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Title: The Little Review, July 1917 (Vol. 4, No. 3)
Editor: Margaret C. Anderson
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, JULY 1917 (VOL. 4, NO. 3) ***
THE LITTLE REVIEW
A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS
MAKING NO COMPROMISE WITH THE PUBLIC TASTE
Margaret C. Anderson
Publisher
JULY, 1917
Imaginary Letters, III. Wyndham Lewis
Poems: T. S. Eliot
Le Directeur
Mélange adultère de tout
Lune de Miel
The Hippopotamus
Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden Ezra Pound
Three Nightpieces John Rodker
Improvisations Louis Gilmore
Poet’s Heart Maxwell Bodenheim
The Reader Critic
Published Monthly
15 Cents a copy
MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Editor
EZRA POUND, Foreign Editor
24 West Sixteenth Street
NEW YORK CITY
$1.50 a Year
Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, New York, N. Y.
The Little Review
VOL. IV.
JULY 1917
NO. 3
Copyright, 1917, by Margaret C. Anderson.
Imaginary Letters
(Six Letters of William Bland Burn to his Wife)
Wyndham Lewis
The Code of a Herdsman
(_A set of rules sent by Benjamin Richard Wing to his young friend
Philip Seddon enclosed with a letter. Under the above title now
edited._)
(1) Never maltreat your own intelligence with parables. It is a method
of herd-hypnotism. Do not send yourself to sleep with the rhythm of the
passes that you make.=As an example of herd-hypnotism, German literature
is so virulently allegorized that the German really never knows whether
he is a Kangaroo, a Scythian, or his own sweet self.=You, however, are a
Herdsman. That is surely Parable enough!
(2) Do not admit _cleverness_, in any form, into your life. Observe the
accomplishment of some people’s signatures! It is the herd-touch.
(3) Exploit Stupidity.=Introduce a flatness, where it is required into
your commerce. Dull your eye as you fix it on a dull face.=Why do you
think George Borrow used such idiotic clichés as “The beams of the
descending luminary—?” He was a great writer and knew what he was
doing.=Mock the herd perpetually with the grimance of its own garrulity
or deadness. If it gets out of hand and stampedes towards you, leap on
to the sea of mangy backs until the sea is still. That is: cast your
mask aside, and spring above them. They cannot see or touch anything
_above_ them: they have never realized that their backs—or rather their
_tops_—exist! They will think that you have vanished into Heaven.
(4) As to language: eschew all clichés implying a herd personality.
Never allow such terms as Top-Hole, Priceless, or Doggo to pass your
lips. Go to the Dictionary if you want an epithet. If you feel eloquent,
use that moment to produce a cliché of your own. Cherish your personal
vocabulary, however small it is. Use your own epithet as though it were
used by a whole nation, if people would have no good reason for
otherwise accepting it.
_Examples of personal epithets._
That man is _abysmal_.
That is an _abysmal_ book.
_It was prestigious!_ } Borrowed from the French.
Here comes that _sinister bird_! }
He is a _sinister card_. (Combination of French and 1890 Slang.)
He has a great deal of _sperm_.
I like a fellow with as much _sperm_ as that.
Borrow from all sides mannerisms of callings or classes to enrich your
personal bastion of language. Borrow from the pulpit, from the
clattering harangue of the auctioneer, the lawyer’s technicality, the
pomposity of politicians.=Borrow grunts from the fisherman, solecisms
from the inhabitant of Merioneth.=“He is a preux, ah, yes-a-preux!” You
can say—“ah-yes-a-preux” as though it were one word, accent on the
“yes.”
(5) In accusing yourself, stick to the Code of the Mountain. But crime
is alien to a Herdsman’s nature.
(6) Yourself must be your Caste.
(7) Cherish and develop, side by side, your six most constant
indications of different personalities. You will then acquire the
potentiality of six men. Leave your front door one day as B.: The next
march down the street as E. A variety of clothes, hats especially, are
of help in this wider dramatisation of yourself. _Never_ fall into the
vulgarity of being or assuming yourself to be one ego. Each trench must
have another one behind it. Each single self—that you manage to be at
any given time—must have five at least indifferent to it. You must have
a power of indifference of _five_ to _one_. All the greatest actions in
the world have been five parts out of six impersonal in the impulse of
their origin. To follow this principle you need only cultivate your
memory. You will avoid being the blind man of _any_ moment. B will see
what is hidden to D.=(Who were Turgenev’s “Six Unknown”? Himself.)
(8) Never lie. You cannot be too fastidious about the truth. If you must
lie, at least see that you lie so badly that it would not deceive a
pea-hen.—The world is, however, full of pea-hens.
(9) Spend some of your spare time every day in hunting your weaknesses,
caught from commerce with the herd, as methodically, solemnly and
vindictively as a monkey his fleas. You will find yourself swarming with
them while you are surrounded by humanity. But you must not bring them
up on the mountain.=If you can get another man to assist you—one, that
is, honest enough not to pass his own on to you—that is a good
arrangement.
(10) Do not play with political notions, aristocratisms or the reverse,
for that is a compromise with the herd. Do not allow yourself to imagine
“a fine herd though still a herd.” There is no _fine herd_. The cattle
that call themselves “gentlemen” you will observe to be a little
cleaner. It is merely cunning and produced with a product called _soap_.
But you will find no serious difference between them and those vast
dismal herds they avoid. Some of them are very dangerous and
treacherous.=Be on your guard with the small herd of gentlemen!
(11) You will meet with this pitfall: at moments, surrounded by the
multitude of unsatisfactory replicas, you will grow confused by a
similarity bringing them so near to us.=You will reason, where, from
some points of view, the difference is so slight, whether that delicate
margin is of the immense importance that we hold it to be: _the only
thing of importance_ in fact.=That group of men talking by the fire in
your club (you will still remain a member of your club), that party at
the theatre, look good enough, you will say. Their skins are fresh, they
are well-made, their manners are good. You must then consider what they
really are. On closer inspection you _know_, from unpleasant experience,
that they are _nothing_ but limitations and vulgarities of the most
irritating description. The devil Nature has painted these sepulchres
pink, and covered them with a blasphemous Bond Street distinction.
Matter that has not sufficient mind to permeate it grows, as you know,
gangrenous and rotten. Animal high spirits, a little, but easily
exhausted, goodness, is all that they can claim.
What seduced you from your severity for a moment was the same thing as a
dull woman’s good-looks.=This is _probably_ what you will have in front
of you.=On the other hand, everywhere you will find a few people, who,
although not a mountain people are not herd.=They may be herdsmen gone
mad through contact with the herd, and strayed: or through inadequate
energy for our task they may be found there: or they may be a hybrid, or
they may even be herdsmen temporarily bored with the mountain. (I have a
pipe below myself sometimes.)
There are numerous “other denominations.” Treat them as brothers. Employ
them, as opportunity offers, as auxiliaries in your duties. Their
society and help will render your task less arduous.
(12) As to women: wherever you can, substitute the society of men.=Treat
them kindly, for they suffer from the herd, although of it, and have
many of the same contempts as yourself. They are a sort of bastard
mountain people.=There must be somewhere a female mountain, a sort of
mirage-mountain. I should like to visit it.=But women, and the processes
for which they exist, are the arch conjuring trick: and they have the
cheap mystery and a good deal of the slipperiness, of the
conjuror.=Sodomy should be avoided, as far as possible. It tends to add
to the abominable confusion already existing.
(13) Wherever you meet a shyness that comes out of solitude, (although
_all_ solitude is not _anti_-herd) naiveness, and a patent absence of
contamination, the sweetness of mountain water, any of the signs of
goodness, you must treat that as sacred, as portions of the mountain.
However much you suffer for it, you must defend and exalt it. On the
other hand, _every_ child is not simple, and _every_ woman is not
weak.=In many cases to champion a female would be like springing to the
rescue of a rhinoceros when you notice that it had been attacked by a
flea. Chivalrous manners, again, with many women are like tiptoeing into
a shed where an ox is sleeping.=Some children, too, rival in nastiness
their parents. But you have your orders in this matter. Indifference
where there should be nothing but the _whole_ eagerness or compunction
of your being, is the worst crime in the mountain’s eyes.
(14) Conquests have usually been divided from their antitheses, and
defeats from conquests, by some casual event. Had Moscow not possessed a
governor ready to burn the Kremlin and the hundreds of palaces
accumulated there, peace would have been signed by the Czar at
Bonaparte’s entrance.=Had the Llascans persevered for ten days against
Cortés, the Aztecs would never have been troubled. Yet Montezuma was
right to remain inactive, paralysed by prophecy. Napoleon was right when
he felt that his star was at last a useless one. He had drained it of
all its astonishing effulgence.=The hair’s breadth is only the
virtuosity of Fate, guiding you along imaginary precipices.=And all the
detail is make-believe, anyway. Watch your star soberly and without
comment. Do not trouble about the paste-board cliffs!
(15) _There are very stringent regulations_ about the herd keeping off
the sides of the mountain. In fact your chief function is to prevent
their encroaching. Some, in moments of boredom or vindictiveness, are
apt to make rushes for the higher regions. Their instinct always
fortunately keeps them in crowds or bands, and their trespassing is soon
noticed. Those traps and numerous devices you have seen on the edge of
the plain are for use, of course, in the last resort. Do not apply them
prematurely.=Not very many herdsmen lose their lives in dealing with the
herds.
(16) Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.
(17) The teacher does not have to _be_, although he has to _know_: He is
the mind imagining, not the executant. The executant, the young, svelte,
miraculous athlete, the strapping virtuoso, really has to give the
illusion of a perfection.=Do not expect _me_ to keep in sufficiently
good training to perform the feats I recommend.=I usually remain up on
the mountain.
(18) Above all this sad commerce with the herd, let something veritably
remain “un peu sur la montagne.” Always come down with masks and thick
clothing to the valley where we work.
Stagnant gasses from these Yahooesque and rotten herds are more
dangerous often than the wandering cylinders that emit them. See you are
not caught in them without your mask.=But once returned to our adorable
height, forget your sallow task: with great freedom indulge your
love.=The terrible processions beneath are not of our making, and are
without our pity. Our sacred hill is a volcanic heaven. But the result
of its violence is peace.=The unfortunate surge below, even, has moments
of peace.
(_Next letter will appear in August number._)
Poems
T. S. Eliot
Le Directeur
Malheur à la malheureuse Tamise!
Qui coule si près du Spectateur.
Le directeur
Conservateur
Du Spectateur
Empeste la brise.
Les actionnaires
Réactionnaires
Du Spectateur
Conservateur
Bras dessus bras dessous
Font des tours
A pas de loup.
Dans un égout
Une petite fille
En guenilles
Camarde
Regarde
Le directeur
Du Spectateur
Conservateur
Et crève d’amour.
Mélange adultère de tout
En Amérique, professeur;
En Angleterre, journaliste;
C’est à grands pas et en sueur
Que vous suivrez à peine ma piste.
En Yorkshire, conférencier;
A Londres, un peu banquier,
Vous me paierez bien la tête.
C’est à Paris que je me coiffe
Casque noir de jemenfoutiste.
En Allemagne, philosophe
Surexcité par Emporheben
Au grand air de Bergsteigleben;
J’erre toujours de-ci de-là
À divers coups de tra la la
De Damas jusqu’à Omaha.
Je célébrai mon jour de fête
Dans une oasis d’Afrique
Vêtu d’une peau de girafe.
On montrera mon cénotaphe
Aux côtes brûlantes de Mozambique.
Lune de Miel
Ils ont vu les Pays-Bas, ils rentrent à Terre Haute;
Mais une nuit d’été, les voici à Ravenne,
À l’aise entre deux draps, chez deux centaines de punaises;
La sueur aestivale, et une forte odeur de chienne.
Ils restent sur le dos écartant les genoux
De quatre jambes molles tout gonflées de morsures.
On relève le drap pour mieux égratigner.
Moins d’une lieue d’ici est Saint Apollinaire
In Classe’ basilique connue des amateurs
De chapiteaux d’acanthe que tournoie le vent.
Ils vont prendre le train de huit heures
Prolonger leurs misères de Padoue à Milan
Où se trouvent le Cène, et un restaurant pas cher.
Lui pense aux pourboires, et rédige son bilan.
Ils auront vu la Suisse et traversé la France
Et Saint Apollinaire, raide et ascétique,
Vieille usine désaffectée de Dieu, tient encore
Dans ses pierres écroulantes la forme precise de Byzance.
The Hippopotamus
The broad backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
Yet he is merely flesh and blood.
Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.
The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.
The potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.
At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.
The hippopotamus’s day
Is past in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.
I saw the potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.
Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.
He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.
Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden
A. D. 1451
Ezra Pound
They entered between two fir trees. A path of irregular flat pentagonal
stones led along between shrubbery. Halting by the central court in a
sort of narrow gallery, the large tank was below them, and in it some
thirty or forty blond nereïds for the most part well-muscled, with
smooth flaxen hair and smooth faces—a generic resemblance. A slender
brown wench sat at one end listlessly dabbling her feet from the
spring-board. Here the water was deeper.
The rest of them, all being clothed in white linen shifts held up by one
strap over the shoulder and reaching half way to the knees,—the rest of
them waded waist- and breast-deep in the shallower end of the pool,
their shifts bellied up by the air, spread out like huge bobbing
cauliflowers.
The whole tank was sunken beneath the level of the gardens, and paved
and pannelled with marble, a rather cheap marble. To the left of the
little gallery, where the strangers had halted, an ample dowager sat in
a perfectly circular tub formed rather like the third of an hogshead,
behind her a small hemicycle of yew trees kept off any chance draught
from the North. She likewise wore a shift of white linen. On a plank
before her, reaching from the left to the right side of her
tank-hogshead, were a salver with a large piece of raw smoked ham, a few
leeks, a tankard of darkish beer, a back-scratcher, the ham-knife.
Before them, from some sheds, there arose a faint steam, the sound of
grunts and squeals and an aroma of elderly bodies. From the opposite
gallery a white-bearded town-councillor began to throw grapes to the
nereïds.
Le Sieur de Maunsier: They have closed these places in Marseilles, causa
flegitii, they were thought to be bad for our morals.
Poggio: And are your morals improved?
Maunsier: Nein, bin nicht verbessert.
Poggio: And are the morals of Marseilles any better?
Maunsier: Not that I know of. Assignations are equally frequent; the
assignors less cleanly; their health, I presume, none the better. The
Church has always been dead set against washing. St. Clement of
Alexandria forbade all bathing by women. He made no exception. Baptism
and the last oiling were enough, to his thinking. St. Augustine, more
genial and human, took a bath to console himself for the death of his
mother. I suspect that it was a hot one. Being clean is a pagan virtue,
and no part of the light from Judaea.
Poggio: Say rather a Roman, the Greek philosophers died, for the most
part, of lice. Only the system of empire, plus a dilettantism in
luxuries, could have brought mankind to the wash-tub. The christians
have made dirt a matter of morals: a son of God can have no need to be
cleansed; a worm begotten in sin and foredoomed to eternal damnation in
a bottle of the seven great stenches, would do ill to refine his
nostrils and unfit himself for his future. For the elect and the
rejected alike, washing is either noxious or useless—they must be
transcendent at all costs. The rest of the world must be like them; they
therefore look after our morals. Yet this last term is wholly elastic.
There is no system which has not been tried, wedlock or unwedlock, a
breeding on one mare or on many; all with equal success, with equal
flaws, crimes, and discomforts.
Maunsier: I have heard there was no adultery found in Sparta.
Poggio: There was no adultery among the Lacedaemonians because they held
all women in common. A rumour of Troy had reached the ears of Lycurgus:
“So Lycurgus thought also there were many foolish vain joys and fancies,
in the laws and orders of other nations, touching marriage: seeing they
caused their bitches and mares to be lined and covered with the fairest
dogs and goodliest stallions that might be gotten, praying and paying
the maisters and owners of the same: and kept their wives
notwithstanding shut up safe under lock and key, for fear lest other
than themselves might get them with child, although themselves were
sickly, feeble-brained, extreme old.” I think I quote rightly from
Plutarch. The girls of Lacedaemon played naked before the young men,
that their defects should be remedied rather than hidden. A man first
went by stealth to his mistress, and this for a long space of time; thus
learning address and silence. For better breeding Lycurgus would not
have children the property of any one man, but sought only that they
should be born of the lustiest women, begotten of the most vigorous
seed.
Maunsier: Christianity would put an end to all that, yet I think there
was some trace left in the _lex Germanica_, and in some of our Provençal
love customs; for under the first a woman kept whatever man she liked,
so long as she fancied: the children being brought up by her brothers,
being a part of the female family, _cognati_. The chivalric system is
smothered with mysticism, and is focussed all upon pleasure, but the
habit of older folk-custom is at the base of its freedoms, its debates
were on matters of modus.
These girls look very well in their shifts. They confound the precepts
of temperance.
Poggio: I have walked and ridden through Europe, annotating, observing.
I am interested in food and the animal.
There was, before I left Rome, a black woman for sale in the market. Her
breasts stuck out like great funnels, her shoulders were rounded like
basins, her biceps was that of a wheel-wright; these upper portions of
her, to say nothing of her flattened-in face, were disgusting and
hideous but, she had a belly like Venus. From below the breasts to the
crotch she was like a splendid Greek fragment. She came of a tropical
meat-eating tribe. I observe that gramenivorous and fruit-eating races
have shrunken arms and shoulders, narrow backs and weakly distended
stomachs. Much beer enlarges the girth in old age, at a time when the
form in any case, might have ceased to give pleasure. The men of this
nubian tribe were not lovely; they were shaped rather like almonds: the
curious roundness in the front aspect, a gradual sloping-in toward the
feet, a very great muscular power, a silhouette not unlike that of an
egg, or perhaps more like that of a tadpole.
Civilized man grows more frog-like, his members become departmental.
Maunsier: But fixed. Man falls into a set gamut of types. His thoughts
also. The informed and the uninformed, the clodhopper and the civilian
are equally incapable of trusting an unwonted appearance. Last week I
met an exception, and for that cause the matter is now in my mind, and I
am, as they say “forming conclusions.” The exception, an Englishman, had
found a parochial beauty in Savoia, in the inn of a mountain town, a
“local character” as he called her. He could not describe her features
with any minute precision, but she wore, he remembered, a dress tied up
with innumerable small bits of ribbon in long narrow bow-knots, limp,
hanging like grass-blades caught in the middle. She came in to him as a
sort of exhibit. He kissed her hand. She sat by his bedside and
conversed with him pleasantly. They were quite alone for some time.
Nothing more happened. From something in his manner, I am inclined to
believe him. He was convinced that nothing more ever did happen.
Poggio: Men have a curious desire for uniformity. Bawdry and religion
are all one before it.
Maunsier: They call it the road to salvation.
Poggio: They ruin the shape of life for a dogmatic exterior. What
dignity have we over the beasts, save to be once, and to be
irreplaceable!
I myself am a rag-bag, a mass of sights and citations, but I will not
beat down life for the sake of a model.
Maunsier: Would you be “without an ideal?”
Poggio: Is beauty an ideal like the rest? I confess I see the need of no
other. When I read that from the breast of the Princess Hellene there
was cast a cup of “white gold,” the sculptor finding no better model;
and that this cup was long shown in the temple at Lyndos, which is in
the island of Rhodes; or when I read, as I think is the textual order,
first of the cup and then of its origin, there comes upon me a
discontent with human imperfection. I am no longer left in the “slough
of the senses,” but am full of heroic life, for the instant. The sap
mounts in the twigs of my being.
The visions of the mystics give them like courage, it may be.
Maunsier: My poor uncle, he will talk of the slough of the senses and
the “loathsome pit of contentment.” His “ideas” are with other men’s
conduct. He seeks to set bounds to their actions.
I cannot make out the mystics; nor how far we may trust to our senses,
and how far to sudden sights that come from within us, or at least seem
to spring up within us: a mirage, an elf-music; and how far we are prey
to the written word.
Poggio: I have seen many women in dreams, surpassing most mortal women,
but I doubt if I have on their account been stirred to more thoughts of
beauty, than I have had meditating upon that passage in latin,
concerning the temple of Pallas at Lyndos and its memorial cup of white
gold. I do not count myself among Plato’s disciples.
Maunsier: And yet it is forced upon us that all these things breed their
fanatics; that even a style might become a religion and breed bigots as
many, and pestilent.
Poggio: Our blessing is to live in an age when some can hold a fair
balance. It can not last; many are half-drunk with freedom; a greed for
taxes at Rome will raise up envy, a cultivated court will disappear in
the ensuing reaction. We are fortunate to live in the wink, the eye of
mankind is open; for an instant, hardly more than an instant. Men are
prized for being unique. I do not mean merely fantastic. That is to say
there are a few of us who can prize a man for thinking, in himself,
rather than for a passion to make others think with him.
Perhaps you are right about style; an established style could be as much
a nuisance as any other establishment. Yet there must be a reputable
normal. Tacitus is too crabbed. The rhetoricians ruined the empire. Let
us go on to our baths.
_Finis_
Three Nightpieces
John Rodker
I
Toward eight o’clock I begin to feel my pulses accelerating quietly. A
little after, my heart begins to thump against its walls. I tremble all
over, and leaving the room rapidly go out on the terrace of the house
and look over the weald.
There is a shadowiness of outline and the air is crisp. The sky in one
corner is a pale nostalgic rose. The trees look like weeds and a bird
flies up through them like a fish lazily rising. The hills really look
like breasts: and each moment I look for the head of the Titan negress
to rise with the moon in the lobe of her ear.
I think of my youth and the intolerable legacy it left me.
I think of the crazy scaffolding of my youth and wonder why I should be
surprised that the superstructure should be crazy too, wavering to every
breeze and threatening ever to come down about my ears. I think too of
wrongs done to this one and that one, and.... “Oh, my God,” I cry, “I
did not know, I did not know,” and my heart thumps louder in my breast
and my pulses throb like a tide thundering and sucking at some crumbling
jetty.
I gulp deep breaths of air to steady myself, but it is of no good. I
think of her whom I love and futility overwhelms me: for this too will
have its common end, and our orbits grow ever remoter. And putting my
head on my breast, faint and reminiscent—the smell from my armpits rises
to my brain, and she stands before me vividly and the same smell comes
from her; but it is more heady and more musky and she looks at me with
intolerable humility.
And a minute after there is only the dark; a hoot-owl’s terrifying call
and the queer yap that comes in reply; the frogs that thud through the
grass like uncertain feet; the trees that talk to each other.
And I would willingly let my life out gurgling and sticky, and sink
without a bubble into its metallic opacity.
II
I had gone to bed quietly at my wife’s side, kissing her casually as was
my custom. I awoke about two in the morning with a start so sudden that
it seemed I had been shot by a cannon out of the obscurity of sleep into
the light of waking; at one moment I had been, as it were, gagged and
bound by sleep; and the next I was wide awake and could distinctly sense
the demarking line between sleep and waking. And this demarking line was
like a rope made of human hair such as one sees in exhibitions of
indigenous Japanese products.
In my ears still rang the after-waves of the shriek which had awakened
me. The nerves governing my skin were still out of control as a result
of the sudden fright, and portions of it continued twitching for a long
time after; my scalp grew cold in patches and my hair stood on end....
In the dark I found myself trembling all over and bathed in a cold
sweat.... And it was impossible to collect myself. My wife, I felt, was
sitting up in bed and a minute afterward she began to weep quietly.
I was still trembling and her quiet weeping made me more afraid. I was
angry with her too, but could not talk to her, I was so afraid. My
voice, I knew, would have issued thin and quavering, and I was afraid of
its hollow reverberations losing themselves uncertainly in the darkness.
By the little light I saw her put her hands up to her head in despair
... as though still half asleep; and before I could stop her again the
same piercing, incredibly terrifying shriek burst from her. Again I
trembled all over, involuntarily gnashing my teeth and feeling my skin
ripple like loathsome worms.
“Stop,” I cried, seizing her by the arms, “Stop,” afraid to wake her,
yet more afraid to hear again that appalling shriek—and in a moment she
was awake ... looking wildly round her, and the quiet weeping gave way
to a wild and tempestuous sobbing.
I was afraid of her, afraid to go on sleeping with her, lest she should
again shriek in that wild and unearthly fashion; afraid to fall asleep
again lest I should be awakened by that appalling shriek dinning in my
ears and my body quivering vilely under the impossible sound. I clung to
her: “What is it, tell me at least what it is,” I said.
For a time she would not tell me. Trembling all over with anguish and
fear of I knew not what, I insisted. When at last she did tell me it was
as though the world had suddenly been cut away from under my feet.
Helplessly and weeping I clung to her, with cold at my heart. That any
human being could accuse another of devilry so sinister, so cold, so
incredible even in dream, I had not conceived of. Loathing her, I clung
the closer in my anguish and despair.
III
One night at supper I had eaten cucumber. Soon after I went to bed and
on the first strokes of ten fell asleep.
After sleeping for a long time I awoke into a dimly lit room. I still
lay on the bed and after a moment a figure entered, and after a few
moments more, another, until in this fashion there were half a dozen
people in the room. I could not distinguish who they were, and quietly
and obscurely they moved round my bed. Now and then there was a hiss out
of the corners of the room, or a chuckle in reply to some unheard
obscenity.
A heavy weight oppressed me as though I knew they menaced me in some
obscure and dreadful way. I could not move.
I could not move, and always the same obscure and dreadful procession
encircled me and shadowy bodies pressed a little closer, then drew back
again to join the sinister group.
And though I saw nothing save their shadowy forms, I knew their eyes
gleamed down at me: their faces were lecherous: their hands clawed; and
forever and through long ages they went round me in sinister procession.
Suddenly ... and how I do not know, I had broken the bonds of sleep and
lay trembling in a cold sweat. Through my protecting blankets the last
strokes of ten were fading.
Improvisations
Louis Gilmore
I
My thoughts are fish
That dwell in a twilight
Of green waters:
They are silver fish
That dart here and there
Streaking the still water
Of a pond.
My thoughts are birds
That have hung their nests
Near the sun:
They are yellow birds
That drift on stretched wings
Over a sea untroubled
By a sail.
My thoughts are beasts
That crouch and wait
In a black forest.
My thoughts are apes
That clamber through the tree-tops
Towards the moon.
II
In winter
People intensify
Their individuality
In houses.
In spring
By the side of lakes
Beneath trees
People walk
Vaguely sentimental.
In summer
Lying upon the warm earth
They hear the grass grow;
Or they become impersonal
In a contemplation
Of stars.
In autumn
People dispel
The characteristic
Melancholy of the season
With a cup of tea.
III
Rare delight,
That of hanging
By one’s tail
Over a pond.
Rare delight,
That of seeing
A green monkey
In the sky.
Rare delight,
That of reaching up
With one’s paw
To touch it.
Rare delight,
That of finding
The strange one
In the water.
Rare delight,
That of clasping
The belovèd
In death.
Poet’s Heart
Maxwell Bodenheim
The Mad Shepherd
The Narcissus Peddler
The Slender Nun
The Wine Jar Maiden
The Poet
A great window of palest purple light. The lower corner of the window is
visible. A dark purple wall frames the window, and narrow rectangles of
the wall, below and to the left of the window-corner, are visible.
Before the window-corner is the portion of a pale pink floor. One tall
thin white candle stands against the dark purple rectangle of wall to
the left of the window-corner. It bears a narrow flame which remains
stationary. Soft and clear light pours in from the window-corner and dim
shapes stand behind it. The Mad Shepherd appears from the left. He holds
a reed to his lips but does not blow into it. A long brown cloak drapes
him: black sandals are on his feet. His black hair caresses his
shoulders; his face is young. He pauses, three-fourths of his body
framed by the palest purple window-corner.
The Mad Shepherd (addressing the palest purple window-corner):
I’ve lost a tune. It’s a spirit-rose, and a reed-limbed boy ran before
me and whisked it past my ears before I could seize him. Have you seen
him, window clearer than the clashing light bubbles in a woman’s eyes?
(A pause). I sat on a rock in the midst of my sheep and smiled at the
piping of my young soul, as it climbed a spirit-tree. Soon it would
whirl joyously on the tip of the tree, and my heart would turn with it.
Then the song brushed past me and made my head a burning feather
dropping down. I stumbled after it, over the sun-dazed hills, and the
reed-limbed boy would often stop, touch both of my eyes with the
song-flower, and spring away. I saw him dance into this black palace. I
followed, through high corridors, to you, palest purple window, towering
over me like a silent mass of breath-clear souls. He has gone. Palest
purple window, tell me where he is?
(There is a short silence. The Mad Shepherd stands despairingly
fingering his reed. The Narcissus Peddler appears from the right. He is
an old man, a huge basket of cut narcissus strapped to his back. His
body is tall and slender; his face a bit yellow, with a long
silver-brown beard. His head is bare. He wears a black velvet coat, pale
yellow shirt, soft grey, loose trousers, and black sandals. He rests his
basket upon the floor. The Mad Shepherd takes a step toward him,
wearily).
The Narcissus Peddler:
A Voice walked into me, one day. How he found me, sleeping between two
huge purple hills, I do not know. He said with a laugh that had ghosts
of weeping in it that he knew a garden where narcissus flowers grew
taller than myself. What was there to do?—my soul and I, we had to walk
with him. He lead us to this palace, spinning the thread of a laugh
behind him so that we could follow. But now he has gone, and there is no
window—only a palest purple window.
The Mad Shepherd:
We can leap through this window, but it may be a trap.
The Narcissus Peddler:
Or a dream?
The Mad Shepherd:
Perhaps this is a dream that is true—an endless dream.
The Narcissus Peddler:
Can that be death?
Mad Shepherd (pointing to the other’s basket):
With death, you would have left your narcissus behind you, for fragrance
itself.
Peddler:
If my life has melted to an endless dream, my chase is over. I shall sit
here and my soul will become an endless thought of narcissus.
(He seats himself beside his basket; Shepherd stands despairingly; the
Slender Nun appears from the right: She is small and her body like a
thin drooping stem; she wears the black dress of a nun but her child
face is uncovered. Her feet are bare. She stops, standing a step away
from the Peddler.)
The Slender Nun:
I see a candle that is like an arm stiffened in prayer. (She pauses)
Palest purple window, is my soul standing behind you and spreading to
light that gently thrusts me down? A flamed-loosed angel lifted it from
me. I ran after him. He seemed to touch you, window, like a vapor kiss
dying upon pale purple silk. (a pause) Must I stand here always waiting
for my soul like a flower petal pressed deep into the earth by passing
feet?
The Shepherd:
You have lost a soul and I a tune. Let me make you the tune and you make
me your soul. You could sit with me on my rock in the hills and make a
soul of my reed—rippling and piping of you, I might weave a new tune.
The Nun:
Can you give me a soul that will be Christ floating out in clear music?
Only then I would go with you.
Shepherd (sadly):
My music is like the wet, quick kiss of rain. It knows nothing of
Christ.
(A short silence)
(The Wine jar maiden appears from the right. She is tall and pale brown;
upon her head is a long pale green jar; her hair is black and spurts
down. Her face is wide but delicately twisted. She wears a thin simple
pale green gown, with a black girdle about her waist, one tasseled end
hanging down. She stops a little behind the Slender Nun, and lowers her
wine jar to the floor. The Nun turns and partly faces her. The Narcissus
Peddler looks up from where he has sat, in a reverie, beside his
basket.)
The Wine Jar Maiden:
My heart was a wine jar stained with the roses of frail dreams and
filled with wine that had turned to shaking mist. One day I felt it
wrenched from me, and mist drops that flew from it, as it left, sank
into my breast and made me shrink. I could not see the thief, but I
followed the scent of my heart trailing behind him. It brought me here,
but at this palest purple window it died. Scent of my heart, have you
spread over this huge window, and must I stand forever looking upon you?
(The Narcissus Peddler slowly rises and takes a stride toward the palest
purple window)
The Narcissus Peddler:
That dim shape behind the window—I believe it is a huge narcissus. I am
a rainbow-smeared knave to stand here juggling the little golden balls
of dreams. I shall spring through the window.
The Slender Nun:
Take my hand when you spring. Perhaps this is God’s forehead, and we
shall melt into it, like billows of rain washing into a cliff.
The Wine Jar Maiden:
If I leap through this window, a cloak of my heart-scent may hang to me.
I shall touch the cloak, now and then, and that shall be my life.
The Mad Shepherd:
I must sit here, and whirl with my young spirit. If I cannot knit
together strands of music better than the tune I ran after, then I
should not have chased it.
(After a short silence the Narcissus Peddler and the Slender Nun, hand
in hand, leap through the window-corner and vanish. The Wine Jar Maiden
leaps after them, a moment later, and also disappears. The Mad Shepherd
sits down and blows little fragments of piping into his reed, long
pauses separating them. As he does this, he looks up at the window, his
head motionless. The Narcissus Peddler, the Slender Nun and the Wine Jar
Maiden appear from the left walking slowly, in single file, as though in
a trance. The Narcissus Peddler stands beside his basket, which he left
behind him; the Wine Jar Maiden beside her jar, and the Slender Nun
between them)
The Mad Shepherd (looking up, astonished):
You return, like sleep-drooping poplar trees that have been given wings
and after long journeyings fly back to their little blue-green hills.
The Narcissus Peddler:
After we sprang we found ourselves in a high corridor, whose air was
like the breath of a dying maiden—the corridor we first walked down,
before we came to this palest purple window.
The Mad Shepherd (wonderingly):
A dream with a strange, buried, quivering palace whose doors are closed.
(The poet quietly appears from the right. He is dressed in a deep
crimson robe, pale brown turban and black sandals; his head is bare. He
surveys the others a moment, then touches the shoulder of the Wine Jar
Maiden. She turns and stares at him. The others turn also)
The Poet:
You are all in my heart—a wide space with many buried, black palaces,
huge pale-purple windows; hills with rocks for mad shepherds, strolling
flower venders, wine jar maidens dancing in high courtyards hushed with
quilted star-light and sometimes a slender nun walking alone through the
aisles of old reveries. I have woven you into a poem, and you were drawn
on by me. But when my poems are made I take my people to a far-off
garden in my heart. There we sit beneath one of the shining trees and
talk. There I shall give you your soul, your heart, your song—and your
huge narcissus flower. And out of them make other poems, perhaps? Come.
(He leads them away)
Spectrum
Emanuel Morgan
Opus 96
You are the Japan
Where cherries always blossom.
With you there is no meantime.
Your are the nightingale’s twenty-four hours of song,
The unbroken Parthenon,
The everlasting purring of the sphynx.
At the first footfall of an uncouth season,
You migrate with one wing-sweep
To beauty.
The Reader Critic
Indiscriminate Illusions
E. L. R., Bear Creek, Pa.:
After reading your article “Push Face” in your June number I have torn
the magazine to pieces and burned it in the fire. You may discontinue my
subscription.
[We have noticed with much amusement that whenever there is an article
in the body of the magazine or a comment in the Reader Critic, no matter
by whom signed, which seems “disgusting, ridiculous or immoral” to some
struggling soul, in comes a letter addressed to Margaret Anderson,
saying: “_Your_ article, _your_ comment.”... The only hope the editor
can have out of so much generous accreditis that some one sometime will
write in giving her credit for Yeats’s poems.—_jh._]
Critical Epilepsy
I. E. P., White Plains, New York:
Your magazine is rubbish, disappointingly insipid, heavily stupid. I
fear it has gas on the stomach. Retract! Give us the unperverted, the
natural, the “sincere.” Our eyesight and pocket-books will not endure
_The Emperor’s Cloak_ (see H. C. Anderson). This vapid trance pose, this
vaporizing makes us wonder why you are attempting to loop the loop. And
again the “atmosphere” of your paper seems as well compassed as a
spider’s journey on the ceiling. We have the same feeling of wanting to
help you both by poking you off with an umbrella.
M. H., La Grange, Illinois:
Some of your stories and criticisms I am glad to have read. I remember
the interesting (and instructive) criticism on our four pianists and a
_wonderful_ short story by Sherwood Anderson,—those two things and a
Harold Bauer eulogy are about the only two things I can recall
favorably. A story written to protest against the hanging of one of our
worst criminals (as in the very first _Little Review_ I received—I
remember because it disgusted me), another story ridiculing our part in
the war (as in the last number), and other queer Emma Goldman sort of
stories (in between these first and last copies) are way beyond me.
Why should one be a Democrat or a Christian or a Militarist or a Mrs.
Potter-Palmer or a push-face policeman to believe in our cause for
entering the war. I wish every paper and magazine might help inspire the
right sort of war enthusiasm. Many, a few years ago, believed in peace
at any price; but many minds have changed, including my own. If the real
business of life is to live, we’ll fight for the privilege so long as we
can’t rely on any other means of gaining that right. And we want at
least a few more generations to live as well as our own. If there are
various ideas of what “living” means I’m glad there are those who can
never understand Emma Goldman’s theories.
German women can’t realize what “living” means if they feel obliged to
get off the sidewalk to let pass a German officer. Do these men who are
afraid to fight for their country know what living means—men who drink
and smoke? Would they believe they stand less chance of recovery from
sickness, less chance of resisting sickness, less chance of _living_
very long, than the men who never touch alcohol or tobacco? (But this is
not the point either, and men are reforming).
Anyway I would rather give a dollar and a half to the Red Cross than
subscribe for _The Little Review_. And also I’m not intellectual enough
to enjoy it.
[There is really nothing to be said to the above two letters:
explanation up against what must be a matter of evolution. It would be
necessary to give out sample copies for a year or so to prospective
subscribers to insure satisfaction before we take their money. Since
there are Hearst publications to give the public what it wants in
literature and art, the cinematograph to give it what it wants in drama,
why should that public bother at all with _The Little Review_?
Especially when we state fairly that we are a magazine of the Arts,
making no compromise with the public taste?—_jh._]
Interest Begins at Home
F. E. R., Chicago:
I have just read your June issue. Won’t you ask Ezra Pound if he should
mind making an effort to be interesting?
[I ask you to make an effort to discover why he is so interesting.]
“The World’s Immense Wound”
Why does Ezra Pound regard America with contempt? America is beneath it.
I have just read Muriel Ciolkowska’s review in _The Egoist_ of _Le Feu_
by Henri Barbusse. In that book M. Barbusse has a character say: “One
figure has risen above the war and will shine for the beauty and
importance of his courage: Liebknecht.”
How this book ever passed the censor is beyond me. To quote further:
The future! The future! The future’s duty will be to efface the
present, to efface it even more than you think, to efface it as
something abominable and shameful. And yet this present was
necessary! Shame to military glory, shame to armies, shame to the
soldier’s trade which transforms men in turn from stupid victims
to ignoble executioners.
A _Feldwebel_ seated, leaning on the ripped-up planks of what
was, there where we stand, a sentry-box. A little hole under one
eye; a bayonet thrust has nailed him by his face to the boards.
In front of him, also seated, with his elbows on his knees, his
fists in his neck, a man shows a skull opened like a boiled
egg.... Near them, appalling sentinel, half a man is standing: a
man cut, sliced in two from skull to loins, leaning upright
against the bank of earth. The other half is missing of this
species of human peg, whose eye hangs out, whose bluish entrails
twist in spirals round his leg.
“The whole book, from beginning to end,” says Mme. Ciolkowska, “is a
fearless revelation, be the theme drowning in swamps, the
storming-parties, the dressing-stations, starvation and thirst which
drives men to drink their own urine:”
Of the greatness and wealth of a country they make a devouring
disease, a kind of cancer absorbing living forces, taking the
whole place and crushing life and which, being contagious, ends
either in the crisis of war or in the exhaustion and asphyxia of
armed peace. Of how many crimes have they not made virtues by
calling them national—with one word! They even deform truth. For
eternal truth is substituted the national truth of each. So many
peoples, so many truths, which twist and turn the truth. All
those who keep up these children’s disputes, so odiously
ridiculous, scold each other, with: “It wasn’t I who began, it
was you.” “No it wasn’t I, it was you.” “Begin if you dare.”
“Begin, you.” Puerilities which keep the world’s immense wound
sore because those really interested do not take part in the
discussion and the desire to make an end of it does not exist;
all those who cannot or will not make peace on earth; all those
who clutch, for some reason or other, to the old state of things,
finding or inventing reasons for it, those are your enemies!
In a word, the enemy is the past. The perpetrators of war are the
traditionalists, steeped in the past ... for whom an abuse has
the power of law because it has been allowed to take root, who
aspire to be guided by the dead and who insist on submitting the
passionate, throbbing future and progress to the rule of ghosts
and nursery fables.
“Verily the criminals are those who echo, ‘because it was, it
must be.’”
Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman have just been given a sentence of
two years in prison, fines of ten-thousand dollars each, and
deportation, for believing these same things!—_M. C. A._
Argument
Louis Putkelis, Cambridge, Mass.:
I am thinking seriously on the subject of Art and I would like to have a
clear exposition of your views and the reasons why they do not agree
with mine.
Having the relation of art to life and to society, as a question,
seriously to heart, I would prefer a serious reply to a serious article
rather than a flippant reply to chance remarks. I had hoped that
discussions would arise among the Reader Critic that would interest a
larger circle of readers and that would sift the question thoroughly.
It seems to me that the last few numbers of _The Little Review_ have
been below your earlier standard—almost below zero. What sympathy can
the majority of readers feel for the foreign editor, Ezra Pound, with
his contemptuous invective against the “vulgus”? The last letter of
Wyndham Lewis, to be sure, has more food for thought, though it seems
that the author’s acquaintance with Russian literature is rather
limited. I could say more about that but I await the psychological
moment.
[To be very serious I had no idea that this department was ever
flippant. I thought we had said so much about art values that we
couldn’t go on boring our audience forever with the same discussions.
And discussing Art isn’t very profitable anyway. We’re trying to show
what it is. When you asked questions which seemed to me quite obvious,
or at least seemed to show quite obviously that you didn’t understand
what we had said in clearing up those values, I knew no better way to
point up our disagreement than by using what is known as “epithet”
instead of going off into long serious discussions of matters that had
already been “got across.”
A contempt for the “vulgus” is the inevitable reaction of any man or
woman who observes the antics of the “flies in the marketplace.” There’s
nothing supercilious about it. It’s a fact that humanity is the most
stupid and degraded thing on the planet—whether through its own fault or
not is beside the point when you’re weighing values. You’re not blaming
humanity when you say that; it isn’t interesting to blame: the
interesting thing is to put the truth of it into a form that will
endure.—_M. C. A._]
Note
Banish
Anne Knish,
Set the dog on
Emanuel Morgan.
_X._
Quotation
M. W., New York:
Here are two extracts from Jean Laher’s _Le Breviare d’un Pantheist_:
their appearance in _The Little Review_ should give a healthy jolt to
many of your disdainful readers,—and many others will thank you silently
from their innermost hearts for printing two of the most beautiful
thoughts in any language.
“Nous sommes devant la Nature comme Hamlet devant sa mère: nous
la jugeons et nous la condamnons, et pourtant nous lui pardonnons
aussi, comme Hamlet à un moment pardonne, saisi de piété filiale
ou seulement d’immense pitié humaine devant la vision, qui lui
est soudainement apparue, de tout le chaos des choses. Et nous,
qui voulons ce qu’elle n’a pas voulu, et qui voulons plus et
mieux que ce qu’elle a voulu, nous aussi nous réconcilierons avec
elle, pour tenter de réparer son mal, autant qu’il se peut
réparer. Et quoiqu’elle fasse ou qu’elle ait fait, nous nous
rappellerons qu’après tout nous lui devons la vie, si nous lui
devons la mort, la vie avec ses souffrances, ses angoisses, avec
ses misères et ses crimes, avec tous ses mensonges, avec tout son
néant, mais aussi avec quelques splendeurs, quelques
illuminations fugitives, et quelques tendresses caressantes, et
le vague amour d’Ophélie, et ces sentiments de miséricorde et de
justice, qu’elle, inconsciente, ne connaît pas, ou qu’elle ne
connaît que par nous, et qui en nous sont nés de notre rébellion
contre elle.”
“En tout, je vois un rythme qui tend vers la beauté, mais qui
trop rarement la prout; et la perception de ce rythme, plus ou
moins apparent dans les choses, par instants, rassure et donne
une jouissance infinie, à laquelle se vient mêler cependant une
certaine souffrance ou mélancolie, celle du besoin insatisfait de
la beauté _parfaite_ en toutes choses.”
Mason & Hamlin
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Mason & Hamlin Co.
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NEW YORK
Eugene Hutchinson
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“Hello Huck!”
Recall that golden day when you first read “Huck Finn”? How your
mother said, “For goodness’ sake, stop laughing aloud over that
book. You sound so silly.” But you couldn’t stop laughing.
Today when you read “Huckleberry Finn” you will not laugh so
much. You will chuckle often, but you will also want to weep. The
deep humanity of it—the pathos, that you never saw, as a boy,
will appeal to you now. You were too busy laughing to notice the
limpid purity of the master’s style.
MARK TWAIN
When Mark Twain first wrote “Huckleberry Finn” this land was
swept with a gale of laughter. When he wrote “The Innocents
Abroad” even Europe laughed at it itself.
But one day there appeared a new book from his pen, so spiritual,
so true, so lofty that those who did not know him well were
amazed. “Joan of Arc” was the work of a poet—a historian—a seer.
Mark Twain was all of these. His was not the light laughter of a
moment’s fun, but the whimsical humor that made the tragedy of
life more bearable.
A Real American
Mark Twain was a steamboat pilot. He was a searcher for gold in
the far West. He was a printer. He worked bitterly hard. All this
without a glimmer of the great destiny that lay before him. Then,
with the opening of the great wide West, his genius bloomed.
His fame spread through the nation. It flew to the ends of the
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Transcriber’s Notes
Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.
The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect
correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.
The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
(before/after):
[p. 3]:
... friend Philip Seddon inclosed with a letter. Under the above
title ...
... friend Philip Seddon enclosed with a letter. Under the above
title ...
[p. 4]:
... potentiality of six men. Leave your front door one day at B.: ...
... potentiality of six men. Leave your front door one day as B.: ...
[p. 12]:
... the opposite gallery a white-beared town-councillor began to ...
... the opposite gallery a white-bearded town-councillor began to ...
[p. 14]:
... Poggio: I have walked and ridden through Europe, annoting, ...
... Poggio: I have walked and ridden through Europe, annotating, ...
[p. 18]:
... Suddenly ... and how I do not know, I had broken the bonds of
of ...
... Suddenly ... and how I do not know, I had broken the bonds of ...
[p. 22]:
... and spreading to light that gently thrusts me down? A
flamed-losed ...
... and spreading to light that gently thrusts me down? A
flamed-loosed ...
[p. 23]:
... (The Narcissus slowly rises and takes a stride toward the
palest ...
... (The Narcissus Peddler slowly rises and takes a stride toward
the palest ...
[p. 29]:
... “Nous sommes evant la Nature comme Hamlet devant sa ...
... “Nous sommes devant la Nature comme Hamlet devant sa ...
[p. 29]:
... mère: nous la jugeons et nous la condamoons, et pourtant
nous ...
... mère: nous la jugeons et nous la condamnons, et pourtant
nous ...
[p. 29]:
... lui pardonnoos aussi, comme Hamlet à un moment pardonne, ...
... lui pardonnons aussi, comme Hamlet à un moment pardonne, ...
[p. 29]:
... la vision, qui lui est sou dainement apparue, de tout le
chaos des ...
... la vision, qui lui est soudainement apparue, de tout le chaos
des ...
[p. 29]:
... “En tout, je vois un rythme qui tend vers la beauté, mais
quit ...
... “En tout, je vois un rythme qui tend vers la beauté, mais
qui ...
[p. 29]:
... certaine souffrance ou mélancolie, celle du besoin insatiss
fait de la ...
... certaine souffrance ou mélancolie, celle du besoin
insatisfait de la ...
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, JULY 1917 (VOL. 4, NO. 3) ***
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