A Letter from London
EZRA POUND
I should be very glad if someone in America could be made to realize the sinister bearing of the import duty on books. I have tried in vain to get some of my other correspondents to understand the effect of this iniquity ... but apparently without success. It means insularity, stupidity, backing the printer against literature, commerce and obstruction against intelligence. I have spent myself on the topic so many times that I am not minded to write an elaborate denunciation until I know I am writing to someone capable of understanding and willing to take up the battle. Incidentally the life of a critical review depends a good deal on controversy and on having some issue worth fighting. Henry IV. did away with the black mediaevalism of an octroi on books, and the position of Paris is not without its debt to that intelligent act. No country that needs artificial aid in its competition with external intelligence is fit for any creature above the status of pig.
The tariff should be abolished not only for itself but because dishonest booksellers shelter themselves behind it and treble the price of foreign books, and because it keeps up the price of printing.
If there is one thing that we are all agreed upon: It is that the canned goods of Curtis and Company and Harper and Company and all the business firms should be set apart from the art of letters, and the artist helped against the tradesman.
As a matter of fact a removal of the tariff wouldn’t much hurt even publishers, as the foreign books we really want in America are the sort which the greed of American business publishers forbids their publishing ... but that is no matter.
It affects every young writer in America, and every reader whether he wish merely to train his perceptions or whether he train them with a purpose, of, say, learning what has been done, what need not be repeated, what is worthy of repetition. There is now the hideous difficulty of getting a foreign book, and the prohibitive price of both foreign and domestic publications. I don’t know that I need to go on with it.
Again and yet again it is preposterous that our generation of writers shouldn’t have the facility in getting at contemporary work, which one would have in Paris or Moscow. It’s bad enough for the American to struggle against the dead-hand of the past generation composed of clerks and parasites and against our appalling decentralization, i. e., lack of metropoles and centers, having full publishing facilities and communication with the outer world—(which last is being slowly repaired)—also our scarcity of people who know.
When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity, since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.—Bernard Shaw, 1916.
A Sorrowful Demon[1]
ALEXANDER S. KAUN
How he hates us, ordinary mortals! No, he seldom hates; he reserves his hatred for God, for life, for the universe. For us, weak bubbles driven on the surface by uncontrollable forces, he has only contempt. Yet, though hating and despising, he is infinitely dear to us: the thick melancholy vein that bulges across his wildcat forehead makes him almost human; the taut string of his remote harp vibrates at times with such yearning and pain that we feel nearly at home with that alien-on-earth, Mikhail Lermontov. We are glad with a petty gladness whenever we discover in him this weakness, his humaneness; we chuckle at the comfortable feeling of being able to observe him on the level plane, freed from the necessity of throwing our heads far back in order to perceive him on the lonely peak. He is our brother, we boast; and we inflict on him the severest punishment for a genius—forgiveness.
But his contemporaries could not forgive him. A general sigh of relief echoed the official announcement of his death “in a fearful storm accompanied by thunder and lightning on the Beshta mountain in the Caucasus”. “Bon voyage”, exclaimed Nicholas I, rubbing his hands in glee over the departure of one of his most undesirable subjects, the uncompromising mutineer. The church refused to bury the arrogant denier. Society applauded Major Martinov whose bullet snapped the life of the unapproachable aristocrat, the mocker of customs and conventions, the maimer of feminine hearts, the careless, fearless duellist who played with life, his own or that of others, as with a valueless toy. The people—there was not such a thing in Russia of 1841.
Society organism cannot digest a foreign element. We are too local in our terrestrial standards to tolerate an individual who is made not of the same stuff that we are made of. Lermontov was a child of a different planet who fell upon our earth by some crude mistake, doomed to chafe twenty-six years among humans. As a child he protested against the fatal misplacement; he discharged his venom in demolishing flower-beds, in torturing animals with tears in his eyes, in brandishing his tiny fists against his grandmother, when he observed her mistreating the serfs. When he grew up—and he grew up early: at ten he loved a girl; at fifteen he conceived his greatest poems, Mtzyri and Demon—his protest had calmed down. He no longer wept or raged—he hated God and despised mankind. His contemporaries tell us that no one could stand his heavy penetrating look. Men hated and feared him; women hated and loved him, as they always do extraordinary things. Lermontov took revenge for his accidental association with mankind; he left behind him a long row of broken hearts and wounded ambitions. His rebellious spirit sought rest in chaos, in torturing others and himself, in creating around him an atmosphere of tragedy, in reckless fighting with the wild Caucasian mountaineers.
And he, the mutinous, seeks storm,
As if in storm he may find peace.
Pechorin, the hero of his autobiographical sketches collected in A Hero of Our Time, is the first Nietzschean in literature. His terse, unpretentious maxims and paradoxes have been re-echoed by Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Przybyszewski, and other writers of the superman-literature. As always is the case with deliberate or unconscious commentators, they liquefy the original. One carelessly dropped sentence of Lermontov is elaborated in tons of Dostoevsky’s gallous psychology, in mountains of Nietzsche’s brain-splittering philosophy, in cognac-oceans of the vivisectionist-Przybyszewski. Pechorin does not talk much; he is too aristocratic for extravagance in words. Pechorin does not compromise; he is not made of that stuff. He neither repents nor seeks atonement; in his hatred for reality he does not erect a consoling phantom in the image of a Superman; he would dismiss with a contemptible shrug Falk’s matrimonial and sexual tribulations. Pechorin is eternally alone. Those who approach him are scorched with his unhuman flame. Alone, in the steppe, after a mad ride which kills his horse, Pechorin hugs the soil and weeps “like a child”. Like a child pressing to its mother’s bosom, plaintively demanding the Why and the Wherefore of existence among strangers. Shall we chuckle at the suddenly-discovered weakness of our enemy? Or shall we modestly turn away our eyes from the stolen sight of a god in his nudity?
I once called Lermontov a sorrowful demon. Not a Lucifer, not a Mephistopheles, but a Russian demon, as the sculptor Antokolsky conceived him. Lermontov-Demon-Pechorin, a quaint superman, neither god nor devil, a pluralistic being, a combination of cruelty and compassion, of contempt and sympathy, of cynicism and sentimentalism, of the loftiest and the basest, of the unhuman and of the human-all-too-human. Dostoevsky?
[1] A Hero of Our Time, by M. Y. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
The Poet Speaks
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
There are people in the world who like poetry if they know the poet. There are a good many people in Chicago just now who understand and enjoy Amy Lowell’s poetry because she read it to them at the Little Theatre.
I know a poet who could make nothing of Vachel Lindsay’s things until Lindsay chanted them to him one day. And I know another who said to me, when I remarked that I didn’t like Alfred Kreymborg’s verse, “Oh, but you would if you knew him.” I am puzzled, because I know this man to be an intelligent being. And somehow I have always been under the naive impression that poetry was a matter of art.
But there are worse things. There is one type of person we always eject promptly from the office of The Little Review. He is the person who says that Amy Lowell’s poetry has no feeling in it. Now please listen: I want to quote you something. It is called Vernal Equinox, it was written by Miss Lowell, and it appeared in the September issue of Poetry; but I want to see it put down in these pages so that we may actually know it has been in The Little Review:
The scent of hyacinths, like a pale mist, lies between me and my book;
And the South Wind, washing through the room,
Makes the candles quiver;
My nerves sting at a spatter of rain on the shutter,
And I am uneasy at the bursting of green shoots
Outside, in the night.
Why are you not here to overpower me with your tense and urgent love?
A poet whose new book will soon be talked of said to me, when I showed this to him, “Yes, it’s very clever, but it has no feeling.” He left the office gladly in three minutes.
Still there are worse things. The Chicago Tribune sent a reporter to the Little Theatre to hear Miss Lowell read and to record his impression of her work and personality for those who still peruse the newspapers. You may have seen the reporter’s article....
And still worse?... Lots of people have been splitting hairs over Amy Lowell’s work, but no human being has been heard to remark: “A beautiful thing is happening in America. Amy Lowell is writing poetry for us.”
Poems[2]
ELIZABETH GIBSON CHEYNE