The University of Chicago Skeletonization
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SKELETONIZATION, CAMERAFLAGE, LOITERING: HABITS OF WITNESSING AFTER THE GREAT WAR A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY CHALCEDONY BODNAR WILDING CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2019 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................................................................................................................................ii LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT: SKELETONIZATION, CAMERAFLAGE, LOITERING: HABITS OF WITNESSING AFTER THE GREAT WAR ............................................................................................................................................................ v INTRODUCTION: SKELETONIZING THE GREAT WAR ........................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: “WHAT IS CLOSER TO THE TRUTH”: MARIANNE MOORE TAKES “IMAGINARY POSSESSION” OF THE WAR’S “WELL EXCAVATED GRAVE” ........................................................................ 24 CHAPTER 2: “LISTEN WHILE I TELL YOU ALL THE TIME”: GERTRUDE STEIN AND ALICE B. TOKLAS ELEGIZE “CAMERAFLAGE” IN COINCIDENCE ................................................................................ 82 CHAPTER 3: “THE LAST BLEAK NEWS OF THE BALLAD”: GWENDOLYN BROOKS LOITERS, AFTER MAMIE TILL-MOBLEY’S BABY .......................................................................................................................... 143 CODA: “AS BLUE AS NIGHT, OR MEMORY” .................................................................................................... 187 APPENDIX: CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT BEN HECHT AND CHICAGO DAILY NEWS EDITOR C. H. DENNIS, FEBRUARY 1919 ............................................................ 203 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................................................................... 208 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Caption Title Page Chapter 1 1.1 “One of the Great Guns…” 36 1.2 “Grotesque Masks the Only Protection Against Gas” 39 1.3 “What Was Once Ypres Cathedral” 42 1.4 “Stripped and Shattered Trunks of Trees at Verdun…” 44 1.5 “Current Poetry,” Literary Digest 56 55 1.6 Marianne Moore, “A Graveyard,” Dial 71 57 1.7 Marianne Moore, “When I Buy Pictures,” Dial 71 63 1.8 “Reims in Her Glory” 67 1.9 “The Shrine of the Holy Sepulcher” 67 1.10 “A Grave[]” palimpsest 77 Chapter 2 2.1 “What Seems a Dead Horse…” 94 2.2 “The Dummy Horse Here Shown…” 94 2.3 “Tree Climber in Black and White, American Front” 94 2.4 “German Observation Post Constructed…” 94 2.5 “Concrete German Observation Post at la Basée…” 94 2.6 “Trafalgar Square, in London, Was Transformed…” 94 2.7 Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas en homme et femme 102 2.8 “Gertrude Stein,” Sir Cecil Beaton, 1937 102 2.9 Gertrude Stein posing for Jo Davidson, Man Ray, 1923 102 2.10 Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation, typescript 2, Part V, Stanza LXXXIII 117 2.11 Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation, Stanza LXXXIII with manuscript, typescript, and printing variations 117 2.12 Unidentified friends of Gertrude Stein, Venice, c. 1904 120 2.13 Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Venice, 1908 120 2.14 Foto-Qualität title page, László Moholy-Nagy, 1931 134 2.15 [Photogram], László Moholy-Nagy, 1925–1927 134 2.16 [Rayograph], Man Ray, c. 1924 134 2.17 “Rayograph: Comb, Straight Razor Blade, and Other Forms,” Man Ray, 1922 134 2.18 Gertrude Stein, manuscript pages, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor 137 2.19 Gertrude Stein, typescript pages, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor 137 2.20 Blood on the Dining-Room Floor colophon dedicated to Carl Van Vetchen 139 Chapter 3 3.1 NAACP Negro Silent Protest Parade, July 28, 1917 145 3.2 “Arrest of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sept 3 1958,” Charles Moore 153 3.3 Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, 1930, Marion, Indiana 172 3.4 Lynching of John (Jack) Holmes, 1933, San Jose, California 172 3.5 Emmett Till post-mortem photographs, Jet Magazine, September 15, 1955, pages 8 and 9 178 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work would not be possible without the support of my committee: Lauren Berlant, Maud Ellmann, and Jennifer Scappettone. Their expertise, patience, line-by-line revisions, and wry humor have been invaluable. Much of the project’s germination and archival grounding come from an NEH Summer Seminar and Institute called “Making Modernism” under the direction of Liesl Olson; I am grateful for her personal and professional guidance and for the resources and time the Newberry Library afforded me that summer. The care and keeping of this work and its author are indebted as well to those who have read, suggested, debated, cajoled, listened, prepared late-night coffee, and accompanied me on long thinking walks. Thank you to Mischa Fleishman, Stephanie Anderson, Margaret Fink, Amanda Davis, Megan Tusler, Tristan Bates, Aleks Prigozhin, Mollie Eisenberg, Steven Crane, Steph Mielcarek, Alice Chan, S. Wissow, Lisa Steinman, Ellen Keck Stauder, and the many past and present members of the Poetry and Poetics Workshop and Chicago Review. Finally, this work is for my family: for my mother Judit Bodnar, who encouraged me to ask my favorite poet a question when I was fifteen, and whose cadence is always in mine; for my sister Samantha Wilding, who best understands the inclusionary and exclusionary work of specialized vocabularies and who appreciates all the best things in coffee; and for my late father Jack Wilding, whose mix of passion and skepticism have been the elegy of this project. iv ABSTRACT: SKELETONIZATION, CAMERAFLAGE, LOITERING: HABITS OF WITNESSING AFTER THE GREAT WAR In contradistinction to the paradigmatic version of war witnessing presented by Paul Fussell, this project tracks American non-combatant poetic modes of witnessing World War I. In the United States, interest in the Great War sparked a boom in journalistic photography that coincided with the growing production of little magazines, meaning that the look of the war on the page was codifying in newspapers at the same moment as the look of the poem on the page was codifying in magazines. This dissertation argues that the “look” of the war on the newspaper page and the “look” of the poem shared a radical communicative efficiency called “skeletonization,” the act of minimalizing or occluding text or detail.1 This process can also intensify, magnify, or shatter the text’s effects, which is where poetic practices have intervened. Though skeletonization generally perpetuated the feel of the flesh-witness accounts Americans craved—by producing the “I” and the seeming intimacy borne of seeming immediacy that a reader could then encounter personally—skeletonization and the related processes of re-fleshing, cameraflage, and loitering were actually a far more complicated and composite process of transmission and reconstruction. This more complicated version of viewing and reading the war therefore presses on the lyric 1 “Skeletonization” is a Chicago Daily News term for the more widely known journalistic term, “cabelese,” the process or product of excising extraneous language or punctuation from a newspaper story prior to sending it by telegram in order to save telegraphing costs. This was of paramount importance for Chicago Daily News war foreign correspondents in a period where telegraph costs could run as high as ten cents a word. Skeletonization also required an act of “re- fleshing” on the other end, where editors intuited and added back the missing language and punctuation prior to publication. I use these terms both literally and figuratively in the dissertation to describe the assumptions made around the process of transmission. For a fuller account of the term “skeletonization,” see the introduction and Appendix A, where I reproduce correspondence between Berlin foreign correspondent Ben Hecht and his editor C. H. Dennis. Newberry Midwest MS Hecht papers, box 2 folder 19, and box 56 folder 1183. v assumptions we have inherited about how the war was witnessed; it asks us to reconsider who counts as a witness. I test out the look of wartime as a lyric problem by proposing three experiments in witnessing. Each involves a journalistic photographic provocation derived from the way in which War Department censorship framed who deserved protection, and what they required protection from—for example, (white) war wives and mothers deserved protection from the visually graphic death of any body they could imagine as their husband’s or son’s. Each experiment then close reads archival photographs and their captions to rework the terms of visual skeletonization, highlighting what journalists deemed necessary viewing and the ways they prepared audiences to read in to images, even when that reading might be at odds with the War Department’s goals. Such potential “errors” in transmission can have poetic effects, and each of my experiments concludes by close reading the content and look of poetry by a female American poet who is generally not taken as a flesh-witness to the war, but whose work speaks to that chapter’s photographic question, in order to