Ardis, The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age 07

Ardis / the dialogics of modernism(s) in the new age

407

Ann L. Ardis is

Professor of English and

Associate dean of Arts

and Humanities at the

University of delaware.

she is author of New

Women, New Novels:

Feminism and Early Mod-

ernism (rutgers 1990)

and Modernism and

Cultural Conflict, 1880-

1922 (Cambridge 2002).

she is also co-editor of

Women’s Experience of

Modernity, 1875–1945

(Johns Hopkins 2002)

and Virginia Woolf Turning

the Centuries: Selected

Papers from the Ninth

annual Conference of

Virginia Woolf (Pace

2000).

The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age

Ann L. Ardis

Was it right, I have been asked, for THE NEW AGE to allow “T. K. L.” to “mimick” Mr. Pound’s articles on Parisian writers while these were still being published? My own answer is, Yes, and with more reasons than I can set down. Nobody, I suppose, thinks it odd that Mr. [Hilaire] Belloc should write in THE NEW AGE in criticism of the National Guilds System; and nobody will think it odd if the editorial exponents of that system reply either currently or at the conclusion of the series. Why, then, should it be thought strange to publish Mr. Pound’s articles and subject them to criticism while they are still before our readers? . . . It will be found, if we all live long enough, that every part of THE NEW AGE hangs together; and that the literature we despise is as-sociated with the economics we hate as the literature we love is associated with the form of society we would as-sist in creating. Mr. Pound—I say it with all respect—is the enemy of THE NEW AGE.

R. H. C., “Readers and Writers,” the New Age, November 1913 1

Although the New Age under A. R. Orage’s editorship (1907–1922) has always been recognized as an important platform for modernist literature and art, scholars are currently taking more careful note of this British journal’s very deliberate self-position-ing in a public sphere that was, even by 1907, segmenting into multiple, and complexly interrelated, counterpublics. Funded by George Bernard Shaw and Lewis Wallace when Orage and Holbrook Jackson first took it over in 1907, the New Age quickly outgrew its Fabian Art League support and went on to promote

modernism / modernity

volume fourteen, number

three, pp 407–434.

© 2007 the johns hopkins

university press

M O d E r N i s M / m o d e r n i t y

408 National Guild Socialism in the early 1910s, “a democratic alternative to the authori-tarian tendencies” of collectivism that also distinguished itself from other socialisms in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century through its emphasis on the role that the arts play in any truly revolutionary agenda for social change.2 As first an “Independent Socialist Review of Politics, Literature, and Art” and then a “Weekly Review of Politics, Literature, and Art,” the New Age distinguished itself from other political weeklies by covering literature and the arts as well as politics. But it also distinguished itself from both mainstream literary reviews and non-commercial little magazines such as Blast and the Egoist, with whom it shared numerous contributors, by devoting roughly half of any given issue (and the first half, at that) to political commentary. As a “political weekly that performed some functions traditionally associated with the literary review,” it published a multiplicity of works by writers such as T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, F. T. Marinetti, and Ezra Pound.3 Yet it published these writers side by side with ar-ticles challenging their work: visual and verbal parodies of modernist texts, artists, and manifestos; columns by the editor and other regular contributors questioning specific aesthetic precepts; and letters to the editor that continued debate about such concerns from one issue to the next.

Because of its interest in staging open-ended exchanges about the social and aes-thetic values of “modern” writing4—and its justification of this practice in terms of its commitment to staging similarly open-ended political debate, as Orage does in the November 1913 editorial excerpted above in the epigraph—the New Age offers a very different window onto the early-twentieth-century Anglo-American cultural scene than that afforded by the little magazines whose role in the production and dissemination of modernism was featured in the first several generations of bibliographic scholarship on modernism post-World War II, and is currently the focus of some very exciting new research in modern periodical studies.5 Moreover, it offers a more richly heteroge-neous record of early twentieth-century cultural debates about the arts than current scholarship on the pluralization of modernism is able to index.6 This essay focuses on two series of articles published in the fall of 1913 by Ezra Pound and Beatrice Hast-ings (Emily Alice Haigh) that exemplify the New Age’s willingness to both showcase and challenge avant-garde aesthetics during the pre-World War I heyday of “blasting and bombadiering.”7

Hastings was Orage’s lover and the self-described shadow co-editor of the journal between 1907 and 1914. After a brief affair with Wyndham Lewis just before the outbreak of World War I, she left both London and Orage for Paris (and Amedeo Modigliani), where she assumed a new role for the journal as its Paris correspondent, writing for it weekly, for several more years, under the pseudonym of “Alice Morning,” the last of thirteen known aliases she employed as a New Age contributor.8 Although Orage himself is typically given full credit for “discovering” any number of soon-to-be-influential modernists, Hastings claims in her 1936 memoir that every creative writer “without exception” “who got a ‘start’ between summer, 1908, and May, 1914” in the New Age “owes that start to me and to no-one else.” Orage, she also claims, dealt exclusively with manuscripts by “old hands and experts whose quality called for


409no judgement.” Furthermore, he “used poems for filling corners, and made few cor-ners” for such work—while she herself “had entire charge of, and responsibility for, the literary direction of the paper, from reading and selection of MSS to the last detail of spacing and position.”9 Because the New Age archives were lost when its editorial offices were bombed during World War II, we cannot know whether Hastings’ account of her control of the journal’s “literary direction” is entirely trustworthy.10 It is undoubt-edly the case, though, as I hope to show here through discussion of her publications in response to Ezra Pound under the pseudonyms “T. K. L.” and “Alice Morning,” that she played a key role in the critiques of the modernist avant-garde that the New Age staged during the pre-war period.

The New Age under Orage’s editorship prided itself on providing “some neutral ground where intelligences may meet on equal terms” in public debate about politics, literature, and the arts.11 Indeed, it claimed a unique and privileged position within the periodical industry on the basis of this commitment to what we might now term Bakhtinian dialogics in the public sphere.12 And it was harshly critical of specialized and mono-vocal periodicals for failing to live up to its own high standards in this regard.13 In the fall of 1913, however, the New Age’s own readers actually questioned the ap-propriateness of the journal’s willingness to publish criticisms of Pound’s work while featuring it, prompting the editor to defend the journal’s policies in the November 1913 editorial that appears as the epigraph to this essay. These exchanges are a fascinating reminder of how sharply critical the New Age could be of the modernist avant-garde, especially when the latter was perceived to be excluding this magazine’s readership—an audience that was predominantly not Oxbridge-educated or socially elite—from full participation in broad discussions of contemporary literature, art, and aesthetics.

As Michael North has pointed out, we risk preserving modernism “in intellectual amber,” retrospectively accomplishing “by critical consensus” modernism’s “insula-tion from the cultural world into which it was introduced,” unless we acknowledge its original simultaneity with other aesthetic practices, its first emergence as just that: an emergent rather than a dominant aesthetic mode or movement.14 Two other key points of critical reference for this discussion are George Bornstein’s argument in Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page about how recovering the original bibliographic and contextual codes of modernist texts can alter interpretations of these works and Mark Morrisson’s claims in The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audi-ences, and Reception 1905–1920 about early British modernists’ interest in renewing or engaging the public sphere in the early 1910s.15 Guided by these and other recent contributions to the scholarship on Anglo-American modernism’s early material history, I want to return to the fall of 1913, when Pound was a regular contributor to the New Age—and was regularly being pummeled by readers, other frequent contributors, and the journal’s editorial staff for what would now be viewed as his classic modernist views on contemporary French poetry.

This essay has three parts. The first section provides an overview of Pound’s pub-lications in the New Age between his first appearance in the journal in 1910 and the publication of the seven-part “Approach to Paris” series, which appeared between 4


410 September and 16 October 1913. The second focuses on the responses to Pound’s work that Hastings published as “T. K. L.” while his “Approach to Paris” series was still being published. Their critical duet—not quite not a conversation, yet one in which Pound ignores the existence of his interlocutor until long after both sets of articles had run their course—culminates a year and a half later in a flurry of letters to the editor in January 1915 in which New Age readers fall in line behind Hastings, writing now as “Alice Morning,” in questioning Pound’s valorization of difficulty. The final section looks at Pound’s letters to the editor in response to these challenges, charting how his early praise for the journal’s commitment to the staging of “critical heterogeneity in public discourse” shifts into a more condescending register toward readers who have failed to understand him; that is, failed to join him in the appreciation of the literature he promotes as the aesthetic of modernity (PFM, 13).

I. Ezra Pound in the New Age, 1910–1913

“Approach to Paris” is the fifth set of essays Pound published in the New Age follow-ing his first appearance in the journal in April 1910.16 In 1913 Pound was 28. Having arrived in London in 1908 with little more in his possession than copies of his first volume of verse, A Lume Spento, which had been “privately printed by an obscure Venetian publisher,” Pound launched what T. S. Eliot would later refer to as his “siege” of the London literary world with a whirlwind of energy, quickly gaining the sponsor-ship of William Butler Yeats, Elkin Mathews, and Ford Madox Hueffer.17 During this phase of his career, Yeats’s famous Monday evenings, Hueffer and Violet Hunt’s salon, the Thursday meetings of the Poets’ Club, and venues such as the G. K. Chesterton’s Square Club, T. E. Hulme’s Secession Club, the British Museum reading room, and the A. B. C. teashop across the street from the New Age’s Cursitor Street offices enabled Pound to move fluidly between the literary establishment and various avant-garde circles in bohemian London.18 In the fall of 1913, he had not yet been introduced to T. S. Eliot by Conrad Aiken. Nor had he yet married Dorothy Shakespear—though his prospective mother-in-law, as Lawrence Rainey has noted, had informed him almost a year earlier of the minimum income it would take for him to support her daughter.19 Moreover, he had not yet cut his ties either with establishment periodicals such as the Times Literary Supplement and the Quarterly Review or with “mainstream critics like Edmund Gosse” and the “poets with respectable credentials” he had cultivated so carefully upon first arrival in London.20 The latter would happen six months later, with the launching of the first issue of Blast.21

I am interested here in both assessing Pound’s attraction to the New Age as a venue of publication during this early phase of his career and documenting key changes in his mode of address to its readership between 1910 and the fall of 1913. The English Review under Hueffer’s editorship provided Pound with his first important avant-garde venue of publication in London when it published “Sestina: Altaforte” in June 1909 and “Three Poems” (“Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” “Nils Lykke,” and “Un Retrato”) in


411October of that same year.22 Five canzoni also appeared there shortly after Austin Har-rison replaced Heuffer as editor, three in January 1910 and two in April.23 By the fall of 1913, however, the English Review under Harrison’s editorship had defaulted—quite successfully, as Mark Morrisson has noted—to featuring only “established” Edward-ian writers, and the New Age had taken its place as the paper “which everybody who was anybody” was reading if they were interested in contemporary politics, literature, and the arts.24

In 1913 Pound was also, of course, publishing in quite a range of other periodicals: mainstream British literary reviews, upstart little magazines on both sides of the At-lantic, “smart” American magazines featuring high- and lowbrow material in tandem, and British working-class papers reaching entirely different audiences than either of these other venues. The Fortnightly Review, for example, featured Pound’s review of The Poems of Rabindranath Tagore in March 1913; the Quarterly Review printed a lengthy article on troubadour poetry in October. Poetry published “Imagisme,” “In a Station in a Metro,” and a dozen other poems of Pound’s in March and April; the New Freewoman published “The Serious Artist” while the “Approach to Paris” series was running in the New Age. The Smart Set published “Portrait D’Une Femme” in November, just after “Approach to Paris” appeared in the New Age; T. P.’s Weekly had published “How I Began—By Ezra Pound, Poet and Critic: Author of ‘Personae’” in June.25 Arguably, though, the sheer number of Pound’s contributions to the New Age, the size of its readership in comparison with that of the little magazines featuring his work, together with the “buzz” surrounding Orage and the New Age circle in the early 1910s make this magazine Pound’s premiere venue of publication at this point in his career. It is important, in this regard, to consider carefully how he positions himself in relation to its distinctively heterogeneous readership.

Pound’s first major publications in the New Age, in 1911–12, were a set of essays entitled “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” that introduced New Age readers to the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer” and the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel. Preceded only by a brief head note from the editor noting that “under this heading Mr. Pound will contribute expositions and translations in illustration of the ‘New Method in Scholarship,’” Pound launches his exposition of critical methodology with the bar-est minimum of drum rolls.26 Re-casting arguments published first in The Spirit of Romance (1910), Pound rehearses for this audience the earlier volume’s arguments about the advantages to be gained through broader dissemination of scholarly research as he explains why the “new” method of literary scholarship, which depends upon the presentation of “Luminous Detail,” is preferable to both “the method of yesterday,” with its focus on “sentiment and generalization,” and the preferred scholarly mode of the present day, which Pound characterizes as a focus on “multitudinous detail.”27

While the editor’s introduction of Pound to the New Age’s readership is markedly minimalist, Pound himself is solicitous of his audience in this (to him) new venue of pub-lication. His exposition of critical methodology is patient and careful, semi-apologetic even for its learnedness, as he establishes the importance of the troubadour traditions through which he charts the progress of poetry—and therefore of culture. “I Gather


412 the Limbs of Osiris” is remarkably free of the sense of disdain for the uneducated or miseducated general public that so often colors his later writings, and his translations of every line of verse quoted in its original language suggest a willingness to work with these readers, not frustration with the limits of their knowledge base. “[I]t is certain,” he writes on 7 December 1911, “that we have had no ‘greatest poet’ and no ‘great period’ save at, or after, a time when many people were busy examining the media and the traditions of [poetry]” (OII, 13). His introduction to this series functions as an overture to New Age readers to count themselves among such a multitude.

Pound’s next publications for the New Age are three sets of essays on the state of the arts, of criticism about the arts, and the relationship of both to institutions of higher edu-cation and the periodical press in America: “Patria Mia” (September-November, 1912; eleven installments); “Through Alien Eyes” (January-February, 1913, four installments); and “America: Chances & Remedies” (May-June, 1913, six installments).28 Speaking from the vantage point of an American who has left the provincial hinterlands behind once and for all, Pound offers an assessment of the current American literary, cultural, and political scene that explains his reasons for choosing to live in London, while also hinting at his motivations as a contributor to the New Age in particular. Pound’s argu-ment in these essays is broadly expansive. Undoubtedly, his attention to the relationship between intellectual development in the arts and the traffic in ideas in the political and economic sphere would have appealed to readers of the New Age who were following the magazine’s coverage of the political arguments between Independent Labour Party parliamentarians, trade union activists, Fabians, and National Guild Socialists about the adequacy of various collectivist solutions to the “problem of wage labor.” Indeed, Pound’s refusal to treat the arts as a separate sphere, distinct from and unrelated to the realm of politics and industry, both anticipates and echoes the arguments of A. J. Penty and other frequent New Age Guild Socialist contributors in the early 1910s about how a revival of the arts is a “necessary factor in social salvation.”29 The focus of Pound’s own arguments is the American risorgimento that might have been expected to accompany the economic and political birth of the new nation—but which he notes has yet to take place. And Pound offers three reasons for this. First, even though the arts “are a nation’s foreign office” and serve as a key means by which “nations gain for each other . . . understanding and intimate respect,” American arts to date have been either too parochial or too derivative of European models to serve this crucial civic purpose effectively.30 Second, while much of the periodical press caters to the public’s demand for lowbrow entertainments, the so-called “‘better magazines’” have failed to support “living art,” art that does something other than comply with formulae.31 And third, the American system of higher education contributes substantially to the public sphere’s failures to function effectively as an inclusive imagined community: having adopted the Germanic model of scholarship, institutions of higher education are failing to engage the public at large in the excitement of aesthetic as well as scientific discov-eries, Pound argues. America would be far better off, he goes on to suggest, if it were to reorganize the system of higher education on the model of the American Academy in Rome so as to provide working artists with financial stipends and an opportunity


413to interact with academic researchers. That, plus the dissemination of Ph.D.-level research through the periodical press would, Pound claims, create a scenario in which universities, practicing artists, and the periodical press would be “linked together for some sort of mutual benefit and stimulus” and a “common-sense view of the arts, as something normal, refreshing, sustaining” would again be possible.32

A “common-sense view of the arts,” a view of the arts “as something normal, re-freshing, sustaining”: this element of Pound’s argument, even its phrasing, would have resonated strongly with New Age readers, who would have heard very similar argu-ments about the value of “brilliant common sense” and the role of the arts in a truly revolutionary socialism in articles by Orage himself as well as from regular contributors such as Penty, Ramiro de Maetzu, and Ivor Brown. As Penty claims, for example, in a series of articles on “The Restoration of the Guild System” that ran simultaneously with Pound’s “Approach to Paris” series, art should not allow itself to be “thrust out of society by the ever-increasing pressure of commercial conditions of existence.”33 Be-cause beauty is the entitlement of “all and each” (“RGS,” 545), art should be a “great socializer for a common and kindred life” (ibid.), not an index of what we would now term cultural capital. Art is, moreover, “one of the great forces of social reconstruction destined to roll back the wave of commercialism” (ibid., 546)—which is why the New Age is so impatient during the pre-war years with socialists who focus exclusively on the “economic emancipation of the workers” and fail to address “the canons that govern the writing of books, the painting of pictures, the preaching of sermons, and even the fabric of religion,” as Orage complains in “Journals Insurgent,” a key statement of his editorial policies.34

Michael Coyle has explained Pound’s “organic” conceptualization of culture, his debt to Victorian sages such as John Ruskin in this regard, and the role that the New Age played for him in both imagining and staging a public sphere undivided into “po-litical” and “literary” arenas.35 What interests me here is Pound’s turn toward a more distinctively and narrowly literary mode of address in his next set of publications for the New Age, the 1913 “Approach to Paris” series. In sharp contrast to his solicitousness toward a general readership in his earliest contributions to the journal, this series in the fall of 1913 strikes the high note of “isolated superiority” that will eventually separate Pound, the “loathed disturber,” from T. S. Eliot, the editor and movement-maker of modernism after World War I, as Michael Levenson has argued.36 Although none of the essays in this series was in fact selected by Eliot for republication in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, they are nonetheless replete with the Poundian touchstones of high modernist aesthetics featured in Eliot’s “carefully constructed” and powerfully influential “retrospective” of Pound’s contribution to literary modernism.37

The “brains of to-morrow’s Paris,” Pound announces admiringly in the first install-ment, are holding “a council of war” against “general stupidity”—something missing as yet on the London literary scene, it seems, for praise of contemporary French poetry is offered hand in hand with sharp criticisms of London in this new series.38 London is “just an easy-chair, the most comfortable place in the world.” Dominated by “older and unattainable writers” like Henry James and W. H. Hudson, it is also home to “at


414 least one notable poet, and perhaps a dizaine [sic] of men who have written delightful poems, and, perhaps, a half-dozen young men who want really to come at good writ-ing” (“API,” 552). Throughout this series, Pound’s self-presentation is as a “serious artist” not a layman reading for his private diversion.”39 Scientific metaphors are rife, deployed as a means of reinforcing the importance of both the poet’s and the literary critic’s enterprises.40 In line with views expressed in his earlier essays on America, Pound complains here about the current state of higher education and its relationship to print journalism and the book trade: “I set out these platitudes,” he writes in “Ap-proach to Paris II,” “because very few people can be persuaded to think of the art of poetic rhythm as an art, and even when some intelligent critic has thought upon these matters seriously he is so apt to be followed by a horde of Boileaus, professors, teach-ers, jackals and ‘yanqui editors of chaste magazines,’ that the effect of his intelligence is almost nullified.”41 Such complaints are yoked with concern for poetry’s marginality in the modern world as well as for the public’s indifference to the arts more generally, even though they are vital, Pound claims, to the development of the human race.

And all of these now familiar Poundian sound bites are built around lots and lots of long, un-translated passages of contemporary French poetry. An exemplary case in point would be the presentation of Remy de Gourmont’s “Le Livres des Litanies” in “Approach to Paris II.” The first passage Pound presents consumes almost an entire column of print on a New Age page, and it is quickly followed by three almost equally lengthy quotations from “Fleurs du Jadis” and “Les Saintes du Paradis.”42 Equally noteworthy in the current context is that the commentary suturing these quotations together, though just barely, actually constitutes a very deliberate refusal to provide detailed analysis of this poetry, even though Pound is deploying these quotations in the service of an argument about the need for careful attention to Luminous Details. Pound began “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” with a request that his readers “bear with [him] a little” and the reassurance that he would be writing “of things which we all know and upon which we for the most part agree” (“OII,” 130). By contrast, “Approach to Paris II” plunges the reader into specific poetic examples without either providing any background information about de Gourmont or explaining why his poetry should be of interest to New Age readers. Moreover, there is no sustained critical exegesis here. After quoting thirty-seven noncontiguous lines from “Le Livre,” for example, Pound breaks off rather summarily: “And so it runs with ever more sweeping cadence with ever more delicate accords, and if you are not too drunk with the sheer naming over of beauty you will wake at the end of the reading and know that the procession of all women that ever were has passed before you” (“AII,” 578). Anticipating the reader’s failure to agree with this last point, he then proffers the following remarks:

I dare say these fragments are unconvincing, but I cannot quote the whole poem in this notice. Neither can I, for the benefit of those deaf to accords, go over the strophes quoted and point out every resolution of sound and every repetition subtler than rhyme. If a man is incapable of hearing this litany I cannot help it. If he is incapable of discerning any melody of words less delicate than that which is marked off by the emphasising of such obvious similarities as cat and bat, again I cannot help it.


415The world is still encumbered by ‘musical’ people who cannot receive the music of De-bussy. [ibid.]

For a critic intent on introducing a “new method of literary scholarship” to a reader-ship as heterogenous as the New Age’s, this is a curiously hostile rhetorical stance to assume. As Gail McDonald notes, Pound was intensely engaged by issues of education throughout his career, starting with his early critiques of American higher education and ending, painfully, in his “salon” at St. Elizabeths.43 Yet he is strikingly disdainful of the teaching moment offered by this series of articles in the New Age about contem-porary French poetry. He thrusts long passages of French poetry under his New Age readers’ noses, then announces he cannot teach them to appreciate the music of these lines. He refuses to proceed with the patience required for close textual analysis: “[I cannot] for the benefit of those deaf to accords, go over the strophes quoted and point out every resolution of sound and every repetition subtler than rhyme.” Failing even to address the issue of why he has chosen not to translate any of this verse, he implies in fact that appreciation of poetry’s music is unteachable. It is an innate skill rather than a learned behavior: “If a man is incapable of hearing this litany I cannot help it. If he is incapable of discerning any melody of words less delicate than that which is marked off by the emphasising of such obvious similarities as cat and bat, again I cannot help it” (“AII,” 578).

The abrasiveness of these remarks is palpable. In his 1942 Rome broadcasts for the BBC, Pound describes having come to London in 1908 in order to reach the “educable minority in the United States” still held in sway by London literary culture.44 As noted earlier, in the fall of 1913 the tough-guy braggadocio of Blast lies just over the horizon, still six months ahead in Pound’s future. The “thorough contempt for the mob” that he will voice in registering his antipathy to both Poetry and Seven Art’s efforts to create great audiences for great art lies still further off in the future (1917).45 Yet an element of hostility toward the New Age’s common reader is creeping into the “Approach to Paris” series. The sense of solicitousness toward a general readership that marked his earliest writings for this magazine has been replaced by a note of defiance. Since Pound “cannot help” anyone incapable of hearing the litany of de Gourmont’s poetry, it would seem that the mere presentation of Luminous Details is to suffice at this point in Pound’s campaign on behalf of what he will retrospectively term “the movement, . . . our modern experiment, since 1900.”46

II. “T. K. L.” and “Alice Morning” Talk Back

Or not, as the case may be. For, starting with the third installment of Pound’s seven-part series, a series of articles by “T.K.L,” the first of two pseudonyms Beatrice Hastings deployed in responding to modernist writings in the New Age, are featured in tandem with Pound’s “Approach to Paris” essays. Unlike Pound’s essays, these articles do not advertise their sequential development through their titles. Nor do they foreground their contrapuntal relationship to Pound’s series—though this is obviously the case to


416 any reader, even though Hastings never once mentions Pound’s name. Occasionally, Hastings’s essays follow Pound’s in a given issue. Sometimes, though, they actually appear before Pound’s essay, providing a response to his contribution to the previous week’s issue even before the reader encounters the current installment. Not only do these essays evidence the rocky reception Pound’s ideas sometimes received in the New Age, they are also what I have come to think of as vintage Hastings: astute in their substantive engagement with the issues of poetic technique and tradition with which Pound is wrestling; cheekily irreverent; Monty Python British by contrast with the rather ponderous American earnestness Pound assumes in presenting himself as a “serious artist” in the “Approach to Paris” series; and sharply critical of Pound’s modernist precepts.47

Consider, for example, the way Hastings “talks back” to Pound in the opening paragraph of “The Way Back to America,” the first installment in her series, which she introduces with the following tongue-in-cheek reference to a classroom setting:48

Attendez, mes enfants! I am about to waste ten minutes in exposition of the so-called English poets. What I have to say is brief, pardieu! They were all French! Who is that interrupting? Ha—you wish to infer that Chaucer wrote no poetry until he forgot he had once been in France? Well, you may infer what you please, I suppose. What? The “Canterbury Tales”? I smile explosively—all pure French, my dear sir! Now sit down and let me talk.49

In their introduction to the digital edition of the New Age, Robert Scholes and the staff of the Modernist Journals Project note how Orage “encouraged various versions of modernism to engage one another in a version of Socratic dialectic—but a dialectic without the authoritative figure of Plato’s Socrates to utter the last word (last words not being good for a weekly magazine that wants readers to buy the next issue.”50 As the opening salvo from Hastings’ series might suggest, however, the dialectic orchestrated by the New Age is not limited simply to a multiplicity of modernisms. It is more expansive still, encompassing not only “various versions” of modernism but also outright attacks on modernist aesthetics and expositions of explicitly nonmodernist agendas for the arts. Moreover, insofar as the journal refuses to grant any single contributor the status of a Socrates, the exchanges it facilitates are more aptly characterized as Bakhtinian dialogics than Platonic dialogues.

Hastings is a key figure in this regard. If she did indeed, as she claims in her autobi-ography, play midwife to modernism through her behind-the-scenes role as a New Age acquisitions editor, she also played a second and very different role in the pages of the journal through her publications under the pseudonyms “T. K. L.” and “Alice Morn-ing.” In this sense, the New Age’s dialogics are doubly compounded: by the critiques of modernism featured side by side with contributions promoting various versions of modernism; and by the play of signed, anonymous, and pseudonymous contributions The New Age also orchestrated. Hastings is by no means the only contributor to have practiced authorial ventriloquism in the New Age through her anonymous, pseudony-mous, and signed contributions. Orage himself, for example, wrote extensively as “R.


417H. C.,” Arnold Bennett wrote both under his own name and as “Jacob Tonson,” and Pound published in this periodical not only under his own signature but also as B. H. Dias and William Atheling. What is unusual, however, is the number of pseudonyms Hastings deployed. The triptych cartoon of her by “Tom. T” [Jan de Junosza Roscisze-wski] in the 1 May 1913 art supplement nicely evokes a sense of this multiplicity even while underrepresenting it (fig. 1).51

Hastings’s exchanges with Pound in the fall of 1913 require contemporary scholars and students of modernism to dismantle Pound’s now magisterial author function and appreciate the full complexity of both writers’ discursive performances in the New Age. Acknowledging that Pound was an emergent rather than an established literary or cultural authority in this context; recognizing too that some of this magazine’s readers would have known the identity of “T. K. L.” while others would not have known to link this contributor with Beatrice Hastings (or “Alice Morning,” or “Beatrice Tina, or any of the other personae Hastings employed), we have to think differently about which of the two is the insider in the New Age circle at this point in time. After all, although Pound’s literary star was certainly on the rise in London and the U.S. in 1913, Hastings was living with the editor when the New Age published these articles.52 More importantly still for my purposes here, we have to think more carefully about what was at stake in the New Age’s outreach to a newly literate working-class and lower-middle-class British populace in order to understand Hastings’s objections to Pound’s increasingly intem-perate stance toward his New Age readers, which she begins to articulate in her very first response to the “Approach to Paris” series through her pseudoacademic address in that opening salvo—a note of mockery toward Pound’s stance as a “serious” critic that will be echoed in Tom T.’s October 1913 cartoon of Pound as a dandy (fig. 2). Before analyzing Hastings’s counterseries in any detail, it will be useful to review the journal’s circulation figures, history, readership, and self-positioning in the public sphere.

In August of 1913, the New Age’s weekly circulation was around 4,500: that is, down from its all-time high water mark at 22,000 in 1908, but nonetheless substantially larger than the circulation of the little magazines with whom the history of modernism has been most closely associated, while at the same time substantially smaller than the circula-tion of mainstream British quarterlies like the Fortnightly Review, “smart” American magazines like the Smart Set, or working-class British periodicals like T. P.’s Weekly.53 Initially priced at one penny an issue (in keeping with other political weeklies, such as the Clarion), its cost per issue was raised to 3p in 1909, where it would stay until November 1913, when it was raised again, to 6p, at which point its circulation dropped again, to 3,500 (NAO, 122). As Scholes et al. emphasize in their introduction to the digital edition, the New Age was “not Bloomsbury, nor was it a creature of the great traditional universities and public schools. Most of the men and women who made it what it was, if they had been to college or university, had studied at the University of London, at the provincial universities, or, like Orage himself, at teacher-training col-leges” (“INA,” 15). Although it was read by the leading literary and political figures of the day, its rank-and-file readers were the socialist autodidacts and left-leaning gradu-ates of Mechanics’ Institutes, working men’s colleges, teacher’s colleges, and extension


418

Fig. 1. Beatrice Hastings. Triptych cartoon

by “Tom T” [Jan de Junosza rosciszewski]

in the 1 May 1913 art supplement of The

New Age. Courtesy of robert scholes. ▲

Fig. 2. Ezra Pound. Cartoon of Pound as a

dandy by “Tom T,” The New Age, October

1913. Courtesy of robert scholes.

▲


419lecturing circuits that Orage set out to uplift socially when he and Holbrook Jackson first founded the Fabian Arts Group in 1906 and then bought, in 1907, a thirteen-year-old Christian Socialist journal called New Age and retooled it as a magazine that would appeal to “a generation rising that finds Tit-Bits useless and T. P.’s [Weekly] unsatisfactory.”54 Even though it dropped the word “socialist” from its masthead by the start of Volume 2 in 1907, the new New Age did not relinquish its self-identifica-tion with a socialist “periodical community” until 1919, when Orage’s disappointment with political trends post-World War I led him from National Guild Socialism to C. H. Douglas’s theory of social credit, psychoanalysis, and Gurdjieffian mysticism (NAO, 266–94). During the pre-war period it positioned itself as frequently and deliberately in relation to periodicals such as the Clarion, Justice, and the Labour Leader as it did to the self-styled “modern” periodicals and little magazines devoted to the promotion of experimental literature and art that emerged during this same period.55

The British left, it is also crucial to remember, was quite a “turbulent, volatile” scene at the turn of the twentieth century, a scene where “anarchism and authoritarianism rubbed shoulders, and politics mixed with art more deeply than in other places” on the political spectrum (“INA,” 15). While the new New Age, from its very start, never limited its pages to writers of a single political persuasion, it featured the work of Guild Socialists such as A. J. Penty, Ivor Brown, and Ramiro de Maetzu both prominently and frequently in the early 1910s, providing them with extensive opportunities to explain how “the mould of a new civilization” would be created through the establishment of national labor guilds.56 They did so, often enough, not simply by mounting a positive case for their own cause but by critiquing other socialisms and other literary and cul-tural movements and institutions, thereby contributing to the magazine’s distinctively rough-and-tumble intellectual give-and take. Robert Blatchford’s Clarion, for example, is criticized regularly between 1912 and 1915 both for supporting its publication through the sale of advertisements and for failing to serve as a forum for “‘living’ discussion or controversy” among socialists.57 The Arts and Crafts movement is accused of not hav-ing “a social theory which accords with its artistic philosophy.”58 Trade unionists need to be cured of the “vice of class conceit.”59 Independent Labour Party socialists and Fabians are mocked for being out of touch with common wage-earners, while Fabians are also attacked in tandem with Vorticists and Italian Futurists for their “decadent” fascination with machinery (in their case, the bureaucratic machinery of the emerging welfare state).60

It is in the context of these sorts of exchange—about the cultural work of the arts, the relationship between political and artistic agendas for social change, the responsibility of intellectuals on the left to speak “for” the proletariat, and the role of specific move-ments and periodicals in working for the re-establishment of “fellowship” in the world of labor—within both a socialist counterpublic sphere and what Morrisson terms the “broader and more generally antibourgeois oppositional sphere” in which magazines such as the Freewoman and New Freewoman operated that Hastings launched her responses to Pound’s “Approach to Paris” series (PFM, 92). Having focused many of her earliest contributions to the New Age on the women’s suffrage campaign and its


420 relationship to socialist reform, she ventures here into a new (for her) arena of debate, utterly unintimidated by Pound’s self-positioning as the “impresario of modernism.”61 As the quotation above from the opening paragraph of “Way Back to America” would suggest, Hastings’s gloves are off in these exchanges. She matches Pound phrase for gloriously idiosyncratic phrase in these bouts of verbal pugilism, wielding the kind of irony, wit, and black humor commonly ascribed to modernists themselves, not their interlocutors. And the needs of her Board-school-educated New Age readership seem to be foremost in mind as she challenges the haughty pompousness of his pronounce-ments on French poetry in the “Approach to Paris” series.

In this regard, it is interesting to note that while Pound quotes liberally in French, Greek, Latin, Italian, and German, Hastings makes a point of translating all of his non-English-language quotations, thereby making this poetry available to a monolingual audience. Occasionally her translations are straightforward, as in “Aristophanes or Tailharde?,” the fourth installment in her series, where she offers an example of both poets’ work before responding to Pound’s comparisons of the two. First she presents a passage from Tailharde:

These tourists wear waterproofs yellowish-grey,With half-boots such as voyagers put on;In front of Rubens, Rembrandt, and WatteauThey halt to consult Guide John.62

Then she features a translation from Aristophanes: Then the stripling, their accuser, fresh from training, bold and quick,Pleads in person, fencing, sparring, using every turn and trick;Grappling with the feeble culprit, dragging him to dangerous ground,Into pitfalls of dilemmas, to perplex him and confound. (“AT,” 703)

This pair of translations sets the stage for her challenge to Pound’s claim that Tailharde is a modern-day Aristophanes. “I absolutely cannot find anything in Aristophanes to compare with this [passage in Tailharde] for sheer uncommentated [sic] fact,” she ar-gues. “[Aristophanes] will be forever at his opinions. It is no use seeking for bare fact in Aristophanes; and for this reason I opine that Monsieur Tailharde does not belong on the Greek shelf” (ibid., 705).

But if the work of translation is undertaken as a serious enterprise in “Aristophanes or Tailharde?,” most of Hastings’s responses to Pound feature parody translations, as when, in “The Way Back to America,” she does an extended riff on de Gourmont’s “fleur hypocrite,” mocking Pound as well as his argument about de Gourmont’s poetry in the process. I quote at length to give my readers a sense of how much real estate the New Age was willing to devote to Hastings’ satire of de Gourmont (and, by as-sociation, Pound):


421Cow hypocrite,Cow of pretence.Cow colour of fawn, more fraudulent than our nags, cow colour of faun, bedaubed with brush, walking lie, cow hypocrite, cow of pretenceCow erst in a pound, footsore down at St. Louis, cow erst in a pound , now corned and in tins at Paris, cow hypocrite, cow of pretence.Cow of visage rouged, Boodle a business man, cow of visage rouged, was spoofed by the paint on your skin, cow hypocrite, cow of pretence.Cow with black eyes, the fatuous mug made a deal, cow with black eyes, gave you the run of his patch, cow hypocrite, cow of pretence.Cow colour of gold, next day he urged his friends to inspect his purchase, cow colour of gold, they spat, these Americans ten, cow hypocrite, cow of pretence.Cow like spotted pard, you should have hitched out of shot, cow like spotted pard, each spit become a splotch, cow hypocrite, cow of pretence.63

It would be a mistake to treat this translation as a sign of simple antipathy to Pound’s ideas about modern French poetry. To lampoon something or someone well, one must be able to think inside the terms of an argument or position before turning it on its head. Without a doubt, Hastings is capable of wicked satire at Pound’s expense. In one sense, her stance in this series calls to mind John Carswell’s characterization of George Bernard Shaw’s role in the debates about socialism staged in the New Age between Arnold Bennett, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, and Shaw in 1908. Shaw’s send-up of “Chester-Belloc,” Carswell notes, is “not really fair,” though it is “very very funny.” We would do well to remember Carswell’s analysis of the “spectacular controversies” Orage coordinated so brilliantly in the early years of his editorship, and the impact they had on the magazine’s circulation and reputation, when considering the New Age’s willingness to feature Hastings and Pound’s dueling banjos in 1913.64

But if Hastings is willing to overstate her objections to Pound’s arguments, she is also genuinely interested in translating his highly abstract and idiosyncratic critical terminology into an idiom more accessible to the New Age’s rank-and-file readership. Arguably, Pound features un-translated passages of French poetry in his essays be-cause he wants to expose his New Age readers to the music and rhythms of French as a language. Hastings’s impatience with this strategy is, I would suggest, keyed to her sense that Pound is beginning to talk over the heads of his New Age readers rather than engaging them in appreciation of what he will later term a “contemporary, Euro-pean, or international criterion” of aesthetic excellence.65 Thus, for example, to return briefly to “Aristophanes or Tailharde?,” Hastings takes great pains to explicate Pound’s characterization of the “presentative method” of the “‘prose tradition’ of poetry” in this essay so that she then can use these translations to refute Pound’s claims about the formal similarities of their writing:


422 Pardonnez moi! I profess to see Monsieur Tailharde with eyes even more clear than his own. He resembles Aristophanes. Granted. But the Frenchman forgets to price his modernity. We are too much arrivés nowadays to compare so precisely with the ancients. You must come at least to Catullus for the beginning of our modern vast large virtue of enjoying the decline of power. Tailharde, bless us, guzzles (he would approve the word) the rot of his nation. The Greek vomited to behold his. There accounts the difference in their respective styles. (“AT,” 705)

In a translation/commentary such as this, Hastings is doing two things. She translates Pound’s critical precepts as well as the non-English-language poetry that he argues embodies them in order to make both the critical terminology and the poetic examples more accessible to New Age readers lacking any formal training in either modern or classical languages. But she does so while questioning Pound’s aesthetic precepts. In keeping with the English poetic nationalism expressed so strongly by Orage and other frequent contributors to the New Age, she has no patience whatsoever with Pound’s criticisms of the London literary scene and his unqualified praise for all things French. Her critique of the parallels he draws between contemporary French and classical Greek poetry in developing a formalist analysis of specific literary techniques is more pointed still, revealing both her familiarity with classical traditions and her deep skep-ticism concerning purely formalist analysis. She is, in this series, always an advocate for “thick” readings of literary texts in their historical contexts, refusing (as in the above) to countenance strictly formal comparisons. And she is also, always, impatient with Pound for failing to acknowledge his substantial personal investments in both the marketing of “our modern experiment” and the naturalization of poetic and criti-cal difficulty. Mocking Pound’s high-handedness, she challenges him to engage more productively in conversation with his New Age audience rather than keeping it at bay through his eugenically-inflected comments about people who are deaf to the music of contemporary French poetry.66

Hastings’s barbed exchanges with Pound continue beyond this particular series, culminating fifteen months later, in January 1915, with her response, as “Alice Morn-ing,” to a new series of essays by Pound in the New Age entitled “Affirmations,” which features a combination of cameo portraits (Arnold Dolmetsch, Jacob Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska) and aesthetic manifestoes (on Imagisme, Vorticism, and the nonexistence of Ireland). While T. K. L.’s responses to Pound’s “Approach to Paris” series seem designed to remind Pound of his obligation to keep the conversation about aesthetics accessible to the New Age’s general readership, Alice Morning expresses exasperation with what she characterizes as his “hopeless” cultism. Comparing his manifestos on Imagism and Vorticism with spiritualist rituals involving magic candles and clouds of incense, she writes:

I almost was about to believe while reading his article, “Affirmations,” that Mr. Ezra Pound was about to wake up. But he sank quietly deeper on the pillow in his final para-graph, which is only an affirmation that he is a hopeless cultist. Bless my heart, Vortices and Quattrocento! Why drag in physics? “Is it,” asks Mr. Pound, “that nature can, in fact,


423only produce a certain number of vortices? That the Quattrocento shines out because the vortices of power coincided with the vortices of creative energy?” It is all fiddling with terms; and creative energy is power. Were there no vortices in nature before the Quattrocento? Yes; and whirlpools, and surges, and Charybdis, and the wheel of Ixion, whereon was bound the poor diable who embraced a cloud thinking it was Juno. I knew a woman once who had decided that everything went in spirals: and, by the way, she played little tricks on you with magic candles and perfumes that arose out of nowhere. The state of things in Art which Mr. Pound deplores is somewhat due to just such florid, pedantic, obscurantist critics as himself—Ixions whom not even an introduction to the almighty gods can clear of pretension.67

This column initiated a cascade of correspondence in the journal’s extensive “Letters to the Editor” section. Although we should never read the New Age’s correspondence columns without remembering Carswell’s suggestion that such letters were “often made up to quota by members of the staff writing under the own or assumed names to keep controversies on the boil,” we should not ignore the level of support expressed for Hastings in this particular instance either (50).

“It would be a delight,” John Duncan writes,

to follow Mr. Pound into his magic world of ribble-rows to stalk pattern-units and plunge the quivering spear into curlicubists, but bread and philosophy are very scarce nowadays, and we are not all fairy knights . . . . Be clear, Mr. Pound. Never say exiguous for narrow, nor talk of the intellectually-inventive-creative spirit when you mean what Englishmen once called wit, quick-parts and fancy.68

“Your contributor, Miss Alice Morning, is right as usual when she describes Mr. Ben Ezra Pound as muddled,” D. Lawrence, writes:

Mr. Pound is so busy borrowing ideas from all sources that he has no time to examine their meanings. He tells us that the present search is for intensity; but intensity by itself is of very little value. It must be intensity efficiently applied. Some verse-makers have inten-sity without efficiency; some have efficiency without intensity; only poets have both. Mr. Pound has no intensity and but little efficiency. If Mr. Pound wants to be efficient he must economise his means and stop running to waste like a British Museum on the loose.69

What are we to make of these strongly worded criticisms of Pound in the New Age? In his still invaluable early study of the journal under Orage’s editorship, Wallace Martin notes how the controversies that erupted “with growing frequency in the New Age” between 1913 and 1914 often took on a personal edge (NAO, 187). In the pre-war heyday of avant-garde blasting and bombadiering, Pound, T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, F. S. Flint, and Richard Aldington took pot shots at each other, not just at Wal-ter Sickert and other advocates of “modern” (but not “modernist”) art.70 What Martin tends to downplay, though, are the criticisms beamed at the modernist avant-garde by Orage himself, by regular contributors to the magazine such as Hastings, and by readers contributing “Letters to the Editor.” Now that the Modernist Journal Project’s


424 online edition of the New Age is complete, this counterblasting and counterbombadier-ing is no longer buried in the archives. In other words, to invoke George Bornstein’s phrasing and method of analysis, the original bibliographic and contextual codes of the modernist writing that the New Age both featured and gave itself license to challenge are fully exposed again—and scholars and students of modernism need to grapple fully with such historical evidence rather than ignore it.

In this context it is worth returning to the quotation from one of the editor’s regular weekly columns, “Readers and Writers,” that serves as the epigraph to this essay:

Was it right, I have been asked, for THE NEW AGE to allow “T. K. L.” to “mimick” Mr. Pound’s articles on Parisian writers while these were still being published? My own answer is, Yes, and with more reasons than I can set down. Nobody, I suppose, thinks it odd that Mr. [Hilaire] Belloc should write in THE NEW AGE in criticism of the National Guilds System; and nobody will think it odd if the editorial exponents of that system reply either currently or at the conclusion of the series. Why, then, should it be thought strange to publish Mr. Pound’s articles and subject them to criticism while they are still before our readers? . . . It will be found, if we all live long enough, that every part of THE NEW AGE hangs together; and that the literature we despise is associated with the economics we hate as the literature we love is associated with the form of society we would assist in creating. Mr. Pound—I say it with all respect—is the enemy of THE NEW AGE. [emphasis added]

The New Age has been described as both “eclectic” and “catholic” in its coverage of contemporary issues in politics, literature, and the arts.71 Yet, in fact it could be nar-rowly partisan—and thereby profoundly critical of the modernist avant-garde—because of its commitment, during this period, to the promotion of a National Guild Socialist agenda for the arts.72 R. H.C.’s November 1913 column states this case bluntly through its comparison of Pound’s treatment in the New Age with that of Hilaire Belloc: the journal is willing to feature both men’s work often within its pages, because it prides itself on providing “some neutral ground where intelligences may meet on equal terms” in a public debate about politics, literature, and the arts.73 Yet it fiercely defends its right to publish critiques of their work for this same reason.

By contrast with R. H. C.’s grand distancing gestures in this particular column (and his much more generous assessment of Pound’s work subsequently), Hastings’s read-ings of Pound are both more narrowly focused and consistently skeptical.74 She works more intimately with his poetics, struggling to make his ideas more accessible to New Age readers, but ultimately expressing frustration with his work precisely because he gives up on that readership: fails to engage it, characterizes it as un-teachable. The driving force behind her criticisms of Pound, I would suggest, is her refusal to normal-ize difficulty, which in turn is motivated by her unwillingness to talk over the heads of the New Age’s rank-and-file readership. Notably, this audience was predominantly not Oxbridge-educated or socially elite. Yet it was engaged by wide-ranging public debates about the arts, thanks to the universality of primary education since 1870, the centrality of language-through-literature training in a vastly expanded state education


425system, and the deep intersections of art and politics in the socialist counterpublic sphere noted earlier.75 And the New Age stands behind not only Hastings but also “John Doe” contributors such as John Duncan in publishing their complaints to Pound about being left behind, left out of the conversation about aesthetics, as he proceeds with the promotion of the modernist avant-garde as an “expert culture”: an elite, coterie culture supported by “patron-investors” that refuses to countenance the possibility that “great art” might find an audience with “great audiences.”76

III. “Had she read my article with that care with which even my lightest utterance deserves . . .”

In closing, I want to look briefly at two letters to the editor Pound published in the New Age that register antithetical reactions to New Age readers and editors’ challenges to his ideas. The first letter, dated January 14, 1915—that is, the week before Hastings’s response to his new “Affirmations” series was published—praises the journal for its commitment to open debate and genuine intellectual exchange within its pages. “THE NEW AGE,” Pound writes, “permits one to express beliefs which are in direct opposi-tion to those held by the editing staff. In this, [it] sets a most commendable example to certain other periodicals which not only demand that all writers in their columns shall turn themselves into a weak and puling copy of the editorial board, but even to damage one’s income if one ventures to express contrary beliefs in the columns of other papers.”77 Two weeks later, however—that is, a week after Alice Morning’s response to his first “Affirmations” essay appeared on January 21—Pound is quick to attack the woman who initiated the cascade of letters challenging his views:

Sir,—the executive and the creative or inventive faculties are not the same. Miss Morning’s quibble over my use of the terms “power” and “creative energy” is unworthy of her voracious intellect. Had she read my article with that care with which even my lightest utterance deserves, she would have been able most clearly to understand me. When Miss Morning confines herself to translating Max Jacob’s poems and to bringing unfamiliar matter before us, we are most grateful for her Parisian explorations.

Mr. Aldington’s priapic parody of his own most successful poem (In Via Sestina) is of considerably less value. Miss Morning at least advances the discussion by forcing me to define one of my terms more exactly.78

I read Pound’s first letter as an endorsement of the New Age’s commitment to Bah-ktinian dialogics in the public sphere. Because the Cursitor Street office’s papers were lost in the bombing of London during World War II, and because Orage systemati-cally destroyed his personal papers as well, we do not know whether Orage solicited this particular editorial from Pound, or edited it before publishing it. By making the published pages of this magazine easily accessible to contemporary readers and stu-dents of modernism, however, the Modernist Journal Project’s digital edition of the New Age exposes the controversies surrounding modernism’s first emergence in the public sphere—and helps us gauge the “critical heterogeneity” of opinion about this emergence (PFM, 13).


426 Although Pound advocates on behalf of such free and open intellectual exchanges in his first letter, he forecloses that possibility in the second as he takes the moral and aesthetic high ground in opposition to his resistant readers. Pound makes several dis-crete rhetorical moves in this second letter. He concedes that Hastings’ objections to his pedantic obscurity have forced him to “define one of [his] terms more exactly.” He encourages her to confine herself to the work of translation.79 And he reads her resis-tance to the difficulty of his writing as a failure to read carefully enough. In his recent book, The Difficulties of Modernism, Leonard Diepeveen analyzes the “social rhetoric” of difficulty in Anglo-American culture, 1910–1950. Difficulty, he notes, “is not just a property of some works of art—it is a cultural situation, the smooth management of which gains a person entry into high culture.”80 Diepeveen’s analysis of the gendered dimension of cultural situations involving the negotiation of “difficulty” is very pertinent here, for Pound’s dismissal of Hastings’s criticisms in this second letter bears a striking likeness rhetorically to T. S. Eliot’s “Olympian, pompous” mode of address in the early essays for the New Statesman, the Egoist, and the TLS that played such a key role in “re-forming” the reading habits of his audience.81 In fact, Diepeveen’s characteriza-tion of how this mode of address works in Eliot’s early criticism to secure his reader’s complicity in his aesthetic judgments—“[n]ot to go along with the argument swept along by these [rhetorical] techniques is to ally oneself with amateurism, sloppiness, and ‘women’”—aptly describes Pound’s second letter.82 Except of course that Pound has literalized the allusion to gender as he discredits Miss Morning’s “quibble” over terminology and her failure to grasp his arguments.83

Listen again to Pound’s response to a reader he concedes has a “voracious intellect” yet dares to disagree with him: “Had she read my article with that care with which even my lightest utterance deserves, she would have been able most clearly to under-stand me.” It is a clever putdown, but a putdown nonetheless, even if it also allows for a bit of humorous self-mockery, as we see Pound assuming the mantle of dandified academic self-importance he complained of in earlier contributions to the New Age when he wrote disparagingly about “professors, teachers, jackals, and ‘yanqui editors of chaste magazines.’” “Had she read my article with that care with which even my lightest utterance deserves, she would have been able most clearly to understand me.” If you had read me carefully, T. K. L., you would be one of “us.” Since you did not, you are one of “them”: the uninitiated, the antimodernists who remain outside the gates of Culture. Claiming the moral and aesthetic high ground, Pound’s response misses Hastings’s point entirely—which is to demand the inclusion of a general, lay audience in a conversation about aesthetics, rather than conceptualizing the latter as an elite, exclusive, minority-culture phenomenon. Bakhtinian dialogics are replaced by Platonic monologue here as Pound shuts down this conversation: claims the last word, asserts the unchallengeable authority of his aesthetic judgments.

To end on a polemical (but nonetheless dialogical) note: I would like to see modernist studies truly defamiliarize difficulty as we continue the work of recovering modernism’s original bibliographic and contextual codes and restoring the full complexity of its first emergence in a diverse array of turn-of-the-twentieth-century periodicals—an array that


427includes but is by no means limited to the noncommercial “small magazines” that have been center stage to date in the material historical scholarship on modernism.84 This would make space in the field for further study of modernism’s original interlocutors, some of whom were “voracious intellect[s]” like Hastings, fully capable of deploying what are often assumed to be modernism’s signature tactics of irony, wit, and black humor in questioning each and every precept of an emergent modernist aesthetics. This would also allow scholars and students of modernism to recognize that a multiplicity of cultural agendas for the arts were still available at the turn of the twentieth century, not all of which positioned artists and intellectuals comfortably in allegiance with difficulty, highbrow culture, and the academy. Such advances in the field would, however, require us to continue probing not only our own continued allegiances to “expert culture,” as Lois Cucullu and others have argued, but also the “rules of scarcity” that continue to organize literary reputation, restricting the number of names and texts that “remain in heavy rotation” in modernist studies in spite of several decades worth of extensive revisionary work, as Aaron Jaffe has noted out recently.85 I hope we are willing to expand our conversations about modernism(s) to encompass these kinds of challenges.

NotesI would like to thank George Bornstein, Patrick Collier, Michael Coyle, Lois Cucullu, Sean Latham,

Kevin McCullen, Robert Scholes, and the students of ENGL 480/680, “Modernism In and Beyond the ‘Little Magazines,’” for their invaluable feedback on drafts of this essay.

1. R. H. C., “Readers and Writers,” the New Age, November 13, 1913, 51.2 . Wallace Martin, The New Age Under Orage: Chapters in Literary History (New York: Barnes

& Noble, 1967), 268; hereafter abbreviated NAO. 3. As Martin notes, Orage wanted the New Age to “mediate between specialized fields of knowledge

and public understanding” even as it encouraged “a vital relationship between literary experimentation and the literary tradition.” For this reason, he characterizes it as a “cultural” periodical rather than either a political or literary one, noting the uniqueness of its intervention in the public sphere in this regard (NAO, 3). More recently, Mark Morrisson has characterized Ford Madox Hueffer’s ambitions for the English Review in similar terms, emphasizing ”the important impulse in early British modernism to enter into what we now call the public sphere, rather than to create magazines to cater to a small elite.” See The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 17; hereafter abbreviated PFM.

4. “Modern,” it should be noted, is a rubric that includes but is not limited to work that fits the definition of “modernism” as an art of abstraction that was institutionalized/ normalized in the 1940s through 1960s. For an important recent discussion of the debates about contemporary work in the visual arts staged in the New Age between “Radical Modernists” and “Conservative” or “Neo-Realist” Modernists between 1910 and 1914, see Robert Scholes, “Old and New in Modernist Art,” Paradoxy of Modernism (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 33–94. As Scholes notes, these “debates over Old and New in visual art . . . set the tone and established many of the terms that have been used since that time” in discussions of modernism in literature as well as in the visual arts (35).

5. See, for example, the special issue of American Periodicals co-edited by Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, “Little Magazines and Modernism,” 15, no. 1 (2005) and their co-edited collec-tion, Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (forthcoming, Ashgate Publishing, 2007). See also Edward Bishop, “Re:Covering Modernism—Form and Function in the Little Magazines,” Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, ed. Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996); David Earle, Re-covering Modernism: Pulp Modern and the Preju-


428 dice of Form (forthcoming, Ashgate Publishing, 2008); Timothy Materer, “Make It Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism,” Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading, ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 17–36; and Michael Murphy, “‘One Hundred Per Cent Bohemia’: Pop Decadence and the Aestheticization of Commodity in the Rise of the Slicks,” Marketing Modernisms, 61–90; and Jayne E. Marek, Women Editing Modernism: ‘Little’ Magazines & Literary History (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995). For a methodological overview of modern periodical studies, see Sean Latham and Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” PMLA 121, no. 2 (March 2006): 517–31.

6. Current conversations about the “state of the arts” in modernist studies tend to focus on the adequacy of the terms “modernism” and “modernisms.” The thrust of my argument here, by contrast, is to encourage a wholesale re-imagining of turn-of-the-twentieth-century studies, so as to address aspects of the historical record that have been either obscured or effaced by both dominant and revisionary treatments of modernism. I will typically default to the singular term “modernism” or “modernist avant-garde” in this essay not because I assume there was any kind of consensus in the early twentieth century about a singular phenomenon called “modernism” but rather because I do not want to lose sight of the centripetal energies of avant-garde cultural politics: the insider/outsider, us/them dynamics of self-promotionalism that mark the cultural avant-garde’s transformation into modernism between 1912 and 1922. For important recent interventions in the modernism vs. modernisms debate, see Scholes, Paradoxy of Modernism; Michael Coyle, “With A Plural Vengeance: Modernism as (Flaming) Brand,” Modernist Cultures 1, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 15–21; Jennifer Wicke, “Appreciation, Deprecia-tion: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no.3 (September 2001): 389–403; Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meaning of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no.3 (September 2001): 493–513.

7. “Blasting and bombadiering” is Wyndham Lewis’s phrasing, as used to title his collected es-says, Blasting and Bombadiering [1937] (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).

8. For biographical information about Hastings, see Stephen Gray, Beatrice Hastings: A Literary Life (London: Viking Penguin, 2004); and Scholes, “Emily Alice Haigh,” February 14, 2007 <http://dl.lib.brown.edu:8080/exist/mjp/mets.xq?metsid=

mjp.2005.01.021.>9 . Beatrice Hastings, The ‘Old New Age’: Orage—and Others (London: Blue Moon Press, 1936),

7, 3.10 . (ibid., 3). Although Tom Steele describes Hastings as the “virtua[l] co-editor,” he acknowledges

that her account of her work for the journal was contested by other members of the New Age circle. Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club 1893–1923 (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1990), 40. Scholes suggests that Hastings “probably did more than she usually got credit for doing but not as much as she claimed.” But he is quick to add: “Orage was the great editor, not Hastings.” “Emily Alice Haigh.”

11. “To Our Readers,” the New Age, April 25, 1908, 503.12. Michael Holquist, ed., M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: Univesity of Texas

Press, 1981). In his recent work on the Dial and the Little Review, Alan C. Golding uses the term “dialogics” to describe the relationship between “these two equally important, though very different, magazines” as he outlines “a historically based model for considering how the shaping of taste by modernist magazines is a collective project, not a matter of the atomized influence of single publica-tions” (“The Dial, The Little Review, and the Dialogics of Modernism,” American Periodicals 15, no. 1 [2005]: 42–55, 42, 43.) I am using the term here to describe not only the New Age’s relationship to other magazines (and not just “modernist magazines” at that) but also the kind of exchanges it orches-trates, both within individual issues of the journal and diachronically, over multiple issues, between its editors, regular contributors, and correspondents in its “Letters to the Editor” column.

13. Such criticism is beamed at political journals as well as narrowly defined “literary” magazines. The Independent Labour Party’s Labour Leader, for example, is accused of being “spiteful, narrow, and ignorant”; the Social Justice Federation’s Justice is described as having “lost in intellectual power” when it “occupied itself more and more [restrictively] with politics.” See “Retrospect,” the New Age,


429November 6, 1913, 8. The publication of the first issue of Blast is anticipated with an accusation that its “conductors” “will . . . be more concerned to propagate their ideas” than to discuss them “in an independent arena.” See R. H. C., “Readers and Writers,” the New Age, January 8, 1914, 307. For further discussion, see Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 143–72.

14. Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 11. My indebtedness to the work of both Raymond Williams and Lawrence Rainey should also be obvious here. See in particular The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 1989); and Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites & Public Culture (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1998).

15. George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2.

16. Pound’s first publication in the New Age was actually a correction to an article written by Edwin Pugh. See E. P., “A Correction,” the New Age, April 28, 1910, 620.

17. Alex Zwerdling, Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 219.

18. Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Patricia Hutchins, Ezra Pound’s Kensington: An Exploration 1885–1913 (Chicago, Ill.: Henry Regnery, 1965); (IM, 10–41).

19. (IM, 44) Rainey uses Pound’s early career in London to trace how an “artistocracy of patron-salonniers” is replaced by “an elite of patron-investors” in modernism’s history (IM, 39). Although this discussion is informed by Rainey’s work, my focus is on Pound’s changing attitude toward the New Age’s socially and educationally diverse readership during the pre-war period.

20. Zwerdling, Improvised Europeans, 233.21. Although Blast has been described as a “pale imitation of Italian Futurism’s attack on high

art” (IM, 38), Pound’s association with it nonetheless changed his relationship with other venues of publication in London, as Zwerdling notes in Improvised Europeans (233).

22. “Sestina: Altaforte,” the English Review, June 1909, 419–20; “Three Poems,” The English Review, October 1909, 382–4.

23. “Three Poems” (“Canzon: The Yearly Slain,” “Canzon: The Spear,” “Canzon: To Be Sung be-neath a Window”), the English Review, January 1910, 193–7. “Two Poems” (“Canzone: Of Incense,” “Thersites: on the Surviving Zeus”), the English Review, April 1910, 9–11. Martha Vogeler, who has recently completed a book-length study of the English Review under Harrison’s editorship, assumes that Harrison “inherited” these five poems from Hueffer before the latter left the magazine. She also notes that “Pound would have appeared more in the English Review after that if he had not held Harrison responsible for Ford’s loss of it—a foolish misunderstanding of Harrison’s role in the transi-tion—and found it hard to extract payment from Harrison for what he did accept” (Martha Vogeler, e-mail to author, November 21, 2006).

24.(PFM, 51); Margaret Cole, as quoted by Martin (NAO, 5). 25. For a complete listing of Pound’s publications during this period, see Lee Baechler, A. Walton

Litz, and James Longenbach, eds., Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, Vol. 1 (New York: Garland, 1991).

26. Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, I,” the New Age, November 30, 1911, 107. 27. Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, [II], A RATHER DULL INTRODUCTION,” the

New Age, December 7, 1911, 130; hereafter abbreviated as “OII.” As Rainey notes, Pound “established his earliest literary identity by offering readers a species of erudite exoticism, recondite material updated with pungent obiter dicta, a learned mode of writing that could appeal only to an upper-middle-class audience with significant cultural capital . . . and ambitious cultural aspirations” (IM, 14). In pitching his ideas to the New Age’s mixed-class, mostly Board-school-educated readership, Pound is engaging a very different audience, a point that is crucial for this discussion.

28. The “Patria Mia” essays were collected and published under separate cover in 1950. “Through Alien Eyes” and “America: Chances and Remedies” were not reprinted until 1991 in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, Vol. 1.


430 29. A. J. Penty, “Aestheticism and History,” the New Age, April 2, 1914, 684.30. Pound, “Patria Mia, IV,” the New Age, September 26, 1912, 516.31. Pound, “Patria Mia, V,” the New Age, October 3, 1912, 539, 540.32. Pound, “Chances & Remedies, VI,” the New Age, June 5, 1913, 143.33. A. J. Penty, “The Restoration of the Guild System, VIII,” the New Age, September 4, 1913,

545; hereafter abbreviated “RGS.” See The New Age Under Orage, 40, for a discussion of the New Age’s catch-phrase, “brilliant common sense.”

34. Orage, “Journals Insurgent,” the New Age, August 7, 1913, 415.35. Michael Coyle, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (University Park:

Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 36. As Michael Levenson notes, “Isolated Superiority” is the title of an essay Eliot published The

Dial in January 1928 assessing Pound’s contribution to modernism; “loathed disturber” is Pound’s self-characterization in a 1932 obituary notice he penned for the Criterion after Harry Munro’s death. See A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 215, 214.

37. Coyle, Ezra Pound, 34.38. Ezra Pound, “Approach to Paris I,” the New Age, September 4, 1913, 551; hereafter abbrevi-

ated “API.” 39. As noted earlier, Pound’s article by this title was being published in the New Freewoman while

the New Age was publishing the “Approach to Paris” series; see the New Freewoman, October 15, 1913, 161–3; and the New Freewoman, November 1, 1913, 194–5.

40. Ian Bell discusses the scientific analogies that give Pound’s literary criticism its characteristic tone in Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (London and New York: Methuen, 1981).

41. Ezra Pound, “Approach to Paris II,” the New Age, September 11, 1913, 578; hereafter ab-breviated “AII.”

42. (“AII,” 577, 578). As Rainey notes, “French was still the lingua franca of European intellectual exchange” in the 1910s, so in one sense it is not at all surprising that Pound defaults to untranslated French in these essays (IM, 29). As we shall see, however, this move on Pound’s part is treated by Hastings and other New Age editorial staff members and readers as a slap in the face of the journal’s mainly Board-School-educated, monolingual, rank-and-file readership.

43. Gail McDonald, Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

44. Ezra Pound, Rome Broadcasts, May 5, 1942, as quoted by Hutchins, Ezra Pound’s Kensington, 67.

45. Ezra Pound, “Judicial Opinion (Our Suppressed October Issue),” Little Review 4 (May 1917): 3–6. See Materer’s discussion of this article in “Make It Sell!,” 22–25.

46. Pound to Felix Schelling, 8–9 July, 1922, in Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, 1907–1941, D. D. Paige, ed. (New York: New Directions, 1971), 180.

47. As Scholes argues in Paradoxy of Modernism, Hastings “deserves better than to be a footnote to Modigliani’s self-destructive life” (226). Thanks to recent work by Scholes, Gray, and others, Hastings is beginning to emerge from the shadows of the many influential men in her life.

48. “Talking back” is bell hooks’s phrasing to describe the ways in which the allegedly passive consumers of a hegemonic popular culture respond to, challenge, and repurpose its meanings and messages. I use it here to emphasize the active responsiveness of the New Age readers to Pound’s pro-nouncements. bell hooks, Talking Back, Thinking Black (Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1989).

49. T. K. L., “The Way Back to America,” the New Age, September 18, 1913, 604. 50. Robert Scholes and Staff of the MJP, “General Introduction to The New Age 1907–1922,” July

12, 2007 <http://dl.lib.brown.edu:8080/exist/mjp/display.xq?docid=mjp.2005.00.001.> 51. Although this point is a digression from my main argument here, I venture to suggest that we

will need to put in play a more flexible and inclusive conceptualization of authorship than modernist studies has accommodated to date if we are to appreciate the periodical press writings of a woman


431like Beatrice Hastings, who playfully and deliberately violated every convention of the author function that is commonly upheld in literary studies.

52. See Gray, Beatrice Hastings: A Literary Life, 265–9, for a discussion of Hastings’s relationship with Lewis.

53. As Martin notes, none of the political weeklies published between 1907 and 1922 had a circula-tion greater than that of the Spectator—which declined from 22,000 in 1903 to 13,500 in 1922. The Nation and The Saturday Review probably had larger circulations before the war than the New Age, which had a fifteen-year average of over 3,000, while the New Statesman’s circulation increased from 3,000 to 7,000 between 1913 and 1925 (NAO, 10). By contrast, the circulation of the modernist little magazines ranged from several hundred to a thousand. Once reported to have a circulation of about 2,000, the Little Review’s circulation in fact is “unlikely” to have risen “much over a thousand,” as Frank Mott notes in A History of American Magazines, Vol. 5 Sketches of Twenty-One Magazines, 1905–1930 [(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 171]. As Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson have noted, The Egoist’s largest circulation was 400 copies per issue in 1913 during its first six months of publication. After long-term subscriptions ran out in November 1916, its circulation never rose again above 200 [Dear Miss Weaver (New York: Viking, 1970), 460.] For information about the Smart Set’s history and circulation (which peaked at 165,000 in 1905–06, but plateaued at about 50,000 readers in 1915), see Sharon Hamilton, “The First New Yorker? The Smart Set Magazine, 1900–1924,” The Serials Librarian 37, no. 2 (1999): 89–104; and Earle, Re-Covering Modernism.

54. The New Age, January 28, 1909, 280. 55. I borrow the term “periodical community” from Lucy Delap, who uses it to discuss how self-

identified “modern” periodicals like the Freewoman and the New Age positioned themselves in relation to each other in Edwardian Britain, sharing personal and professional networks of both readers and contributors, placing advertisements in each other’s pages, and participating in “freelist” exchanges that do not necessarily or obviously observe the hierarchy of status in the periodical press’s increas-ingly diversified landscape. See “The Freewoman, Periodical Communities, and the Feminist Reading Public,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 61 (2000): 233–76. Delap’s reading of the New Age’s self-positioning in the public sphere needs to be complicated through recognition of its engagement in a socialist periodical community that included magazines established in the 1880s and 1890s such as the Clarion, the Labour Leader, and Justice as well as regional periodicals like the Bristol Venture as well as those representing “modern” metropolitan interests like the New Statesman. Nonetheless, her argument about how periodical communities function dovetails beautifully with Alan Golding’s recent research on the “dialogism” of the Little Review and the Dial, offering further proof of the need for a “historically based model for considering how the shaping of taste by modernist magazines is a collective project, not a matter of the atomized influence of single publications” (“The Dial, The Little Review, and the Dialogics of Modernism,” 43).

56. “Press Cuttings,” the New Age, September 9, 1915, 464. See also NAO, 193–211. 57. Geo. Brimelow, “The Clarion,” the New Age, October 23, 1913, 773. See also Orage’s critique

of modern newspapers and periodicals’ reliance on advertising, “Readers and Writers,” the New Age, January 15, 1914, 339. In response to a public announcement that the Clarion was folding in 1915, he proclaims: “that final divorce between publicism and advertisement which so many of you have long desired” has finally been achieved. “The pillmakers having gone, let them never come back. Let them spread their nets in the dailies, those breeding-places of wild geese. But let us weeklies abjure them and trust to the public even if we perish of it” (“Readers and Writers,” the New Age, August 12, 1915, 357). The Clarion actually continued to be published through 1927; the announcement in 1915 was a false alarm, one of many in the face of periodic funding crises. It is interesting to note in this context that the New Age discontinued all advertisements other than its own subscription advertisments at the outset of Volume 15 (May 7, 1914).

58. A. J. Penty, “The Restoration of the Guild System VI,” the New Age, August 28, 1913, 511.59. “Our New Avatar,” the New Age, February 3, 1910, 316.60. “The Death of an Idea,” the New Age, July 10, 1913, 287. 61. For consideration of Hastings’s play of voices in the New Age’s staging of feminist and anti-


432 feminist debates, see Delap, “Feminist and anti-feminist encounters in Edwardian Britain,” Institute of Historical Research 78, no. 201 (August 2005): 377–99; and Ardis, “Debating Feminism, Modernism, Socialism: Beatrice Hastings’ Voices in the New Age,” in Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (University of Illinois Press, 2007), 310–59. “Impresario” is Rainey’s term for describing “the unusual place in the history of modernism” that Pound has come to occupy. See Modernism: An Anthology ( Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 39.

62. T. K. L. [Beatrice Hastings], “Aristophanes or Tailharde?,” the New Age, October 9, 1913, 702; hereafter abbreviated “AT.”

63. T. K. L [Beatrice Hastings], “The Way Back to America,” 605. 64. John Carswell, Lives and Letters: A. R. Orage, Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield, John

Middleton Murry, S. S. Koteliansky 1906–1957 (New York: New Directions, 1978), 40, 36; hereafter abbreviated LL.

65. Ezra Pound, “Small Magazines,” The English Journal XIX, no. 9 (November 1930): 689–704; 691.

66. As Morrisson’s analysis of the subscription lists, price changes, and marketing strategies of the Freewoman, New Freewoman, and Egoist would suggest, the New Age’s increases in price between 1907 and 1913 put it well beyond the reach of the working-class readers it initially marketed itself to address as a penny weekly (PFM, 105). Like Marsden’s magazine, the New Age shifts from one “discursive arena” to another as it re-imagines and “up-markets” itself during this period (ibid., 104). The doubling of price in November 1913—just after the exchanges between Pound and Hastings over his “Approach to Paris” series end—may well be an index of its primary interest at this point in time in engaging a rising middle-class “that was highly educated but not endowed with the social prestige and financial capital of the established middle and upper middle classes (ibid., 108). Even if that is the case, though; that is—even if the New Age is marketing itself between 1909 and 1914 to a rising middle class readership rather the working-class audience it reached initially as a 1d. political weekly—its willingness to showcase Hastings’s critique of Pound’s avant-garde obscurantism in the fall of 1913 still registers its engagement with the public sphere, its resistance to Pound’s own re-orientation toward an elite coterie audience for “serious” art. “Our New Avatar,” an unsigned editorial published three months after the New Age’s first major price increase in 1909, is an important early statement of the magazine’s re-orientation in this regard; see the New Age, February 3, 1910, 316–17.

67. “Alice Morning” [Beatrice Hastings], “Impressions of Paris,” the New Age, January 21, 1915, 308–9.

68. John Duncan, “Letter to the Editor,” the New Age, February 11, 1915, 415.69. D. Lawrence, “Letter to the Editor,” the New Age, February 18, 1915, 438. 70. See also Levenson, “The War Among the Moderns,” A Genealogy of Modernism, 137–164.71. Steele, Alfred Orage, 15; Martin, NAO, xi.72. Carswell notes that the Guild Socialism of S. G. Hobson, which began to mark TNA as early

as 1911, “was the leading political theme of the paper” by 1913 (83). 73. “To Our Readers,” the New Age, April 25, 1908, 503.74. Martin notes that Orage found little of value in Pound’s criticism. “I would part Mr Pound

from his theories as often as I found him clinging to one, for they will in the end be his ruin,” Orage writes on August 5, 1915 (NAO, 332–3). What Orage shared with Pound, however, is a belief that good poetry is “a product of conscious discipline rather than inexplicable afflatus” (New Age Under Orage, 256). Thus, on July 25, 1918 Orage will defend Pound’s poetic craftsmanship. Noting how English critics “pretend that poetry grows on bushes or in parsley-beds,” Orage describes Pound’s tendency to offer “a ton of precept for a pound of example” as an American habit—“more than in any other country save Germany, it appears to be required [in America] of a man that there shall be ‘significance’, intention, aim, theory—anything you like expressive of direction—in everything he does.” Yet the “truth of the matter” about poetry and craftsmanship, he goes on to emphasize, “lies with Mr Pound. Dangerous as it may be to require that a poet shall be learned in his profession, it is much more dangerous to deprecate his learning” (the New Age, July 25, 1918, 201). See also Orage’s


433“Readers and Writers” column on the occasion of Pound’s leaving London for Paris, the New Age, January 13, 1921, 126–7.

75. See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (1961; Peterborough, Ontario and Letchworth, Hertfordshire: Broadview Press, 2001); Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke and Chris Weedon, Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class (New York: Metheuen, 1985), 21–29; Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001). For work on the democratization of literary culture in the interwar period, see Jonathan Wild, “‘Insects on Letters’: John O’ London’s Weekly and the New Reading Public,” Literature and History 15, no. 2 (autumn 2006): 50–62; and Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

76. “Expert culture” is Lois Cucullu’s term, as used in Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture: Woolf, Forster, Joyce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). See also Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (London: Verso, 1993). “Patron-investors” is Rainey’s term, as used in Institutions of Modernism (35). “Great poetry for great audiences” was Poetry ’s catch-phrase under Harriet Monroe’s editorship; for a discussion of Pound’s eventual dis-engagement with this magazine because of its stance in this regard, see John Timber-man Newcomb, “Poetry’s Opening Door: Harriet Monroe and American Modernism,” American Periodicals 15, no. 1 (2005): 6–22.

77. Pound, “Affirmations II,” the New Age, January 14, 1915, 277.78. Pound, “Vorticism,” the New Age, January 28, 1915, 359; emphasis added.79. That Pound does so is actually rather curious, given how inelegant her translations are. Dora

Marsden is actually harder on Hastings than Pound is in this regard. In the October 1, 1913 issue of the New Freewoman, in the context of a set of mock reviews, she lampoons Hastings’s translations through pseudo-comparison with S. H. Butcher and A. Lang’s translations for the Harvard Classics series. See “Reviews,” the New Freewoman, October 1, 1913, 149.

80. Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2003), xiii, 42.81. Hugh Kenner’s phrasing, as quoted by Diepeveen, “‘I Can Have More Than Enough Power’:

T. S. Eliot’s Construction of His Audience,” Marketing Modernisms, 37–60, 43.82. ibid.83. See Newcomb, “Poetry’s Opening Door,” for Pound’s very similar treatment of “Miss

Monroe.”84. “Small magazines” is Pound’s phrasing; see his 1930 retrospective on modernism in the little

magazines by that title in The English Journal XIX, no. 9 (November 1930): 689–704. This important essay is now available on the MJP website at http://orage.mjp.brown.edu/mjp/pdf/smallmagazines.pdf. As Suzanne Churchill argues, recent scholarship on the little magazines is “remind[ing] us of the necessity of remaining embedded in the muddle of modernism, even as we continue to seek more expansive and inclusive paradigms” (The Little Magazine OTHERS, 222). That “muddle” only becomes thicker, and productively so, as material historical research in modernist studies expands beyond an exclusive focus on the little magazines to include venues of publication such as the British Vogue, The Smart Set, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, the Freewoman, the New Freewoman, Crisis, the Messenger, and Opportunity. In addition to scholarship cited above, see Helen McNeil, “Vortex Modernism: A Little Magazine and the Making of Modernity,” Journalism, Literature and Modernity: From Hazlitt to Modernism, ed. Kate Campbell (Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 141–69; Jane Garrity, “Selling Culture to the ‘Civilized’: Bloomsbury, British Vogue and the Marketing of National Identity,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (April 1999): 29–58; Garrity, “Virginia Woolf, Intellectual Harlotry, and 1920s British Vogue,” Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechancial Reproduc-tion, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York: Garland, 2000): 185–218; Leslie Hankins, “Iris Bary, Writer and Cinéaste, Forming Film Culture in London 1924–1926: The Adelphi, The Spectator, the Film Society and the British Vogue,” Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 3 (September 2004): 488–515; Anne E. Carroll, “Protest and Affirmation: Composite Texts in the Crisis,” American Literature 76, no. 1 (March 2004): 89–116; Carroll, Word, Image and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the


434 Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Russ Castronovo, “Beauty Along the Color Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and the Crisis,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (October 2006): 1443–59; and Ardis and Patrick Collier, eds., Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

85. Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1.

Ardis, The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age 07

Documents

Transcript of Ardis, The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age 07