Birkbeck, University of London Italian Futurism and the Development of English Literary Modernism, 1909–1915 Robyn Sarah Jakeman Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 Declaration I, Robyn Jakeman, declare that this thesis is my own work. Where I have drawn upon the work of other researchers, this has been fully acknowledged. 2 Abstract This thesis considers the role of Italian Futurism in the development of English literary modernism between 1909 and 1915. It maps a set of complex and heterogeneous responses to the movement, involving both rejection and appropriation, in which attempts to experiment with English literature are undertaken in a bid to become ‘modern’. I argue that Futurism represented for many English modernists a profoundly relevant approach to a social and cultural crisis that had emerged in the late nineteenth century. In this sense, Futurism was less a movement to be officially joined than a methodology that was appropriated in order to subvert and develop fin- de-siècle cultural discourses. The thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter one addresses Futurism’s inception in the internationalised space of cultural production of Europe before the First World War, and the movement’s emergence in England. It suggests that Futurism was frequently understood as a means of transforming social discourses of decline, cultural discourses of Decadence, and the relationship between art and the public. The second chapter explores Harold Monro’s interactions with F. T. Marinetti and his publication of Futurist poetry in Poetry and Drama, and considers how Monro transmitted Futurism to an English readership to suggest ways of developing Decadent and Symbolist poetry. Chapter three examines Wyndham Lewis’s use of Futurist strategies in Vorticism to negotiate the Aestheticist divide between art and life, but also shows how tensions between the two movements continue to manifest in Blast. The fourth chapter considers Mina Loy’s writings in the context of Futurist discourses and New Woman debates in Florence, demonstrating how she appropriated Futurist methods to inform her feminist thought and disrupt the basis on which 3 gendered difference is predicated. I conclude the thesis by considering the implications of my work for the field of modernist studies. 4 Acknowledgements I would not have been able to write this thesis without the support of a number of colleagues, friends, and family members. I am eternally grateful to my PhD supervisors Joanne Winning and Ana Parejo Vadillo, whose encouragement and positive feedback has motivated me to complete this thesis. Their critical insight has developed my thinking and enriched my work enormously over the last few years, and I cannot imagine having better or more inspiring mentors. Special thanks are due to the Hanbury Charity, which provided me with a generous grant to buy a new laptop at the beginning of this degree. Flore Janssen and Sasha Dovzhyk gave up their time to read various chapter drafts over the course of my PhD, and I am indebted to them for their perceptive comments and suggestions. David Gillott gave me invaluable advice on referencing. Charlotte Logan-Jones kindly checked my French translations. Kashif Nazir has been a dependable and supportive partner throughout the high and low points of this work, and I cannot thank him enough for the extraordinary patience he has shown while I have had to work long and late hours at the library. Above all, I would like to thank my parents, Robert Jakeman and Pauline Jakeman, and my grandfather Raymond Jakeman, for their unwavering and unconditional support throughout the process of my PhD studies. Without their kindness and generosity I would certainly never have been able to start, and still less complete this work, and so it is to them that I dedicate this thesis. 5 Table of Contents List of Illustrations 8 Introduction 9 Chapter One: An Imagined Community: Transnational Futurism and Futurism in England, 1909–1914 41 Conceiving Space: Futurism’s Nationalist and Cosmopolitan Tendencies 45 Futurism and European Fields of Cultural Production 59 Establishing Futurism in England 69 Conclusion 90 Chapter Two: ‘The Beautiful Future’: Harold Monro, Poetry and Drama, and Futurism 92 Harold Monro and F. T. Marinetti’s Futurism 97 Futurist Poetry in Poetry and Drama: Between Symbolism and Futurism 112 Monro’s Futurism 124 Afterlives of Futurism 136 Conclusion 141 Chapter Three: ‘A Futurism of Place’: Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism between Aestheticism and Futurism 144 Vorticism in the Field of Cultural Production 149 Lewis and Aestheticism 157 Lewis and Futurism 174 ‘Futurism, Magic and Life’ 185 Conclusion 196 6 Chapter Four: Mina Loy’s Futurist Methodology: Degendering the Modern Woman 200 Loy and New Woman Discourses in Florence 205 Futurism and ‘Woman’ 219 Loy’s Futurist Methodology 236 Towards a Materialist Feminism 253 Conclusion 257 Conclusion 261 Bibliography 270 7 List of Illustrations Figure 1. E. X. Kapp, ‘Impression of Wyndham Lewis’, The New Weekly, vol. 1, no. 11 (30 May 1914), p. 331. 169 Figure 2. X. Marcel Boulestin, ‘Post Georgian’, The Blue Review, vol. 1, no 3 (July 1913), n. p. [‘Frontispiece’]. 171 8 Introduction Erupting on to the European cultural scene on the front page of the Parisian daily newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, Futurism announced a new literary and artistic programme that celebrated modernity in all its guises.1 The ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, devised and disseminated by the movement’s founder and impresario F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944), narrated the story of its author’s car crash and metaphorical rebirth, followed by a catalogue of hyperbolic statements intended to demonstrate Futurism’s commitment to the innovative and rebellious but also destructive powers of modernity. It claimed to address itself not to the intellectual elite, but to the modern phenomenon of the crowd — the ‘great masses shaken with work, pleasure, or rebellion’ — and demanded the demolition of ‘museums, libraries, [and] academies’: institutions that encouraged the worship of the past rather than stimulating a love for the future.2 Most controversially, the movement called for the glorification and aesthetic appreciation of war as the ‘only hygiene of the world’, as well as ‘militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt for woman’.3 While it is perhaps something of a commonplace to begin a study of Futurism with a brief summary of its founding gesture, no other document has encapsulated so successfully the aims and objectives, as well as the inherent tensions and contradictions of the movement. Futurism was presented as a fundamental break with the past, existing in an atemporal sphere, yet the first manifesto is filled with references to the past and present. It claimed to address the 1 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Le Futurisme’, Le Figaro, 20 February 1909, p. 1. 2 F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ [1909], in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 49–53 (p. 51). 3 Ibid. 9 masses but was publicised in a famously literary newspaper. And, perhaps most significantly, while the manifesto’s emphasis is placed on a specifically Italian national renewal, it speaks to — or rather, shouts at — an international cultural community. The international manifestations of Futurism, specifically its manifestations in English literature, are the focus of this thesis. Although much attention has been devoted to this subject, the movement has essentially been portrayed in modernist criticism as an unwelcome invasion, a movement that had no influence, or was, quite simply, ineffective. For Paul Peppis, Futurism’s ‘effect on [English] literature remained virtually non-existent, and when it did have an effect on actual writing it did so only in the wake of its unquestionable influence in forming a visual avant-garde in England’, and while Cubo-Futurism was strongly evident in painting, there ‘was no equivalent assimilation of Futurism in writing’.4 If Futurism is studied in relation to literary modernism then it is largely considered in terms of its fascination with modernity, its identification with the machine, and its obsession with speed. It also tends to focus predominantly on the ultra-male strands of modernism — the ‘men of 1914’ as Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) later referred to himself, Ezra Pound (1885– 1972), T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), and James Joyce (1882–1941).5 As a result, English responses have often been understood to be unambiguously hostile to Futurism: Lawrence Rainey, for example, refers to Imagism as the ‘first anti-avant-garde’, while Martin Puchner brands Lewis and Vorticism as the ‘rear-garde’, adopting a ‘defensive’ stance within a nascent avant-garde culture.6 4 Paul Peppis, ‘Futurism, Literature, and the Market’, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 132–51 (p. 142). 5 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering [1937] (London: Caldar and Boyars, 1967), p. 252. 6 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 30; Martin Puchner, ‘The Aftershocks of Blast: Manifestos, Satire, and the 10 A focus on Futurism’s fetishisation of technological modernity and the aesthetics of speed, which is perhaps to say the more superficial aspects of the movement’s