On the Evening of Wednesday 7 January 1914, Crowds Gathered
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
In London, Around 1914 Rosie Šnajdr Ph.D. University of East Anglia School of Literature Drama and Creative Writing Submitted October 2013. “This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution.” Abstract This approximation to a year study considers London, 1914 as a site of early modernism’s emergence. It focuses on the cultural interactions between experimental and popular artists, aesthetics, and institutions that were an impetus for, and influence on the development of early modernism. Chapter one discusses the complexity of early modernism’s relationship with popular literary sphere. Two staged public events that happened in January are compared—G. K. Chesterton’s trial of a Dickens character and Ezra Pound’s dinner in honour of the poetic accomplishments of an old man who insisted he was not a poet. Both involved bids for literary autonomy and attempts at public self-fashioning. Neither included attempts to enact a separation of experimental and popular culture. Chapter two concerns the strategies by which the Egoist advertised its resistance to the commercialisation of literature. Attempts were made to shame profitable cultural arbiters, battles were waged against censorship in protection of the artist’s right to autonomy, and attacks were made upon the purveyors of jingoistic war poetry. Rather than being evidence of vehement anti-commercialism, these resistances are shown to operate in the commercial interests of the little magazine. Chapter three considers the competition between rival experimentalisms, charting the way in which the compositors of BLAST appropriated notions of heroism from a new breed of adventure story— mechanical war fiction—to distinguish their talk of machines from that of the Futurists. By interacting with popular culture the Vorticists embraced an avant-garde aesthetic, even as they resisted certain kinds of avant-garde activity that they perceived to have been cheapened by their success and ubiquity. Chapter four re/visits three poets—formative Georgian Poetry contributor W. H. Davies, anthology abstainer Rose Macaulay, and one-poem-Imagiste Skipwith Cannell—to demonstrate the ways in which appearances in anthologies have distorted and deleted parts of the poetic record. 2 Contents List of Illustrations 4 Introduction 5 1. Public Relations 13 The Trial of John Jasper 13 The Peacock Lunch 28 The New Cake of Soap 51 2. Anti-Commercialism in The Egoist 54 The Egoist 55 Pound and the Times Literary Supplement 58 Joyce and Censorship 67 The Egoist at War 76 War Poetry 79 3. Mechanical War Stories 85 The Machine Age Adventure Hero 86 ‘The Air Scout’ 90 ‘Full Back’ 93 ‘The Steel Spanner’ 96 ‘The Despatch Rider’ 98 ‘Danger!’ 103 The World Set Free 111 BLAST 114 4. An Anthology of Exceptional Poets, 1914 121 W. H. Davies 123 Rose Macaulay 136 Skipwith Cannell 147 Afterword 172 Conclusion 175 Bibliography 177 3 List of Illustrations 1. Poster for the Dickens Fellowship’s Trial of John Jasper 14 2. ‘The Lewis-Brzeska-Pound Troupe’ cartoon by Brodsky 60 3. Page dividers used in Egoist and Times Literary Supplement 67 4. Skipwith Cannell’s ‘Nocturne Triste’, as it appeared in Poetry 149 5. Skipwith Cannell’s ‘The Dance’, as it appeared in The New Freewoman 153 6. Advertisement for Skipwith Cannell, Interior Decorator 170 4 Introduction As the chimes rang out over Parliament Square, announcing the arrival of 1914, a lot of things did not happen. The spirit of old London did not collapse, the Christian era did not end, human character did not change, and the world did not break in two. That these things did not happen meant that the year had much in common with the later years about which writers would come to make these claims.1 To date, human culture has proven to be stubbornly resistant to total ruptures and seismic shifts; a fact that fundamentally problematises all attempts that we make to periodise it. Whether critics limit themselves to a long century, a monarch’s reign, a decade, or, as has been the case with this study, a single year, there is inevitably some arbitrariness about the precise dates that are chosen to bookend analyses of cultural trends. If anything, the tighter the temporal focus, the easier it is to notice the inherent difficulty of drawing lines in the sand. Attendant to the limitations of periodisation, my thesis approximates to a year study—wandering out of my year whenever a discussion seemed to require it, but always in the end returning back to the London of 1914. The project began with the notion that 1914 was an important year for experimental writing. After all, Wyndham Lewis had named his friends after it and the many critical books that subsequently took his phrase, ‘The Men of 1914’, into their titles attest to the significance of that year’s publications. Since periodising culture was a messy business even for Lewis, it is necessary to note that there were no publications by Eliot in 1914, he being more properly a man of 1915 onwards. Nevertheless, Pound, Lewis, and Joyce did publish works that would become part of the modernist canon—Des Imagistes, BLAST and A Portrait of the Artist. It was the publication of these important experimental works within the space of a few months and a few miles that led me to suspect that London 1914 could be postulated as the scene of canonical modernism’s emergence. Over the last thirty years, we have come to accept that the works of modernism did not develop in a vacuum. These texts and the aesthetic ideas that underpin them were produced within a wider framework of cultural production and, furthermore, this broader field was an impetus for, and influence on their development. The intense scrutiny of a selective canon of literary texts and their immediate biographical context, which had previously constituted the field of modernist studies, had, in the words of Tim Armstrong, ‘come at the cost of the suppression of a broader discursive world.’2 It was not a question of throwing out the canon but of deregulating its borders. The ‘big’ texts, thus de-privileged, would be stripped of their critical insulation and could be better understood. Around them would grow a criticism of 1 In the order listed, these were claims made by D. H. Lawrence about the winter of 1915-16 in Kangaroo, London: Martin Secker, 1923, 243; Ezra Pound about midnight on 29-30 of October 1921 in “Note to Calendar,” The Little Review 8.2 (Spring 1922), 40; Virginia Woolf about December 1910 in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, London: Hogarth Press, 1924, 4; and Willa Carther on 1922 in the preface to Not Under Forty, London: Cassell and Company, 1936: v. 2 Tim Armstrong, Modernism, A Cultural History, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005, 27. 5 popular literature, book production, publishing practices, and marketing. Following in this vein, I have attempted to resituate the canonical texts of 1914 in the discussions, production, and marketing of broader literature, both popular and classic, in an attempt to better understand the drive and character of emergent modernism. What did happen in 1914? The question can be answered with a quick leaf through the penny papers—a category that The Times joined, with much fanfare, in March. News of the price reduction and the difficulty its printers experienced with meeting the subsequent increase in demand was reported widely, even on the other side of the globe.3 In Parliament, the question of Irish Home Rule continued to be a political football, as Asquith’s minority Liberal government attempted to retain the essential support of Irish Nationalist ministers and the Tory opposition attempted to stop them. Irish Unionist politician, barrister and judge, Edward Carson, presided over the arming of likeminded citizens in Northern Ireland and, in March the situation nearly boiled over into civil war.4 In the event, the British Army at Curragh found mutiny preferable to the prospect of shooting at civilians who marched under the Union Jack. Women continued to pursue the right to vote and, in the same month as the Curragh Incident, Mary Richardson took a meat-cleaver to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Galley. A number of experimental art groups found interesting ways to promote themselves and their artworks by entering into dialogues with the commercial and political spheres, sometimes whilst arguing that they were not. The Vorticists, for example, provided a patronising condemnation of Richardson’s actions, arguing that ‘IF YOU DESTROY A GREAT WORK OF ART you are destroying a greater soul than if you annihilated a whole district of London’, but approved of their energy, calling them ‘comrades’ and ‘the only things’ apart from artists ‘left in England with a little life in them.’5 I am almost certain that, had Richardson turned up at the Rebel Arts Centre, she would have been permitted to make the tea. Cinema attendance continued to be a popular pastime, with patrons witnessing the film debut of both Charlie Chaplin and his tramp alter ego in Making a Living and Kid Auto Races at Venice. Early scenes for another famous film would also be shot, as Frank Hurley took up his role of official photographer on Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition to cross Antarctica. The mission, which would come to be seen as the last major expedition of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, would have all the calamity and redemption of an adventure novel.