Part 1
THE LITTLE REVIEW
A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS MAKING NO COMPROMISE WITH THE PUBLIC TASTE
Margaret C. Anderson Publisher
JUNE, 1917
Chinese Poems (translated from the Chinese of Li Po by Sasaki and Maxwell Bodenheim) Push-Face jh. Improvisation Louis Gilmore Poems: William Butler Yeats The Wild Swans at Coole Presences Men Improve with the Years A Deep-Sworn Vow The Collar-Bone of a Hare Broken Dreams In Memory An Anachronism at Chinon Ezra Pound Imaginary Letters, II. Wyndham Lewis The Reader Critic
Published Monthly
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MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Editor EZRA POUND, Foreign Editor 31 West Fourteenth Street NEW YORK CITY
$1.50 a Year
Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, New York, N. Y.
The Little Review
VOL. IV.
JUNE 1917
NO. 2
Copyright, 1917, by Margaret C. Anderson.
Chinese Poems
Translated from the Chinese of Li Po by Sasaki and Maxwell Bodenheim
Gently-Drunk Woman
A breeze knelt upon the lotus-flowers And their odor filled a water-palace. I saw a king’s daughter Upon the roof-garden of the water-palace. She was half-drunk and she danced, Her curling body killing her strength. She grimaced languidly. She smiled and drooped over the railing Around the white, jewel-silenced floor.
Perfume—Remembrance
When you stayed, my house was filled with flowers. When you left, all disappeared, except our bed. I wrapped your embroidered clothes about me, And could not sleep. The perfume of your clothes has stayed three years. It will always be with me. But you will never come back. While I think of you yellow leaves outside Are dropping, and white dew-drops moisten the moss beneath them.
Drunk
When we fill each other’s cups with wine, Many mountain flowers bloom. One drink; another; and another— I am drunk; I want to sleep, So you had better go. Come tomorrow morning, hugging your harp, For then, I shall have something to tell you.
Mountain-Top Temple
Night, and rest in the mountain-top temple. I lift my hands, and knock at the stars. I dare not talk loudly, For I fear to surprise the people in the sky.
Push-Face
jh.
I
It is a great thing to be living when an age passes. If you are born in an age in which every impact of its expression is a pain, there is a beautiful poetic vengeance in being permitted to watch that age destroy itself.
What other age could have so offended? Instead of pursuing the real business of life, which is to live, men have turned all their denials and repressions into the accumulation of unessential knowledge and the making of indiscriminate things. Other ages have taken out their repressions in religious frenzies, but this age has taken everything out in motion. It is an elementary fact of sex knowledge that rhythmic motion is part of sex expression. Isn’t it ironical and immoral that those nations which have prided themselves most on their virtue, and have hugged tightest to themselves the puritanic ideal, are the ones that have gone maddest over motion? America, being the most virtuous, obviously has the least sense of humor and has exceeded herself. From the cradle to the turbine engine, from the rocking-chair to the spinnings and whirlings of a Coney Island, she has become a national mechanical perpetual whirling Dervish.
The wheels became rollers which have rolled life out thin and flat.
Then Art cried out with all her voices. In the last few years we have had a return to the beginnings of all the Arts. If there ever comes a time in the world when men will give their attention to the life of Art and understand its movement, they will find it alert and inevitable. Life would follow it trustingly if it were not for the intrusions and hindrances of men. The Thing had happened: Life had made its protest through Art. But this consciousness never reached the unendowed mind. It (the unendowed mind) forced Life to avenge itself by flying into war.
II
“I pray God,” said President Wilson, “that the outcome of this struggle may be that every element of difference amongst us will be obliterated—The spirit of this people is already united, and when suffering and sacrifice have completed this union, men will no longer speak of any lines either of race or association cutting athwart the great body of this nation.”
But the Anarchists, who are never agreeable or content in any country, no matter how perfect, arranged a non-conscription meeting in a hall in Bronx Park the night before registration. So “united was the spirit of this people” that no one attended this non-conscription meeting except the 5,000 who crowded the hall and the 50,000 who stood outside in the streets for several hours.
There were squads of the usual police and dozens of rough raw fellows in soldiers’ uniforms to hold back the crowd and keep it in order,—a crowd that scarcely moved and seldom spoke except in low tones or in foreign languages; a crowd too full for speech, because of this last numbing disappointment in America. The only demonstration it made was to applaud when an echo of the applause inside the hall reached it. Any attempt to get nearer the hall was met with clubs and the fists of soldiers in your face. Nasty little Fords with powerful search-lights raced up and down and about the hollow square. A huge auto truck hung with red lights acted as a mower at the edges. Word went about that it was mounted with a machine gun.
As I was pushed about in the crowd I overheard always the same conversations:
“Is she there”?
“Over there where the light is”?
“Yes, on the second floor.”
“Are there any people inside”?
“Oh it’s full since seven o’clock.”
“Oh!?”
“Will they let her speak?”
“Who? Her”?
Silence.
“Will they get her, do you think”?
“Will the police take her”?
A thin pale Russian Jew, standing on a rock looking over the heads of the crowd, was spoken to by a stranger. “They’ll get her tonight all right.” The Russian looked over to the lighted windows of the hall and said in revolutionary voice: “She’s a fine woman, Emma Goldman.”
Suddenly in the densest part of the crowd a woman’s voice rang out: “Down with conscription! Down with the war!” Several other women took it up. The police charged into the crowd. The crowd made a slight stand. The soldiers joined the police, and with raised clubs, teeth bared and snarling, they drove the crowd backward over itself, beating and pushing. Three times the crowd stood. Three times they were charged. Women were beaten down and run over. Men were clubbed in the face and escaped, staggering and bleeding.
How much of this treatment will it take to obliterate every element of individuality amongst us?
III
In the same week the plutocrats and artists held an Alley Festa for the Red Cross. At a cost of $10,000 they turned the stables of MacDougal Alley into a replica of an Italian street, draped it with much color, daubed it with much paint, hung it with many lights. I hope there were pluts there; the artists we saw were not artists. You can easily pick out the pluts: they look like figures from the wax-works; but the “artists” looked like Greenwich Village. It was a bastard performance, a bastard street, a bastard hilarity, bastard plutocrats and bastard artists, with bastard soldiers guarding the scene.
Between the acts they all congregated in the Brevoort to have drinks. The pluts foregathered,—women in up-town clothes, looking like Mrs. Potter Palmer, with grey marcelled hair and broad stiff black hats, holding the hands and looking neurotically into the eyes of young men who resembled bank clerks. Groups of artists came in, costumed like people fleeing from a fire. I believe they thought they were Neopolitans or something. They all settled clamourously at one table and fell amourously upon each other’s necks. There was nothing personal, nothing unique, nothing imaginative about any of their costumes. One woman sat in the embrasure of a man’s arm, sharing his chair with him. She had short hempy hair, she was dressed in street-gamin clothes, she was at least forty, and her cheek bones were on a line with her nostrils. No human head should be made that way; it’s intolerable except in fish, frogs, or snakes.
The greatest American dancer came in, followed by a little girl and a train of men—_bummel-zug dritte classe_. She had draped about her a green plush toga, thrown over her shoulder in a fat knot—not apple green, nor emerald green, nor sap green, but a green and texture sacred to railroads. The only other perfect example I have seen of that color and texture was on the great chairs in the station at Mons. She was too-young-looking—a type much admired in my childhood when China dolls lived, with painted China hair undulating above pink and white China faces. When she looked up in conversation her profile made almost a flat line, the chin retiring into the neck as if it had no opinions on the subject, the eyes rolling up but no expression of the face moving up with them. Oh beautiful people, oh beautiful fête!
The music and lights drew the children out of the slums back of Washington Square: fathers holding babies in their arms, and strings of little children trimming the edges of the sidewalks at a respectful distance around the back entrance, were pushed in the face and told to get out, to move on, by policemen and some more rough fellows in khaki—because ... this was a fête for humanity. And it’s all right, this game of push-face: every one plays it. When you’re little children you play it and call it push-face; nations call it government; the “people” are playing it now in Russia and call it revolution.
Improvisation
Louis Gilmore
Your hands are perfumes That haunt the yellow hangings Of a room.
Your hands are melodies That rise and fall In silver basins.
Your hands are silks That soothe the purple eyelids Of the sick.
Your hands are ghosts That trouble the blue shadows Of a garden.
Your hands are poppies For which my lips are hungry And athirst.
Poems
William Butler Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole
The trees are in their autumn beauty The woodland paths are dry Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine and fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count. I saw, before I had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings.
But now they drift on the still water Mysterious, beautiful; Among what rushes will they build; By what lake’s edge or pool Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day To find they have flown away?
I have looked upon these brilliant creatures And now my heart is sore. All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight The first time on this shore The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old, Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still.
October, 1916.
Presences
This night has been so strange that it seemed As if the hair stood up on my head. From going down of the sun I have dreamed That women laughing, or timid or wild, In rustle of lace or silken stuff, Climbed up my creaking stair. They had read All I have rhymed of that monstrous thing Returned and yet unrequited love. They stood in the door and stood between My great wood lectern and the fire Till I could hear their hearts beating: One is a harlot, and one a child That never looked upon man with desire, And one, it may be, a queen.
November, 1915.
Men Improve With the Years
I am worn out with dreams; A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams: And all day long I look Upon this lady’s beauty As though I had found in book A pictured beauty; Pleased to have filled the eyes Or the discerning ears, Delighted to be but wise: For men improve with the years. And yet and yet Is this my dream or the truth? O would that we had met When I had my burning youth; But I grow old among dreams, A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams.
July 19, 1916.
A Deep-Sworn Vow
Others, because you did not keep That deep sworn vow, have been friends of mine, Yet always when I look death in the face, When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, Suddenly I meet your face.
October 17, 1915.
The Collar-Bone of a Hare
Would I could cast a sail on the water, Where many a king has gone And many a king’s daughter, And alight at the comely trees and the lawn, The playing upon pipes and the dancing, And learn that the best thing is To change my loves while dancing And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
I would find by the edge of that water The collar-bone of a hare Worn thin by the lapping of water; And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare At the old bitter world where they marry in churches, And laugh, over the untroubled water, At all who marry in churches, Through the white thin bone of a hare.
July 5, 1915.
Broken Dreams
There is grey in your hair. Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath When you are passing; But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing Because it was your prayer Recovered him upon the bed of death, But for your sake—that all heart’s ache have known, And given to others all heart’s ache, From meagre girlhoods putting on Burdensome beauty—but for your sake Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom, So great her portion in that peace you make By merely walking in a room.
Your beauty can but leave among us Vague memories, nothing but memories. A young man when the old men are done talking Will say to an old man “tell me of that lady The poet stubborn with his passion sang us When age might well have chilled his blood.”
Vague memories, nothing but memories, But in the grave all all shall be renewed. The certainty that I shall see that lady Leaning or standing or walking, In the first loveliness of womanhood And with the fervour of my youthful eyes, Has set me muttering like a fool. You were more beautiful than any one And yet your body had a flaw: Your small hands were not beautiful. I am afraid that you will run And paddle to the wrist In that mysterious, always brimming lake Where those that have obeyed the holy law Paddle and are perfect: leave unchanged The hands that I have kissed For old sake’s sake.
The last stroke of midnight dies All day in the one chair From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged In rambling talk with an image of air: Vague memories, nothing but memories.
November, 1915.
In Memory
Five and twenty years have gone Since old William Pollexfen Laid his strong bones in death By his wife Elizabeth In the grey stone tomb he made; And after twenty years they laid In that tomb, by him and her, His son George the astrologer And masons drove from miles away To scatter the acacia spray Upon a melancholy man Who had ended where his breath began.
Many a son and daughter lies Far from the customary skies, The Mall, and Eadés Grammar School, In London or in Liverpool, But where is laid the sailor John That so many lands had known, Quiet lands or unquiet seas Where the Indians trade or Japanese; He never found his rest ashore Moping for one voyage more: Where have they laid the sailor John?
And yesterday the youngest son, A humorous unambitious man, Was buried near the astrologer; And are we now in the tenth year? Since he who had been contented long, A nobody in a great throng, Decided he would journey home, Now that his fiftieth year had come, And “Mr. Alfred” be again Upon the lips of common men Who carried in their memory His childhood and his family.
At all these deathbeds women heard A visionary white sea bird Lamenting that a man should die, And with that cry I have raised my cry.
An Anachronism at Chinon
Ezra Pound
Behind them rose the hill with its grey octagonal castle, to the west a street with good houses, gardens occasionally enclosed and well to do, before them the slightly crooked lane, old worm-eaten fronts low and uneven, booths with their glass front-frames open, slid aside or hung back, the flaccid bottle-green of the panes reflecting odd lights from the provender and cheap crockery; a few peasant women with baskets of eggs and of fowls, while just before them an old peasant with one hen in his basket alternately stroked its head and then smacked it to make it go down under the strings.
The couple leaned upon one of the tin tables in the moderately clear space by the inn, the elder, grey, with thick hair, square of forehead, square bearded, yet with a face showing curiously long and oval in spite of this quadrature; in the eyes a sort of friendly, companionable melancholy, now intent, now with a certain blankness, like that of a child cruelly interrupted, or of an old man, surprised and self-conscious in some act too young for his years, the head from the neck to the crown in almost brutal contrast with the girth and great belly: the head of Don Quixote, and the corpus of Sancho Panza, animality mounting into the lines of the throat and lending energy to the intellect.
His companion obviously an American student.
Student: I came here in hopes of this meeting yet, since you are here at all, you must have changed many opinions.
The Elder: Some. Which do you mean?
Student: Since you are here, personal and persisting?
Rabelais: All that I believed or believe you will find in _De Senectute_: “... that being so active, so swift in thought; that treasures up in memory such multitudes and varieties of things past, and comes likewise upon new things ... can be of no mortal nature.”
Student: And yet I do not quite understand. Your outline is not always distinct. Your voice however is deep, clear and not squeaky.
Rabelais: I was more interested in words than in my exterior aspect, I am therefore vocal rather than spatial.
Student: I came here in hopes of this meeting, yet I confess I can scarcely read you. I admire and close the book, as not infrequently happens with “classics.”
Rabelais: I am the last person to censure you, and your admiration is perhaps due to a fault in your taste. I should have paid more heed to DeBellay, young Joachim.
Student: You do not find him a prig?
Rabelais: I find no man a prig who takes serious thought for the language.
Student: And your own? Even Voltaire called it an amassment of ordure.
Rabelais: And later changed his opinion.
Student: Others have blamed your age, saying you had to half-bury your wisdom in filth to make it acceptable.
Rabelais: And you would put this blame on my age? And take the full blame for your writing?
Student: My writing?
Rabelais: Yes, a quatrain, without which I should scarcely have come here.
Sweet C.... in h... spew up some....
(pardon me for intruding my own name at this point, but even Dante has done the like, with a remark that he found it unfitting)—to proceed then:
......some Rabelais
To ..... and ..... and to define today In fitting fashion, and her monument Heap up to her in fadeless ex .....
Student: My license in those lines is exceptional.
Rabelais: And you have written on journalists, or rather an imaginary plaint of the journalists: Where s......, s.... and p..... on jews conspire, and editorial maggots .... about, we gather .... smeared bread, or drive a snout still deeper in the swim-brown of the mire.
Where s....., s..... and p..... on jews conspire, And editorial maggots .... about, We gather .... -smeared bread, or drive a snout Still deeper in the swim-brown of the mire. O .... O ..... O b...... b...... b.... O c..., ........ O .... O ......’s attire Smeared with ...........................
Really I can not continue, no printer would pass it.
Student: Quite out of my usual ......
Rabelais: There is still another on publishers, or rather on _la vie litteraire_, a sestina almost wholly in asterisks, and a short strophe on the American president.
Student: Can you blame ...
Rabelais: I am scarcely ....... eh.....
Student: Beside, these are but a few scattered outbursts, you kept up your flow through whole volumes.
Rabelais: You have spent six years in your college and university, and a few more in struggles with editors; I had had thirty years in that sink of a cloister, is it likely that your disgusts would need such voluminous purging? Consider, when I was nine years of age they put me in that louse-breeding abomination. I was forty before I broke loose.
Student: Why at that particular moment?
Rabelais: They had taken away my books. Brother Amy got hold of a Virgil. We opened it, _sortes_, the first line:
_Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge litus avarum_
We read that line and departed. You may thank God your age is different. You may thank God your life has been different. Thirty years mewed up with monks! After that can you blame me my style? Have you any accurate gauge of stupidities?
Student: I have, as you admit, passed some years in my university. I have seen some opposition to learning.
Rabelais: No one in your day has sworn to annihilate the cult of greek letters; they have not separated you from your books; they have not rung bells expressly to keep you from reading.
Student: Bells! later. There is a pasty-faced vicar in Kensington who had his dam’d bells rung over my head for four consecutive winters, L’Ile Sonnante transferred to the middle of London! They have tried to smother the good ones with bad ones. Books I mean, God knows the chime was a musicless abomination. They have smothered good books with bad ones.
Rabelais: This will never fool a true poet; for the rest, it does not matter whether they drone masses or lectures. They observe their fasts with the intellect. Have they actually sequestered your books?
Student: No. But I have a friend, of your order, a monk. They took away his book for two years. I admit they set him to hearing confessions; to going about in the world. It may have broadened his outlook, or benefited his eyesight. I do not think it wholly irrational, though it must have been extremely annoying.
Rabelais: Where was it?
Student: In Spain.
Rabelais: You are driven south of the Pyrenees to find your confuting example. Would you find the like in this country?
Student: I doubt it. The Orders are banished.
Rabelais: Or in your own?
Student: Never.
Rabelais: And you were enraged with your university?
Student: I thought some of the customs quite stupid.
Rabelais: Can you conceive a life so infernally and abysmally stupid that the air of an university was wine and excitement beside it?