The Reader Critic

Yeats’s “Upon a Dying Lady”

J., New York:

I wonder how many of your readers know that the Seven Poems by William Butler Yeats in the August number of The Little Review were inspired by and written about Miss Mabel Beardsley, the sister of Aubrey Beardsley? I remember when Yeats was writing them. She was dying of a lingering illness. She was a Catholic, and it is of course well known that Aubrey Beardsley became a Catholic before he died. Artists, poets and writers like Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, W. B. Yeats, and other old friends of her brother and herself, used to take turns in visiting her. Some of them made points of collecting their best and in some cases most improper stories for her. I hope that she kept a diary and entered some of the stories in it. W. B. Yeats was tremendously moved by her fine spirit and gaiety. The Seven Poems were the result.

The story is one that Meredith would have loved. And she was a joyous creature that Meredith would have loved had he known her. There was no wearing of black there, no making a luxury of her grief, no flaunting it in the faces of others, even though they might sympathize with or share her feelings. It was all quite French, what a spirited French woman would do. She would have enjoyed the story published in the Letters of Meredith that an old Cornish woman told him:

“A hunting Squire in her neighborhood had a very handsome wife, whom he valued less than the fox’s tail. One of the Vivians eyed her, admired, condoled, desired and carried her off. Some days after, she was taken with compunction or compassion, and about midnight the forsaken squire, sitting in his library, heard three knocks at the window. ‘That’s Bess,’ he said, and let her in. She was for weeping and protesting repentance, but he kissed her, taking the blame on himself, rightly, and the house was quiet. Old Lady Vivian, like many old ladies, had outgrown her notions of masculine sentiment in these matters; she said to my friend: ‘What are the man’s family making such a fuss about! My son only had her a fortnight!’”

Gargoyles

An Old Reader:

I have never been a real subscriber. The only copy of The Little Review I ever bought was the memorable March issue with Galsworthy’s letter in it. For a long time after that The Little Review was my religion; it converted me to a faith in New America, it inspired me to dreams and creative work. It was my first American sweetheart, and as long as it remained such it aroused in me the whole gamut of love emotions, from passionate admiration to passionate hatred. It would pain me to become just a subscriber, to manifest my attitude through a dollar and a half. Better leave the ashes undisturbed by profane poking.

Of late I have thought a good deal about the magazine. I have been camping near the ocean, and have spent some time in your various haunts of last summer where the natives still gossip about the Little Review crowd. Plunging at night into the phosphorous surf and other delightful sins, mingled with communion with some Little Review worshippers, has disturbed my academic calm and provoked my reveries. One night I was awakened and perceived an apparition moving from the roaring sea toward my gigantic fire. I heard a voice, a wail: “Help! Margaret Anderson is murdering me!” Was it the spirit of The Little Review?

For surely the spirit of the old Little Review is dead. You seem to be proud of your evolution, of the graves of your old gods that loom in your eyes like stepping-stones to those heights where you bask in the wisdom of the Ezras. I hope your new faith is as sleeve-deep as your former acquired creeds. For the beauty of the old Little Review, the secret of its magnetism and appeal to Young America, lay in its youthfulness, its spontaneity, in its puerility, if you wish. For puerility mates with originality. The Ezras know too much. Their minds are black, scarcely smouldering logs. They are yogis; you remember how Galsworthy hoped that you would escape the danger of becoming yogis?

An Ezraized Little Review will have no appeal to Young America. Shall I tell you that in my summer class I had students from various western states to the University of California because they saw my name in the catalogue, and they associated my name with the old Little Review? These worshippers are cold to the recent issues. And I sympathize with them. The new Little Review is gargoylitic, monotonously so. We can still enjoy a passage in Wyndham Lewis, although Remy de Gourmont has said the same things more beautifully and less flippantly. We are still grateful for such a jewel as Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Poet’s Heart”: Bodenheim is the greatest of all the Others, for he does not suffer from self-consciousness, from too-much-knowing. But it is Ezra who sprawls all over The Little Review and bedecks it with gargoyles. Mr. Pound is digestible only in the early miniatures:

“Oh fan of white silk, clear as frost on the grass-blade”....

I hope that you will soon tire of your over-sophisticated associates and drive them out of the sanctuary. After all you are a rock ... you are still persisting at the impossible and the miraculous. I am looking forward to the next stage in your evolution. And I send you my hearty greeting, over the gargoylitic heads of your miseacres, for the next fresh, spontaneous Little Review.

[This letter I think will find an echo in the minds of many of our first subscribers. I have several faults to find with its point of view, but one especially: I cannot see why personal qualities such as freshness, spontaneity, enthusiasm, etc., are in any way a guarantee for an interesting or important magazine. Being temperamentally spontaneous, my actions will always be characterized by impulsiveness, etc. But I know that spontaneity will never help me to write an immortal poem. You must keep things in their proper correspondences.

I very spontaneously accept the cooperation of a group of writers who can really write. Literature is their medium. Playing the piano is mine. When I play the piano very beautifully to the original Little Review “worshippers” they will know it is not because I am young and fresh and enthusiastic but because I know a great deal about how the piano should be played. I can’t do such things to words. Wyndham Lewis does it in this issue in a passage—“Leonardo’s beauty consisted in a red rain on the shadowed side of heads”.... That is a matter of great prose. And the only reason for a magazine of the Arts to be published is that it shall produce great prose, great poetry, great reproductions of sculpture, painting, and music. We are going to have the latter as soon as possible.—M. C. A.]

Phases of Crazes

H. L. C., Chicago:

I have just read your circular letter in which you state your aims and set forth your plans for the future. It is the best-written letter of the kind I have ever read.

But I don’t like your promises, so I am going to risk your Reader Critic (that at least is always interesting: no one ever seems to be safe from you) and tell you why.

I wish you didn’t have such a craze for foreigners and self-exiled Americans. I think you have missed your chance right here in your own country. I am sure there are writers if you would go after them who, if they couldn’t write so well, would on the other hand be writing in a familiar manner about subjects known to us and in so doing be creating a literary tradition of our own.

I am tired of these floods of Russian, French, Scandinavian, Irish and Hindoo stuff that have swept the country. The war will probably reduce the importation of foreign books, and I for one think this will be a good thing....

[I should think there might be room in America for one magazine which will print work just because it is good, no matter where it is produced. All we ask in this is to be allowed a choice of crazes.

To us is seems that there is an indiscriminate craze in the theatre, in books, in magazines, and even in exhibition rooms, for the American product with all its sins upon it. Let your fears for the contamination or stifling from abroad of American letters be at rest. Congress and the established publisher have attended to all that. Ignorance is protected from invasion far better than the country itself.

Each generation in this country is spared the shock of contemporary foreign masterpieces. When a masterpiece reaches America, a generation late, Time has tempered it to the shorn. I happen to know something of Tagore’s experience with this protection. When Tagore was first “discovered” in America—(he had been published in London and had with him only a few personal copies of his work)—he sent to his London publishers for extra copies to meet the requests of his friends. Aside from a terrific tariff, the red tape and the questioning as to the integrity of his purpose in importing his own books proved too wearing an experience: the idea was abandoned. On his recent trip he brought with him a small collection of very gentle Indian water colours, with no other motive than to create if possible an understanding of Indian art in this country. His pictures were held up at the port of Seattle, he was called again and again before inspectors, made to swear all kinds of oaths, and to deposit a fabulous sum (some forty thousand dollars, as I remember) to assure the government that his intentions were all right.

As he was leaving the country some one asked him if he ever intended making another visit,—(there had been some agitation before this about including the Hindoo in the Oriental Immigration laws)—and Tagore replied, “I do not know. You will make a law against the Hindoo coming to your country. You have now a law against books. It may be you will make a law against poets coming too?”

When the western nations have finished making the world safe for democracy, if it wouldn’t be too satirical the Orient might wage a world war to make the world safe for Art.—jh.]