Issues of Modernism: Editorial Authority in Little Magazines of the Avant Guerre Raymond Tyler Babbie A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2017 Reading Committee: Brian Reed, Chair Leroy Searle Jeanne Heuving Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English © Copyright 2017 Raymond Tyler Babbie University of Washington Abstract Issues of Modernism: Editorial Authority in Little Magazines of the Avant Guerre Raymond Tyler Babbie Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Brian Reed, Professor Department of English Issues of Modernism draws from the rich archive of little magazines of the avant guerre in order to examine the editorial intervention that shaped the emergence of modernism in their pages. Beatrice Hastings of The New Age deployed modernist techniques both in her fiction and in her editorial practices, blurring the line between text and context in order to intervene forcefully in the aesthetic and political debates of her age, crucially in the ongoing debates over women’s suffrage. The first chapter follows her emergence as an experimental modernist writer and editor, showing how she intervened in the public sphere via pseudonyms and anonymous writing. When Roger Fry’s exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, became the scandal of the London art world in late 1910, she used the debate over its value as an impetus to write experimental fiction that self-consciously drew from post-impressionist techniques. She continued to develop and use these techniques through the following years. The second examines her career in 1913, during which she continued to develop her modernist fiction in counterpoint to her political interventions and satires. The third chapter turns to Dora Marsden, contextualizing her developing editorial techniques from The Freewoman to The New Freewoman, and into The Egoist. This chapter demonstrates that Marsden saw seriality as a way to mitigate language’s essential unreliability, a turn that made her journal a natural home for modernist experimentation. The final chapter examines H.D., a poet whose work and reception were deeply influenced by editorial decisions. Her use of complex serial poetics was overshadowed by the rhetoric of imagism in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, a circumstance that had long-lasting repercussions on the evaluation of her work. Each of these case studies involves modernist texts that shaped, and were shaped by, their periodical context. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE—Beatrice Hastings’ Modernism ...................................................................... 21 CHAPTER TWO—To the Last Detail: Beatrice Hastings’ Editorial Assemblage 1912-1914 .... 65 CHAPTER THREE—A Flexible Frame: Dora Marsden, Significance, and Signification in The Freewoman and The New Freewoman ....................................................................................... 100 CHAPTER FOUR—The Crystalline Legend: H.D.’s Serial Poetic in the Nineteen-Teens ...... 150 CONCLUSION—Montage at the Rag and Bone Shop .............................................................. 195 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................... 203 Babbie 1 INTRODUCTION In this dissertation, I examine magazines of the avant guerre and early years of the war, from 1908-1917, that first published many of the texts by the loose category of Anglo-American modernism. I consider how several editors of little magazines used their positions to influence how their readerships encountered the modernist avant-garde, following that movement’s increased attention to the form of a text or artwork, or the act of calling attention to the importance of form through experiment. The editors of little magazines attended to form as they arranged the texts that became each issue. As modernism developed in these magazines, some editors became increasingly experimental in their own writing, and some allowed their experiments to take place on the higher level of editorial function. This dissertation examines three case studies of the interaction of periodical form and modernist aesthetic philosophy in four chapters. The first two chapters examine the career of Beatrice Hastings in The New Age. Chapter one shows how Hastings began to experiment with her editorial power at roughly the same time she began to experiment with modernist form in her fiction. Her embrace of pseudonyms as a means to construct arguments breaks the unspoken rules of editorial conduct. Her first formally innovative short story is also a letter to the editor of The New Age, and explicitly engages with the ongoing debate over post-impressionist aesthetics hosted in the journal’s pages. Chapter two continues to follow the entwined threads of Hastings as innovative author and experimental editor, showing how she began to blend the political positions of The New Age with increasingly radical uses of pseudonyms, and used modernist fiction to advance those positions, even as they grew increasingly antifeminist. Hastings used the magazine both as a container for innovative work and as form with which to innovate. Babbie 2 Chapter three turns to Dora Marsden’s three journals, The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist. While Hastings experimented in The New Age through the use of multiple genres and pseudonyms to create intertextual assemblages, Marsden used the unique capabilities of the periodical as a tool for philosophical inquiry. Chapter three examines how her philosophical study of linguistics emerged from the rhetoric of The Freewoman, but then developed into a deep skepticism of the linguistic sign. Marsden used dialog with correspondents and contributors as a means to outline her theories about the untrustworthy nature of the sign in an attempt to evade the paradox of using language to criticize language. These dialogs call attention to the problems inherent in the conventions that govern communication; and they also begin to explain her willingness to host modernist art in her journals. Chapter four shifts the attention from the editor to the edited, as it considers H.D.’s early career in the little magazines. H.D. garnered many reviews and much attention despite having a very small body of work. These reviews quickly established grounds for reading H.D. as a chaste, austere, and pure poet. While intending to praise H.D., the patterns of reading established by reviews in Poetry and The Egoist created a version of H.D. that occluded the most interesting aspects of her work, in particular their intertextual and serial nature. Each chapter examines, then, the impact of modernism on editor and text, a reciprocal influence that shapes both sides of the transaction. I. Marjorie Perloff establishes the high stakes of understanding the avant guerre in The Futurist Moment. Her claims for the importance of collage could stand as a description of an intensely edited issue of The New Age or The New Freewoman: Babbie 3 Thus collage, perhaps the central artistic invention of the avant-guerre, incorporates directly into the work an actual fragment of the referent, thus forcing the reader or viewer to consider the interplay between preexisting message or material and the new artistic composition that results from the graft. If collage and its cognates (montage, assemblage, construction) call into question the representability of the sign, such related Futurist modes as manifesto, artist’s book, and performance call into question the stability of genre, of the individual medium, and of the barrier between artist and audience. The modernist magazines could sit alongside any of these genres, partaking in all of the above as they do. Picasso’s collages incorporated newspaper into their canvases in part to reference these capacities of periodical text. In Marsden’s case, they even reached the point of calling the representability of the sign into question. In Hastings’, perhaps the performance was the most important of the genres listed above. In her book Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant- Garde, Faith Binckes insists that The New Age’s editorial interventions must be read through their performative function (203). Hastings’ many pseudonyms attest to the truth in this. Perloff’s Futurist Moment establishes the importance of the avant guerre as well as the general frame of this project’s attention to periodicals as a modernist form. In The Picasso Papers, Rosalind Krauss extends Adorno’s theses on new music to Picasso’s career. Krauss divides Picasso’s career into two phases. The first is true modernism, modernism that explores the nature of the sign and the signified. The second is pastiche, the attempt to make things new. It is a particularly apt coincidence that the sign and pastiche are directly associated with two of the main characters of this study. Dora Marsden published “The Science of Signs” in The Egoist, and had been writing about the nature and limits of signification since The New Freewoman, and even at times in The Freewoman. It was during The New Babbie 4 Freewoman that she began to use the affordances of the form of periodical publishing to build her arguments. Meanwhile, Beatrice Hastings published many of her literary works in the Pastiche column of The New Age, and thrived on imitation, satire, and criticism; and on the many