PERFORMANCES OF AUTHORSHIP IN THE MODERNIST SALON A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Cecily Hodges Swanson May 2013 © 2013 Cecily Hodges Swanson PERFORMANCES OF AUTHORSHIP IN THE MODERNIST SALON Cecily Hodges Swanson, Ph. D. Cornell University 2013 Literary salons were a vital part of modernist culture. Although scholars have called attention to the ways in which salon conversations shaped subsequent works of literature, they have ignored the extent to which modernist writers conceived of conversation as a form of literary practice in itself. Performances of Authorship in the Modernist Salon argues that within the modernist salon, conversation first came to be treated as a medium that could be circulated, and even “saved,” like the printed page and the sound recordings that were just becoming available. What had been a metaphor became a material practice: for Gertrude Stein, writing was like “talking and listening,” but for lesser-known American salon organizers, talking and listening were forms of writing. “Salon writing,” as practiced by Natalie Barney, Muriel Draper, Margaret Anderson, and Jean Toomer, challenges presumptions about the irretrievability of modernist sociability. The blank pages, unpublished memoirs, transcribed conversations, broadcasts, and performance skits that compose the archives of these writers are not mere supplements to literary and historical analysis; these artifacts are themselves the literature of the modernist salon. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH In 2005, Cecily Swanson received her B.A. in English with highest honors from Reed College, where she completed an undergraduate thesis on Ezra Pound’s Cantos. She studied in Paris during the summer of 2004, earning a certificate for superior level French from the Sorbonne. She completed her Master degree in English at Cornell University in 2009 and received her Ph.D. in 2013. During the summer of 2008, she received a certificate for graduate work in French from the Institut d’études françaises d’Avignon. In 2012-2013, she was the recipient of an FGSS (Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) dissertation completion fellowship. Her dissertation emerged out of research at rare book and manuscript libraries on both sides of the Atlantic: the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, and the Bibiliothèque Nationale in Paris; the British Library in London; the Beinecke Library at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She has published essays in the Journal of Modern Literature, Metropolitan Archivist, and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. iii For my parents, Devon Hodges and Eric Swanson. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation tries to eschew pieties about conversation—that it inspires, that it is an end in itself, that it is the goal of all intellectual endeavors. Yet, when I consider my debt to so many interlocutors, I can only think in gushing platitudes about the importance of colloquy. Ellis Hanson’s perceptive comments on an early seminar paper about Oscar Wilde sparked my interest in conversation as a writerly form. I am so thankful for his insightful reading of my work throughout graduate school. His superlative sense of literary style raises the bar for academic writing; with his fine ear and attentive eye, he improved each of my dissertation chapters. Working as his research assistant in the summer 2011, I gained first hand appreciation of his critical acumen. Jeremy Braddock profoundly influenced my conceptualization of this project. It was he who encouraged me to pursue archival research, and at each step of the writing process, he invigorated my ideas and opened my eyes to critical possibilities I would have missed otherwise. Talking with him made working hard feel worth it. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to learn from such a challenging and brilliant scholar. Margo Crawford joined my dissertation committee at a turning point in the project’s evolution; it is thanks to her shrewd readings and incisive questions that I began to understand how to frame my theoretical apparatus. I always leave her office with a renewed sense of purpose, motivated by her energy and buoyed by her suggestions. Jonathan Culler has been extraordinarily generous with his time and provided crucial support for my research in France. I am thankful for his encouragement of my forays into French literature and for the high example he sets as a scholar and a teacher. I owe sincere thanks Rick Bogel, for his long encouragement and sharp responses to my writing, and also to George Hutchinson, for his extremely helpful thoughts on my Toomer chapter and his support of my work. Numerous grants made my archival research possible: a FLAS scholarship from the U.S. Department of Education allowed me to spend a summer studying French literature in Avignon, France; a year-long fellowship as the graduate assistant to Cornell’s study abroad program in v Paris permitted me to study Natalie Barney’s archives; a Society for the Humanities travel grant enabled me to work at the British Library; and two awards in the summer of 2011—the Alice Hanson Cook Award and the M. H. Abrams award—provided resources for my research at the Beinecke Library. This year, a FGSS dissertation fellowship gave me the time and support to complete this project. “I am not solitary whilst I read and write.” So claimed Emerson, but few graduate students at the end of their dissertations would agree. How wonderful to have friends with whom to talk “through tea, through whisky, through dinner. Through the night,” as Muriel Draper put it. Grey Anderson has been a careful reader of my work for more than ten years; I trust his opinion always. Other Reed friends—Osman Balkan, Jake Becker, Jacob Bromberg, Dan Denvir, Kate Hardy, and Andy Rumbach—have exemplified the twinned art of living well and thinking well. Many thanks are due to the remarkable friends I made during graduate school: Caetlin Benson- Allott, Jacob Brogan, Jane Carr, Lily Cui, Sarah Ensor, Andrea Gadberry, Danielle and Jameel Haque, Paul Flaig, Ari Linden, Leo Pollak, and Seth Perlow. Particular gratitude is due to Stephanie DeGooyer, who provided much cheer and encouragement, and to Jess Keiser, Owen Boynton, and Ingrid Diran, who offered useful comments on various iterations of these pages. And, in the words of Montaigne when asked to explain his friendship to de la Boétie, I say to Myranda Gillies, “Par ce que c'estoit luy; par ce que c'estoit moy.” This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Eric Swanson and Devon Hodges, for their unflagging interest in my work, their careful feedback on all my writing, and their commitment to intellectual rigor. I am the lucky writer who can count her parents among her most important readers. I also thank my brother Tristan Swanson, and my dear extended family, especially Kathryn Swanson, Carmela Ciararu, and Bill Tagliani. Kip Berman was an advocate of my studiousness when I was a somewhat wayward college freshman and he was an even more footloose senior. He has remained a pillar and has shown me what it means to be steadfast—to another, and to a goal. When my grandma Shirley Wolfe died last April, we discovered that she had been a prolific diarist. Her journals—witty, cranky, serious, and artistically ambitious— vi remind me of the tireless performances of authorship I discuss in the pages that follow. To keep writing, without a clear end or an audience, is an achievement from which I draw inspiration. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgments v Introduction: Talking of Michelangelo? The Salon Writers Against Influence 1 1. Salon Style: Natalie Barney and the Imprint of the Archive 27 Individualism and Bohemianism in Barney’s Early Writings and Salon 32 Brokering Modernist Experimentation in the Wake of the Salon 46 2. Conversation Pieces: Circulating Muriel Draper’s Salon 58 Beginnings: Edith Grove and Music at Midnight 61 “Talking It Over” after Music at Midnight 73 3. The Little Review and the Rise of the Reader Critic 83 The Ladies’ Home Journal and The Dial 87 “Tokens of Familiarity” in “The Reader Critic” 94 The Literary Genealogy of Salon Conversation 102 “Vers Libre Prize Contest” and the “Blank” Issue 106 “So Many Really Bad Poems”: Anderson’s Condemnation of her Contest 119 4. Author Dysfunction in Jean Toomer’s Gurdjieff Archive 124 Toomer’s Early Gurdjieff Practice 129 Scripting Social Experience in Chicago 135 The Cottage Experiment and “Life Behind the Labels” 140 Non-Identification in Cane’s “Box Seat” 147 Coda: Writers Without Literature 155 Bibliography 167 viii Introduction Talking of Michelangelo? The Salon Writers Against Influence “Most inspiration [is] merely unconscious plagiarism, and writing in general [is] a moment of arrested development”—Natalie Barney (The One who is Legion 96) “We talked through tea, through whiskey…through the night”—Muriel Draper (Music at Midnight 111) “I can conceive of a library without books”—Margaret Anderson (“Home as an Emotional Adventre” 54) “My entire associative process is composed of such images and such conversations!”—Jean Toomer (“Notes from Mill House Gurdjieff Meeting” 1) In New York City in the early 1940s, Muriel Draper drafted a short screenplay about the music salon she had run in London between 1909-1914. Her salon, whose guests included John Singer Sargent, Henry James, and Vaslav Nijinsky, had been the inspiration for several popular articles in Harper’s Magazine, a bestselling 1928 memoir, Music at Midnight, and an improvisational NBC radio show, “It’s a Woman’s World” (1937-1938). Draper’s “arrangement for filming,” stored within her capacious archive at the Beinecke library, describes the lively, impromptu quality of these gatherings, but also communicates her sense of her salon’s literary importance: It was not long before London heard about this miraculous private concert season, and used every means to obtain invitations and place in this exclusive auditorium….Results show immediately.