The Space and Place of Modernism

The Little Magazine in New York

Adam McKible

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136067860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines reactions to the Russian Revolution by four little magazines of the teens and twenties ( The Liberator, The Messenger, The Little Review, and The Dial ) in order to analyze some of the ways modernist writers negotiate the competing demands of aesthetics, political commitment and race. Re-examining interconnections among such superficially disparate phenomena as the Harlem Renaissance, Greenwich Village bohemianism, modernism and Leftist politics, this book rightly emphasizes the vitality of little magazines and argues for their necessary place in the study of modernism.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The Blood and Bones of Modernism

Scene: A cellar in Greenwich Village. A few chairs and tables, weird and grotesque paintings and sketches on the walls, a battered upright piano in one corner and windows curtained with batik, complete the picture. A shabbily dressed man and woman are chatting at one of the tables. In the corner a waitress in Russian village costume sits reading a copy of the Dial. (George Schuyler, “At the Coffee House,” The Messenger, June 1925, 236)

I. TIME, SPACE, AND MODERNISM

The abstractions time and space enjoy wide currency in discussions and histories of American modernism, and with good reason; in the early twentieth-century, many writers were profoundly interested in the relationships of time and space to the shifting experiences of the modern condition. In the ensuing decades since the rise of modernism, and through the processes of canonization and institution building, however, this interest in time and space has been too often reified rather than interrogated. As a starting point for my discussion of little magazines and the Russian Revolution, I want to meditate on two essays by inveterate little magazine figures — T. S. Eliot’s 1919 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and Mike Gold’s 1921 “Towards Proletarian Art” — in order to tease out some of the ideas about not only time and space, but of place, nation, and body that arise in these essays.

Eliot’s essay points toward two of modernism’s most important aesthetic ideals: the impersonality of the poet and the monumentality of art. Eliot describes the “mature poet” as one who surrenders to “something which is more valuable” than himself, the poetic tradition. Distancing himself from his own feelings and emotions, the mature, impersonal poet acts as a “catalyst” and “receptacle” of the tradition (6-8). Arguing also for the monumentality of art, Eliot envisions the poetic tradition as a “simultaneous order” (4), a synchronous space in which past and future are contained in eternal time:

[W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (5)

In this passage, Eliot produces a topography of art, one that can be almost entirely mapped and known, even into the future, because the poetic is always a fixed quality. Monuments shift upon the introduction of the new, but that very novelty is anticipated, because the future is already incorporated into the past. Eliot further elaborates upon this spatialization of art by describing the poetic tradition as “the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations” (5-6). Eliot’s image, then, is of art as a landscape, dotted by monuments that are linked to each other by their proximity to the banks of a single river.

Eliot continues to evoke the topography of poetry by proposing in his conclusion “to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine [himself] to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry” (ll). This assertion prompts two questions: 1) Who is Eliot’s “responsible person?” and 2) what, exactly, is on the near side of Eliot’s “frontier?” At first glance, the answer to the second question would be simply “poetry.” That is, having described the spatial conditions of art, Eliot points toward that now familiar modernist conception of poetry as inhabiting an autonomous realm of art, a formulation that participates in the Enlightenment rationalization of the aesthetic into a discrete phenomenon. If this is the case, then it seems to me that Eliot does seem to be arguing for something perilously close to metaphysics, because despite its appeal to rational compartmentalization, the autonomous realm of art also sounds very much like Plato’s metaphysical conception of Ideal Forms. Thus, the border Eliot erects between poetry and metaphysics lacks stability as a dividing line; his monuments are at least as mystical as they are concrete.

There is, however, another answer to the question about poetry’s place on this side of metaphysics, which Eliot deploys to solidify his claims about art. At the border of metaphysics in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” one finds nation and race, and it is within these phenomena that Eliot’s poetry resides: “Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind” (3). Nation and race constitute the “existing order” within which poetry resides. Seemingly out of time and “elsewhere,” Eliot’s ideal poet actually partakes of and participates in “the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind” (6). In other words, when Eliot polices “the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism,” what he and his traditional poets preserve are the integrity and consistency of “the mind of Europe,” which contains (presumably amongst other things) the poetic tradition. Eliot’s aesthetic space thus possesses more geographical specificity than the near metaphysical “simultaneous order” of “existing monuments” might at first glance indicate.

Who then is the “responsible person” inhabiting this poetic space, which, as it turns out, has greater ties to identifiable places than the autonomous realm of art might seem to suggest? First, this person is of Europe, but this is a place he must engage adversarially, because, Eliot writes, races and nations are “oblivious” to their own “critical habits [and] creative genius” (3); the nation must be forced to listen against its will. More importantly, however, Eliot’s responsible person is someone whose experience of poetry is not merely intellectual, but bodily: “criticism is inevitable as breathing ... a man [writes] not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country” is present (emphases added, 3-4). Inside the mind of Europe, one finds the body of the poet, fixed to its host in a vexed but symbiotic relationship.

As it turns out, the body of the poet plays a decisive role in Eliot’s essay. A fascination with the corporeal — and the necrotic — arises in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and this is because the mind of Europe ultimately speaks and lives through the bodies of its “dead poets,” a phrase that Eliot repeats with surprising regularity in his text. The corpses of Eliot’s dead “ancestors” are littered across his essay, and when he suggests that the poet enters the tradition by becoming the inanimate “receptacle” of art, his meaning is almost literal—the poet’s entrance among his ancestors is very nearly a suicide: “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (7). No wonder, then, that the “new (the really new)” poet might fear being “amputated” by his forebears, as Eliot indicates; after all, his death is demanded of him if he wishes his work to “fit in” (5) with the elders’ monuments.

Eliot names this deathly relationship to the living tradition of poetry “the historical sense,” which “involves a perception, not only of the past-ness of the past, but of its presence. . . . This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional” (4). The past and present co-exist in a tradition that joins Homer’s Greece, Dante’s Italy, and Shakespeare’s England into a seamless whole. This is an historical sense that only grudgingly admits to the fissures and seams of lived, diachronic experience. It is a collapsing of life and death, and the poet experiences the world as if he were already dead, because that which is truly alive is outside of life. “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (ll). Eliot’s past lives in a timeless, vampiric relationship to the present and the future, and his present is simultaneously iconoclastic (the “really new” does, after all, alter the monuments), sycophantic (it needs to “fit in”), and bloodless. What’s more, the historical paradigm Eliot establishes kills the contingencies of the future in advance of itself, because it has already been anticipated by the past, and the writers of its monuments are always already dead. I want to suggest, therefore, that Eliot’s “historical sense” is an almost purely spatial term, because all of its monuments—past, present, and future—can be located as easily as “a patient etherised upon a table.”

While the function of death in Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” may need some teasing to bring it to the surface, death clearly constitutes the very possibility and necessity of Mike Gold’s 1921 essay, “Towards Proletarian Art.” According to Michael Folsom, Gold’s essay is “one of the first major documents in radical literary theory in the United States. It was the first significant call in this country for the creation of a distinctly and militantly working class culture. The American currency of the term ‘proletarian literature’ can be dated from the publication of this article” (62). If Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” produces a topography of art, Gold establishes its timetable. He begins his essay: “In blood, in tears, in chaos and wild, thunderous clouds of fear the old economic order is dying. . . . We know the horror that is passing away with this long winter of the world.... it must die. But let us not fear. Let us fling all we are into the cauldron of the Revolution. For out of our death shall arise glories” (20).

In a sense, death forecloses the future in Eliot’s text, because it undergirds the perpetual present of art, but in Gold’s essay, death guarantees the future, because it figures into the teleologically informed, diachronic experience of revolutionary time. Gold’s introduction emphasizes the relationship of art to time by locating it at the historical crisis of competing modes of production. Citing The Little Review (one of Eliot’s American publishing outlets) for disapprobation, Gold challenges the spatialized, autonomous realm of art represented by Eliot’s simultaneous order of monuments and instead champions writing imbued with the contingencies of lived time. Following the reasoning of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which Marx warns revolutionaries against being beholden to the “tradition of all the dead generations [which] weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (595), Gold’s essay proceeds by arguing for an art that challenges “that nightmare in man’s brain called Eternity” (20). “Towards Proletarian Art” calls for literary production that is keenly aware of the present’s struggle with (not acquiescence to) the past in order to usher in a particular—revolutionary—future.

Gold claims that to conceive of the proper time for art, “It is necessary first to discuss our place in eternity,” which he dismisses as a “huge, brooding pale evil,” a “poison,” and a “white, meaningless face” (20). Further, this eternity has been the domain of the “artist-saints of time” (20), who have been sickened by the competitiveness and hyper-individualization of capitalism. For Gold, the autonomy of art constitutes a prison sentence, not emancipation: “The art ideals of the capitalistic world isolated each artist as in a solitary cell, there to brood and suffer silently and go mad” (22). In effect, Gold reads Eliot’s self-extinguishing, individual talent as being trapped inside the landscape of existing monuments.

Gold counters the ideology of the timeless, autonomous realm of art and the “death” it demands through two examples that insist on the primacy of daily, lived experience in specific places. First, Gold evokes his childhood by describing himself as the manifestation of a specific place and time: “I was born in a tenement. That tall, sombre mass, holding its freight of obscure human destinies, is the pattern in which my being has been cast. It was in a tenement that I first heard the sad music of humanity rise to the stars. The sky above the airshafts was all my sky; and the voices in the airshaft were the voices of all my world. . . . The tenement is in my blood” (21). For Gold, art is not an escape from these conditions, not a “continual extinction” as it is for Eliot, but rather a means of self-expression and actualization—“the tenement pouring out its soul through us, its most sensitive and articulate sons and daughters” (21). The art of the tenement takes place at a historically specific time, not in eternity, and in identifiable places, not among a landscape of idealized monuments.

The second example of Gold’s valorized art is the Prolet-Kult of the Russian Revolution. Like the art of the tenements, Prolet-Kult “is not an artificial theory evolved in the brains of a few phrase-intoxicated intellectuals” (23), but rather a living manifestation of the needs and desires of the Russian masses. It, too, has its concrete sources: “In factories, mines, fields and workshops the word has been spread in Russia that the nation expects more of its workers than production. They are not machines, but men and women. They must learn to express their divinity in art and culture” (23). Prolet-Kult, he writes, “is the resurrection” (24).

Gold closes his essay by arguing that proletarian culture in America must develop according to the lessons learned both through the shared but personal experience of daily working class life and through the more distant but equally useful example of the Russian Revolution. Rejecting “artistic insanity,” he concludes that, “It is not in that hot-house air that the lusty great tree will grow. Its roots must be in the fields, factories and workshops of America—in the American life. When there is singing and music rising in every American street, when in every American factory there is a drama group of the workers, when mechanics paint in their leisure, and farmers write sonnets, the greater art will grow and only then. Only a creative nation understands creation. Only an artist understands art. The method must be the revolutionary method—from the deepest depths upward” (24). Naming a number of locations from and within which art is produced, Gold gestures here toward places that admit to time and history in ways that Eliot’s aesthetic does not; we can read poetry as “placed” and temporal in Gold’s essay. However, like Eliot, Gold conceives of poetry as a bodily experience; references to “bones,” “brain and heart,” “body,” and “blood” indicate that poetry is a visceral experience for Gold. But despite his embrace of death in the service of revolution, Gold ultimately thinks of the poet as a living force — a “lusty great tree” — from which poetry emerges rather than, as in Eliot, a passive receptacle through which the poetic tradition passes. For Gold, Russian Prolet-Kult and American proletarian art constitute “the first effort of historic Man” (23) to articulate a living poetry filled with the energies of revolutionary time.

But Gold’s challenge to eternity and his “historical sense” of poetry unravel in ways that destabilize his essay. Through the figures “divinity” and “resurrection,” Gold rejects the false consciousness represented by an eternal and autonomous realm of art, but at the same time he embraces a conceptualization of “the masses” that bears a striking resemblance to Eliot’s order of monuments. As it turns out, and despite their very real political and aesthetic differences, both writers ground their manifestoes in a space out of time. Gold writes: “Masses are never far from the earth. Masses are never far from the heaven. Masses go on—they are the eternal truth. Masses are simple, strong, and sure. They never are lost long; they have always a goal in each age” (22). Like Eliot’s simultaneous order, which always anticipates its future, Gold’s masses seem in the end to exist independently of diachronic time; the masses, too, are a kind of monument. Even Eliot’s image of the river of tradition finds an echo in Gold’s essay when the latter characterizes the “Social Revolution” as “the religion of the masses, articulate at last . . . which says that Life is one, that Men are one, through all their flow of change and differentiation. . . . [This] ocean is greater than the tiny streams that trickle down to be lost in its godhood” (22).

To support his claim that the “Revolution is the permanent mood” flowing through human history, Gold situates his waters in an idealized landscape, “the Orient.” As informed by European ethnocentrism as Eliot, Gold exoticizes Orientals, by which he means the people of the Near East, as happily communal primitives, and he establishes cultural borders that, while they are meant to valorize this particular Other, work instead to consolidate the greater complexities of “the mind of Europe.” Passing Eliot at the border of metaphysics, Gold crosses the frontiers of mysticism in his stereotypical depiction of “Oriental” culture: “In the Orient, where millions live and labor and die, peace has brooded in the air for centuries. There have never been individuals there, but family clans and ancestor worshipers, so that men have felt themselves part of a mystic group extending from the dim past into the unfolding future. Men have gathered peace from that bond, and strength to support the sorrow of Life. From the solidarity learned in the family group, they have learned the solidarity of the universe, and have created creeds that fill every device of the universe with the family love and trust” (22). Literally between paragraphs describing the very concrete experiences of the tenement and later sections that present the successes of Prolet-Kult, the example of the Orient stands as a vaguelydefined space of the imagination that moves Gold’s argument forward only through imprecision and unexamined ethnocentrism. So, while Eliot relies on ideas about race and nation to provide solidity to an autonomous realm of art, Gold does the same to lend weight and truthfulness to the eternal nature of revolution. Gold’s seemingly diachronous, historically informed manifesto falls for the trap of eternity at the very moment in his text—his illustration of how the masses can always be counted on for the truth— when he most wants to get away from such ahistorical thinking.

I have paired Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and Gold’s “Toward Proletarian Art” because they participate in the critical debate over...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One: Introduction, The Blood and Bones of Modernism
• Chapter Two: “There is a difference between prose and poetry”: The Russian Revolution in The Liberator
• Chapter Three: Our (?) Country: Mapping “These ‘Colored’ United States” in The Messenger
• Chapter Four: “You can’t go back, they’ll cut your throat”: The Failure of Nostalgia in The Dial
• Chapter Five: The Exodus of The Little Review
• Chapter Six: “Beauty in our slaughter-fold”: The Gold-McKay Liberator
• Chapter Seven: Conclusion, “So interesting and modern . . . Her gesticulating hands show her origin”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index