Part 1
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Literature Drama Music Art
MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR
APRIL, 1917
I, Mary MacLane jh. The War M. C. A. Isadora Duncan’s Misfortune Margaret C. Anderson James Joyce The Vers Libre Contest Sea Poppies H. D. Images of Friendship Maxwell Bodenheim Stream Richard Aldington Flower and Foam Edward J. O’Brien The Master Jeanne D’Orge Autumn Ballet Charles Wharton Stork Once More—the Road Charles Ashleigh Lovescape Adolf Wolff Victory Sarah Bard Field Art is Born Miriam van Waters The Flower Smeller L. R. Bonham November Afternoon Marjorie Allen Seiffert The Soldiers Horace Holley The Assault John Cournos Girl of Jade and Ivory Mitchell Dawson The South Witter Bynner A Mother’s Sacrifice Book Store Announcement “Surprise”! The Reader Critic
Published Monthly
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MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher 31 West 14th Street NEW YORK CITY
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Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, New York, N. Y.
THE LITTLE REVIEW
VOL. III.
APRIL 1917
NO. 10
Copyright, 1917, by Margaret C. Anderson.
“I, Mary MacLane”
jh.
When I heard that there was to be a new Mary MacLane book I was full of excitement, remembering vaguely her first book. “What has the world done to you?” I thought as I went rapidly and curiously through the pages. I came upon parts that made me more excited. Has she made poetry—has she made literature? Then I read it through properly from first to last.
It seems to me that Mary MacLane’s Diary of Human Days is the best answer in the world to all those people who hold that to express yourself completely and sincerely is to have to created Art. Mary MacLane says: “So I write this book of Me—my Soul, my Heart, my sentient Body, my magic Mind: their potentialities and contradictions.”
Aside from the story, which is a sort of Spoon River of thoughts, emotions, rebellions, unconventionalities, humor, the writing of those parts which promised to be poetry in the whole became a too-pretty prettiness, a kind of Ladies’ Home Journalness. There is a way some maiden ladies hold a brush when painting still-life—we call it Spencerian.... But what makes me the most weary is the tape-worm words: Feel-of-my-Fingers, my Boredom-of-the-Moment, etc., etc.
It is an amusing book. It is an unhappy book, and it is surprising in all kinds of ways. It is chiefly surprising because it is not the contradictions that contradict: it is the potentialities, the affirmations. Whatever she affirms in the letter—that she is artist, pagan, radical, outlaw, humorist,—she denies in the spirit. She is really a rather set little conservative with a Presbyterian conscience. She is an interesting and entertaining neurasthenic. Her book is surprisingly ungrown, surprisingly commonplace. It is surprisingly not a surprise.
She makes much talk of her old soul “worn by long cycles of time”; she names herself an artist—a double title to a universal consciousness; and then proceeds to analyze toward a universal consciousness. She lovingly cherishes her free analytical mind and then in chapters like “I am someway the Lesbian woman” and “I am not Respectable nor Refined nor in Good Taste” she refutes her free analytical mind in the best manner of the “good non-analytic creatures.” I cannot find the interest to a free mind, to any thinking mind, in questioning the refinement of the natural feelings induced by a shower bath in the solitude of a mountain gorge. A grown mind does not consider whether it is unrefined to be natural or expect that it ought to feel “timorous, sexless, or hygenic” under such circumstances. A grown mind does not question the integrity of its emotions.
_I, Mary MacLane_ is good fun to read and there is enough charm in its abrupt realism to make up for its cloying fancifulness. It is annoying and exasperating—annoying because it makes you feel sorry for Mary MacLane and exasperating because it makes you wish you could help her clear up the design a bit. It is too personal. It is an intrusion. The artist reveals not how he lives but how he Exists, not his objects but himself. And if he chooses himself as his object, as Mary MacLane has done, he has not made his task any different or less difficult. It is as foolish to talk about the artist as the man as to talk about Art as life. Whether an artist tells out his whole soul in a single verse or in great creations through a long life time, or only exists fully and no one has known how he passed one of his “human days”, what he has created will tell forever how he Existed. It is never what life does to the artist; it is what the artist does to life.
Mary MacLane has created nothing. She has given us an anatomical drawing of her life, has wistfully told her story with some imagination, some beauty of phrase, some poetical conceptions, with honesty, sincerity, with the humor of a martyr. The newspapers will take it up; it will be praised and jeered and quoted by wits and half-wits; moral fossils will refuse to sell it and others to read it; Lady Writers will say “she has made a contribution to literature.” She has made a contribution, but it would seem rather to the sexual theory.
To-day.
It is the edge of a somber July night in this Butte-Montana.
The sky is overcast. The nearer mountains are gray-melancholy.
And at this point I meet Me face to face.
I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.
Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with great intentness.
I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:
I am rare—I am in some ways exquisite.
I am pagan within and without.
I am vain and shallow and false.
I am a specialized being, deeply myself.
I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other _pointes_.
I am dynamic but devastated, laid waste in spirit.
I’m like a leopard and I’m like a poet and I’m like a religieuse and I’m like an outlaw.
I have a potent weird sense of humor—a saving and a demoralizing grace.
I have brain, cerebration—not powerful but fine and of a remarkable quality.
I am scornful-tempered and I am brave.
I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.
I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.
I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in my truth.
I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.
I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.
I am young, but not very young.
I am wistful. I am infamous.
In brief, I am a human being.
The War
Margaret C. Anderson
[_We will probably be suppressed for this._]
Isadora Duncan’s Misfortune
Margaret C. Anderson
It is impossible to write about the art of Isadora Duncan. She has no connection with that mysterious phenomenon.
Now, please, all you people who put us down as æsthetes or shallow cultists or youth rebelling for the sake of sensation, or tiresome upholders of art “principles,” or sapless supporters of art as a “hole and corner” affair—please for a moment, just listen. If you get enraged with the censorship of the vicious Mr. Sumner every one knows it is not because you wish to flaunt your theories of good literature to the heavens for the want of something better to do. Very well. Grant me the same sincerity. And grant me also another thing: that I may possibly have something true to say.
I have waited five years to see Isadora Duncan. I went to the Metropolitan expecting to see the Dionysian, “the feet of the Centaur trampling the stage,” etc. I expected inspiration in a form that you are lucky enough to experience a very few times in your life. Everybody had talked to me this way about Isadora Duncan; every poet, painter, sculptor and musician, every radical I know, had said, “She has real greatness.” Well, this is what I saw:
Isadora Duncan ran and jumped and skipped and stamped and swooned about the stage, dragging with her a body that was never meant to move in rhythmic line, turning music into stories of war and religion, illustrating the stories with obvious gesticulations toward the heavens or maudlin manoeuverings towards the grave, using the same gestures for the sweetness of Schubert as for the sacraments of César Franck, moving always _inside_ the music, never dominating it, never even controlling it, never holding or pushing it to an authentic end. In all my life I have never felt such disappointment or such a weary knowledge of the public’s predilection for what is truly bad. It didn’t occur to me to conceal these ideas. I tried to explain what was wrong. I used Isadora Duncan as the best example I knew of the differentiation between the artist and the pseudo-artist. I tried to show how her conception of Art was identical with only one other conception in the world: the dream of the adolescent brain: that to feel greatly is to make Art and to put your passion and your anguish into expression is to create. Isadora felt a great deal. She shook her head and arms in such a fury of feeling that she appeared to be strangling; and when there was no way of reaching a further intensification she shook her whole body in a kind of spasm of human inability to bear the grief of the world. And every move was a futile and pitiable one because never once did her body become that mould through which a design is to shape its course and flow into its ultimate form. If the music made a wide swinging curve she made a cramped sudden curve; if it made a descending line she interpreted that, for some mysterious reason, by reverently clutching her abdomen and looking to God.
“Oh,” they say, “you are talking about technique.”
No, no, no! I am not talking about technique. I am almost never talking technique.
Yvette Guilbert has so little voice that she couldn’t sustain the singing of a single song through with beauty—as we commonly speak of beauty. Yet every time she moves her hand or turns her bird-like head or throws that voice into the creation of her design she shows herself an artist in the one real sense of the word. Is that a matter of technique? Cezanne studied light until he was able to paint objects as though they were reflected in a kind of eternal light. Is that merely technique? Harold Bauer studied sound until he has made the technique of the older pianists sound not like an end, nor even like a means to an end, but merely like a lack of full vision. What do you call that? James Joyce writes a novel in which a new kind of literary architecture is achieved not by his following of but by his departure from what has been established as the technique of good writing. What do you call that?
“Well, then,” says Mr. John Cowper Powys, when we argue all this, “you are at fault. Whenever you allow any theory of art to interfere with your enjoyment you are doing a silly thing.” But why should it occur to you that I am doing that? Is it the obtrudance of an obstinate art theory that makes you acclaim the poetry of Byron quite second-rate poetry compared to that of Shelley or Keats? You would not say that your esoteric art principles interfered with your enjoyment of Mr. Kipling, but that Mr. Kipling interfered with your enjoyment of what might have been his art. Isadora herself interferes with the possibility of any æsthetic experience out of her dancing. What she does is to inspire the mob with the only kind of feeling the mob is ever inspired with. If you were much moved by what she suggested to you—“the trampling feet of the Centaur, the look in her face as though she could drink blood”—why not realize that you can feel those things, _if you feel like it_, in the performance of the cheapest amateur.
Almost no expression of the arts is too decadent to give you such reactions. But that is no criterion of Art. In fact the more of those feelings you have the more you will know that what you are viewing is not Art. Because in the presence of the latter you feel almost nothing, you imagine nothing, you are like a being in vacuo, “your mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal.” So you are talking only of what Isadora made you feel, not what Isadora _made_. And the best—perhaps the only—test for Art is that your emotion is focused on the forms in the picture, not sidetracked to what those forms suggest to you or inform you of—as in descriptive painting or any other bad expression. Clive Bell has said all this and said it more than lucidly. Why should I be repeating it? You all believe it, and all your shrines are built to this one miracle.
So you must not insist to us that Isadora Duncan is an artist. This generation can’t be fed on any such stuff. We are tired of that kind of loose valuation. We all know and share the debt the world owes Isadora Duncan, and which the Russian Ballet acknowledged and put to a use she herself could not do. But you should not force us into a position where it positively takes courage to stand up for those values which you yourselves believe in. Isadora Duncan, as you will know after seeing her once, is a woman of small intelligence, a monument of undirected adolescent vision, an ingrained sentimentalist. The spectacle of her dancing draped in an American flag is bad enough; but her unconsciousness of how emotion must be transmuted through a significant medium is to me far more sad.
A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft loud vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal and soft swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret quietly and swiftly....
Darkness was falling.... A trembling joy, lambent as a faint light, played like a fairy host around him. But why? Her passage through the darkening air or the verse with its black vowels and its opening sound, rich and lutelike?—_From James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man”._
James Joyce[1]
I suppose Mr. Joyce had some idea in mind when he gave his book the title of A Portrait of the _Artist_ as a Young Man. But the critics seem to want it their own way and say, “Mr. Joyce paints the Irishman as he really is.”... Irishman, doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief, I suppose. Francis Hackett says it “reveals the inevitable malaise of serious youth.” Why then doesn’t this inevitable malaise of all our serious youth end inevitably like this: the call “to create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, a living thing, new and soaring, and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.”
H. G. Wells assures us that the youth of his country need not suffer such tortures of adolescence because of England’s more common-sense treatment of the sex question. And all the time Mr. Joyce was talking about the artist of any land, not the youth of England or any other country. In this country there is only God to thank that the young artist does not go entirely mad over one and all of its institutions. In our country the young artists could suffer tortures far beyond anything suffered by Stephen, over the utter emptiness of the place. But he will always suffer. He will always be “a naked runner lost in a storm of spears.”
There is too much geography of the body in this education of ours. You can talk about or write about or paint or sculpt some parts of the body but others must be treated like the Bad Lands. You can write about what you see that you don’t like, what you touch, taste, or hear; but you can’t write about what you smell; if you do you are accused of using nasty words. I could say a lot more about the geography of the body, and how its influence goes all the way through until the censor makes a geography for your mind and soul. But I want to talk about nasty words. The result of this education is that we have all the nasty words in the world in our language. How often a European or an Oriental will say: “Oh, to us it is something very nice—beautiful; but to you it would not be nice; it is much different in English.” When they told James Joyce he had words like that in his book he must have been as surprised as a painter would be if he were told that some of his colors were immoral.
His story is told the way a person in a sick room sharply remembers all the over-felt impressions and experiences of a time of fever; until the story itself catches the fever and becomes a thing of more definite, closer-known, keener-felt consciousness—and of a restless oblivion of self-consciousness.
jh.
* * * * *
This James Joyce book is the most beautiful piece of writing and the most creative piece of prose anywhere to be seen on the horizon to-day. It is consciously a work of Art in a way that _Jean-Christophe_ made no effort to be; it is such head and shoulders above _Jacob Stahl_ or Gilbert Cannan’s _Mendel_ that one must realize those books as very good novels and this as something quite more than that. It can be spoken of in terms that apply to _Pelle the Conqueror_, but only in this way: each is a work of Art and therefore not to be talked of as lesser or greater; but while _Pelle_ is made of language as it has been used the _Portrait_ is made of language as it will come to be used. There is no doubt that we will have novels before long written without even as much of the conventional structure of language as Mr. Joyce has adhered to—a new kind of “dimension in language” which is being felt in many places and which George Soule has illustrated beautifully in an article in _The New Republic_.
But that isn’t the most important thing. The interest in _Pelle_ is in the way its stories are told. The interest in the _Portrait_ is in the way its æsthetic content is presented.
For instance, these fragments:
He thought his face must be white because it felt so cool. He could not get out the answer for the sum but it did not matter. White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could....
The corridors were darkly lit and the chapel was darkly lit. Soon all would be dark and sleeping. There was cold night air in the chapel and the marbles were the colour the sea was at night. It was cold and dark under the seawall beside his father’s house.
There was a cold night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. It was not like the smell of the old peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at Sunday mass. That was a smell of air and rain and turf and corduroy. But they were very holy peasants.... It would be lovely to sleep for one night in that cottage before the fire of smoking turf, in the dark lit by the fire, in the warm dark, breathing the smell of the peasants, air and rain and turf and corduroy.
The altar was heaped with fragrant masses of white flowers: and in the morning light the pale flames of the candles among the white flowers were clear and silent as his own soul....
* * * * *
... The air of the late March evening made clear their flight, their dark quivering bodies flung clearly against the sky as against a limp hung cloth of smoky tenuous blue.
He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them before all their darting quivering bodies passed: Six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd or even in number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. They were flying high and low but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling about a temple of air.
He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice behind the wainscot: a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry as shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools....
A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the seadusk over the flowing waters.
M. C. A.
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[1] _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce. New York: B. W. Huebsch._
The Vers Libre Contest
At last after many months the prize contest has been decided. I know very little about prize contests, but I imagine that there has never been one in the history of poetry which could boast so many really bad poems. Personally I think there are not more than four or five with any suggestion of poetry in them: the rest are either involuntarily humorous, like the one printed at the end, or pompously anachronistic like the one which asks: “Shall I with frantic hands unloose the cord that binds me to this life?”
The judges were Eunice Tietjens, Helen Hoyt, and William Carlos Williams. They came to no unanimous decision as to which two poems were the best, and the only two they voted for mutually are those printed below. _Sea Poppies_ turned out to be by H. D., and _Images of Friendship_ by Maxwell Bodenheim. (The former had not yet been published in H. D.’s book).
Sea Poppies
H. D.
Amber husk fluted with gold, fruit on the sand marked with a rich grain,
treasure spilled near the shrub-pines to bleach on the boulders:
your stalk has caught root among wet pebbles and drift flung by the sea and grated shells, and slit conch-shells.
Beautiful, wide-spread, fire upon leaf, what meadow yields so fragrant a leaf as your bright leaf?
Images of Friendship
Maxwell Bodenheim
Grey drooping-shouldered bushes scrape the edges Of bending swirls of yellow-white flowers. So do my thoughts meet the wind-scattered color of you.