
Margaret Anderson
Publisher
AUGUST, 1917
Seven Poems: William Butler Yeats
Upon a Dying Lady
Certain Artists Bring Her Dolls and Drawings
She Turns the Dolls’ Faces to the Wall
Her Friends Bring Her a Christmas Tree
List of Books: Comment by Ezra Pound
Passages from Letters of John B. Yeats
James Joyce’s Novel
Certain Noble Plays of Japan
Theatre Muet John Rodker
Stark Realism Ezra Pound
Verses Iris Barry
What the Public Doesn’t Want M. C. A.
Orientale Louis Gilmore
The Reader Critic
Copyright, 1917, by Margaret Anderson.
Published Monthly
MARGARET ANDERSON, Editor
EZRA POUND, Foreign Editor
24 West Sixteenth Street
15 Cents a Copy $1.50 a Year
Entered as second-class matter at P. O., New York, N. Y.
THE LITTLE REVIEW
VOL. IV. AUGUST 1917 No. 4
Seven Poems
William Butler Yeats
1
Upon a Dying Lady
With the old kindness, the old distinguished grace
She lies, her lovely piteous head amid dull red hair
Propped upon pillows, rouge on the pallor of her face.
She would not have us sad because she is lying there,
And when she meets our gaze her eyes are laughter lit,
Her speech a wicked tale that we may vie with her,
Matching our broken-hearted wit against her wit,
Thinking of saints and of Petronius Arbiter.
2
Certain Artists Bring Her Dolls and Drawings
Bring where our Beauty lies
A new modelled doll, or drawing
With a friend’s or an enemy’s
Features, or may be showing
Her features when a tress
Of dull red hair was flowing
Over some silken dress
Cut in the Turkish fashion,
Or it may be like a boy’s.
We have given the world our passion
We have naught for death but toys.
3
She Turns the Dolls’ Faces to the Wall
Because to-day is some religious festival
They had a priest say Mass, and even the Japanese,
Heel up and weight on toe, must face the wall
—Pedant in passion, learned in old courtesies,
Vehement and witty she had seemed—, the Venetian lady
Who had seemed to glide to some intrigue in her red shoes,
Her domino, her panniered skirt copied from Longhi,
The meditative critic, all are on their toes—
Even our Beauty with her Turkish trousers on.
Because the priest must have like every dog his day
Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon,
We and our dolls being but the world were best away.
4
She is playing like a child
And penance is the play,
Fantastical and wild
Because the end of day
Shows her that someone soon
Will come from the house, and say—
Though play is but half done—
“Come in and leave the play”.
5
She has not grown uncivil
As narrow natures would
And called the pleasures evil
Happier days thought good;
She knows herself a woman
No red and white of a face,
Or rank, raised from a common
Unreckonable race,
And how should her heart fail her
Or sickness break her will
With her dead brother’s valour
For an example still.
6
When her soul flies to the predestined dancing-place
(I have no speech but symbol, the pagan speech I made
Amid the dreams of youth) let her come face to face,
While wondering still to be a shade, with Grania’s shade,
All but the perils of the woodland flight forgot,
And that made her Dermuid dear, and some old cardinal
Pacing with half-closed eyelids in a sunny spot
Who had murmured of Giorgione at his latest breath—
Aye and Achilles, Timor, Babar, Barhaim all
Who lived in shameless joy and laughed into the face of Death.
7
Her Friends Bring Her a Christmas Tree
Pardon, great enemy,
Without an angry thought
We’ve carried in our tree,
And here and there have bought
Till all the boughs are gay,
And she may look from the bed
On pretty things that may
Please a fantastic head.
Give her a little grace
What if a laughing eye
Have looked into your face—
It is about to die.
List of Books
Comment by Ezra Pound
1
Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats. _Cuala Press,
Dundrum, Dublin. 12 shillings._
To begin with one of the more recent; I have already sent a longer
review of John Yeats’ letters to _Poetry_ on the ground that this
selection from them contains much valuable criticism of the art to which
that periodical is “devoted”. I again call attention to the book for its
humanism, for its author’s freedom from the disease of the age. It is
good, for America in particular, that some even-minded critic, writing
in detachment, without thought of publication, should have recorded his
meditations. There can be no supposition that he hoped to start a social
reform. Carlos Williams wrote a few years ago:
“Nowhere the subtle, everywhere the electric”. Quibblers at once began a
wrangle about the subtlety of electricity. We can not massacre the
_ergoteur_ wholesale, but we might at least learn to ignore him; to
segregate him into such camps as the “New Statesman” and the “New
Republic”; to leave him with his system of “graduated grunts” and his
critical “apparatus”, his picayune little slot-machine.
John Yeats writes as a man who has refused to be stampeded; he has not
been melted into the crowd; the “button-moulder” has not remade him. He
praises solitude now and then, but he has not withdrawn himself into a
pseudo-Thoreauian wilderness, nor attempted romantesque Borroviana. Lest
we “of this generation and decade” imagine that all things began with
us, it is well to note that a man over seventy has freed himself from
the effects of the “Great Exposition” and of Carlyle and Wordsworth and
Arnold—perhaps he never fell under the marasmus.
I have met men even older than Mr. John Yeats, men who remembered the
writings of the French eighteenth century. They had endured the drought,
and kept a former age’s richness. When I say “remembered the writings of
the French eighteenth century,” I mean that they had received the effect
of these writings as it were at first hand, they had got it out of the
air; there is a later set who took it up as a speciality, almost a
fanaticism; they are different. Then there came the bad generation; a
generation of sticks. They are what we have had to put up with.
2
James Joyce’s Novel. _The Egoist, London._ _B. W. Huebsch, New
York._
_A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ was so well reviewed in the
April number of this paper that I might perhaps refrain from further
comment. I have indeed little to add, but I would reaffirm all that I
have yet said or written of the book, beginning in _The Egoist_,
continuing in _The Drama_, etc. Joyce is the best prose writer of my
decade. Wyndham Lewis’s _Tarr_ is the only contemporary novel that can
compare with _A Portrait_; _Tarr_ being more inventive, more volcanic,
and “not so well written.” And that last comparison is perhaps vicious.
It would be ridiculous to measure Dostoevsky with the T-Square of
Flaubert. Equally with Joyce and Lewis, the two men are so different,
the two methods are so different that it is rash to attempt comparisons.
Neither can I attempt to predict which will find the greater number of
readers; all the readers who matter will certainly read both of the
books.
As for Joyce, perhaps Jean de Bosschère will pardon me if I quote from a
post card which he wrote me on beginning _A Portrait_. It was,
naturally, not intended for publication, but it is interesting to see
how a fine piece of English first strikes the critic from the continent.
“Charles Louis Philippe n’a pas fait mieux. Joyce le dépasse par le
style qui n’est plus _le_ style. Cette nudité de tout ornement
rhétorique, de toute forme idiomatique (malgré la plus stricte sévérité
contre le détour ou l’esthétique) et beaucoup d’autres qualités
fondamentales font de ce livre la plus sérieuse oeuvre anglaise que
j’aie lue. Les soixante premières pages sont incomparables, ...”
The “most serious”, or to translate it more colloquially: “It matters
more than any other English book I have read”. De Bosschère has not yet
published any criticism of Joyce, but he is not the only established
critic who has written to me in praise of _A Portrait ..._ Joyce has had
a remarkable “press,” but back of that and much more important is the
fact that the critics have praised with conviction, a personal and vital
conviction.
3
Certain Noble Plays of Japan. _Cuala Press, Dublin. 12
shillings._
Noh, or Accomplishment. _Knopf, New York, $2.75. Macmillan,
London._
The earlier and limited edition of this work of Ernest Fenollosa
contains four plays, with an introduction by W. B. Yeats. The larger
edition contains fifteen plays and abridgements and all of Fenollosa’s
notes concerning the Japanese stage that I have yet been able to prepare
for publication. This Japanese stuff has not the solidity, the body, of
Rihaku (Li Po). It is not so important as the Chinese work left by
Fenollosa, but on the other hand it is infinitely better than Tagore and
the back-wash from India. Motokiyo and the fourteenth-century Japanese
poets are worth more than Kabir. Fenollosa has given us more than Tagore
has. Japan is not a Chinese decadence. Japan “went on with things” after
China had quit. And China “quit” fairly early: T’ang is the best of her
poetry, and after Sung her art grows steadily weaker.
It would be hard to prove that the Japanese does not attempt (in his
art, that is) to die in aromatic pain of the cherry blossom; but his
delicacy is not always a weakness. His preoccupation with nuances may
set one against him. Where a Chinese poet shows a sort of rugged
endurance, the Japanese dramatist presents a fine point of punctilio. He
is “romanticist” against the “classical” _and_ poetic matter-of-factness
of the Chinese writer. The sense of punctilio is, so far as I can make
out, a Japanese characteristic, and a differentiating characteristic,
and from it the Japanese poetry obtains a quality of its own.
The poetic sense, almost the sole thing which one can postulate as
underlying all great poetry and indispensible to it, is simply the sense
of overwhelming emotional values. (For those who must have definitions:
Poetry is a verbal statement of emotional values. A poem is an emotional
value verbally stated.) In the face of this sense of emotional values
there are no national borders. One can not consider Rihaku as a
foreigner, one can only consider him human. One can not consider
Odysseus, or Hamlet, or Kagekiyo as foreigners, one can only consider
them human.
At one point in the Noh plays, namely in the climax of _Kagekiyo_ we
find a truly Homeric laughter, and I do not think the final passages of
this play will greatly suffer by any comparison the reader will be able
to make. If I had found nothing else in Fenollosa’s notes I should have
been well paid for the three years I have spent on them.
If I dispraise Tagore now I can only say that I was among the first to
praise him before he became a popular fad. The decadence of Tagore may
be measured. His first translations were revised by W. B. Yeats; later
translations by Evelyn Underhill, facilis et perfacilis descensus, and
now they say he has taken to writing in English, a language for which he
has no special talent. If his first drafts contained such clichés as
“sunshine in my soul”, he was at least conscious at that time of his
defects. Praise was rightly given to his first poems because it was
demonstrated and demonstrable that they were well done in Bengali, i. e.
that they were written in a precise and objective language, and in a
metric full of interest and variety. The popular megaphone took up
phrases made to define the originals and applied them to the
translations. Imagine a criticism of Herrick and Campion applied to a
French or German prose translation of these poets, however excellent as
a translation in prose! As the vulgarizer hates any form of literary
excellence, he was well content with obscuring the real grounds for
praise. The unimportant element, that which has made Tagore the prey of
religiose nincompoops, might easily have passed without comment.
However, it has proved the baccillus of decay. Sir Rabindranath having
been raised in a country where the author need not defend himself
against blandishment ... I mean the force of the babu press is scarcely
enough to turn anyone’s head or his judgement.... Sir Rabindranath is
not particularly culpable. His disciples may bear the blame as best they
may; along with his publishers. But no old established publishing house
cares a damn about literature; and once Tagore had become a commercial
property, they could scarcely be expected to care for his literary
integrity.
He might still wash and be clean; that is to say there is still time for
him to suppress about three fourths of the stuff he has published in
English, and retain some sort of literary position.
Another man who stands in peril is Edgar Masters. He did a good job in
_The Spoon River Anthology_. What is good in it is good in common with
like things in the Greek anthology, Villon and Crabbe: plus Masters’s
sense of real people. The work as a whole needs rewriting. The
difference between a fine poem and a mediocre one is often only the fact
that the good poet could force himself to rewrite. “No appearance of
labour?” No, there need be no appearance of labour. I have seen too many
early drafts of known and accepted poems not to know the difference
between a draft and the final work. Masters must go back and take the
gobbetts of magazine cliché out of his later work; he must spend more
time on _Spoon River_ if he wants his stuff to last as Crabbe’s
_Borough_ has lasted. There is a great gulph between a “successful” book
and a book that endures; that endures even a couple of centuries.
I would not at any cost minimize what Edgar Masters has done, but his
fight is not yet over.
4
The Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries,
by Arnold Dolmetsch. _Novello, London. W. H. Gray, New York._
Arnold Dolmetsch’s book has been out for some time. No intelligent
musician would willingly remain without it. No intelligent musician is
wholly without interest in the music of those two centuries. But this
book is more than a technical guide to musicians. It is not merely “full
of suggestion” for the thorough artist of any sort, but it shows a way
whereby the musician and the “intelligent” can once more be brought into
touch. If Dolmetsch could be persuaded to write a shilling manual for
the instruction of children _and_ of mis-taught elders it might save the
world’s ears much torture. Dolmetsch’s initial move was to demonstrate
that the music of the old instruments could not be given on the piano;
any more than you could give violin music on the piano. His next was to
restore the old instruments to us. There is too much intelligence in him
and his book adequately to be treated in a paragraph. I am writing of
him at greater length in _The Egoist_. His citations from Couperin show
the existence of vers libre in early eighteenth-century music. I do not
however care unduly to stir up the rather uninteresting discussion as to
the archaeology of “free” verse.
5
Prufrock and Other Observations, by T. S. Eliot. _The Egoist,
London. One shilling._
The book-buyer can not do better.
Frost tinges the jasper terrace,
A fine stork, a black stork sings in the heaven,
Autumn is deep in the valley of Hako,
The sad monkeys cry out in the midnight,
The mountain pathway is lonely.
... The red sun blots on the sky the line of the colour-drenched
mountains. The flowers rain in a gust; it is no racking storm
that comes over this green moor, which is afloat, as it would
seem, in these waves.
Wonderful is the sleeve of the white cloud, whirling such snow
here.
—_From “Noh”, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound._
Theatre Muet
John Rodker
I
Interior
Black Curtain.
In one corner the picture of a door.
A man in black tights (so that only his face is seen and the outlines of
his body divined) crosses the stage.
He passes through the door.
We follow him because the curtain is raised.
Black room.
Again he crosses the stage and striking a match, lights a gas jet at his
own height with great deliberation.
* * * * *
Man goes off unseen.
Three chairs become apparent.
They are in a line—two kitchen chairs—
once white—dirty.
One—old—beautiful—
highly polished.
In the flickering light the three chairs grow
unutterably mournful.
II
Hunger
The Celestial Quire.
The lambent sea-green flames that are the celestial quire burn shrilly,
striving....
They describe the circle which is Kosmos, swirling shrilly.
When they writhe it is outside three-dimensioned space.
Forever they return in their orbits.
* * * * *
Forever they return in their orbits.
If they writhe at all, it is outside the three-dimensioned spaces.
They do not touch each other. They do not clash with each other.
* * * * *
Nor is there light in Space.
III
A room. Sombre faces of 1, 2, and 4 (women) in profile.
Man (3) with back to audience.
They are seated round a gas fire.
Glow seen through legs and chair legs.
A silent duel in progress between 1 and 3 seated diagonally.
2 and 4, more or less neutral, obscure issue.
* * * * *
Conversation clockwise (need not be materialised).
1. “What shall it be then, Cerise?”
2. “It was a lovely party.”
3. “Pouf” (lights a cigarette).
4. Sighs (blow out smoke).
Silence.
Conversation resumed. Same things more or less. The man’s back becomes
inimical, hating 1. His back muscles prepare to spring and so ripple to
crouch.
1 trembles, fearful. Tries to talk to show her nonchalance, fails. Her
heart beats thud, thud, thud.
2 and 4 neutral, disturb inimic waves.
The man loses his tenseness. Obscurely he collects all his forces for a
final overwhelming, but they dissipate among 2 and 4 (neutral). 4 now
becomes sympathetic to him and so drains more vitality. 1 stiffens,
gathers that 2 is her ally.
Also 4 unconsciously.
Man rises to his feet. For a moment tries to gather vitality through
firm feet and twitching fingers.
His shoulders fall, he stumbles out.
Three sighs of relief.
* * * * *
Conversation:
1. What shall it be?
2. Such a lot of men!
* * * * *
Hours later:
1 in bed. Mass of shadow on white sheets.
Cannot sleep, tosses about.
Attack of nerves.
One feels it has gone on for hours.
She seeks relief.
IV
To S. E. R.
Man and Woman, face to face. Same height. Woman facing audience.
Woman mad, breathing heavily, whites of eyes showing, striking man in
face, once ... twice.
His back is to audience. No muscle of it moves. (Inert—a crumbling block
of salt).
Her madness drops. His passivity makes her doubt his reality—then her
own.
In the uncertain pause, she is again assured of her reality.
More blows, same effects.
Tears blind her, she dashes them away.
More blows, face distorted.
Still same effects.
The ubiquitous man, appearing and reappearing (real and phantom) before
her strained eyes makes them water.
She feels it a weakness—swallows. Another weakness.
Stares dully at the figure before her.
Impotence realised—weeps.
Weeps loudly and slobberingly and hopelessly like a whipped child.
Weeps more loudly yet, more hopelessly: with distorted muscles, copious
tears and lengthening and coarsening of upper lip.
Such lack of control is intolerable.
Members of the audience want to strike each other.
Audience
Intellectual
and otherwise.
A few women weep too, in identical pitch.
It becomes a panic spreading suddenly.
The men leave quickly, swallowing hard.
One man throws a brickbat at the inert back, then
another.
Others do the same.
When he sinks stoned, expiring—a yell of exultation
rises from the men—long sighs of relief from the women.
“ANTICHRIST”
Outside the Theatre—weeping: fitful, intolerable—mounts from street to
street and star to star in festoons of distinguished and unutterable
melancholy.
V
1.
Thick twilight. A long row of houses, several storeys high.
All have area railings and steps leading up to the front door.
One light in a top window a third of the way down the block.
A drab yellow light also works through glass of street door.
A woman walks (bent) on the pavement in front of these houses hovering
undecidedly, evidently fearful.
Then she draws herself together and climbs the steps leading to the lit
door.
She waits shuffling from foot to foot, seeming undecided—(she has rung
the bell).
The door opens a little, a wedge of light moves out and a dark figure
appears for a moment breaking it. They talk for a few seconds, and both
enter. The door shuts. A wedge of darkness passes across the lit panes.
The light works out tranquilly again.
2.
Stairs dimly lit, narrow, carpeted. The figure climbs, climbs,
climbs—foreboding, distrust and fear at every point.
3.
A room—walls dark red; small, stuffy, unbearable.
The woman stands uneasily just inside the door—waiting.
The room is full of impending tragedy.
Influences are in the room and in the next room.
Tragedy becomes apparent in the woman’s pose.
She waits.
Nothing happens.
With dramatic suddenness, her body droops—she cringes.
(Nothing, nothing, NOTHING happens).
Curtain—very quietly, like a sigh, so that it is some seconds before
audience realises that play is over.
Stark Realism
This Little Pig Went to Market
(_A Search for the National Type_)
Ezra Pound
This little American went to Vienna. He said it was “Gawd’s Own City”.
He knew all the bath-houses and dance halls. He was there for a week. He
never forgot it—No, not even when he became a Captain in the Gt.
American Navy and spent six months in Samoa.
This little American went West—to the Middle-West, where he came from.
He smoked cigars, for cigarettes are illegal in Indiana, that land where
Lew Wallace died, that land of the literary tradition. He ate pie of all
sorts, and read the daily papers—especially those of strong local
interest. He despised European culture as an indiscriminate whole.
Peace to his ashes.
This little American went to the great city Manhattan. He made two and
half dollars per week. He saw the sheeny girls on the East Side who
lunch on two cents worth of bread and sausages, and dress with a flash
on the remainder. He nearly died of it. Then he got a rise. He made
fifteen dollars per week selling insurance. He wore a monocle with a
tortoise-shell rim. He dressed up to “Bond St.” No lord in The Row has
surpassed him.
He was a damn good fellow.
This little American went to Oxford. He rented Oscar’s late rooms. He
talked about the nature of the Beautiful. He swam in the wake of
Santyana. He had a great cut glass bowl full of lilies. He believed in
Sin. His life was immaculate. He was the last convert to catholicism.
This little American had always been adored—and quite silent. He was
quite bashful: He rowed on his college crew. He had a bright pink
complexion. He was a dealer in bonds, but not really wicked. He would
walk into a man’s office and say: “Do you want any stock? ... eh ... eh
... I don’t know anything about it. They say it’s all right.” Some
people like that sort of thing; though it isn’t the “ideal business man”
as you read of him in _Success_ and in Mr. Lorimer’s papers.
This little American had rotten luck; he was educated—soundly and
thoroughly educated. His mother always bought his underwear by the
dozen, so that he should be thoroughly supplied. He went from bad to
worse, and ended as a dishwasher; always sober and industrious; he began
as paymaster in a copper mine. He made hollow tiles in Michigan.
His end was judicious.
This little American spoke through his nose, because he had catarrh or
consumption. His scholastic merits were obvious. He studied Roumanian
and Aramaic. He married a papal countess.
Peace to his ashes.
This little American ... but who ever heard of a baby with seven toes.
This story is over.
Verses
Iris Barry
His Girl
The bigger boys, gathered round the gates in the dusk,
Watch her walk away with their teacher.
They stop shouting, somewhat astonished
That she should wait for him in the cold.
They do not see very much in him themselves
And stare, commiserating the stupidity of woman.
Widow
Monica may well modulate her voice
And pose as a charming and sympathetic person.
Everyone knows she has had two husbands
And driven both to a lasting great distance.
At the Ministry
_September 1916_
Having received the last volume of a certain poet
I look out of the office window—
Coloured shirts: green, blue, red, grey:
Men in coloured shirts moving heavy things with deliberation
Out there in the sun.
The junior typist cries ecstatically
On seeing the costly photogravure of the author,
Clasping her hands and flushing.
But I sit and look out at the irregular wandering shirts,
At the men unloading projectiles
And storing them in the dark sheds.
The Black Fowl
Black fowl, perching,
I have seen nothing more beautiful than your plumes.
It should be pleasant to nestle luxuriously in that rich black.
But there is no joy in the winking eye that watches me
As you stand there perching.
At the Hotel
While at table
Or chatting conventionally in the drawing-room
She eyes him.
They are seen together everywhere
Husband and wife.
Nothing but her vigilance binds them.
Her smoothness sickens him:
She is not even successful.
She may keep his body to her bed—
It is easier than a scene and remonstrances.
Towards dawn he turns, smiling,
Dreaming of a girl on the hotel-staff.
(Already he has trifled with her in his heart).
Towards the End
Others might find inspiration and wide content
In this mellow kitchen, the beams and washed walls,
Flagged floor lit by the log-glow:
But the beetles and mice appreciate it more than I.
And my Mother is bored to death,
(She keeps putting records on the gramophone)
Even grandfather eating his supper by the jumping light from the hearth
Hardly seems to enjoy his food.
Very patriarchal-benign he looks.
Somehow his shadow on the wall awes me in its grandeur
As though he might not be here long,
And the beetles and mice come into their own very shortly.
What the Public Doesn’t Want
Margaret Anderson
America is a confounding place.
About four years ago I wanted to start a magazine. Two things in life
interest me more than other things: Art and good talk about Art. _The
Little Review_ was launched as an organ of those two interests.
For three years, at irregular intervals, it reflected my concern about
various other matters. When I got incensed over the sufferings of what
is called the proletariat I preached profound platitudes about justice
and freedom. I had always had the sense to know that all people can be
put into two classes: the exceptional and the average. But when I
decided that the only way to prevent the exceptional from being
sacrificed to the average was for everybody to become anarchists, I
preached the simple and beautiful but quite uninteresting tenets of
anarchism. I have long given them up. I still grow violent with rage
about the things that are “wrong”, and probably always shall. But I know
that anarchism won’t help them. I have known good anarchists who are as
dull as any other good laymen. And I have no interest in laymen. Only
sensibility matters.
I had always known that education doesn’t produce sensibility, but I
came to think that _something_ could produce it. Now I know that nothing
under the heavens will make any one sensitive if he is not born that
way.
I had always known that people didn’t want Art, but I imagined that they
would be glad to be made to want it. Now I know that they are “not
merely indifferent to it: they hate it malignantly”.
Therefore, to sum up: all these ideas were not interesting enough to
have bothered about.
But the curious thing about America is that while she thinks such
insipid and pleasant and harmless ideas are abominable and dangerous,
she also thinks they are interesting!
Any magazine that concerns itself with such ideas is sure to get an
audience. Your audience will think that you are crazy or that you want a
sensation, or, what is worse, that you are a sort of “Pollyanna”
throwing sunshine and optimism into dark places in order to help the
world. But it will be interested in reading you for one reason or
another.
And now after working through unbelievable aridness _The Little Review_
has at last arrived at the place from which I wanted it to start. At
last we are printing stuff which is creative and inventive, and, thank
heaven, not purely local. The audience mentioned above, in the
aggregate, resents it. We no longer interest that audience. The layman
says that we are now given over to the bizarre and the “aesthetic” (that
adjective which in America means something vaguely inconsequential, if
not something shameless and immoral). People who like to “help”
magazines with “artistic” leanings are not to be allured by Art. People
who can’t prove that they know anything about good letters dare to tell
us that we don’t know anything about them. Editors who make it a point
of honor to discover artistic value in the work of their contemporaries
feel that we are meticulous and too “arty”. And the writers themselves
are the most absurd. Maxwell Bodenheim writes that he “knows” Ezra Pound
judges poetry on the basis of his personal dislikes. That is as
necessarily untrue as anything can be. Any one who is unwilling to
praise what seems to him unworthy of praise, anyone whose interest in a
poet’s work abates when the work shows no signs of further progress—any
such critic will come in for this kind of slander. Any such critic will
get himself talked about the way people love to talk in New York: if you
try to discuss a man’s work with them they say “that man is my enemy”,
or “that man is my friend”. It’s very puzzling: they seem to think their
remarks have something to do with literature.
Another remarkable thing that happens in New York: if you walk upon the
street with a sensitive and rare and distinguished person you will find
that he attracts more curious and resentful attention than the most
badly-made, the most atrociously dressed, or the most grotesquely
deformed human beings who surround him.
But this is the attitude of all America.
I have made several thoughtless statements about “Help us to make _The
Little Review_ a power”, etc. I know that nothing on earth will do that
except our own contents. They tell me that Henley was a power in England
with _The National Observer_ when its circulation had shrunk to eighty
subscribers. I should be willing to pursue dominion even to that point,
but it will probably not be necessary. Our circulation grows in spite of
criticism and misunderstanding.
You can help us to give you more each month by subscribing for your
friends who are interested in a magazine which is not interested in the
public taste.
Orientale
Louis Gilmore
Wil’t thou listen
To the voices of peacocks;
Or would’st thou prefer that the cats
Perform a nocturnal serenade?
This is no common
Entertainment
That I have prepared for thee,
Indifferent one.
The columns are smeared
With fire-flies,
And the glow-worms shed a light
Among the dishes....
But first let the slaves
Anoint thee with what
Has lain a long while
In the sun;
Or with this
Thou perceive’st
In a yellow
Vial.
The Reader Critic
Oddities?
A. R. S.:
I have found _The Little Review_ excessively burdened with what you
describe as “stuff in which the creative element is present”. Indeed my
impression is that it is devoted more to invention than to
interpretation, and therein misses its calling as an agency of “Art”.
And as to quality, it is not my understanding that “Art” is necessarily,
or usually, insipid or bizarre, as represented in your publication.
These are times for men to be attending to more serious things than
aesthetic oddities.
[The above letter was written to us by one of the front citizens of a
large city, on his club stationary,—a men’s club where old Betties
gossip and criticize women’s clothes. Yet he would say to men like
Wyndham Lewis, and other of our contributors now in the trenches, that
these are times for men to be attending to more serious things than
aesthetic oddities.
How smoothly he has set down the attitude of the great average mind
toward Art. No, I cannot say average. Average implies variation. It is
the perfect contempt of the elderly gentleman art patron for the
creative and the original. From long years of supporting museums of art,
the city beautiful plan, opera organizations, etc., he acquires the
attitude of the affluent married man toward his wife: whatever is
supported by him must necessarily be a thoroughly understood subject,
and even if inferior, must be the interpreter of his life.—_jh._]
Radicalism and Conservatism
M. L. K.:
I am renewing my subscription to _The Little Review_, though I don’t
know just why. I don’t understand you very well any more. I don’t know
whether I approve. You used to be very different. Sometimes you were
great. Your own article “Life Itself” and Ben Hecht’s “Dregs” I shall
always remember. You used to show such fine sympathy for all kinds of
social suffering. I cannot see how a magazine devoted only to what you
call Art can have a very vital share in the solving of our present great
problems. This is such a splendid opportunity for your radicalism....
[Conservatism: to preserve the best. As a term of abuse, to preserve
good and bad indiscriminately.
Radicalism: to get to the root of the matter. Usually to eradicate good
and bad indiscriminately.
Besides they are terms filthy from contact with politics.—_F. E._]
Too British
V. H., Maine:
I like the July number a lot. It’s consistently good all through. The
only thing I was disappointed in was the “Imaginary Letters”. It’s so
damned British! It’s very clever, there’s no question—but to me at least
it lacks beauty. The T. S. Eliot poems are in something the same vein
but much more mature, and awfully well written. I like the Ezra Pound
very much—in fact everything else.
[I can’t see why Lewis’s Letter is any more essentially British than
Nietzsche’s “Flies in the Market Place”. And since it is very good
writing why hasn’t it beauty?—_M. C. A._]
Reproach
... I am sorry about one thing,—you don’t seem to be able to get rid of
the propaganda. All the things Pound sends you are in a way propaganda.
If not, what are they trying to do; just shock people? Eliot’s poem
about the Church is all right. That sort of thing ought to be said and
he has said it so well that it will get over. But I think his “Lune de
Miel” is disgusting, in one line simply impossible. I am terribly
interested, but I do wish they would be a little more delicate.
[I am with you on the propaganda. Extermination seems simple and direct
and lasting and the only solution to me. Shocking people I believe is a
fever of extreme youth which cools very soon,—as soon as caught almost.
If one could only shock them to the foundations there might be some
interest, but they are never shocked beyond where they are always
trembling anyway. Eliot is quite outside that kind of interest.
We are known, in magazine lingo, as a class magazine. At first I was
puzzled as to what that meant. But when a distinguished foreigner, a man
who might have competed with the Jodindranath of Ezra Pound’s article,
said that that article was a “matter for police suppression” I thought
that he was probably the only person qualified to understand it. There
is that class. And then there is the other class,—the one expressed by
the gentleman who laughingly said: “There is a number of such
backgrounds that should be so exploited”.—_jh._]
War Art
B. C., Kansas:
_The Little Review_ is the only magazine I have laid eyes on in months
that hasn’t had a word in it about this blasted war. How do you do it?
[Perhaps it’s because none of us considers this war a legitimate or an
interesting subject for Art, not being the focal point of any
fundamental emotion for any of the peoples engaged in it. Revolutions
and civil wars are different ... but that is a long story. There never
has been a real revolution yet: peoples have revoluted but they have
never seemed to hold on to what they have fought for. By the time the
revolution gets to be history they are back behind where they started,
staggering under the same kind of burdens. They are really hunch-backs,
but they think that which bends their backs can be unloaded. And civil
wars, whatever their pretext, seem always to be the fight of the
self-righteous uncultivated against the cultivated and the suave.
I am not writing this as a “scholar of history.” I am just wandering on
when I don’t very much want to. At least I do feel strongly that nine
tenths of the stuff written is a rotten impertinence to be discouraged.
Some reviewers call these efforts “deeply touching and of poignant
appeal”. Consider the morbid deadliness of the U-Boat and then this
poem:—
You are a U-Boat you,
You’re number 23,
U-Boat you’re after me
U-Boat this is not war,
U-Boat you make me sore.
There are three stanzas supporting this chorus which are a matter of
abnormal crime. And this is the effort of a woman educated in one of the
best colleges in the country.—_jh._]
To “jh”
Israel Solon, New York:
I see in your last issue: “After reading your article ‘Push-Face’ in
your June number I have torn the magazine to pieces and burned it in the
fire. You may discontinue my subscription”.
We would destroy you instead of falling upon his face for the one red
moment you tendered him. What is one to say to this?
Life would be hard to bear were it not that of this all life is made, by
this all life destroyed.
Louise Gebhard Cann, Seattle:
... Mr. Pound’s swashbuckling always sets me to crying, with my eye on
the needy American public. “Encore! Encore!” But I am not tempted to
reread him, except for the purpose of looking up in the dictionary the
novel words he uses. However, since reading his Dialogue in the June
_Little Review_, I have reversed my opinion; for I shall read that
excellent chat between the student and Rabelais twice as many times as I
read any one of John Davidson’s “Tête-à-têtes”.
I intended to interject quite parenthetically before that no one who
conscientiously reads the author of “Jodindranath Mawhwor’s Occupation”
can fail to develop a vocabulary; and since the art of writing is the
art of words,—that, given language, inevitably formal literature
arises,—Mr. Pound is a high-pressure manufacturer of literature-matrix.
The May number was certainly an achievement,—the sort of thing we’re
hungry for; but we missed “_jh_”.
Your “Push-Face” is precisely to the point. Its weakest part is your
satire on clothes and appearance. To seize upon the merely external, to
ridicule a woman because of her age, is the easiest and therefore the
most journalistic form of humor. I am certain that in time we shall come
into a form of wit so potent that it will deal with character as you
deal with double-chins and tunics. You yourself attain this penetrating
force of satire when you throw up against the Red-Cross activity the
activity of the police in pushing back the little children from the
slums beyond the Square.
[You seem to me to be a bit confused in your criticism of my “Push-Face”
article. “Its weakest part is your satire on clothes and appearance”—and
later you are certain that we shall come into a form of wit so potent
that it will deal with character as I dealt with double-chins and tunics
(appearance and clothes). But I feel certain that we shall never come
into a time when the reader will be penetrating enough to recognize
psychology from a mere dealing with “externals”.
The part you criticise was an attempt to strike through externals to
suggest a psychology of anatomy,—a psychology founded on a theory that
the definitive lines of the body take their intention from something
more fundamental than will power. I have not read Dr. Adler’s theory of
the “fictitious goal”. But I have learned from my study of the human
body, in drawing from it, and from that eternal observation of it which
becomes a tireless and almost unconscious preoccupation of the
painter,—I have learned that it is possible for even the slightly
intelligent to stamp his body with all the movement, bearing, and spirit
of some cherished ideal or some protective colouring of himself which he
wishes to present to the world. In great stress or in crises where the
entire will power is overthrown or engaged elsewhere the body, like the
mind, assumes its true lines and presence. On the stage this is a very
simple way of unmasking a character,—you will say, an obvious way. Then
why may not the fictitious role be obvious to the painter,—not a matter
of “mere externals” but a legitimate thing to seize upon as a subject
for satire or what you choose? This class of people—those of the
fictitious role—are really the richest material for Art. It is only in
cases where there is creative power back of the fictitious role that the
thing itself becomes an art: in poets, musicians, painters, etc., when
the fictitious becomes a thing created, where with mind and body they
have created a wholly new, unshakable, well-designed character from
themselves.
Byron, the unwanted, spiritless, club-footed child who created from this
material a brilliant symbol of romantic manly beauty, “flashing a
flaming heart across Europe”.
But all this is too interesting and immense to deal with in a paragraph.
Sometime perhaps I will go into it at length.—_jh._]
The stag’s voice has bent her heart toward sorrow,
Sending the evening winds which she does not see,
We cannot see the tip of the branch.
The last leaf falls without witness.
There is an awe in the shadow,
And even the moon is quiet,
With the love-grass under the caves.
—_From “Noh”, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound._
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“Hello Huck!”
Recall that golden day when you first read “Huck Finn”? How your
mother said, “For goodness’ sake, stop laughing aloud over that
book. You sound so silly.” But you couldn’t stop laughing.
Today when you read “Huckleberry Finn” you will not laugh so
much. You will chuckle often, but you will also want to weep. The
deep humanity of it—the pathos, that you never saw, as a boy,
will appeal to you now. You were too busy laughing to notice the
limpid purity of the master’s style.
MARK TWAIN
When Mark Twain first wrote “Huckleberry Finn” this land was
swept with a gale of laughter. When he wrote “The Innocents
Abroad” even Europe laughed at it itself.
But one day there appeared a new book from his pen, so spiritual,
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Mark Twain was all of these. His was not the light laughter of a
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A Real American
Mark Twain was a steamboat pilot. He was a searcher for gold in
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The world has asked is there an American literature? Mark Twain
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remained as simple, as democratic as the plainest of our
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dreaming of high things—brave in the face of trouble—and always
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A SELECTION OF BOOKS
from
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Poetry and Drama.
Prufrock and other Observations, _by T. S. Eliot_.
Noh: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan, _by Ernest
Fenollosa and Ezra Pound_. _$2.75._
The Love Poems of Verharen, _translated by Flint, Symons, and
others_. _$1.50._
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Psychology of the Unconscious, by _Dr. C. G. Jung_. _$4.00._
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Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, _by Dr. Sigmund Freud_.
_$2.50._
The Neurotic Constitution, _by Dr. Alfred Adler_. _$3.00._
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, _by James Joyce_.
_$1.50._
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$6.00._
Mendel, _by Gilbert Cannan_. _$1.50._
Dubliners, _by James Joyce_. _$1.50._
Miscellaneous
Le Feu, _by Henri Barbusse_.
Chamber Music, _by James Joyce_.
The Works of Anatole France. _Each $1.25._
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Transcriber’s Notes
Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.
The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect
correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.
The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
(before/after):
[p. 3]:
... And when she meets our gaze her eyes are laughter lit ...
... And when she meets our gaze her eyes are laughter lit, ...
[p. 3]:
... Her speech a wicked tale that we may vie with her ...
... Her speech a wicked tale that we may vie with her, ...Project Gutenberg
The Little Review, August 1917 (Vol. 4, No. 4)
Various
Chimera44
College