Discovering old worlds to conquer
David Wright
MAKERS OF THE NEW: THE REVOLUTION IN LITERATURE, 1912-1939 by Julian Symons
Deutsch, £12.95
GENIUSES TOGETHER: AMERICAN WRITERS IN PARIS IN THE 1920s by Humphrey Carpenter
Unwtn Hyman, £12.95
Julian Symons in his Makers of the New and Humphrey Carpenter in his Geniuses Together are concerned with much the same period and cast of characters — the four founding fathers of what is called modernism, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis; with their coevals .and epigoni, Ford Madox Ford, T. E. Hulme, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, H. D. and Basil Bunting; not to mention a rich dramatis personae of minor characters, patrons of the arts and artists, such as the lawyer John Quinn and those respectable ladies Sylvia Beach and Harriet Weaver; the drinkers and denizens of Montparnasse, the wild men and women, half-forgotten eccentrics and half- failed geniuses: Robert McAlmon, Harry Crosby, Nina Hamnett — a world that came into being around 1912 and was over by 1939, the year that saw the publication of Finnegans Wake and the beginning of the second world war.
Of the two books Julian Symons's is the more serious — after all it carries the subtitle 'The Revolution in Literature, 1912-1939.' He is wrong, though, to claim that there is no other book that looks at modernism through the links between Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Lewis — has he forgotten Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era? Never mind: Mr Symons begins excellently with a set of thumbnail sketches or mini- biographies of his main protagonists, in- cluding Edward Marsh and Harriet Mon- roe. These are enlivened with much vivid contemporary detail, e.g. Violet Hunt's description of Pound playing tennis, 'the flaps of his polychrome shirt flying out like the petals of some flower and his red head like a flaming pistil in the middle'; Conrad Aiken recalling Eliot as 'a tall, rather dapper young man with a lamian smile' and T. E. Hulme, sent down from Cam- bridge, leaving the university astride a coffin.
Equally excellent is Mr Symons's account of the birth, life, and death of such seminal magazines as The Egoist in which Joyce's Portrait of the Artist first appeared, and whose circulation — never more than 200 — was wildly disproportionate to its influence. As for his definition of 'modern- ism' Mr Symons details its history but is fairly vague about its nature. It was T. E. Hulme, killed prematurely in the first world war, whose ideas were the driving force. 'I believe in original sin. . . I can't stand Romanticism. . . . I am a certain kind of Tory' — a position that Eliot came to adopt. With modernism 'the ideas were reactionary, the art works revolutionary'. Of the men of 1914 Symons concludes: 'they changed permanently the language in which poetry was written, and enlarged beyond measure what could be .said and the way of saying it in fiction'.
I am not so sure about that 'permanent- ly'. It has happened before and will prob- ably happen again. Just as 'Modernism' in poetry was a turning away from dead diction, and in all the arts a reaction to the technological revolution triggered by the invention of the internal combustion en- gine, the Romantics, a century earlier, had reacted to the industrial revolution and returned poetry to 'the language really spoken by men.' Modernism, however, went further; the baby was thrown out with the bathwater: form, measure, and rhyme abandoned. Hulme, the father of Imagism, produced the barren axiom that the pur- pose of poetry is not to express feelings but to evoke an image. Not so: the purpose of poetry is not to express feelings but to give pleasure — a law that the great modernist poets, masters of cadence like Pound and Eliot, may not have acknowledged but obeyed.
In the hands of the untalented modern- ism degenerated into gimmickry for the sake of originality — if it's new, it's Art. As Mr Symons points out, this was a nonsense that Eliot and Wyndham Lewis saw through, though Pound, whose common sense and flair seems to have deserted him around 1925, still clung to the fallacy. Hence his championship of dead-end ex- perimentalists like the musician Antheil and the poet Zukofsky. American modern- ism, according to Mr Symons, was essen- tially anti-intellectual and suspicious of Europe. His unfriendly but just analyses of the work of W. C. Williams, Gertrude Stein and Hemingway go far to make his point — but he refuses to discuss Scott Fitzgerald, whose novels he admires yet manages to find conventional. Even The Great Gatsby? And what about Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and the Tietjens tetralogy?
Both Julian Symons and Humphrey Carpenter underestimate Ford, who was Pound's only mentor — and Pound was everybody's mentor. Neither of them men- tions Hugh MacDiarmid, that hammer of the Sassenfich, who is certainly one of the great modernist poets of the age. But MacDiarmid is well outside Mr Carpen- ter's field, which is more or less confined to American writers in Paris in the 1920s. His is more entertaining and gossipy a book than that of Mr Symons. Nonetheless it is spiked with a number of penetrating observations and some first-class criticism. He is much kinder to Gertrude Stein, whose style, according to Symons, really derived from early experiments in spir- itualist automatic writing. But Carpenter shows, by supplying conventional punctua- tion to a couple of paragraphs from her Making of the Americans, how nearly her writing approaches that of Henry James and even Jane Austen! All the same he quotes her brother Leo's acrid comment: 'Gertrude does not know what words mean.'
The principal figure in Being Geniuses is Ernest Hemingway, here revealed as an unpleasant and treacherous kind of man. Carpenter's judgment of the novels is acute, though he spends far too much space on Fiesta, alias The Sun Also Rises. But then it is not so much a novel as a brilliant piece of malicious reportage — the characters being real people, typical Amer- ican Montparnassians let loose and at a loss in Pamplona. But Harold Loeb, por- trayed as the fool Cohn in the novel, seems to have been something of a wit in real life, to judge from his verdict on that inveterate anecdotal romancer Ford, who, said Loeb, 'was blessed with total mrecall; he remem- bered nothing that actually happened.' As Carpenter points out, American writers who went to Paris in the 1920s went there to discover Europe, but found America. But the unacknowledged hero of Mr Carpenter's book is Robert McAlmon (whom Joyce nicknamed McAlimony after his divorce from the shipping heiress Bryh- er, née Ellerman) — McAlmon, whom Symons places in his category of 'genuine phoneys' along with Eugene Jolas of transi- tion and Harry Crosby of the Black Sun Press. McAlmon was chief among those who, like Crosby, talked and drank away what talent they had — in McAlmon's case a very genuine one. It was he who, with Marcel Duchamp, pointed out that the non-creative drinkers and hangers-on of Montparnasse contributed to the success of the creative groups by presenting 'in con- centrated form their share of human types and manifestations'. To the truth of this I, no less tlidn Jeffrey Bernard on another page, can testify, having been brought up and educated in a similar world, the Soho pubs of the Forties and Fifties, where many of the ageing refugee survivors of Mont- parnasse — e.g. Nina Hamnett and Sylvia Gough, who both figure in Mr Carpenter's book, talked and drank; and where another generation of poets and painters, Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Malcolm Wil- liams, George Barker, Dylan Thomas and W. S. Graham among others would for- gather nightly among the kings of Poland and Redondo, failed burglars, Cambridge Senior Wranglers and all sorts and condi- tions of women and men.
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