Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature 1912-1939.

THE MEN OF 1914

In Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940 (1986), Shari Benstock perpetrates a revisionist study of Modernist writing that turns literary history on its head. Focusing on a group of lesbians in Paris, Miss Benstock rewrites history so as to give Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, et al. top billing. Miss Benstock attacks what she calls "the hegemony of masculine heterosexual values that have for so long underwritten our definitions of Modernism," and attributes these women's alleged eminence to their rejecting the oppressive patriarchy's "enforced heterosexuality."

Miss Benstock, then, will not like Julian Symons's Makers of the New. For this book is frankly patriarchal in celebrating what Symons calls "The Founding Fathers" of Modernism: Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. Symons offers us a witty and informal "blend of biography, literary history, and criticism designed to show the course of literary modernism, as it developed in Britain and America."

The definition of the Modernist movement in letters is now so unsettled that Symons pretty well finesses the problem by lightly defining Modernism as work by writers who were "attempting consciously to change the form, language, or subject matter of literature, sometimes all three." Limiting himself wholly to British and American writing, Symons has the Modernist phase running from the founding of Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 to the publication of Finegans Wake and the closing down of Eliot's Criterion in 1939. As a narrative of the "men of 1914," as Wyndham Lewis called them, Makers of the New recounts the rise and decline of the new literature, its characteristic forms of expression, and the little magazines in which it appeared. Due attention is paid to the lesser role of women like Amy Lowell, Margaret Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Harriet Monroe, and Harriet Weaver. An epilogue describes the fate of the main Modernists: Joyce glorified, Eliot sanctified, Lewis ostracized, and Pound in a cage (arrested by the U.S. Army in Pisa for treason). Since the history of this movement has been told many times before, does Symons have anything new to add?

Principally a wry wit, a mild cynicism, and a satirist's eye for the surprising detail. Rarely has the obesity of Amy Lowell been linked so hilariously to Imagism as a style. Joyce's limp handshake and his perpetual squint bring him alive. Ezra Pound's windmill pugilism (with Hemingway) is lovingly described. Here is Symons on Hilda Doolittle:

She was the sister of one of Pound's fellow students, her father taught astronomy at the university, and Pound met her first at a Hallowe'en party where he was dressed as a Tunisian prince. Hilda was tall, coltishly awkward, bony, and regarded as beautiful by some but not by [William Carlos] Williams, who thought Pound exaggerated her charms absurdly. She was, Williams said, "a litle clumsy but all to the mustard. . . . A girl that's full of fun, bright, but never telling you all she knows, doesn't care if her hair is a little mussed, and wears good solid shoes."

More than textual analysis, Symons loves literary gossip, of which the book is full. Even so, he seriously distinguishes Eliotic Modernism from the version developed in America under the aegis of Williams. British to the core, Symons naturally prefers the Eliot line and deplores the anti-intellectualism of Williams and his epigones; he doubts Williams's proclamation that there are "no ideas but in things." Symons is likewise dismissive of Williams's claim to have discovered a new American prosody: "[Williams] never defined it, beyond making some remarks about the breathing habits of Americans being different from those of the British, and it would seem that the variable foot in Williams's own work varied just as he felt at any particular moment." In Symons's view, "the effects obtained we re certainly very different from those of European modernists. At best they may be thought trivial, at worst null." This will raise some American hackles, but not mine.

One of the surprises of the book is Symons's attempt to rehabilitate Wyndham Lewis, whose importance "has been consistently understated or even almost ignored, especially by American writers." For Symons, Lewis's Tarr (1918), Time and Western Man (1927), and The Apes of God (1930)

Contained speculations and suggestions about the modern state, the individual's place within it, and the implications involved in sexual and political liberalism that even today astonish by their acuity and far-sightedness. They contain analyses looking forward to the spread of unisex clothing and behavior and the increasing power of homosexuality, they suggest the likely development of giant trusts and cartels that in their internal pattern would resemble socialist states. Lewis. . . linked thedisintegration of the family (something hardly contemplated at the time) with the development of feminism, [and] condemned the idea that Negro culture should be considered as at all equivalent to white. Why was the writer who advanced these disturbing, novel ideas not proclaimed as an important sociological philosopher, why was there not a cult of his work among the intelligentsia?

The answer to this question points to the failure of the Modernist movement. Symons argues that (with the exception of Joyce) the "artistic demolition work" of the men of 1914 was performed with a distinct social intention in mind--saving society from the worm-eaten liberalism that then infected it. In that sense the movement did not succeed, and by 1939 the fact that their differing conservative social visions had failed to materialize "inevitably affected their art and their attitude.c Lewis's flirtation with Fascism simply sank his reputation for social thought, and although he recant ed in The Hitler Cult, his undisciplined prose and his one-world coercive politics dropped him into the oubliette. And while joyce with Ulysses "changed utterly" the twentieth-century novel, Symons argues that Joyce's more radical experiments in unreadable language, such as in Finnegans Wake, were "no longer profitable." Finally, Eliot's conversion to Christianity in 1927 "involved for him changes of attitude and of literary style" incompatible with Modernist thought. Only Pound "remained in relation to literature a pure revolutionary." But since The Cantos were the product of a disintegrating mind given over to Fascism and anti-Semitism, they are only intermittently coherent and must, finally, be judged a failure. Still, of these four writers Symons concludes that "they changed permanently the language in which poetry is written, and enlarged beyond measure what could be said and the way of saying it in fiction." For this accomplishment, the men of 1914 "deserve honor."