The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

SEPTEMBER, 1915

Published Monthly

15 cents a copy

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO

$1.50 a year

Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago

The Little Review

Vol. II.

SEPTEMBER, 1915

No. 6.

Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson

Reversals

Margaret C. Anderson

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons.

It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.—Whitman.

What do you call the place you live in?

I will describe it to you. Perhaps you can find a new name for it.

It is a place where men do not hold up their heads and look free.

Where men dare not seek what they were born for: life.

Where many men work and starve, and many work and turn into cabbages, and many steal and turn into rats, and a few own the land and turn into hogs.

Where nature is not as important as law.

Where law is cause rather than effect.

Where religion is faith rather than affirmation.

Where love is never as strong as things.

Where age is decay rather than more life.

Where art is encouraged but not recognized.

Where revolt is the strongest of emotions and the weakest of actions.

What do you call this strange place where it is immoral to take life deeply, and moral to be a half-thing?

Where it is beautiful to have theories of living, and ugly to apply them.

Where it is right to dabble and wrong to realize.

Where ignorance is a virtue and knowledge a crime.

Where nature is obscenity and man’s abuse of it purity.

Where philistinism is a habit and intellectual groping a “fad.”

Where reputation is more vital than character.

Where sociability is a goal instead of a vice.

Where indirection is known as unselfishness and self-direction as egotism.

Where thinking is only a sort of autistic stammering.

Where genius, “being youth and wisdom,” is sent to school to learn—(Never mind; I can’t remember what).

Where impulse is assassinated before it can prove its worth.

Where one must achieve in gloom or be suspected of “lightness.”

Where beauty comes only when one has struggled beyond the need of it.

Where sex is known as the greatest human experience, and experience in sex as the greatest human sin.

Where religion is known to be an unfolding, but experience in unfolding looked upon as irreligious.

What do you call this fantastic place where age that is weak rules youth that is strong?

Where parents prescribe life for children they cannot understand.

Where politicians and prostitutes and police and the press are despised but honored and great spirits are suspected of greatness but feared and cast out.

Where nations go to war for things they do not believe in and individuals will not go to revolution for things they do believe in.

Where those who know the rottenness in Denmark cannot think through to what caused it.

Where birds that fly are put into cages and men who soar are put into jails.

What do you call this incredible place where men go inch by inch to death in jails? Where they cease to hear and see and feel and smell and talk and walk and sing and sleep and work and play and think and be—not by order of gods or monsters but by order of men? What do you call a place where those who must cease to be are richer than those who are?

What do you call this awful place where every great spirit walks not only in rebellion and misunderstanding and isolation but in persecution?

Where there are no heroes to make an end of horrors.

Where even to live outdoors cannot clean men.

Where there is no imagination and no faith.

Where there is no silence....

Do you call it an asylum of crazed beings who annihilate each other? Not at all. You call it the world. You say it is “a good old world, after all.” And you resent the “freak” who tells you your world is upside down.

Out of the loneliness of self-direction comes the only completion of life.—“The Scavenger.”

Moods

Ben Hecht

I have heard the water beasts roaring in the night,

Leaping and howling,

Stung to madness by the tempest’s might.

I have seen them splintering their heads in a furious race,

Plunging through the bellowing gloom

With a boom ... boom ... boom—

And from each torn face

I have watched their white blood

Sweeping in a foam across the night.

I have heard the water beasts snarling at the wild beating blows

Of the strong handed winds that tore them into rows

And churned their entrails into hissing snows.

The water is a restless smile soft as a woman’s hair.

At noon it closes its vast blue eye and falls asleep.

At night as the swooning day gives birth,

The water is an opal glittering

On the gnarled black fist of the earth.

I have heard the water purring in the sun with its blue back arched,

And have seen the drowsy water beasts rising from their beds.

I have heard them chant as they formed and marched

With their green peaked hoods tipping rakish on their heads.

The water is frozen. Under its stiffened bosom

The beasts run blindly to and fro

And rising from beneath

Crunch one another with their frozen teeth.

It burns.

My soul is like water.

Sorrow

The night is a black poppy.

The moon weeps

Spilling a torrent of silver tears

Across the black petals.

The wind laughs.

The black face of the water

Glistens with rows of flashing teeth

Laughing back.

Always laughter.

Ho, the stars are little devils

And I am their master.

Humoresque

Faces. Faces.

Swimming like white fever specks away.

Faces. Coming close.

See the meaningless odd bumps on them called features:

A maniac crooning over lumps of putty fashioned them.

Look. Important faces!

And there—nice empty ones

(Yellow bits of paper blanks

Blown along the street.)

And look. Good God! A happy one!

Faces.

Crazy bumped and colored discs

Bobbing, bobbing,

Swimming, fading

Like white fever specks

I am one of them.

Rain

The rain is like laughter.

The black devils of my brain

Have leaped outside the window

And are laughing at me.

An Invitation to Cheat Posterity

(To W.)

Come, thief, an epic seethes within my brain

I will condense it to a sigh

And breathe it in your ear.

Come to my arms, the mad words start

There is a sonnet in my finger tips

There is a lyric bursting from my heart

I will condense them all into

A single kiss upon your lips.

My Island

You shall stand on a rock in the darkness

Naked and shining with beauty.

And I shall sit by the water and gaze on you

And as you come gliding through the mists,

Struggling out of the night’s black mouth,

I shall rush to you and embrace the moon.

You shall lie on the rock like the crest of a wave

White and vague in the distance.

Your hair shall play over you like a sunbeam

And as I come running to you I shall embrace the sea.

You shall play on the wide sheets of sand

Golden against the blue water paint

Curling over the edge of the world

And your arms shall beckon to me until I shall go mad

And run to you to embrace the sun.

You shall lie, a silver jewel in the ebony arms of shadows,

Your breath stirring the white flowers of your bosom

You shall lie in the velvet depths of silence

Like a white stain on the night.

You shall call to me and I shall bend over you,

And that is all there is to life—

I bending over you in the darkness.

Soul-Sleep and Modern Novels

Will Levington Comfort

An American novelist who wanted sales, and who was willing to sacrifice all but the core of his character to get sales, found himself recently in a challenging situation. As he expressed it:

“Along about page two hundred in the copy of the novel I am on, the woman’s soul wakes up.”

“A woman’s novel?” I asked.

“Meant to be,” said he. “Study of a woman all through. Begins as a little girl—different, you know—sensitive, does a whole lot of thinking that her family doesn’t follow. Tries to tell ’em at first, but finds herself in bad. Then keeps quiet for years—putting on power and beauty in the good old way of bumps and misunderstanding. She’s pure white fire presently—body and brain—something else asleep. She wants to be a mother, but the ghastly sordidness of the love stories of her sisters to this enactment, frightens her from men and marriage as the world conducts it——”

“I follow you,” said I.

“Well, I’m not going to do the novel here for you,” he added. “You wouldn’t think there was a ray of light in it from this kind of telling. A man who spends five months of his best hours of life in telling a story, can’t do it over in ten minutes and drive a machine at the same time——”

“We’re getting out of the crowd. What does the girl do?” I asked.

“Well, she wanted a little baby—was ready to die for it, but had her own ideas of what the father should be. A million married women have thought the same thing here in America—pricked the obscene sham of the whole business but too late. Moreover they’re the best women we’ve got. There are——”

He actually shook the hat off his head—back into the seat at this point.

“There are some young women coming up into maturity here in America—God bless ’em—who are almost brave enough to set out on the Quest for the Father of the baby that haunts them to be born.... That’s what she did.

“He was a young man doing his own kind of work—doctoring among the poor, let us say, mainly for nothing—killing himself among men and women and babies; living on next to nothing, but having a half-divine kind of madness to lift the world.... She saw him. You can picture that. They were two to make one—and a third. She knew. There was a gold light about his head for her eyes. Some of his poor had seen it. The young man himself didn’t know it, and the world missed it altogether.

“She went to him. It’s cruel to put it this way.... I’m not saying anything about the writing or about what happened, but the scene as it came to me was the finest thing I ever saw. We always fall down in the handling, you know.... I did it the best I could.... No, I’m not going to tell you what happened. Only this: A little afterward—along about page two hundred of the copy—her soul woke up.”

“Why not, in God’s name?”

He glanced quickly at me as a man does from ahead, when his car is pressing the limit.

“Ever have a book fail?” he asked.

“Seven,” said I.

He cleared his throat and the kindest smile came into his eyes.

“They tell me at my publisher’s that I slowed up my last book badly—by taking a woman’s soul out for an airing—just a little invalid kind of a soul, too. Souls don’t wake up in American novels any more. You can’t do much more in print nowadays than you can do on canvas—I mean movie canvas. Of course, you can paint soul, but you can’t photograph it—that’s the point. The movies have put imagination to death. We have to compete. You can’t see a soul without imagination—or some sort of madness—and the good people who want imagination in their novels don’t buy ’em. They rent or borrow. It’s the crowds that go to the movies that have bright colored strings of American novels, as the product runs—on their shelves—little shiny varnished shelves—red carpets—painted birds on the lampshades and callers in the evenings....”

There was a good silence.

“Do you know,” he said presently, “I’ve about come to the conclusion that a novel must play altogether on sensuous tissue to catch the crowd? Look at the big movie pictures—the actors make love like painted animals.... I’m not humorous or ironical. It’s a big problem to me——”

“Why, you can’t touch the hem of the garment of a real love story until you are off the sensuous,” I offered. “The Quest only begins there. I’m not averse to that. It belongs in part. We are sensuous beings—in part. But I am averse to letting it contain all. Why, the real glow comes to a romance—when a woman’s soul wakes up. There’s a hotter fire than that which glows blood-red——”

“I know,” he said quickly. “I know. That blood-red stuff is the cheapest thing in the world, but that’s where the great thing called human interest lives.... I’m sure of this story until her soul wakes up. She stirs in her sleep, and I see a giantess ahead—the kind of woman who could whistle to me or to you—and we’d follow her out—dazed by the draw of her. They are in the world. I reckon souls do wake up—but I can feel the public dropping off every page after two hundred—like chilled bees—dropping off page by page—and the old familiar battle ahead. I can feel that tight look about the eyes again——”

“Are you going to put her soul back to sleep?” I asked, as we turned again into the crowd.

I wasn’t the least lordly in this question. I knew his struggle, and something of the market, too. I was thinking of tradesmen—how easy it is to be a tradesman; in fact, how difficult it is to be otherwise—when the very passion of the racial soul moves in the midst of trade.

“She’s beautiful—even asleep,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ll have to give her something. I’m building a house. She’s in the comprehension of the little varnished shelves—asleep.”

“Doesn’t a tight look come about the eyes—from much use of that sort of anæsthetic?” I asked.

“Let’s get a drink,” he answered.

A fairly widespread intellectual movement, though it be madness, has a profound and almost sacred significance. Primitive races believe that madmen are the voice of God. As much might be said of artists. Their madness is often wiser than the average wisdom.—Romain Rolland.

Poems

Maxwell Bodenheim

Pastels

(In the city-square)

I

I think you are a masquerading nun

Who has been lavish with reds, thinking to obliterate herself ...

But you should also

Have placed a red cloth over your etched face.

II

Woman twirling a fan, burdened with many colors,

I salaam to you.

Your youth has gone, but you have made

An excellent effigy.

Thoughts

There is a white-jacketed old man, with eyes like milk-drops,

Who rakes leaves under hundreds of young low trees

With the arms of children and strong bodies.

When he has gravely raked them together,

He burns them and squats beside the fire,

And looks timidly, smilingly ...

He never squints up at the green leaves above him.

A Woman In the Park

She strives to braid her scant hair

And silence the bundled baby at her side.

(Her face has the cast of a frightened novice praying for deftness.)

Then she looks at the spinning-legged children in the wading-pool,

And the charcoal of her eyes has an odd after-glow, for a moment,

As though she half-regretted her tight grey clothes.

Richard Aldington’s Poetry

Amy Lowell

What a melancholy thing it is to have to admit that one of our national traits so often interferes with our appreciation of the fine arts, and therefore with the pleasure and profit to be derived from them! As a nation, we are dreadfully impressed by noise. The loud and compelling, even if the blatant, is sure to attract our attention. It is as though we were tone-deaf to all instruments save those of percussion, and colour-blind to all except the primary colours.

This is a particularly unsatisfactory condition, as we are really of a very welcoming temper. We are as anxious to make friends in art as in life. We have no quarrel with originality; on the contrary, it is decidedly pleasing to us. But our sympathies are bounded by our capacities, and our capacities are to a great extent limited to the perception of loud tones and crude colours. To teach the public to hear semi tones and see half-shades, perhaps that is one of the functions of the Imagist poets.

I suppose it is this preoccupation with what Walter Scott used to call “the big, bow-wow style,” which has kept Richard Aldington’s work from being as well understood here as it is in England. The very delicacy of it; its elusiveness, in which suggestions appear and disappear like a blowing mist; its faint, gradually changing colour; all these things confuse the average American poetry lover. While a few people find in Mr. Aldington’s work poetry of a most exquisite and stimulating kind, the great mass of readers turn away bewildered.

This is inconceivable to me. How is it that we do not notice that a man is standing beside us unless he digs us in the ribs with an aggressive elbow? Our own country-woman, who writes under the pen-name of H. D., has had to contend with much of the same partial understanding, and it remained for an Englishman, Mr. Aldington himself, to write an explanation and appreciation of her work in an American magazine—this magazine. It is time that an American should explain to her countrymen the work of the Englishman, who is Richard Aldington.

Water and poetry have a quality in common. They both have a way of seeping—seeping, and without apparent flow, arriving. We are constantly finding fault with American publishers for permitting English firms to bring out the first books of our authors; it is to the honour of America that Richard Aldington’s first book is to appear in the autumn, with the imprint of an American house.

Indeed, in speaking of the non-understanding of the mass of American readers and reviewers, I must add the paradox that the minority here is quicker to perceive excellence than the people of any other country. It is our own magazine Poetry, with its far-seeing and daring editor, who first introduced Mr. Aldington to a considerable public, and her lead was quickly followed by The Little Review; an American firm, the Boni’s, printed a number of his poems in an Anthology: Des Imagistes; and another American firm, Messrs. Houghton Mifflin, printed others in Some Imagist Poets. So Mr. Aldington’s work has seeped little by little to where we can look at it as a reflecting lake. More sputtering brooks of poetry have brawled away and disappeared, but Mr. Aldington’s output lies placid and arresting before us.

What is the quality of this work which makes it at once eluding and enduring? I think it is stark, unsentimental preoccupation with beauty. Mr. Aldington is in love with beauty. “Not,” to quote Leigh Hunt, “in the little present-making style, with baskets of new fruit and pots of roses, but with consuming passion.” There is nothing pretty about this poetry; it is not prettiness, but beauty, that the poet is after.

This naked beauty Mr. Aldington found in the Greeks. One feels that his youth was passed in a kind of painful homesickness, the nostalgia of a beauty which he could not then see about him. Greek poetry and Italian landscape gave him ease, and, solaced and flowering, his first work was under their influence.

I do not know which of Mr. Aldington’s poems first saw the light of day in Poetry, and I have not the volumes here to refer to. But the first collection of his poems in Des Imagistes shows this preoccupation with Greek themes. All of the poems are Greek in feeling, many of them have Greek titles and are perfectly Greek in content. Take this one, for instance:

Bromios

The withered bonds are broken.

The waxed reeds and the double pipe

Clamour about me;

The hot wind swirls

Through the red pine trunks.

Io! the fauns and the satyrs.

The touch of their shagged curled fur

And blunt horns!

They have wine in heavy craters

Painted black and red;

Wine to splash on her white body.

Io!

She shrinks from the cold shower—

Afraid, afraid!

Let the Maenads break through the myrtles

And the boughs of the rohododaphnai.

Let them tear the quick deers’ flesh.

Ah, the cruel, exquisite fingers!

Io!

I have brought you the brown clusters,

The ivy-boughs and pine-cones.

Your breasts are cold-sea-ripples,

But they smell of the warm grasses.

Throw wide the chiton and the peplum,

Maidens of the Dew.

Beautiful are your bodies, O Maenads,

Beautiful the sudden folds,

The vanishing curves of the white linen

About you.

Io!

Hear the rich laughter of the forest,

The cymbals,

The trampling of the panisks and the centaurs.

The objectors say that that is merely a copy. It lays itself open to that criticism, certainly, but how exquisite a copy. And how difficult to make such a copy! Try it and see! Mr. Aldington is a master of suggestion. His descriptions are never overloaded, and yet there is the picture. In the next stanza to the last, notice the blowing, rippling linen over the white bodies of the young girls.

A little of this goes a long way, you say. Yes, I think that is true, but Mr. Aldington has other strings to play. He has irony, a not-too-common trait in modern poetry. I know few things more beautiful, and more ironical than this:

Lesbia

Use no more speech now;

Let the silence spread gold hair above us

Fold on delicate fold;

You had the ivory of my life to carve.

Use no more speech.

....

And Picus of Mirandola is dead;

And all the gods they dreamed and fabled of,

Hermes, and Thoth, and Christ, are rotten now,

Rotten and dank.

....

And through it all I see your pale Greek face;

Tenderness makes me as eager as a little child

To love you

You morsel left half cold on Caesar’s plate.

That last line is a triumph of the disagreeable. Mr. Aldington’s beauty does not cloy; he knows how to spice it:

In the Via Sestina

O daughter of Isis,

Thou standest beside the wet highway

Of this decayed Rome,

A manifest harlot.

Straight and slim art thou

As a marble phallus;

Thy face is the face of Isis

Carven

As she is carven in basalt.

And my heart stops with awe

At the presence of the gods.