MODERNIST WOMEN IN PRINT: MINA LOY, KAY BOYLE, MARY BUTTS, AND THE PERIODICAL PRESS by SHANNON WHITLOCK LEVITZKE (Under the Direction of Adam Parkes) ABSTRACT The present study argues that the quick and steady growth of magazines in the early twentieth century informed the availability, popularity, reception, and influence of, as well as shaped the creative and critical work done by, modernist women writers. In particular, it examines the publishing careers of Mina Loy, Kay Boyle, and Mary Butts and posits that the women were able to forge professional identities for themselves through the various periodicals in which they appeared. While all of the authors published books, their careers in avant-garde and mainstream magazines, as well as in newspapers, reveal the importance of the British and American periodical press in developing, maintaining, and sometimes harming their status as writers. By examining the significant impact that their contributions to, and appearances in, periodicals had on their relationships with their peers, their readers, their artistic choices, and, to some extent, their failed canonization, we can further our understanding of the role the press played in fostering contemporary women’s modernism and upending our current beliefs of the movement’s core characteristics, as well as recontextualize both aesthetic innovation and the politics of professionalism. INDEX WORDS: Kay Boyle, Mary Butts, Mina Loy, little magazines, modernism, periodical press, publishing MODERNIST WOMEN IN PRINT: MINA LOY, KAY BOYLE, MARY BUTTS, AND THE PERIODICAL PRESS by SHANNON WHITLOCK LEVITZKE MA, Auburn University, 2001 BA, Auburn University, 2000 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2011 © 2011 Shannon Whitlock Levitzke All Rights Reserved MODERNIST WOMEN IN PRINT: MINA LOY, KAY BOYLE, MARY BUTTS, AND THE PERIODICAL PRESS by SHANNON WHITLOCK LEVITZKE Major Professor: Adam Parkes Committee: Jed Rasula Susan Rosenbaum Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2011 iv DEDICATION For Ronnie, Tyler, and Mia v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee members, Adam Parkes, Jed Rasula, and Susan Rosenbaum, for their support throughout this process and for enriching my graduate school experience. Adam Parkes, in particular, has offered extensive and helpful feedback on every draft, and without his insight and guidance, this project would not have been possible. I also would like to thank the University of Georgia Graduate School, the University of Georgia English department, the Jane and Harry Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, and the Modernist Studies Association for funding that allowed me to pursue research related to this dissertation and to present various sections of it at professional conferences. Most of all, I would like to thank my family: Jud, Gayle, Kyle, and Megan Whitlock, who fostered my love of learning and encouraged me at every step of the way; Ronnie, who has always given me love, support, and encouragement, even when I doubted myself; and Tyler and Mia, who have lightened my heart and reaffirmed my sense of purpose. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 MODERNISM AND THE PERIODICAL PRESS .......................................................1 I. A Short History of the Periodical Press in America and England ........................1 II. The Changing Face of Modernist Periodical Studies ..........................................8 III. Modernist Women Writers in the Periodicals ..................................................14 2 MAPPING THE MODERN: MINA LOY AND THE LITTLE MAGAZINES .........24 I. Introducing Mina Loy .........................................................................................24 II. Loy’s Early Publications ...................................................................................28 III. The Rogue Years ..............................................................................................42 IV. Others Fame.....................................................................................................57 V. The Modern Woman .........................................................................................64 3 HOLDING THE ARTIST ACCOUNTABLE: KAY BOYLE IN THE AVANT- GARDE AND POPULAR PRESS ..............................................................................80 I. Reexamining Kay Boyle’s Publishing Legacy ...................................................80 II. Boyle’s Little Magazine Poetry and the Dangers of Aestheticism ...................86 III. Isolation and Exploitation in Boyle’s Fiction ..................................................97 IV. Undermining the transition Proclamation ...................................................104 V. Boyle’s Covert Feminism ...............................................................................109 vii VI. The Writer and the War .................................................................................115 4 “HOPE OUT OF THE REVIEWING BUSINESS”: MARY BUTTS, MODERNISM, AND THE BOOK REVIEW .....................................................................................131 I. Mary Butts, Reviewer .......................................................................................131 II. The Critical Culture of Modernism and the Role of the Book Review ...........133 III. Butts’s Chosen Venues ..................................................................................139 IV. Modern Antiquity ..........................................................................................144 V. Myth and the Modern Landscape....................................................................165 VI. “We are its priests”: Preserving England’s Legacy and Landscape ..............175 5 THE ENDURING LEGACY OF THE MODERN PERIODICAL PRESS ..............199 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................209 1 CHAPTER 1 MODERNISM AND THE PERIODICAL PRESS I. A Short History of the Periodical Press in America and England In August of 1924, Kay Boyle wrote to her good friend and mentor Lola Ridge, “I believe you didn’t know that Harriet Monroe [of Poetry] accepted the Harbor Song—with reservations. I needed the money and agreed to her censorship. She couldn’t ‘risk’ the section entitled ‘Whore Street’ and she didn’t ‘dare’ retain the word ‘buttocks’ in the section ‘For the Sea’” (qtd. in Scott 153). Boyle’s reluctant acquiescence in Monroe’s revisions illustrates the position of many modernists, who were torn between the need to see their work published and the desire to maintain the integrity of their aesthetic vision. This was not a novel struggle, of course. For years, writers had been forced to make similar choices and to bow to the stringent demands of censors. But Boyle’s situation is noteworthy for other reasons. To begin with, the work was published in Monroe’s Poetry, a little magazine that boasted an Open Door Policy and was dedicated to showcasing the talents of experimental young writers. Only five years earlier, in fact, Monroe had written, “Art is not static—it must go on or retreat” (qtd. in Scott 241). Thus, her unwillingness to “risk” or “dare” some of the more controversial of Boyle’s passages indicates an oft-ignored pressure that editors faced in balancing the demands of their readership with their magazines’ competitiveness as fresh artistic venues.1 Equally important, though, is the fact that Boyle published “Summer,” a revised version of the poem with the “Whore Street” section intact, in This Quarter a few months after its appearance in Poetry. Ernest Walsh specifically chose it for his magazine to emphasize his hands-off stance and to challenge those 2 editors and publishers who would compromise the authenticity of a work in order to placate either the reading public or official censors. An open act of defiance against publishing constraints, Walsh’s decision was perhaps more significant because of the dialogue that it represented. By responding to Monroe via This Quarter, Walsh demonstrated that the little magazines of the early twentieth century were not isolated products with fixed readerships but complex, dynamic facets of a larger network of artistic production. Walsh’s objection is just one example of the myriad ways in which writers and editors engaged with one another through the magazines, but it illustrates well what Jayne Marek calls the “material culture” of the era and the channels through which artists were able to shape, define, and ultimately validate the modernist project.2 This dialogue did not end with avant-garde periodicals either but spread to magazines and newspapers of all sizes and “brows,” demonstrating the interconnectedness of the larger publishing culture. An author appearing in Others, for example, might be parodied or praised in the New York Evening Sun, as was the case with Mina Loy, who was featured there as the ideal “modern” woman but also ridiculed for her upending of romantic conventions in “Love Songs.” Or, like Mary Butts, a writer might review for the modernist magazine Time and Tide while simultaneously submitting work to a widely circulated mainstream paper such as The Sunday Times, disrupting myths of modernist