The Little Review, November 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 7)

Lord Alfred Douglas has sued George Moore for blasphemy. The Queensburys were born to be fools: whenever art appears in England they become Wilde-eyed.

Whoever started the tradition of George Moore’s naughtiness? The Brook Kerith is as reverent as Mr. Moore is chaste. A long time ago we used “psycho-analysis” on Mr. Moore and knew then that he could never get out of the world without writing a book about religion. The Brook Kerith is the story of the Christian religion made out of Mr. Moore’s religion, which is Art.

Here is another man who hasn’t written the great American novel.

Where did the superstition arise which makes writers, dramatists, painters, feel that the goblins will get them if they don’t hold to American subjects to make American art? It’s as funny as if they should say: let’s use only American-made materials and we’ll have an American art. Landscape and atmosphere effect about the only difference of temperament in nations. At least Art is so universal that the temperament of your nation is the only thing that can stamp your Art. You might write about pink pagodas in China and have American art. The temperament in these American novels would make this country seem all a western plain under a steely sky. It’s the same with their style: it’s like going through underbrush, tough and tangled and scratchy, not like walking through rich old orchards or wandering in terraced gardens.

They all sound as though they had been written in the morning.

These writers want their novels to be strong. They are: strong like an ox, not like a tiger. And they don’t even know about these American things they are writing of. Dreiser doesn’t know what a genius is (I mean, what is a genius), so he makes one: a home-made genius who comes out like home-made clothes.

These writers want their books to be homely—the great American vice: made from the people, by the people, for the people. It’s merely another form of the glorification of sockless senators, etc.

They can’t even name their books:

“Sister Carrie”!

“Jennie Gerhardt”!

“Windy McPherson’s Son”! etc., etc.

San Francisco, October 1.

This morning I lay in bed looking at the ceiling and thinking about cats. How elegante they are, and impenetrable, and with what narrow slant-eyed contempt they look out upon the world. Perhaps that’s the way it looks through little black perpendicular slits.... Anyway I thought of cats, and of violin strings made of catgut, and wondered about cats and music. Is it because violins are made of living things—wood and catgut and mother-of-pearl and hair,—that they make the most beautiful music in the world?

This afternoon we crossed the hills and the bay to the theatre where Paderewski was to play. We knew that Tagore was in the city too, and all the way over we speculated prayerfully as to whether he would be at the concert.

We bought standing room, and stood waiting in the foyer near the table, where Mme. Paderewska was selling her dolls for the benefit of destitute Poland. I looked at those dolls and wanted one so much that I was afraid I couldn’t enjoy the concert. They were masterpieces! I shall make myself one—perhaps like the Polish Faust, a gorgeous man with fawn-colored kid boots; or perhaps like the Zaza, a little girl of pale pink sateen with somewhat the look of Mlle. Pogani in the Cubist exhibition. She had hair of red-brown silk thread, and her dress was emerald-green. She had little pellets of bright pink satin sewed on to make cheeks,—“and she seets always on the piano when Mr. Paderewski practices.”

I wandered back to my standing-room and looked indifferently at the crowded house. There were too many people, I thought. And then with tears hurting my eyes and an ache in my throat choking me I called out: “There—there’s Tagore—in the third box!”—and made them look quickly so they wouldn’t see me cry. There he sat in the first chair in a robe the color of grass-cloth and a pale violet cap upon his head. From where we stood it looked like a high forage-cap, but soft; and he wore great glasses made of horn. There were some East Indians with him, and two Americans—just men. I watched him until I was almost in a trance: the angle at which his head was put on, the cheek bones that were like an extra feature.... Everything that lies beyond the reach of thought and wonder seemed concentrated in that dark Stranger. I trembled, frightened by my imagination and a little melancholy.

At last Paderewski came out to his piano, elegante and impenetrable. I seemed to see him quite differently beside Tagore—a bright heaven beside a still universe. I was so filled there was no room left in me for the music. Once he came back and played Schumann’s Warum: a nice touch: Warum for that great Wonderer. What could our Warum sound like to him?

All the while I watched Tagore who sat so motionless; not seeming to be there, until Paderewski began some brilliant harsh thing of Liszt’s, when he smiled and leaned forward. Was he thinking “What wonderful children these are?”

After the concert we ran down to the front row for the encores. The theatre was filled with all its noises of banging seats and slamming doors and people moving. Paderewski looked out at them as he played, eyes narrowed, watching with contempt: a great cat! He stopped, waiting in silken rage for quiet, then smiled, raising his hand and striking the keys with a sheathed paw.

Tagore went behind, and we waited to see him by the stage entrance, in a narrow paved alley under hanging iron stairways. How he came out through the dusk, not looking, walking alone! And he went away on foot, simple and mysterious, into the crowds.

With that spell upon us we went back into the dark theatre. Under the one light, chattering women were packing the dolls and a man went about slamming up seats. An expressman came, the trunks were taken away, and the women left as noisily as they had come. The doors were closed, and we waited in front of the theatre under a blazing white light. A great limousine rolled up; a laughing group came from the stage entrance: Paderewski in a high silk hat, a loose cape about his shoulders. He got into the lighted car, waved his farewells to the group on the sidewalk, touched a slight kiss to someone, and was driven away into the bright city.

Daybreak, the last of the four “Pelle” books, will come from the publishers this fall. I wonder how many people in this country have read the other three, or have ever heard of Martin Anderson Nexø? I went into McClurg’s last Christmas to buy the first two volumes, but they told me they had ordered only one copy and it had been sold. In all of Chicago there wasn’t one to be had.

There was an epidemic of Jean-Christophe here; every one had to read it whether he was an audience for Rolland or not. Critics like to compare Pelle and Jean-Christophe by saying that Nexø has done for a labor leader what Rolland did for a musician. But he hasn’t: Rolland tells the life of an artist and makes of it a great tract; Nexø tells the life of a labor leader and makes of it a great work of art. The difference is something like this: underneath Jean-Christophe lies a skeleton structure of Rolland’s on which he is constantly working, through Christophe’s experiences in art, to raise a monument to the life force; in Pelle the life force sweeps all treatises from Nexø’s hands and raises a monument to art.

Labor itself is the only thing that can help labor,—the only thing except Art. People can read about the wrongs of labor in the social magazines until they are blind, and stop outside the words. But here is something to stir the imagination, to make them feel and then to think about labor. And the poor! Nexø has made an Arabian Nights of the poor. But instead of incense and magic and white palaces with gilded domes he tells of the fragile, perfect things the poor have out of Nothing,—out of which all beautiful things are made.

That first night in Bornholm when Pelle, left all alone in the shipyard, stoops down in the half dark to see if the ground is pink as he has seen it painted on a map in Sweden—that stuck me in the heart, and I knew how it would be with Pelle in the end. That is the whole story, really: Pelle was always looking for the painted ground. In Daybreak, although I have heard nothing of the book, I know Pelle finds it for himself and makes it for the poor.

The boy Pelle I love most,—that imaginative, creative little Pelle who went about carving his animals and ships, helping Lasse in the cow-barns and sleeping there on the dung-piles, making his way through the strange and violent life at Stone Farm. This Pelle seems to disappear entirely in the labor struggle, during the time when he himself feels that whatever he gains for the poor is not what the poor most needs. But through all the story the love of Pelle and Lasse runs like music,—dear old smelly Lasse who was never able to match his idea of himself with the world. After a life of crushing labor and frustrated courage he crawls away to die in some horrible cellars under the docks, bound to be independent to the last. Pelle finds him there,—Pelle who couldn’t take care of one because he was caring for thousands. Like the rest of us he learned that little trick from God.

People say to me that the town where Pelle learned his trade is overdrawn. “Why make a town without one normal person in it? It isn’t true to life!” It’s truer than life: it’s as true as art. Poverty, like some great Rodin, has brought these people out of the earth: some twisted, warped, grotesque, brutally handled; others beautiful or gigantic, cut passionately; their feet only left in the ground—all part of that from which they are hewn.

In the Ark Nexø shows you something quite different of the poor—the city poor. My heart always aches about the Ark, not because they are so cold there and so without every last thing in the world; but because it is such an amazing and wonderful thing to be poor. Nexø doesn’t tell about the poor from any angle of the middle-classes; he doesn’t thrust upon them the psychology of any other class; he leaves them their own souls, and their own world. He isn’t writing of the abject, of failures, or of social settlement charges. He is writing of the Poor—the poor you have always with you. It isn’t the things they don’t have that make them so poignant: it’s what they have. He tells you of one little possession and you know all they have never possessed.

I am waiting for the fourth volume to find out what it was that Ellen did. Every reviewer in the country has taken it for granted that Ellen resorted to prostitution to save Pelle and their children from starvation. But if I know Ellen she did nothing of the kind. She never could have done that. She took Pelle’s carving of the ten-croner note and had it made into money, thereby causing Pelle’s arrest for counterfeiting. If this isn’t what happened then there is no psychology for women.

Out of all the stories in Pelle I choose these three: the story of Hanne, of the end of her proud youth; the story the old grandmother at Kalle’s tells of her love; and the story of the Great Power and his wasted Art. There never was a story like the Great Power. It alone tells all there is to tell of the working classes,—how labor jumps at the throat of labor and the poor destroys its own.

[1] Pelle the Conqueror: Boyhood; Apprenticeship; The Great Struggle; Daybreak, by Martin Anderson Nexø. New York: Henry Holt.

“The most ‘modern’ writer Paris can boast, not excepting Apollinaire,” is the word that comes from Ezra Pound. His Ulysse fait son lit was published in the August issue and l’Offre de Plebs will be found in this one. He has brought out many volumes, has been translated into Russian by Veselofsky, and before the war contributed frequently to La Nouvelle Revue Française and L’Occident.

MARK TURBYFILL

EZRA POUND

Before you issue another number of your magazine half blank, I must again ask you seriously to consider the iniquity of the present “protective” tariff on books.

This tariff has contributed more than any other one cause, and perhaps more than all other causes, to the intellectual isolation of America, to her general ignorance, to her sodden parochialism.

I have expressed myself on this subject many times. Mr. George Haven Putnam has been fighting against the evil for years. It is one ground on which all intelligent Americans, whatever their disagreements as to literary canon may be, can come together.

I am too much buried in work to write you an article at present. There are hundreds of young men with more time than I have, to whom this is a matter not of mere general interest, but of vital and personal importance.

The simple fact is that it is very, very difficult to get foreign books in the United States. There is no facilitation of their sale. The 25% tariff serves as an excuse for an exorbitant elevation of the price of all foreign books, whether imported in sheets, or bound.

Result: Editors of sodden and moribund “better” magazines talking about De Regnier and De Gourmont as “these young men”, in 1914.

Result: provincialism, isolation, lack of standards of comparison, and consequent inability to recognize good work when it appears. When it gets praise it is praised in company with rubbish.

American writers handicapped in competition with men living in civilized countries. Export of best, and even of moderately good, artists instead of export of art.

I can’t go into the whole question of free trade. It has worked in England. It has, more than anything else, made the “Empire.” I do not see why it should ruin the Republic.

But that is not my business. I mean, Free Trade in the widest sense is not my present affair. The prohibitive tariff on books is very much everybody’s affair if they care a hang for the intellectual state of the country.

The state of the copyright laws is barbarous, but it is perhaps more the affair of the maltreated authors than of the country at large. It is evil only as other obstructory measures are evil. But this matter of excluding foreign books in the interest of a few artizans (who are better paid than authors and who seek nothing above immediate gain, and whose loss in the event of reform would be negligible) is immediate and vital.

The whole question of censorship, as to Dreiser, as to Hokusai prints destroyed by customs officials, etc., are all really minor issues, largely dependent on this matter of the exclusion of the words thought and knowledge.

If among the young writers gathered about The Little Review you can not find two or three to take up this question, to study it, to marshal the data (vide Putnam’s “Books and Their Makers” to start with, re. the causes of the rise of Paris as the world’s intellectual capital),—if you can not find such young authors, then your young literati are a set of rotters and the Great West is more of a mud-hole than I should have thought it.

STEFAN BRAZIER

Will you make The Little Review a Christmas present by renewing your subscription if it has run out? We will value it more than having our stocking filled with gold. It will make the December issue possible for us and will insure your having the magazine during the year when it is to become really good.

We couldn’t have an October issue, owing to our usual embarrassment about funds; so this will have to serve as a sort of October-November, though I can’t put that on the cover because they tell me it would violate some new law.

We are back in Chicago where we shall stay for a month before moving to New York. Word comes from every part of the country that young magazines are dying, and that even The Masses may have to succumb before the increasing cost of paper, etc. That must not be! The Masses is too valuable to lose and everybody must do something about it. As for The Little Review, we may have to come out on tissue paper pretty soon, but we shall keep on coming out! Nothing can stop us now.

I feel as though we have an entirely new lease on life and were just starting with what we have to say.

The poems published in the Vers Libre Contest are still in the hands of the judges. There were two hundred and two poems, thirty-two of which were returned because they were either Shakespearean sonnets or rhymed quatrains or couplets. Manuscripts will be returned as promptly as they are rejected, providing the contestants sent postage.

The results will be announced in our December issue, and the prize poems published.

—The Contest Editor.