WRITING COMMUNITIES: AESTHETICS, POLITICS, AND LATE MODERNIST LITERARY CONSOLIDATION by Elspeth Egerton Healey A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2008 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor John A. Whittier-Ferguson, Chair Associate Professor Kali A. K. Israel Associate Professor Joshua L. Miller Assistant Professor Andrea Patricia Zemgulys © Elspeth Egerton Healey _____________________________________________________________________________ 2008 Acknowledgements I have been incredibly fortunate throughout my graduate career to work closely with the amazing faculty of the University of Michigan Department of English. I am grateful to Marjorie Levinson, Martha Vicinus, and George Bornstein for their inspiring courses and probing questions, all of which were integral in setting this project in motion. The members of my dissertation committee have been phenomenal in their willingness to give of their time and advice. Kali Israel’s expertise in the constructed representations of (auto)biographical genres has proven an invaluable asset, as has her enthusiasm and her historian’s eye for detail. Beginning with her early mentorship in the Modernisms Reading Group, Andrea Zemgulys has offered a compelling model of both nuanced scholarship and intellectual generosity. Joshua Miller’s amazing ability to extract the radiant gist from still inchoate thought has meant that I always left our meetings with a renewed sense of purpose. I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my dissertation chair, John Whittier-Ferguson. His incisive readings, astute guidance, and ready laugh have helped to sustain this project from beginning to end. The life of a graduate student can sometimes be measured by bowls of ramen noodles and hours of grading. The generous fellowship support of the University of Michigan Department of English and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies has enabled me to partake of these graduate staples according to my own appetite rather than by necessity. Paul, John, Mona, Olivia and all of my wonderful co-workers at the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership have provided me with a rejuvenating early modern sojourn from twentieth century writing. Some of the most exciting and intellectually fulfilling moments of my work on this project have come while combing through Intercultural Publications memos, William Carlos Williams prescription pad notes, and early New Directions publicity materials. I am greatly indebted to the generosity of Indiana University’s Lilly Library, whose Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship supported a month-long research trip to work with the fascinating Intercultural Publications Mss. I must also ii thank the librarians at the University of Buffalo’s Lockwood Memorial Library and Harvard University’s Houghton Library for their assistance during my visits to their respective William Carlos Williams and New Directions Publishing Corp./James Laughlin collections. All three libraries proved such enticing environments that they have convinced me to make a career of working in archives and special collections. My graduate experience has been infinitely enriched by the remarkable cohort of women with whom I entered the English Ph.D program. I am constantly awed by the brilliance of their intellects and the depth of their kindness. Marjorie Rubright and Laura Ambrose were the first friends I made in Ann Arbor, and they have encouraged me with their insightful feedback, gift for gab, and willingness to indulge my sweet tooth. My Victorianist heroes Ji-Hyae Park and Latha Reddy diligently read the draftiest of drafts and have been my compatriots in all things silly and frivolous. The immediacy of the friendship of Lauren LaFauci and Rebecca Smith has not been diminished by their geographic relocations; their telephone calls have offered an important lifeline during these past years of writing. My fellow modernists Emily Lutenski and Jenny Sorensen have inspired me with their thinking on twentieth century literature. Tamara Bhalla, John Cords, and Gavin Hollis have ensured that I took study breaks for feasts consisting of Spanish Tortillas and outlandish cocktails. Thank you to my Lovely Television Ladies for camaraderie and cupcakes, and especially to Taryn Hakala and Casie LeGette, whose fabulous company made my final year of writing more enjoyable than I could have hoped. Finally, I would like to thank my wonderful family. My sister Emma’s patience in offering last-minute feedback on my French translations is matched only by her unshakeable support of all of my intellectual endeavors. Throughout my academic career, my parents have always graciously refrained from asking, “So, when are you going to get a job?” and have instead volunteered intellectual, emotional, and material support far beyond what any adult daughter could expect. My father’s tireless scouring of University of Toronto library book sales has meant that I always come home to a surprise trove of literary delights. I have used many of his finds (including the Riding and iii Graves first edition!) in the course of writing this dissertation. Since my childhood, my mother has provided me with an inspiring exemplar of passion for and dedication to the work of the mind. Her endless energy makes me hopeful for the years ahead! It is to my family—Emma, Robin, and Toni—that I dedicate this dissertation. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii List of Figures vi Introduction: Writing Communities 1 I. Notes Towards (and Away from) a Definition of Community 7 II. Late Modernism / Belated Modernism 15 III. Making Modernisms 21 IV. Overlapping Communities, Overlapping Inquiries 26 Chapter 1. Left Bank Legacies: Modernist Memoir’s Communal Economy 30 I. Conversations across the Page: Drawing the Discursive Field of Modernist Memoir 32 II. (The Problem with) Being Geniuses Together 43 III. Starring Roles at the Moveable Feast: Modernist Memoir and the Discourse of Celebrity 62 Chapter 2. Letting the Colors Run: William Carlos Williams and the Negotiation of Local and Literary Community 96 I. 9 Ridge Road: Williams and his Local Community 99 II. The Paper Forum: Williams and Literary Community 108 III. Conjunctions and Disjunctions: The Question of Community in The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams 112 IV. Being the Locus: Paterson as a Site of Conversation 122 Chapter 3. Publishing the Revolution of the Word: New Directions’ Consolidation of the Communities of the ‘New’ 145 I. New Directions: Politics and the Experimental Writer 153 II. The Ancestral (and Filial) New: Re-envisioning the Temporal and National Parameters of the Modern Movement 167 Chapter 4. Institutionalizing Anti-Institutionalism: The Paradox of Perspectives USA’s Cold War Modernism 193 I. Formal Skirmishes 196 II. Modeling Nationalist / Internationalist Modernism 204 III. National Representatives: (Mis)adventures in Synecdoche 210 IV. Shifting Paradigms 222 V. Ezra Pound: A Case Study in Clashing Cultures 231 Conclusion: Modernist Redux 242 Bibliography 247 v List of Figures Figure 1.1 Sylvia Beach in Shakespeare and Company. 93 1.2 Adrienne Monnier in her bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres. 94 1.3 The man in the shadow and the man in the sun: Robert McAlmon (left) and Ernest Hemingway in a Spanish bullring, 1923. 95 1. 4 Journalist and publisher William Bird. 95 3.1 Spearhead ad published in The Nation in November 1947. 191 3.2. New Classics book jacket for Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (NC 11 1946); design by Alvin Lustig. 192 3.3. New Classics book jacket for Gustave Flaubert’s Three Tales (NC 7 ca. 1945); design by Alvin Lustig. 192 4.1 Part of the table of contents for the first issue of Perspektiven, Perspectives USA’s German language edition. 239 4.2 The cover of the American edition of Perspectives USA, No. 2 (Winter 1953). 240 4.3 Perspectives USA, No. 8 (Summer 1954) was the last issue to feature the words “art music literature” on the cover. 240 4.4 The cover of Perspectives USA, No. 10 (Winter 1955). 240 4.5 The covers of Perspectives USA, No. 13 and 14. 241 vi Introduction: Writing Communities Writing on the neglect of tradition in After Strange Gods (1934), T.S. Eliot declared, “What is disastrous is that the writer should deliberately give rein to his ‘individuality’, that he should even cultivate his differences from others; and that his readers should cherish the author of genius, not in spite of his deviations from the inherited wisdom of the race, but because of them.”1 This moment signals a development in Eliot’s communalist turn, his increasing preoccupation with the bonds of collectivity offered by religious and (for him, European) cultural tradition. Though many of his fellow writers would take issue with the particular tenor of Eliot’s assessments in After Strange Gods, they too were increasingly contemplating the tensions between innovation and tradition, individuation and association. Indeed, the 1930s and the subsequent wartime years stand as a period during which contrasting visions of community dominated the social and political landscape. Communism, Left-ism, New Deal politics, and Fascism (to span the political spectrum) all diverged from Liberalism’s emphasis on the individual to refocus attention on the social body. Community accordingly re-emerged as a live topic of both political and aesthetic debate. Writing Communities: Aesthetics, Politics, and Late Modernist Literary Consolidation sets out to examine several key late modernist re-articulations of literary community that occurred alongside and in conversation with the era’s more recognizable politicized communities. It argues that late modernist constitutions of literary community entailed not only an aesthetic response to and corrective of a 1920s strain of individualism, but also a self-conscious attempt to influence the paradigms and figures by which modernist communities were beginning to enter into cultural memory. 1 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1934), 33. The collection is a print version of the speeches that Eliot delivered as the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia in 1933.