The Little Review

A Real Magazine

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

I am afraid to write anything; I am ashamed.

I have been realizing the ridiculous tragedy of The Little Review. It has been published for over two years without coming near its ideal.

The ultimate reason for life is Art. I don’t know what they mean when they talk about art for life’s sake. You don’t make art so that you may live; you do just the reverse of that. Life takes care of itself, rolls on from the first push, and then falls over the edge. Art uses up all the life it can get—and remains forever. Art for Art’s sake is merely the sensible statement of the most self-evident fact in the world. It has been the easy creed of charlatans; but what does that matter? It has always been the faith of the strongest.

Well—I wanted Art in The Little Review. There has been a little of it, just a very little.... It is tragic. I tell you.

And Revolution? Revolution is Art. You want free people just as you want the Venus that was modelled by the sea.... All my inadequate stammerings about Emma Goldman have been to show her as the artist she is: a great artist, working in her own material as a Michael Angelo worked in his.

Now we shall have Art in this magazine or we shall stop publishing it. I don’t care where it comes from—America or the South Sea Islands. I don’t care whether it is brought by youth or age. I only want the miracle!

Where are the artists? Where is some new Pater, and how will his “She is older than the rocks among which she sits” sound to us? Where is some new Arthur Symons with his version of “Peter Weyland”? Where is a Henry James and a Hardy and a Bjornson and an Andreyev for us? Where is a Jean-Christophe who will let us publish his songs?

Helen Hoyt, you have a poem in this issue called The Tree. It is not Art; it is merely a rather good poem. You could have made it Art. Do it every time, for the love of the gods! “Sue Golden” has one about Jim and Arabella. It has an interesting idea that many people need to understand. Why not make Art of it? I know one of hers which begins “My body is too frail for these great moods”—and the miracle is in it.

I loathe compromise, and yet I have been compromising in every issue by putting in things that were “almost good” or “interesting enough” or “important.” There will be no more of it. If there is only one really beautiful thing for the September number it shall go in and the other pages will be left blank.

Come on, all of you!

AMY LOWELL

R. G.

Some new Agitation is always fretting the souls of those who feel that it is their task to save the world from itself. Of late it has been Birth Control. They have been going to prison for merely mentioning the words Birth Control in the presence of an ingenue government. And all the time the government has the most perfect system of Birth Control for genius and art—the National Board of Censorship—so perfect as to produce sterility.

A simple mind would wonder why these agitators don’t first fight the censorship, and perhaps all these things would be added unto them!

Last winter a rumor did come out of New York that a few of these and a few artists were trying to form a plan of unorganized but concerted action, each profession or art or group protesting to the state on its own behalf. It turned out to be another of those Spoon River things: when the test came a few stood by the idea, but the others were either too lily-livered to have their names appear or the inevitable Puritan ancestor arose to remind them that after all they were Plymouth Rocks.

And all the while the tale grows finer yet:

Jerome Blum, a painter of reputation, a real painter, returned from China in the spring naively bringing with him, to this land of the free, a little collection of Chinese and Japanese art to keep by him for the delight of his soul. In the collection was a book over one hundred and fifty years old, containing eight original paintings on silk, by one of the greatest of Chinese painters, and a Japanese scroll, twelve feet long, of even finer workmanship.

Mr. Blum was summoned before the Collector of the Port of Chicago. The two works described had been declared obscene by an appraiser: “They would arouse the passions of an ordinary man.” They were to be destroyed, with the possible inclusions of the entire case of old bronzes, tapestries, embroideries, etc., in which they were shipped. Mr. Blum had laid himself open to a fine of thousands of dollars, with something like five years imprisonment, for good measure.

Law versus Art. Mr. Blum offered to paint out all objectionable parts, asked permission to send the things back to China or permission to present them to some museum. “Art or no Art, all paintings of the kind were to be burned” was the decree from the customs officials. And the two “obscene” works of art were burned in the furnace of the Federal building.

No need here to go into what Mr. Blum must have suffered as an artist over the destruction of precious beauty never to be replaced—or as a man over the delicate and unobscene discussions, by the officials, of the objectionable parts, over the injustice of having his property destroyed without trial before a jury of his peers.

All people of any education know that the art of all ancient peoples sprung from a desire to recreate for the hearts of men the mystery of creation and reproduction of life; thence came religion to explain to the minds of men the awe and wonder of creation. The Art of the Orient is almost wholly concerned with these subjects. Here was where Mr. Blum’s became “obscene” art.

If the censors should become informed woe for the Christian churches, each raising an “obscene” phallic symbol, in the cross, shamelessly uncensored to the sky; the bishops would mourn their fish-mouthed phallic hats, and so on endlessly.

Who knows but if left to themselves they may not even reach themselves in their unlimited censorship and be their own destruction?

—And Gone One Better[1]

CAESAR ZWASKA

It has come to be that on the stage, where once we watched for artists, we find only vainly strutting weak-willed human beings. We are not held, and the light within the sacred space grows dimmer. We lose all interest in places where once we have found Art.

And how desperate we have become!

The procession of the Imagists has been the only sacred thing before our eyes—thin and fragrant. Their fragility has the sap of eternity; blustering winds, blowing through the gaps back-stage, tear at them in vain. The Imagists have grown straight and strong. The beauty of their tiny procession strikes into our very hearts the emptiness, the appalling desolation, of our position.

Carl Sandburg has understood the failures and the lies and exposed the cause. He has shown the lie of your government and the farce and folly of monuments to those who kill to keep it alive. He exposes your little deaths and their perfumed sorrow and the bunk of words and antics of your Billy Sunday and fellow citizens. He has heard the “fellows saying here’s good stuff for a novel or it might be worked up into a good play,” when speaking of an Italian widow living in city slums. He has the courage and the knack of giving them the challenge—calling their bluff; and he declares with strong conviction that he’s able to back up his defiance. Who of the scatter-brains living could put her or her daughter-in-law or the working girls or the entire mob, for that matter, into a play? But he has put them, their spirit, into lines, gaunt and vivid as their lives. And I declare he is the only modern that has got it across.

This is the process of the book and of the poet’s progress: The Chicago poems; he has worked his vengeance; from the cinders and ashes, glowing still, rise sparks, brilliant and tiny. (He calls them Handfuls.) The stifling smoulder of the War poems to the warm rich glow of The Road and the End and the flame of the fire with its attendant fogs and then grim shadows. As a confession, or rather a solidifying of the entire force of the poet, he reveals the Other Days, quite as intense as the present mood. This from the last of that section:

Why should a man speak? When there are things to say, such as the Red Son, always have your lips ready to speak:

Poetry has grown stronger in your eyes?

Thus has Carl Sandburg in one book gone the entire range of a life today. The humanitarian poet as well as the artist-poet. He has proven things—and peoples. The nigger: foam of teeth ... breaking crash of laughter; Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti: with that kindling wood piled on her head, coming along Peoria street nine o’clock in the morning; Jan Kubelik: girls of Bohemia ... in the hills with their lovers; Chick Lorimer: a wild girl keeping a hold on a dream she wants; Mischa Elman: a singing fire and a climb of roses; the plowboy: turning the turf in the dusk and haze of an April gloaming; the gypsy: her neck and head the top piece of a Nile obelisk. He has known uplands when the great strong hills are humble; losses: and one day we will hold only the shadows; wars: in the wars to come kings kicked under the dust and millions of men following great causes not yet dreamed out in the heads of men; joy: sent on singing, singing, smashed to the hearts under the ribs with a terrible love; the mist: at the first of things, I will be at the last; and The Great Hunt:

The Case of Masters

In one of Whitman’s songs he speaks to those “who would assume a place to teach, or be a poet here in the States”; or, rather, he questions them, something like this:

And so on. I think the questions quoted and the rest of the poem are valuable; especially in thinking of Masters’ new book.[2] Because here are put to the lawyer, who is known as a poet, all the questions of our time. They are put to him because his first book gave us to believe that he was the first poet whom we need scrutinize closely since Whitman spoke his simplicities to the present and the next ten futures.

Masters may not cringe before these “terms obdurate.” He will point to The Spoon River Anthology. I will point to his work before the Anthology and again these later things. Masters of course loves Walt Whitman. He knows the poem from which I quoted. But Theodore Watts-Dunton—you remember him? Masters, I am sure, is more anxious and willing to accept, nay, subscribe to, the rules and judgments of this Victorian critic than to the mere words spoken in poesy of Watts-Dunton’s American contemporary, Whitman. I am almost certain of this. Masters speaks highly of Watts-Dunton’s essay on poetry. It appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Please read it and find the Masters creed. He seems ready to bow before it. If Masters wants honors as a decadent he can have them—really he has earned them. The Spoon River Anthology: its manner, joy, abandon, deepest humanity, art (all that makes it the tremendous book it is), seem to be the one great thing that Masters had to give us. The new book does not show the “truly deep poetic spirit” which Francis Hackett claims to have found in it. Such a judgment is given the lie by such poems as: St. Francis and the Lady Clare, Rain in My Heart, Simon Surnamed Peter, The City, Helen of Troy, O Glorious France, Love Is a Madness, The Altar, Soul’s Desire, Ballad of Launcelot and Elaine, In Michigan, The Star.

Our own feeble voice aside, I merely put before you words of two men—one a creator and critic, and the other a creator and human being. And I hope I have visualized for you the pathetically absurd spectacle of a “modern poet” bowing on bended knee before—. Well, why should a poet bow at all?

[1] Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg. New York: Henry Holt.

[2] Songs and Satires, by Edgar Lee Masters. New York: Macmillan.

BEN HECHT

JOHN GRIMES

He might have removed mountains or carved out empires; instead he turns his nails against provincial society and scratches. Pechorin—egoist, self-seeker, hater, superman in swaddlings—stifled to madness by the air of Russia, bled of energy, his idealism thwarted; fearing to raise his head from the ashes and launch against circumstance, there was nothing in all Holy Russia that could test his soul in supreme activity. He lacked the moral courage that forced the sons of the fathers into revolution. There was left mockery, and the insulting of the soul with puny wickedness, vapid and provincial. So genius was poured into the mould of the commonplace.

Pechorin sought a splendid isolation. He killed humanity in his heart, became a creature of self, and began to hate as sincerely as a revengeful, spoiled child. His hatred becomes sordid vindictiveness; his emotions correspond to tantrums. He feeds upon the ruined hopes and the despair of society, making himself “an author of middle-class tragedies.”

He looms before us on the screen, menacing, grandiose, Byronic. But he is great only from the scaling of values. His contact is incessantly with weaker types who bend or break before him. Grushnitski is a modish idealist; Bela, a captive maid who acknowledges his right to do as he wills; Vera, a hysterical sentimentalist of that spirituelle type to whom the intense physical traits of Pechorin make a ready appeal. She quiets her scruples with the sacred notion that she is sacrificing herself, soul and body to one whose life would otherwise be incomplete. Princess Mary is a typical Byronese victim, a devotee at the shrine of heroism, who for nothing in the world would give herself to a man who has not some mystery or who has not been the victim of some crushing sorrow. Contrast her with the vital, passionate Natalya in Turgene’s Rudin.... Pechorin hunts easy game. He acknowledges that he has never loved women of spirit: “Once only I loved a woman with a firm will that I was unable to vanquish. We parted enemies.” What would these erotic, parasitic Byrons subsist upon nowadays? Woman is no more the mere giver; she asks and receives in return.

Pechorin wins from us not honest hatred but contempt. One searches the book for an honorable impulse upon his part. He is a washed-out Byron; a pale Don Juan. He loves many women for the excitement of mere change. “We live out of curiosity. We expect something new. How absurd, and yet how vexatious!” Women fall at his feet and he asks derisively: “Can it be that wickedness is so attractive?” He knows the ways of his victim by heart, he anticipates her every move, and calls her accomplishment tiresome. Passion has shriveled until it is an inglorious segment of his life. It is a thing of curiosity rather than of sympathy. Love is an annoyance, yet he persists in it: “I feel within me an insatiate hunger that devours everything it meets upon the way. I look upon joy and suffering only in their relation to myself, regarding them as nutriment that sustains my spiritual forces.... To none has my love ever brought happiness because I have never sacrificed anything for the sake of those I loved. I have only tried to satisfy the strange cravings of my heart, greedily draining their feelings, their tenderness, their joy, their suffering—and I have never been able to sate myself.”

It occurs to Pechorin that such aimlessness cannot but be a misinterpretation of the mystic handwriting of life. “It cannot be that I came purposeless into the world. A purpose there must have been, and surely mine was an exalted destiny because I feel within my soul powers immeasurable. But I was unable to discover that destiny. I allowed myself to be carried away by the allurements of passions innane and ignoble. From that crucible I issued hard and cold as iron.”... “My chief pleasure is to make everything around me subject to my will. To be the cause of suffering or joy to another without having a definite right to be—is it not the sweetest food for our pride?”

Lermontov is honest. He makes no attempt to vindicate a type. He must have smiled at his hater, his incipient superman, shattered by fate casting himself on the bare steppe after killing his horse in a mad ride, and clasping his body to the earth. Did he think to merge himself with the great “I am”?

“Alas! there cometh a time when man shall no longer give birth to a star. Alas! there cometh the time of the most contemptible man who can no longer despise himself!”

Thus spake Zarathustra!

Not submission, self-abnegation, Tolstoyanism, but wholesome self-hatred, acknowledging in one’s self but a bridge to beyond-man. Pechorin saw life as an end in itself. He was a creature of the surface, he feared to plunge into the blue depths.

One smiles at his childlike attempt to be self-efficient, isolated, damnable. But one is impatiently sorry that his splendid vitality was turned from healthful pioneering to the puny triumphs of the ballroom, and the conquest of hysterical ladies. Young Russia despises life except as a means. It will hurl revolutions into the world’s face, it will build empires. Life will be a hot flame of action and not a hectic afterglow of spent passion.

[3] A Hero of Our Time, by A. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.

HELEN HOYT

(After reading Edgar Lee Masters’ “Jim and Arabel’s Sister”)

SUE GOLDEN