M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 1 0 – 1 9 4 5

transitionsGeneral Editor: Julian Wolfreys

Published titlesORWELL TO THE PRESENT: LITERATURE IN ENGLAND, 1945–2000 John BranniganCHAUCER TO SHAKESPEARE, 1337–1580 SunHee Kim GertzMODERNISM, 1910–1945: IMAGE TO APOCALYPSE Jane GoldmanPOPE TO BURNEY, 1714–1779 Moyra HaslettPATER TO FORSTER, 1873–1924 Ruth RobbinsBURKE TO BYRON, BARBAULD TO BAILLIE, 1790–1830 Jane StablerMILTON TO POPE, 1650–1720 Kay Gilliland StevensonSIDNEY TO MILTON, 1580–1660 Marion Wynne-Davies

BATAILLE Fred Botting and Scott WilsonNEW HISTORICISM AND CULTURAL MATERIALISM John BranniganGENDER Claire ColebrookPOSTMODERN NARRATIVE THEORY Mark CurrieFORMALIST CRITICISM AND READER-RESPONSE THEORY Todd F. Davis and Kenneth WomackIDEOLOGY James M. DeckerQUEER THEORIES Donald E. HallMARXIST LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY Moyra HaslettLOUIS ALTHUSSER Warren MontagRACE Brian NiroJACQUES LACAN Jean-Michel RabatéLITERARY FEMINISMS Ruth RobbinsDECONSTRUCTION•DERRIDA Julian Wolfreys

Forthcoming titlesDICKENS TO HARDY, 1837–1884 Julian Wolfreys

TERRY EAGLETON David AldersonJULIA KRISTEVA AND LITERARY THEORY Megan Becker-LeckroneNATIONAL IDENTITY John BranniganHÉLÈNE CIXOUS: WRITING AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE Abigail BrayHOMI BHABHA Eleanor ByrnePOSTMODERNISM•POSTMODERNITY Martin McQuillanROLAND BARTHES Martin McQuillanMODERNITY David PunterPSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE Nicholas RandSUBJECTIVITY Ruth RobbinsPOSTCOLONIAL THEORY Malini Johan SchuellerTRANSGRESSION JuIian Wolfreys

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transitions

M o d e r n i s m ,1 9 1 0 – 1 9 4 5I m a g e t o A p o c a l y p s e

Jane Goldman

© Jane Goldman 2004

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataGoldman, Jane, 1960–

Modernism, 1910–1945 : image to apocalypse / Jane Goldman.p. cm. — (Transitions)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.ISBN 978-0-333-69620-0 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-333-69621-7 (paper)1. English literature—20th century—History and criticism.

2. Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. 3. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Modernism (Literature)—United States.I. Title. II. Transitions (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm))

PR478.M6G65 2004820.9'112—dc21 2003054923

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 113 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04

ISBN 978-0-333-69621-7 ISBN 978-1-4039-3839-8 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-1-4039-3839-8

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-0-333-69620-0

Oh, give me liberty! for even were paradise my prison,Still I should long to leap the crystal walls

(John Dryden)

For Gus and Roberta, with love

C o n t e n t s

General Editor’s Preface ixPreface xiAcknowledgements xxiii

1 Introduction: “Make It New”A Guide to Transitions in the Period of Modernism and the Avant-Garde 1

Part I 1910: Image, Order, War 31

2 Literature after 1910:Formalism, the Visual Arts and Cultural Change 33

3 Tradition, Order, War and the Dead:Critical and Cultural Contexts for T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 77

4 The Egoist, War, Hell and Image:T. S. Eliot, Dora Marsden, John Rodker, Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington 104

5 “Tradition” and “Mrs Brown”: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf 143

Part II Image, Gender, Apocalypse 161

6 Rude Mouths: Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Virginia Woolf, Nathanael West and Ezra Pound 163

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7 Gender Wars in Hell: James Joyce, Kurt Schwitters, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf 199

Part III Apocalypse 1945 209

8 Order, Night, Rage: Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Eugene Jolas, James Joyce, W. H. Auden and Nathanael West 211

9 Apocalypse, Auschwitz, the Bomb and After: Virginia Woolf, David Gascoyne, Paul Celan, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein and Kurt Schwitters 237

Chronology 256Annotated Bibliography 272Bibliography and References 276Index 291

v i i i C o n t e n t s

G e n e r a l E d i t o r ’s P r e f a c e

Transitions: transition–, n. of action. 1. A passing or passage from onecondition, action or (rarely) place, to another. 2. Passage in thought,speech, or writing, from one subject to another. 3. a. The passingfrom one note to another. b. The passing from one key to another,modulation. 4. The passage from an earlier to a later stage of develop-ment or formation . . . change from an earlier style to a later; a style ofintermediate or mixed character . . . the historical passage oflanguage from one well-defined stage to another.

The aim of Transitions is to explore passages and movements inlanguage, literature and culture from Chaucer to the present day. Theseries also seeks to examine the ways in which the very idea of transi-tion affects the reader’s sense of period so as to address anew ques-tions of literary history and periodisation. The writers in this seriesunfold the cultural and historical mediations of literature during whatare commonly recognised as crucial moments in the development ofEnglish literature, addressing, as the OED puts it, the “historicalpassage of language from one well-defined stage to another”.

Recognising the need to contextualise literary study, the authorsoffer close readings of canonical and now marginalised or overlookedliterary texts from all genres, bringing to this study the rigour ofhistorical knowledge and the sophistication of theoretically informedevaluations of writers and movements from the last 700 years. At thesame time as each writer, whether Chaucer or Shakespeare, Milton orPope, Byron, Dickens, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf or SalmanRushdie, is shown to produce his or her texts within a discerniblehistorical, cultural, ideological and philosophical milieu, the text isread from the vantage point of recent theoretical interests andconcerns. The purpose in bringing theoretical knowledge to thereading of a wide range of works is to demonstrate how the literatureis always open to transition, whether in the instance of its productionor in succeeding moments of its critical reception.

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The series desires to enable the reader to transform her/his ownreading and writing transactions by comprehending past develop-ments. Each book in the second tranche of the series offers a peda-gogical guide to the poetics and politics of particular eras, as well as tothe subsequent critical comprehension of periods and periodisation.As well as transforming the cultural and literary past by interpretingits transition from the perspective of the critical and theoreticalpresent, each study enacts transitional readings of a number of liter-ary texts, all of which are themselves conceivable as having effectedtransition at the moments of their first appearance. The readingsoffered in these books seek, through close critical reading, historicalcontextualisation and theoretical engagement, to demonstrate certainpossibilities in reading to the student reader.

It is hoped that the student will find this series liberating becausethe series seeks to move beyond rigid definitions of period. What isimportant is the sense of passage, of motion. Rather than providing adefinitive model of literature’s past, Transitions aims to place you inan active dialogue with the writing and culture of other eras, so as tocomprehend not only how the present reads the past, but how thepast can read the present.

Julian Wolfreys

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Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse addresses the main liter-ary transitions in the first half of the twentieth century. It charts andsamples the major movements and significant canonical texts of theperiod; it considers the contexts in which they were written and firstpublished; and points to the important critical and theoretical ques-tions and debates surrounding and emerging from it. This book intro-duces the reader to major canonical texts by the literary giants of theperiod alongside key works by a number of its other important andinteresting figures. I set out below the (five) main questions this bookaddresses concerning the period. There follows a brief discussion ofthe issues of periodisation and the book’s selection of material, and anote on the “little magazines” of the period (which provided the firstcontext of publication for many of the works in focus). These ques-tions and issues inform the outline that follows of the formal shapeand contents of this book.

Five introductory questions

1. What are the most important and interesting literary movementsand texts of the period 1910 to 1945? Broadly speaking, the most important and interesting movements ofthis period were modernist and avant-garde, according to the argu-ment of this book, and they are located between the Imagist move-ment at its start and the Apocalypse movement at its close. The mostimportant and interesting texts of this period are energetic and exper-imental. They pushed (and still push) the “literary” as a genre out ofall recognition, and made (make) new transformational languages,forcing new and conflicting models of engagement and inter-penetration between art and real life. The “image” becomes a signifi-cant semantic and structuring unit, common to all genres, and collage

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(or montage, or mosaic) the radical organising principle of manyavant-garde texts. What are the major transitions occurring in theliterature of this period? The major transitions are in the inventing,the forging, the laying down and recasting of these new, conflictingand transformational, modernist and avant-garde languages. Thisbook will introduce and offer guidance through the main transitions,conflicts and movements of the period and sample a range of its mostimportant avant-garde literary languages.

2. Where was much of the writing of this period first published andread, first theorised, formulated, and reviewed? In the international forum of the avant-garde, in the pages of themany “little magazines” that flourished in these decades, and whichwere issued along with limited editions of individual works, from themany small, independent presses. This was where literary art, inmany languages, European, English and American, in many forms,and in both established and new genres, appeared alongside visual(including filmic and photographic) and musical arts, as well as scien-tific, philosophical, psychoanalytical and cultural, political and socialcommentary, and aesthetic and political manifestos. This book willintroduce the reader to some of the most significant and influentialtexts of the period, in these important first contexts. Each of the threeparts that follow the introduction, therefore, focuses its discussion, inpart, on a significant issue (or two) of one important little magazinefrom the period. Part I looks at The Egoist, Part II Blast, and Part IIItransition.

3. What are the critical and theoretical questions we should ask of thetexts of this period? There are many, but the two most important questions that are askedimplicitly, and sometimes explicitly, throughout this book are thefollowing: (1) “Who is speaking?” and (2) “Where is she?” The first,“Who is speaking?”, is a question I derive from one of the most impor-tant and influential critics writing on the literature of this period,Erich Auerbach (see below). This is an excellent question to ask ofmodernist and avant-garde texts, not only to establish perspectives ontheir often complex narrative points of view and so on. It is an essen-tial question to ask of such experimental and multi-vocal texts that sooften engage in juxtaposing citations and quotations from othersources, and so often give voice to other writers, living and dead, as

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well as to discourses and ideologies from such diverse other quarters,social, political, scientific, psychoanalytical, artistic and musical. Ismodernity speaking, or is tradition speaking? we might also ask. “Whois speaking?” is also an essential question to ask of experimental textsthat seek to explore and produce new models of the self, identity, andsubjectivity. Part I, with these questions very much in mind, exploresone of the period’s major, and formative, manifestos: “Tradition andthe Individual Talent”, by T. S. Eliot. But the question resonatesthroughout this book. The second question, “Where is she?”, is takenfrom the influential theorist of gender, Hélène Cixous (seeColebrook). Not only does it supplement the question, “Who is speak-ing?” with the thought “Is he or she speaking?”, but it also points upthe questions of how language itself may be gendered, and how liter-ary language may be gendered. If the literature of the period, whetherby women or men, is concerned with inventing and developing new,conflicting and transformational, modernist and avant-gardelanguages, it may well be concerned with how such languages aregendered, and what kinds of gendered subjectivity they record andproduce. Part II of this book gives special attention to this question oftransitions in gender politics. But again, it is one that resonatesthroughout.

4. What are the most important and interesting contexts for the literature of this period? These contexts may include the historical, political, cultural, andintellectual. The historical and political contexts for the periodinclude: the Great War, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, the execu-tion of the Russian Tsar (1918), the establishment of the Irish FreeState (1922), Mussolini’s March on Rome (1922), the establishment ofthe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1923), Hitler’s Munich Putsch(1923), the General Strike in Britain (1926), the collapse of theAmerican stock exchange (1929), Hitler’s chancellorship of Germanyand the burning of the Reichstag (1933), the British abdication crisis(1936), the Spanish Civil War (1936), and the Second World War,culminating in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima andNagasaki (1945). The cultural and intellectual contexts for the period’sexplosion of modern literature and modern art include: the develop-ment and accessibility of transport, and huge increases in its speed;the emergence of visible and invisible communications such asphotography, the cinema, the telephone, telegraphy and the wireless,

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which resulted in the rapid transmission of news, ideas, and imageson a scale previously unknown; the discoveries of X-rays and radium;the artificial generation of electricity and its use in everyday life; andnot least, discoveries and hypotheses about the structure of matter,space, and time, and about the processes of perception, and theunderstanding of the self. Part I of this book addresses many of thesecontexts as well as the emergent trajectories of critical and intellectualframing of the period. The Chronology at the back gives a moresystematic indication and sampling of such contexts, and the argu-ment throughout the book makes reference to many of them.

5. Who are the most important writers (in English) of this period?James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein,T. S. Eliot, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, WallaceStevens are among the giants who appear in most accounts, includingthis one. And there are legions more to add to this preliminary listdepending on what movements and what critical approaches areemphasised (not all of whom can be, although several are, givendetailed attention in this book): Amy Lowell, Katherine Mansfield,Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, John Middleton Murray, T. E.Hulme, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, LauraRiding, Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir, Ernest Hemingway, F. ScottFitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, DjunaBarnes, Mina Loy, May Sinclair, Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley, W. H.Auden, John Dos Passos, Christopher Isherwood, Nathanael West,Stevie Smith, Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Edith Sitwell, DavidGascoyne, Kurt Schwitters, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, GrahamGreene, Stephen Wallace, Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson. Butbefore this list spills over the page and fills the book, it would behelpful now to consider some of the important factors in the design ofthis guide, which will both describe the major transitions of theperiod, as outlined above, and also sample, with close-readings, asignificant range of its writing, poetry, fiction, essays and manifestos.

Periodisation and the selection of material

In charting transitions in this (or any) period, examining the impor-tant moments and movements, exploring the works of its significantwriters, it would be surprising to find the texts of most interest evenly

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distributed so that each subdivision of the period (decade or five-yearspan perhaps) is represented equally. But further complications arisein considering a period that has been roughly defined under therubric of “Modernism”, a retrospectively applied aesthetic order thatanachronistically declares itself as a-temporal, or as “the new”. It isalso a period where the legacy of an apparently arbitrary process ofperiodisation itself has produced two conflicting aesthetic modesmasquerading as historical eras, dividing our task into a considerationof the literature of “the twenties” as high modernist and aesthetic, andof the literature of “the thirties” as realist reportage and politicallyengaged. Recent critical attempts to rethink and reappraise the litera-ture of these two decades has to some extent undermined their powerto signify two distinct sets of aesthetic values, but at the same time thesense is perpetuated, nevertheless, of attributing particular aestheticvalues to what remain arbitrary divisions of time.

My choice of dates, 1910 to 1945, however, does indicate, of course, a broad sense of chronological development, and after theIntroduction, the book roughly begins with 1910 and ends around1945. But it soon becomes clear that we have to turn to certain impor-tant declarations and developments in the 1920s to begin to under-stand the significance of the year 1910; and we have to look at othercritical moments in the 1930s and well beyond the 1940s to under-stand how this whole period has been filtered, and how it continuesto be filtered by various later and contesting theories (which are oftenemergent, nevertheless, in the period itself).

If we now consider the two dominant decades in terms of theirdesignation as two aesthetic modes rather than strictly temporal cate-gories, it will be evident to the reader that I have given some priority,in some senses, to material of the 1920s and its antecedents in the1910s, because this is, without doubt, the most significant material ofthe period. But it also manifestly exceeds its temporal, historicaldemarcations. This book gives focus primarily to the works of the1930s that take forward the founding aesthetics of the earlier avant-garde and modernist pushes. And similarly, the “political” issues of“the thirties” are addressed in terms of their impact on later readingsof the 1910s and 1920s. The diverse projects of this period in fact havealready been filtered for many post-1945 readers through the domi-nant critical debates of the 1930s concerning socialist realism and thebacklash against “modernism”, and through later subsequent ColdWar criticism.

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My readings from the 1930s may therefore, in places, depart fromsome representations of “the thirties”. This is not because of blindand obvious devotion to “high Modernism” and the “historical avant-garde”, although, like George Melly (see Chapter 1), I admit to alwayscarrying on my person the sound poems of Kurt Schwitters (just incase). The most significant work in the 1930s perpetuates and devel-ops from these earlier movements. To dwell on “the thirties” aesthet-ics would not therefore be representative of the 1930s. It would in factdiminish the power, scope and complexities of continuing avant-garde and modernist projects as they flourished in the 1930s and wellafter. Unlike some accounts of this period, which read the 1930s as“the thirties”, marking the point where the avant-garde andmodernism is said to falter and decline, this book shows that themajor transitions of the period occur in the 1910s and 1920s; and thatthe era of the 1930s to mid-1940s marks in fact a period of furtherflourishing, and of reactions to, and refinements and reassessmentsof, those first powerful heaves. Furthermore, it is absurd and mislead-ing to try to force an account of the rise of modernism and the avant-garde into neat, linear, chronological order. Many of the movementsin this era sought so creatively to interrupt, abolish, conquer or tran-scend history and time. They do not obey such an impoverished senseof historicism and periodisation. Nor do they afford equal andmeasured emphasis and space allocated to each decade in mechani-cal sequence. Such an approach would ignore the very legacy of theperiod, the very transitions (and gloriously juvenile schismatics) thatit wrought. So Blast! all so-called “objective” accounts of the literatureof 1910 to 1945. You are dull and irrelevant.

The field of possible material for inclusion, furthermore, is enor-mous, indeed overwhelming. The Chronology and Bibliography at theback of this book serve as useful quick indices of the significant worksof the period. In the course of the book I discuss or mention a greatmany of them, but inevitably, not all; and nor would I wish to givethem the equal emphasis and attention that such tables and lists tendto suggest. The Bibliography and Chronology constitute the closest itis possible to get to an “objective”, systematic, and chronologicalaccount or reading list for the era. But to extend this approach intocontinuous prose, focusing on extensive close-readings of texts inrelation to contexts of all kinds, is not possible in a book of this length,nor even desirable for the reasons I give above.

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Reading the period through its “little magazines”

In selecting material for close-reading and for constructing the argu-ment, I have included in each chapter material drawn from one ormore issues of the three little magazines for particular focus. And Ihave also found it helpful to take an “image” from visual culture as aspringboard to wider discussions. The selection of magazine issues isbased first on situating key texts, such as from Joyce’s fiction, Eliot’sessays, or Wyndham Lewis’s manifestos, for example, in this culturalcontext. A synchronic reading of key moments in the era arises fromthis practice, and allows an element of chance to dictate what othertexts and authors come into focus. In Part I, for example, we turn toThe Egoist to read one of the era’s most influential documents, Eliot’smanifesto, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. Turning its pages,we encounter all sorts of bed-fellows and cross-currents: not just thework of other contributors such as Joyce or Dora Marsden, butreviews and advertisements directing us to Pound or Sitwell orHuxley. We are able to visit major canonical authors alongside thoseless well known, and those who have become of more recent interestin studies of the period. By focusing on the little magazine, then, wealready arrive at an understanding of the period that is not availablethrough the more conventional and systematic, genre-based treat-ment of poetry, novels, plays. The little magazine is a site where thesegenres explode into each other, and where other genres emerge withnew significance – the manifesto and essay in particular.

Structure and contents

Each main part and each chapter in this book begins with a detailedintroduction. What follows below is an overview of the contents, andbrief introductions to the main parts: the Introduction, and Parts I to III.

Introduction: “Make It New” – A Guide to Transitions in thePeriod of Modernism and the Avant-garde

The Introduction takes its title from Ezra Pound’s famous avant-gardeslogan “Make It New”, the founding impetus for the literature of theperiod this book covers. Chapter 1, which in fact constitutes the

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Introduction, finds an excellent guide to the founding movements ofthe period, and to their diverse reorientations, in the pages ofNathanael West’s cult modernist novel The Dream Life of Balso Snell(1931). West’s avant-garde guide to the great canonical, avant-gardetexts of high modernism (by James Joyce, Marcel Proust, GertrudeStein, Fyodor Dostoevsky and so on) also enables us to discuss anddefine the most important critical terms that have emerged inmapping this period: modernism, modernity, the avant-garde, thenew, postmodernism, and so on. West’s novel arms us with anoverview of the scope and range of the period. And from its positionin the trajectory of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics, roughlymid-way in the period (1931), is projected a discussion that directs usboth back to earlier founding avant-garde texts and languages andforward to their later developments and concerns. Our reading ofWest’s novel provides a set of critical terms and questions, then, forproceeding through the period, and through this book. As well asdefining and addressing the terms “avant-garde” and “modernism”and their cohorts, this reading of West also opens up a discussionreflecting on the significance of the other terms, and the dates, in thetitle of this book: “Image to Apocalypse” and “1910–1945”. The ratio-nale and scope of this book is then compared with those of otherintroductions to the period and to its dominant designated aestheticmode, “modernism”. The chapter closes with a note on the formal,academic study of modernist and avant-garde works.

Part I to Part III: the tripartite structure

What follows my Introduction is in three parts. And this structurereflects my selection of texts in relation to chronology, from the firstheaves in the 1910s and 1920s to the refinements, reactions, regroup-ings and realignments of the 1930s and 1940s. As for the shape ofthese three parts, I have modelled them on the structure of VirginiaWoolf’s, novel To the Lighthouse (1927), a structure that Woolfemployed specifically to chart, through narrative, the passage of timebetween two eras. She first outlined this model in a visual image inher notebooks as “two blocks joined by a corridor” (Dick: 44–5), thediagram for the tripartite shape of her novel. The first and third partsof the novel each treat a block of time, while the second, middle partis a corridor in which “Time Passes”. Each part, which may also stand

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alone, as a discrete and distinct piece of work, is subdivided intosections of varying length, sometimes sequential in the argument,sometimes juxtaposed. And, like Woolf’s middle section, “TimePasses”, the central section of this book is also concerned with thepolitics of gender and language.

It is not on some whim that I have chosen to follow Woolf’s model,but in recognition of her achievement in To the Lighthouse, of forginga set of narrative tools for charting and inscribing cultural transitionsin the passage of historical time. Erich Auerbach recognises the sameachievement in his influential essay on To the Lighthouse, the climac-tic chapter of his classic work on representation and narrative inWestern literature from Homer to the twentieth century, Mimesis: TheRepresentation of Reality in Western Literature (1946). Here, he offersan impressive reading of a section of To the Lighthouse (in terms ofpoint-of-view, narrative voice, time, interior and exterior conscious-ness, epistemology and fragmentation) and asks of it his famous ques-tion: “Who is speaking in this paragraph?” He also makes the pointthat modern philologists (himself included) share the very techniqueof modern writers that his final chapter identifies in Woolf. This tech-nique is encapsulated in To the Lighthouse by the artist, Lily Briscoe:“The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were littledaily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in thedark; here was one” (To the Lighthouse, p. 249). Auerbach explains:“interpretation of a few passages . . . can be made to yield more, andmore decisive, information . . . than would a systematic and chrono-logical treatment. Indeed, the present book may be cited as an illustra-tion” (Auerbach: 525). And this book too follows this example ofrepresentative sampling of key works across the span of the period.

Woolf’s structure is also significant for the weighting of emphasis inthis book. In this respect it follows the elegiac rhythm of the dactylicpulses in Woolf’s three parts (— ^ ^): the first is the longest, followedby two shorter units. And I have replicated that rhythm in the follow-ing chapters too in my emphasis on that enormously rewarding andrich “first heave” of avant-gardism of the 1910s and 1920s. The secondflourishing (perhaps weakening, perhaps merely disseminating andregrouping), after-echoes of avant-gardism, resonating and retchinginto the 1930s and 1940s, receive less space. But these after-echoes, Ipropose, are often robust and of more importance, signifying as theydo the continuation of avant-garde and modernist practices beyondthe confines of the canonical “period” of modernism, than is the

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backlash of realism and “political” reportage that is usually fore-grounded to characterise the 1930s. The work of this first phase is theimage and apocalypse of the era, its theoretical and practical ground-ing, and its greatest transition. Having survived and regroupedthrough the trials of the 1930s, avant-garde forces are by the mid-1940s gathering again from dactylic subdual, for the next greatcreative heave.

Part I 1910: Image, Order, WarPart I, our first block, examines the significance of 1910 and thecontext of cultural change in the wider period: 1910 is not merelyanother date on the calendar, an arbitrary historical marker, it is a siteof potent cultural myth, the myth of sudden historical and culturalchange itself. The “image” that Part I begins with is the Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910 in London, the first major show ofmodern art in Britain, but it also touches upon similarly importantcultural events and moments elsewhere in the three years that follow:the Armory Show in New York (1913) and the cubist development ofcollage in Paris (1912). The little magazine of special interest for Part Iis The Egoist, which comes to focus in the discussion of the period’sfounding critical works by Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot.

Part I addresses three significant essays, from the heart of theperiod, that have shaped our understanding of literary transitions inthis period and since: Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” (1919; 1925)and “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924); and T. S. Eliot’s “Traditionand the Individual Talent” (1919). In particular, it is in “Mr Bennettand Mrs Brown” that 1910 famously comes to cultural and literaryattention as the moment of change, the inception of “the new”; and itis “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, first published in The Egoistin two instalments, that puts forward a new model of “the new” in artin relation to “traditional” art, both in and beyond time or history.“Modern Fiction” is the manifesto of the new from which so many ofour ladders of literary modernity start. These essays are considered indialogue with each other and in relation to other essays and mani-festos of the period, as well as in terms of their significance for criticaldebates on modernism, formalism and the avant-garde. Part I in itselfspans and charts many of the intellectual transitions of 1910 to 1945in focusing, as it does, on canonical modernist manifestos in theirimmediate published context as well as in a wider cultural contextand with reference to their far-reaching critical reception. The rise of

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the manifesto and essay as an art form in itself may be considered oneof the main transitions of the period.

As well as the founding essays of Eliot and Woolf, the work ofnumerous other authors of the period is touched upon and discussedin Part I, including: Henry Adams, Blaise Cendrars, Ezra Pound,Dorothy Richardson, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Dora Marsden,John Rodker, Edith Sitwell, Osbert Sitwell, Isaac Rosenberg, andRichard Aldington.

Part II Image, Gender, Apocalypse“Part II: Image, Gender, Apocalypse”, our corridor in which “timepasses”, looks at the currency of the image in a selection of texts fromthe Imagist movement onwards, and opens up questions of gender,class and war (just as Woolf’s “Time Passes” does) as points of transi-tion, opposition, and crisis, and points up montage and collage of theimage as the dominant avant-garde aesthetic mode. The springboard“image” is Wyndham Lewis’s vortex. The magazine is Blast (with alook too at transition). The focus is on works, from 1910 into the1930s, by major “modernist” authors, both male and female: Pound,H.D., Stein, Eliot, Yeats and Woolf. Since the mid-twentieth-centuryconstruction of a predominantly male canon of modernist and avant-garde writers, epitomised in Hugh Kenner’s, The Pound Era: The Ageof T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis (1972), several decadesof feminist and gender-based scholarship has opened up the field toconsiderations not only of women writers of the period, but also ofthe inscriptions of gender and sexuality in both male- and female-authored texts. Part II of this book acknowledges the huge signifi-cance of such gender-based work in approaching the period, andshows how gender ultimately in fact provides the metaphoricalstaging and basis for so many of the wider, and apparently uncon-nected, concerns of modernist literature and culture.

Part III Apocalypse 1945“Part III: Apocalypse 1945”, our second block, and final part, looks atavant-garde regroupings during the 1930s and 1940s to 1945, in theface of resurgent realism, the nemesis apparent of modernism andavant-gardism, showing that nevertheless modernist and avant-gardepractices continue to flourish. The springboard “image” is Picasso’sGuernica; and the magazine in focus is transition. There is discussiontoo of the Apocalypse movement, and of work by David Gascoyne and

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Dylan Thomas and W. S. Graham. I have chosen to emphasise suchauthors, along with the work of canonical “modernist” writers in thelater phase (Joyce, Stein, Woolf, H.D., Stevens and Williams) and ofmavericks such as Schwitters and West, more than work by canonical“thirties” and “forties” writers such as W. H. Auden, ChristopherIsherwood, Graham Greene, George Orwell and so on. Greene is handi-capped, according to Paul Fussell, by “his inability to master Englishsyntax and the fine points of English sentence structure” (1982: 94).He does little for the progress of avant-garde language, and along withOrwell represents a dreary, melancholic residual modernism, in myview, mutilated by liberal guilt, worthiness, and didacticism. Stevens’s“The Idea of Order at Key West” (1935), Stein’s Dr Faustus Lights theLights (1938; 1949), West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), Woolf’s“Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940), Williams’s “Paterson: TheFalls” (1944), Schwitters’s PIN (1946) are the important, and mypreferred, landmarks to the 1930s and 1940s. I nevertheless wouldadmit to occasionally balking at that great landmark of late highmodernism, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and sometimes in negoti-ating it have to agree with Orwell’s view of Joyce as an “elephantinepedant”. But it pains me far more to leave out readings of Jean Rhys,Djuna Barnes, Patrick Hamilton, Muriel Rukeyser, David Jones, orBessie Smith, or a decent account of the Bahaus and its impact, itstransition from Germany to America, than it does to avoid Orwell’sand Greene’s transatlantic achievements of the period. I choose thissort of route, hardly a “road less traveled by”, in the happily biasedopinion that what counts here is to mark the indomitable persistence,and sometimes precarious transitions, of avant-garde and modernistpractices, in the teeth of the socialist realist backlash and of the rise offascism, a persistence that Joyce, Gascoyne, Stein, West, Schwitters etal. represent, whether their careers are ending or beginning, more orless, with the dropping of the atomic bomb.

The book’s final chapter and final part close with readings of thepoetics of Gertrude Stein, Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters in themid-1940s. Their words serve as this book’s conclusion, marking a post-war place of Apocalypse from which modernism’s and the avant-garde’s new ladders start. Transitions continue. This book, Modernism,1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse, charts the vast and numerous transi-tions between two perfect miniature manifestos: between Ezra Pound’sinjunction to “Make It New”, and Rauol Hausmann’s and KurtSchwitters’ celebration, “Poetry Intervenes Now”; from “MIN” to “PIN”.

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A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s

This book began with and owes its life to the encouragement andeditorial generosity of Julian Wolfreys. It was shaped by many happyyears of researching and teaching "Modernism", and by invaluableexchange with colleagues and students, at the Universities ofEdinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee, in the Centre for ContinuingEducation, Edinburgh, and in the Scottish Universities InternationalSummer School. I owe a great deal to formative and illuminatingdiscussions over the years, inside and outside academe, with thefollowing people: Dan Abel, Judith Allen, David Ayers, Hugh Bell,Rachel Bowlby, Claire Brennan, Linda Clare, Claire Colebrook, HughCollins, John Coyle, Cairns Craig, Mark Currie, Aidan Day, PeterEasingwood, Paul Edwards, Femi Folorunso, Jonathan Goldman,Martin Hammer, Philip Hobsbaum, David Hopkins, Chris Huxley,Ronnie Jack, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Gail Low, Alison Lumsden, PaddyLyons, Mike McIlroy, Gus McLean, Caroline McNairn, John McNairn,Stella McNairn, Niall Martin, Marjorie Metzstein, Andrew Millington,Sara Mills, Drew Milne, Lesley Morgan, Pam Morris, Alan Munton,Ken Newton, Colin Nicolson, Jason Pennells, Michael Phillips, WaynePrice, Geraldine Prince, Faith Pullin, Patrick Reilly, Ian Revie, AndrewRoberts, Wallace Robson, Jack Ross, Louise Rourke, Roger Savage,Dietrich Scheunemann, Susan Sellers, John Seth, Sean Smith, StanSmith, Lee Spinks, Jane Stabler, Jim Stewart, Randall Stevenson, KathSwarbrick, Trudi Tate, Olga Taxidou, Geoff Ward, Rob Watt, ArchieWebb, Keith Williams, Karina Williamson, Julian Wolfreys, MarionWynne-Davies. I would also like to thank for their help: Gwen Hunter,Jean Spence and Margaret Swayne in the office of the Department ofEnglish at the University of Dundee; Ann Simpson, archivist of theGabrielle Keiller Collection at the Dean Gallery, Scottish Gallery ofModern Art, Edinburgh; and Valery Rose and Jocelyn Stockley; SonyaBarker and Anna Sandeman at Palgrave. I also thank Peter Kitson,Head of English at Dundee, for finding funds towards the cost of the

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cover illustration. I am particularly grateful for the constructive criti-cism of Claire Colebrook, Philip Hobsbaum and Olga Taxidou whoread the later drafts of this book. Its ladders start in a childhood spentwith painters and lovers of "modern" art, beginning with my parentsJoy Sinclair and Robert Goldman. My late father instilled in me a loveof visual and verbal art, sharing his energetic pleasure in works byKurt Schwitters, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and many otherartists and writers who feature in the following pages. This book isdedicated to Gus McLean. I cannot thank him enough for his infec-tious bibliophilia, for introducing me to the satires of Nathanael West,for placing in my hands many (too many to list) other volumes ofconsequence, for his support and generosity in so many ways.

x x i v A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s