Two Points of View
Violette of Pere Lachaise, by Anna Strunsky Walling. New York: Frederic A. Stokes.
A gigantic background—the eternal graves and trees and monuments of the old Paris cemetery. The rest is fudge. A mouse born out of the bowels of a mountain. Nauseating feminine sentimentalism. Boring talk, talk, talk.
K.
The reviewer above is absolutely mistaken about Mrs. Walling’s book, I believe. It is the story of one of those human beings—rare people—who live inner lives of extraordinary intensity. It is radiantly absorbing, to me.
M. C. A.
The Reader Critic
The Editor:
We have had cancellations, congratulations, and a lot of indignant letters about Ben Hecht’s “Dregs.” I print two of them below. As it happens, these stories are among the best things The Little Review has printed. With the exception of some of the poetry and two stories of Sherwood Anderson’s, they may be listed as the only “literature” we have published. Some one has compared them to Gorky. But this is not a very accurate judgment. As a reviewer pointed out in the November issue, Gorky could feel his stories, could imagine them deeply, but he could never quite tell them. The supreme virtue of Ben Hecht’s “Dregs” is that he could tell them. That is the art. Of course I have nothing to say to those people who deplore Mr. Hecht’s subject matter and urge me to use some moral judgment in selecting things for The Little Review. There is no such thing as moral judgment in literature. There should be no such thing in life, but unfortunately—
A Sorrowful Friend:
The Little Review: Literature, Drama, Music, Art. Which of these four shrines did you intend to desecrate in offering Ben Hecht’s “Dregs”? Or have you added an “unwritten” class to your list, comprehensive enough to include such bold portrayals of viciousness and filth, of licentiousness and lust, as these three degenerate—manifestations!
Little Review—how could you do it? You who have hitherto held so bravely to the tenets of beauty and truth in thought and expression, held to them courageously through storms of adverse criticism, consent to print descriptions of the bestial abnormalities of the scum of mankind! If you, who profess to look to a higher, better realization of life, consent to crawl in the gutter with the vermin, what can we expect of the lesser publications?
You have polluted an edition of your magazine; it is true that flames will destroy the manuscript, but what of the hideous memory that remains? Take heed—Little Review; remember that cleanliness is akin to godliness and—look to your soul!
Florence Kiper Frank, Chicago:
May I call your attention to the fact that Mr. Edward J. O’Brien, in his annual review of the year’s fiction, not only lists all the stories printed in The Little Review during 1915 among those possessing “distinction,” but double-asterisks (verb) the three sketches of Ben Hecht’s published under the title “Dregs.” This in the chaste and genealogical Boston Evening Transcript! And, following to the best of my ability Mr. O’Brien’s rather vague reference to and nebulous listings of the stories to be published in his anthology, The Best Stories of 1915 and Year Book of American Fiction, I can but come to the startled conclusion that Ben Hecht’s three stories are all to be reprinted in the estimable collection. Good for Ben Hecht, The Little Review, and Mr. O’Brien’s catholicity of judgment! Some of us there are who like to have our opinions backed and bolstered by authority. And what more august authority than the printed word of Boston. Some of us—but of course not your insurgents. Perhaps Mr. Hecht will resent congratulations. I tender them, nevertheless—with apologies. Good stuff, Ben Hecht! Do us some—more of them.
I’m truly grateful to your reviewer who found my play, The State Forbids, “negative as literature.” If he had found it bad architecture or mediocre sculpture I should have been less pleased.
Play making, to my mind, is not a form of literature (even though its medium chances to be words) but it is an art of spacing ... focusing ... building. Structure upon structure! Foundation. Ornament. Design. An art as distinct from other forms of word utility as color medium is from plastic art. Drama is related to literature only in so far as all arts are inter-related. No more than this. By drama I mean, of course, plays intended (at least in the writer’s mind) for production. These alone are plays. For one reason or another they may never reach the boards, but they must have lived in the writer’s fantasy as things produced. Desk drawer dramas are not plays.
I believe that the hope of the modern drama lies in the artist who can learn to look upon himself as a builder ... a maker and not a writer of plays.
And so again I thank your critic whose charity has made me feel that I am on the road which leads to “Somewhere.” Even though at the end of my journey I may not yet have reached the first mile stone.
Virginia York, Washington, D. C.:
It is published in windy Chicago, The Little Review. Claimed by management, editors and its readers to be the very, very last, last word in prose and poetry; it is sold at fifteen cents a copy. Normal-minded, healthy folk will find it cheap at that price, because normal-minded, healthy folk will find in it fifteen laughs for fifteen cents, despite the fact that it is entirely a serious publication.
Years ago an editor sent me to the government hospital for the insane just outside Washington, to interview a certain man. As I passed into the building an elderly gentleman of profoundly respectful manner presented me with a neatly-bound pamphlet which he said he had written, edited and illustrated entirely by himself. Examining it later, the cover-page proved to be a mass of meaningless, whirling lines labeled in carefully printed letters, “The Croucher At The Door.” The reading matter was wholly unintelligible.
A poet-friend has given me the October number of The Little Review. The vers libre poetry in the small magazine might easily be called “The Croucher At The Door” for all the sense to be made of it. In fear and trembling that my own unworthy brain might finally have addled, relatives and friends were invited to peruse the contents of the volume. I thank heaven they could make nothing of it.
One contribution entitled Cafe Sketches, by Arthur Davison Ficke, is herewith reprinted for the benefit of readers of this page who are denied access, and accompanying the laugh, to The Little Review. Mr. Ficke, after telling in the first verse that he is in a cafe, surrounded by a “cortege of seven waiters,” mourning for a “boundlessly curious lady,” recites in mournful meanderings:
Presently persons will come out
And shake legs.
I do not want legs shaken.
I want immortal souls shaken unreasonably.
I want to see dawn spilled across the blackness
Like a scrambled egg on the skillet;
I want miracles, wonders.
Tidings out of deeps I do not know ...
But I have a horrible suspicion
That neither you
Nor your esteemed consort
Nor I myself
Can ever provide these simple things
For which I am so patiently waiting.
Base people!
How I dislike you!
Maybe you think this is funny, but certainly it is not intended to be. Seriousness, thick, black, dense seriousness is the keynote of The Little Review. This is vers libre with a vengeance. “Persons will come out and shake legs. I do not want legs shaken.” Here we have the spirit of the dance! It is quite evident Mr. Ficke does not wish joy to be unconfined.
There have been many descriptions of dawn, probably none so unique as “the dawn spilled across the blackness like a scrambled egg on the skillet.” The second verse is short and to the point, but it is much to be thankful for both in point of length and the statement that we are abhorred.
In order to restore our thoughts to something sane, to take away from us the taste of such gibberish, consider for a moment the following eight lines by Harriet Howe, recently published in The Literary Digest. Comparison between the two authors is utterly impossible, totally unnecessary: