Part 2

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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