WRITING COMMUNITIES: AESTHETICS, POLITICS, AND LATE MODERNIST LITERARY ...

266 Pages·2008·2.39 MB·English

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WRITING COMMUNITIES: AESTHETICS, POLITICS, AND LATE MODERNIST
LITERARY CONSOLIDATION

by

Elspeth Egerton Healey

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(English Language and Literature)
in the University of Michigan
2008

Doctoral Committee:

Associate Professor John A. Whittier-Ferguson, Chair
Associate Professor Kali A. K. Israel
Associate Professor Joshua L. Miller
Assistant Professor Andrea Patricia Zemgulys
© Elspeth Egerton Healey
_____________________________________________________________________________

2008
Acknowledgements

I have been incredibly fortunate throughout my graduate career to work closely with the
amazing faculty of the University of Michigan Department of English. I am grateful to Marjorie
Levinson, Martha Vicinus, and George Bornstein for their inspiring courses and probing questions,
all of which were integral in setting this project in motion. The members of my dissertation
committee have been phenomenal in their willingness to give of their time and advice. Kali Israel’s
expertise in the constructed representations of (auto)biographical genres has proven an invaluable
asset, as has her enthusiasm and her historian’s eye for detail. Beginning with her early mentorship in
the Modernisms Reading Group, Andrea Zemgulys has offered a compelling model of both nuanced
scholarship and intellectual generosity. Joshua Miller’s amazing ability to extract the radiant gist from
still inchoate thought has meant that I always left our meetings with a renewed sense of purpose. I
owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my dissertation chair, John Whittier-Ferguson. His incisive
readings, astute guidance, and ready laugh have helped to sustain this project from beginning to end.
The life of a graduate student can sometimes be measured by bowls of ramen noodles and
hours of grading. The generous fellowship support of the University of Michigan Department of
English and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies has enabled me to partake of these
graduate staples according to my own appetite rather than by necessity. Paul, John, Mona, Olivia and
all of my wonderful co-workers at the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership have
provided me with a rejuvenating early modern sojourn from twentieth century writing.
Some of the most exciting and intellectually fulfilling moments of my work on this project
have come while combing through Intercultural Publications memos, William Carlos Williams
prescription pad notes, and early New Directions publicity materials. I am greatly indebted to the
generosity of Indiana University’s Lilly Library, whose Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship supported a
month-long research trip to work with the fascinating Intercultural Publications Mss. I must also
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thank the librarians at the University of Buffalo’s Lockwood Memorial Library and Harvard
University’s Houghton Library for their assistance during my visits to their respective William Carlos
Williams and New Directions Publishing Corp./James Laughlin collections. All three libraries
proved such enticing environments that they have convinced me to make a career of working in
archives and special collections.
My graduate experience has been infinitely enriched by the remarkable cohort of women
with whom I entered the English Ph.D program. I am constantly awed by the brilliance of their
intellects and the depth of their kindness. Marjorie Rubright and Laura Ambrose were the first
friends I made in Ann Arbor, and they have encouraged me with their insightful feedback, gift for
gab, and willingness to indulge my sweet tooth. My Victorianist heroes Ji-Hyae Park and Latha
Reddy diligently read the draftiest of drafts and have been my compatriots in all things silly and
frivolous. The immediacy of the friendship of Lauren LaFauci and Rebecca Smith has not been
diminished by their geographic relocations; their telephone calls have offered an important lifeline
during these past years of writing. My fellow modernists Emily Lutenski and Jenny Sorensen have
inspired me with their thinking on twentieth century literature. Tamara Bhalla, John Cords, and
Gavin Hollis have ensured that I took study breaks for feasts consisting of Spanish Tortillas and
outlandish cocktails. Thank you to my Lovely Television Ladies for camaraderie and cupcakes, and
especially to Taryn Hakala and Casie LeGette, whose fabulous company made my final year of
writing more enjoyable than I could have hoped.
Finally, I would like to thank my wonderful family. My sister Emma’s patience in offering
last-minute feedback on my French translations is matched only by her unshakeable support of all of
my intellectual endeavors. Throughout my academic career, my parents have always graciously
refrained from asking, “So, when are you going to get a job?” and have instead volunteered
intellectual, emotional, and material support far beyond what any adult daughter could expect. My
father’s tireless scouring of University of Toronto library book sales has meant that I always come
home to a surprise trove of literary delights. I have used many of his finds (including the Riding and
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Graves first edition!) in the course of writing this dissertation. Since my childhood, my mother has
provided me with an inspiring exemplar of passion for and dedication to the work of the mind. Her
endless energy makes me hopeful for the years ahead! It is to my family—Emma, Robin, and
Toni—that I dedicate this dissertation.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

List of Figures vi

Introduction: Writing Communities 1
I. Notes Towards (and Away from) a Definition of Community 7
II. Late Modernism / Belated Modernism 15
III. Making Modernisms 21
IV. Overlapping Communities, Overlapping Inquiries 26

Chapter 1. Left Bank Legacies: Modernist Memoir’s Communal Economy 30
I. Conversations across the Page: Drawing the Discursive Field of Modernist Memoir 32
II. (The Problem with) Being Geniuses Together 43
III. Starring Roles at the Moveable Feast: Modernist Memoir and the Discourse of
Celebrity 62

Chapter 2. Letting the Colors Run: William Carlos Williams and the Negotiation
of Local and Literary Community 96
I. 9 Ridge Road: Williams and his Local Community 99
II. The Paper Forum: Williams and Literary Community 108
III. Conjunctions and Disjunctions: The Question of Community in The Autobiography of
William Carlos Williams 112
IV. Being the Locus: Paterson as a Site of Conversation 122

Chapter 3. Publishing the Revolution of the Word: New Directions’ Consolidation
of the Communities of the ‘New’ 145
I. New Directions: Politics and the Experimental Writer 153
II. The Ancestral (and Filial) New: Re-envisioning the Temporal and National
Parameters of the Modern Movement 167

Chapter 4. Institutionalizing Anti-Institutionalism: The Paradox of Perspectives
USA’s Cold War Modernism 193
I. Formal Skirmishes 196
II. Modeling Nationalist / Internationalist Modernism 204
III. National Representatives: (Mis)adventures in Synecdoche 210
IV. Shifting Paradigms 222
V. Ezra Pound: A Case Study in Clashing Cultures 231

Conclusion: Modernist Redux 242

Bibliography 247

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List of Figures

Figure

1.1 Sylvia Beach in Shakespeare and Company. 93

1.2 Adrienne Monnier in her bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres. 94

1.3 The man in the shadow and the man in the sun: Robert McAlmon (left) and
Ernest Hemingway in a Spanish bullring, 1923. 95

1. 4 Journalist and publisher William Bird. 95

3.1 Spearhead ad published in The Nation in November 1947. 191

3.2. New Classics book jacket for Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (NC 11 1946); design by
Alvin Lustig. 192

3.3. New Classics book jacket for Gustave Flaubert’s Three Tales (NC 7 ca. 1945); design
by Alvin Lustig. 192

4.1 Part of the table of contents for the first issue of Perspektiven, Perspectives USA’s
German language edition. 239

4.2 The cover of the American edition of Perspectives USA, No. 2 (Winter 1953). 240

4.3 Perspectives USA, No. 8 (Summer 1954) was the last issue to feature the words
“art music literature” on the cover. 240

4.4 The cover of Perspectives USA, No. 10 (Winter 1955). 240

4.5 The covers of Perspectives USA, No. 13 and 14. 241

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Introduction: Writing Communities
Writing on the neglect of tradition in After Strange Gods (1934), T.S. Eliot declared, “What is
disastrous is that the writer should deliberately give rein to his ‘individuality’, that he should even
cultivate his differences from others; and that his readers should cherish the author of genius, not in
spite of his deviations from the inherited wisdom of the race, but because of them.”1 This moment
signals a development in Eliot’s communalist turn, his increasing preoccupation with the bonds of
collectivity offered by religious and (for him, European) cultural tradition. Though many of his
fellow writers would take issue with the particular tenor of Eliot’s assessments in After Strange Gods,
they too were increasingly contemplating the tensions between innovation and tradition,
individuation and association. Indeed, the 1930s and the subsequent wartime years stand as a period
during which contrasting visions of community dominated the social and political landscape.
Communism, Left-ism, New Deal politics, and Fascism (to span the political spectrum) all diverged
from Liberalism’s emphasis on the individual to refocus attention on the social body. Community
accordingly re-emerged as a live topic of both political and aesthetic debate. Writing Communities:
Aesthetics, Politics, and Late Modernist Literary Consolidation sets out to examine several key late modernist
re-articulations of literary community that occurred alongside and in conversation with the era’s more
recognizable politicized communities. It argues that late modernist constitutions of literary
community entailed not only an aesthetic response to and corrective of a 1920s strain of
individualism, but also a self-conscious attempt to influence the paradigms and figures by which
modernist communities were beginning to enter into cultural memory.

1 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1934), 33. The collection is a print
version of the speeches that Eliot delivered as the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia in
1933. Eliot would further explore the notions of religious and cultural community in both his later poetry,
including notably Four Quartets, and works of social and religious criticism like The Idea of a Christian
Society (1939) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948).
1
In conjunction with the larger social and political turn to community, the 1930s saw the
emergence of new ethnographic projects. In the United States, the New Deal had occasioned a
number of anthropological initiatives. Under the auspices of the WPA, the Federal Writers’ Project
began compiling an archive of oral histories and produced a series of the State and Local Guides. In
England, Mass-Observation set about compiling what it termed an “anthropology of ourselves.”
Beginning in 1937, the project sought to record the opinions, experiences, and quotidian activities of
ordinary British citizens through work of citizen “observers” and volunteer self-reports.2 This
heightened interest in what has elsewhere been termed “auto-ethnography” was also found in
modernist circles, where, I argue, it expressed itself in part as an increased attention to the dynamics
of and narratives surrounding literary community.3 But let us begin by way of example.
In 1939 the Partisan Review submitted a questionnaire to a “representative list of American
writers” in order to assess, as it titled the results, “The Situation in American Writing.”4 One of the
survey’s seven questions asked respondents to reflect upon their intellectual pedigree and the place of
communal affiliations in their writing: “Do you find, in retrospect, that your writing reveals any
allegiance to any group, class, organization, region, religion, or system of thought, or do you conceive
of it as mainly the expression of yourself as an individual?”5 Wallace Stevens replied by formulating
an ironic counterpoint between his own views about his writing and those of readers (presumably)
outside of the world of modern literature:

2For a concise summary of Mass-Observation’s activities, see Angus Calder, "Mass Observation 1937-
1949," in Essays on the History of British Sociological Research, ed. Martin Bulmer (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985).
3 James Buzard, "Mass-Observation, Modernism, and Auto-ethnography," Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 3
(1997). Buzard notes that Mary Louise Pratt also uses the term “autoethnograpy,” though in a different
context, in her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
4 The writers and critics whose responses were published in the Summer 1939 issue of the magazine were:
John Dos Passos, Allen Tate, James T. Farrell, Kenneth Fearing, Katherine Anne Porter, Wallace Stevens,
Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, John Peale Bishop, Harold Rosenberg, and Henry Miller. A
second installment was published in the Fall 1939 issue and contained responses that the editors explained
had been received too late to be published with the first set. The respondents in the second installment
were Sherwood Anderson, Louise Bogan, Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Fitzgerald, R.P.
Blackmur, and Horace Gregory. "The Situation in American Writing; Seven Questions," Partisan Review
VI, no. 4 (1939); "The Situation in American Writing; Seven Questions (Part Two)," Partisan Review VI,
no. 5 (1939).
5 "The Situation in American Writing; Seven Questions," 27.
2
Unquestionably and notwithstanding the fact that I indulge in a good deal of abstraction, I
do not regard my poems as mainly an expression of myself, nor as modern in the sense in
which that unpleasant commonplace is so frequently used. Still, some time ago, when I sent
one of my books to an honest man in England, he wrote to me saying that he found it
personal and modern, and that these qualities were not his dish of tea.”6

Less facetious was fellow poet William Carlos Williams, who was quick to acknowledge his own
writing’s indebtedness to ideas circulating in the various communal settings of his youth, including
“the grammar school ideas of my public school bringing up” and “things I learned in my father’s
own Unitarian Sunday School,” as well as the inspiration offered by “the past of the United States.”7
He was, however, more reluctant to identify himself with any particular community of writers,
especially where such an association might be construed as superseding other connections. “But I
am passionately one, not of a writers’ group, but with a potential right feeling and thinking man of
the world, the kernel of all groups […],” Williams explained. 8 In her reply, Gertrude Stein declared
simply, “I am not interested.”9 The varying degrees of resistance evident in these responses suggests
a shared ambivalence about situating one’s authorial self and one’s writing in relation to communal
identities, particularly as they pertain to literary allegiances.
However, the questionnaire itself offers a manifestation of communal affiliation that is
perhaps even more illuminating than those found in Stevens’s, Williams’s, and Stein’s statements.
During the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s the questionnaire surfaced in little magazines as a
discursively revealing, if not explicitly articulated, alternative to the manifestos that had dominated
the literary landscape of the teens and early twenties.10 The publication of artists’ responses to

6 Wallace Stevens, "The Situation in American Writing; Seven Questions [Response]," Partisan Review VI,
no. 4 (1939): 40.
7 William Carlos Williams, "The Situation In American Writing; Seven Questions [Response]," Partisan
Review VI, no. 4 (1939): 43.
8 Ibid.
9 Gertrude Stein, "The Situation in American Writing; Seven Questions [Response]," Partisan Review VI,
no. 4 (1939): 41.
10 I do not mean to imply that the questionnaire replaced the manifesto. Manifestos remained a part of
modernist discourse, as evinced by the Partisan Review’s publication and endorsement of Diego Rivera and
André Breton’s “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” only a few issues prior to “The Situation
in American Writing” questionnaire. However, as a genre, the survey allowed for an alternative expression
of community that invoked and was predicated on communal associations without positing a shared credo.
Unlike most manifestos, it is literally a multi-vocal text, and as such offers an alternative to the notion of
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