Abstract
I should like, for a moment, to return to the origins of Modernism, to an overview of its development, in order to focus upon a curious inconsistency.
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Notes and References
Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: realism, idealism, and the American experience (New York, 1979), p. 243.
Quoted in John Tytell, Ezra Pound: the solitary volcano (London, 1987), p. 80.
Frank Lentricchia, Modern Quartet (Cambridge, 1994). T. S. Eliot and Stevens are quoted in Lentricchia without source.
This passage and previous extract reprinted in R. W. Flint and A. A. Coppotelli (eds), Marinetti: selected writings (New York, 1972), p. 42.
E. M. Forster, Howards End (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 199.
Marinetti joined the Italian Fascist party in 1918, became a favourite of Mussolini and was appointed the party’s parliamentary candidate. Later, Mussolini, courting the Catholic church for support, disowned Marinetti; but the latter, swallowing his pride, rejoined the party and died defending Bellagio in 1944. For further details see Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (London, 1989). Pound’s support of fascism requires no documentation.
See especially Dennis Brown’s stimulating study, Intertextual Dynamics: within the literary group — Joyce, Lewis, Pound, and Eliot (London, 1990), to which I am indebted for a number of references; as well as
Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (London, 1976);
Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Movement: avant garde, avant-guerre, and the language of rupture (Chicago, 1986);
R. W. Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: towards the condition of poetry (Baltimore, 1985);
Eric Svarny, The Men of 1914: T. S. Eliot and early modernism (Milton Keynes, 1988). For a study sensitive to the origins of this group’s anti-populist and fascist tendencies, see
Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (Oxford, 1993). Recent book-length studies by Fredric Jameson, Tom Normand, Sue-Ellen Campbell, Daniel Schenker, David Ayers, Toby Foshay and Scott Klein demonstrate a marked revival of interest in Lewis and in the movements he helped foster.
Pound’s comment in supporting Wyndham Lewis’ application for a Guggenheim fellowship; quoted in Noel Stock, The Life of Wyndham Lewis (San Francisco, 1982), pp. 326–7.
John Rothenstein, in the foreword to Jane Farrington, Wyndham Lewis: catalogue of the exhibition at the Manchester City Art Galleries (London, 1980), and Brown, Intertextual Dynamics, op. cit., p. 14.
This aspect of the computer age is examined in Richard A. Lehan, The Electronic Word: democracy, technology, and the arts (Chicago, 1993), especially pp. 31f.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 126, 477. His response to Futurism is recorded in a letter to Edward Garnett, dated June 1914, in which he approves in principle Marinetti’s statement: ‘It is the solidity of a blade of steel that is interesting by itself, that is, the uncomprehending and inhuman alliance of its molecules in resistance to, let us say, a bullet. The heat of a piece of wood or iron is in fact more passionate, for us, than the laughter or tears of a woman.’
There is a discussion of the relationship between Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture and Pound’s poetry in Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: studies in the poetry of the Pound tradition (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 33f.
Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), p. 244.
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (Boston, 1945), p. 21.
Bernard Bergonzi, in The Listener, 19 September 1963. Rubin Rabinovitz, The Reaction Against Experiment in the Novel, 1950–1960 (New York, 1967) takes a similar view, regarding such fictional conservatism as a failing.
Preface to Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (eds), The Contemporary English Novel, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 18 (New York, 1980).
Stephen Spender, The New Realism (London, 1939), p. 8.
Cf. Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven, 1970),
Harold Bloom, Yeats (New York, 1970) and
Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (New York, 1963).
Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: crisis and mastery in modern literature (New Brunswick, 1963), containing his essay ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’, originally published in 1945.
Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley, 1963), p. 190.
Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (London, 1965), p. 70. The second remark, made to Marius de Zayas, is quoted in The Arts, May 1923.
Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, Art and Literature, 4 (1965), 193;
Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Boston, 1965), especially pp. 19f.;
Richard Wollheim, On Art and the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1973). Modernist artists thereby accentuated a trend already manifesting itself towards the end of the previous century, when Whistler, in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London, 1890), p. 128, demanded that the arts should appeal to the sense of eye or ear ‘without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like’.
James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 100.
Preface to the 1952 edition of Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: a study (New York, 1930), a work providing the reader with a guide to such parallels.
To Gerald Brenan, in Virginia Woolf, Letters, ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautman (New York, 1978) 2:598, dated 25 December 1922.
See Terence Diggory, William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Painting (Princeton, 1991), and
Peter Halter, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Cambridge, 1994), both of which examine his involvement in the new art movements and his connection with foreign artists who gathered in New York at that time.
William Carlos Williams, ‘Recollections’, Art in America, 51 (1963), 52.
Quoted in Bram Dijkstra, Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Princeton, 1978), p. 75, from a manuscript at Buffalo.
Jacob Epstein, Let There Be Sculpture: an autobiography (London, 1940, revised edition 1955), p. 56.
Ezra Pound, Gaudier Brzeska: a Memoir (London, 1916).
R. H. Wilenski, The Meaning of Modern Sculpture (London, 1932).
The Graphic, January 1920. For a number of references in this section I am indebted to Charles Harrison’s fine study of this period, English Art and Modernism (New Haven, 1994).
The profound influence exerted by Auden on his contemporaries, including C. Day Lewis, Rex Warner, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice, is discussed in Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford, 1988), pp. 18–21.
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Roston, M. (2000). Palpable and Mute. In: Modernist Patterns. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389403_8
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