NUMBER ONE
VIENNA
TWENTY CENTS
DIRECTOR: GORHAM B. MUNSON
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Business office : Peter K. Hurwitz7~Treasurer, 1361 -"’TfT'S'Beet, Brooklyn,
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IDENTITY CARDS
Louis Aragon: A youthful student of medicine who served in the war. Poet, novelist, critic, co-director of Littérateur and associate editor of Aventure, the two organs of the youngest French generation in letters.
Will Bray: He has covered at prodigious speed an enormous amount of literary territory during his nineteen years. He has lived alternately in America and in France and writes in both languages.
Malcolm Cowley : A contributor of poetry and essays to a number of publications, including the Dial, the Little Review, the N. Y. Evening Post Literary Review. He graduated from Harvard not long ago and is living in Montpellier, France, at present.
Matthew Josephson: A recent graduate of Columbia University and a resident of Paris. He has been published by Poetry : A Magazine of Verse. Lately, he joined the staff of Aventure. A helpful counselor at the meetings in Paris which planned Secession.
Tristan Tzara: His cry, „Dada“, has travelled around the world from the Café Voltaire, Zurich in 1916. A Rou- manian who writes in French. He is author of La Première Aventure Céleste de Mr Antipyrine, Vingt-Cinq Poèmes and Calendrier cinéma du coeur abstrait.
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NUMBER ONE
SPRING
1922
I
Tickets PLEASE
said the conductor, and Benjamin settled back
into his seat, and by this action wrapped
solitude about him like a cloak.
Strangers brushed past him
down the aisle, soiling only
the fringes of his mantel;
his eyes had turned
to watch the hills that so proceeded like awkward
vast dancers across his eyes;
to watch the moving
mist of his breath as it crept along the pane.
II
He says to himself
— it is the placing
of the foot upon the step deposited by the porter;
it is the leisurely
procession with baggage up a red plush aisle:
out of such gestures there grows
the act of travel.
Johnstown, Pittsburgh: these cities
escape the grasp of the hand
these cities are pimpled on hills;
Manhattan is corseted briefly about with waters.
You climb into a train, give a tip, open a paper, light a
cigar, and the landscape
jerks unevenly past.
Your knees straighten
automatically at Pittsburgh; a porter
takes the luggage, saying rapidly
—- this way to a taxi, Boss,
this way to a taxi,
and the hills and fields of Pennsylvania quiver
behind you vaguely, the landscape of a dream.
2
III
As the other train passed he looked through the
plate glass of the dining car — the other — and saw
a fork suspended in the air and before it had finished
its journey he was peering into a smoking car with a
silver haze and four men playing cards over a suitcase
clamped to their knees. A world, a veritable world, as
seen beneath the microscope. A world in an envelope
sealed with the red tail light that proceeded gravely
past him up the track. A world sealed out of his world
and living for thirty-five seconds of his life.
IV
The lights of the train proceed
transversely across the water;
across the water strides
the shadow of the engineer;
the square barred windows move across the water
as if they marked a prison that exists
never between four walls, but only moves
continually across a world of waters.
V
His head drooped lower gradually; he dreamed
of the locomotive that boldly had deserted
the comfortable assurance of steel rails;
it turned and leaped
like a beast hunted along the wooded slope.
BMMMP
over logs, over stones and among
the trees that leaned away from it as it passed,
and all the time the engineer bending out of his cab
and saying
— The four fourteen will be on time at Youngsville
the four fourteen will be on time WON’T it, Bill.
And the trees, reassured, lean back to their posts again.
VI
Time is marked not by hours but by cities; we are
one station before Altoona, one station beyond Altoona;
3
CRESSON : change cars for Luckett, Munster and ail
points on the line that runs tortuously back into a
boyhood, with the burden of a day dropping like ripe
fruit at every revolution of the driving wheel, with a
year lost between each of the rickety stations: Beulah
Road, Ebensburg, Nant-y-glo; gather your luggage and
move it towards the door. BIG BEND.
VII
O voyagers, with you
I have moved like a firefly over the waters;
with you I was spit
like a cherry seed from the puckered lips of the tunnel.
Come: let us join our hands,
dance
ring around the rosy, farmer in the dell
around this clucking locomotive. Come!
And out of the red cabooses huddled in the yards,
out of the engine cabs and roundhouses
will stream out silently to meet us
these others.
Come !
VIII
Out of the group at the station, no form detached itself
to meet him; the circle of their backs 1
was a wall against him. He waited
until the checkerboard lights of the train had shown
phantasmally along the shale of the cut and vanished.
He buttoned his coat and stumbled into the darkness,
the darkness proceeded along with him until
he picked it up and wrapped it about his shoulders,
bending his shoulders under the weight of the darkness,
he stumbled away with his burden of bushes and hills.
MALCOLM COWLEY
4
BOTTLE FOUND AT SEA*
Lost as I am by the edge of this profound lake in
which is mirrored an unknown sky, shall I ever attain
the linking of my existence with the human centuries
whose faint trail seems scarcely to penetrate these
.regions? Even the sense of time is forgotten : whether
I go toward yesterday or tomorrow, there is no way
of knowing. And these words suggest nothing more,
since it is impossible to tell whether the ages have
been arrested forever or whether their flight has been
hastened with the uniformly accelerated rapidity of a
body approaching the sun. If only I had a watch with
me to end this uncertainty. A diffuse light reigns
eternally over this world and the sun that is of space
as well as of time has deserted this immutable firmament.
The lovely liquid expanse which composes my horizon
rounds out toward the west and receives at the north-
west a stream that flows from the north. As far as I
can ascertain with the aid of my compass, its direction
seems to be north-northeast by south-southwest. But
how to measure its extent? I have made the circum-
ference of the lake several times without arriving at
even the haziest idea as to the year or minute of the
length of the voyage. At first glance I had estimated
the circumference to be a hundred miles. Later con-
jectures brought this figure up from a hundred to a
hundred and fifty or a hundred and sixty miles. The
actual span must be somewhere between these two
numbers. Nor can the time that I place at the disposal
of this investigation serve as a yard-stick : it comprises
anything from a few sparse thoughts to a desert of
ennui and vexation. The beatings of my pulse inform
me no better, their irregularities born no doubt of
the helplessness in which I find myself to appraise
equivalents amid such astounding phenomena. The
vegetation in its development follows no habitual or
logical order of growth. There are trees here which
grow downward, flowers that give forth leaves, buds
that the wind carries off to make a carpet for me.
* Fragment from Telamaque, a novel to be published this
spring. Translated from the French by Will Bray.
2
5
Certain plants remain invariable; others seem as ephe-
meral as my regard. Suddenly I feel myself ageing as
I lift my eyelids. I should certainly make a poor
hour-glass. .
How I could have blundered about in time; I still
wonder at this. I had accepted with real pleasure an
invitation to go to Normandy and stay at the villa of a
friend, Celeste P . . . married recently. Paris was
thinning out, and the thought of spending a few days
by the sea-shore where the air was so pure and re-
freshing with the nip of salt, was by no means
unpleasant to me. It had been a superb day. The sun
brimmed over in the fields. The dust invaded the
railroad coaches, but nearing the sea we scented its
delicious tang and it went right to our hearts. Getting
off the train, I looked about me and saw that the sky
was sky-blue. Celeste advanced toward me with her
hand outstretched. Suddenly a fit of abstraction seized
me, I thought of other things: once you have thought
of other things, you are done for. Impossible to get
back to the point of departure, and following the
thread I reached some desert region at some indeter-
mined epoch of the universe. At first I did not under-
stand what was happening to me. I said to myself:
„This cannot last“. Now I do not even know whether
it does last.
I have come to believe that in the temporal impasse
into which I have strayed there is no soul that lives.
Only a companion in misfortune could help me to
regain life. Together we could reconstitute time. Sim-
ply a matter of comparison. Alone, I lose grip on
myself in wrestling with my identity: if I remained the
same from one minute to another how could I experience
the transformation announced by this movement of the
clock-hand? I end by losing all track of the continuity
of my thought. For in the most general sense all is
logical to me in solitude, and, writing as I am for
chance salvagers, for blind savages, or for the deaf
tides that carry my bottle, I can scarcely trust that the
language I use will ever be understood by any man
other than myself. Why, it is impossible for me to
read it over: I am only intelligible to myself in flashes.
My sheet of paper all at once becomes perfectly blank
6
again, or covered with ideas I have never had. The
words themselves come invested in strange masks, or
bare and different from each other. Bursted balloons.
Pastimes, pleasures, leisure, salt of life, all seem strange
customs, rites devised to hasten death along. Fire is
what I find most mysterious of all. The novel I kept
in my pocket during the entire journey has remained
there and 1 reassemble in it my only memories of
human life. Preposterous existence bounded only by
the most elementary of questions. I take, for instance,
from my book, the character called George, hotelkeeper.
How the emblems of all the trades balance themselves
unhappily in the blue city of the vision. This horrible
limitation, the branch of holly which the man fixed
above his door one morning condemned him to be
nothing but an innkeeper for all eternity. Is it not true
that in books sudden illuminations flash between the
conventional characters one longs to resemble? The
choice between two destinies is tragically lost in the
disordered movements of the heart. A very beautiful
woman, two or three singular exaltations, a moment of
perfect happiness, the entire life of a citizen of the
world reduces itself to a few metaphors more wretched
and vulgar than a carpenter’s shop : the split up wood
hardly arouses any enthusiasm. Through staring into
space for a long time there grows in my breast the
image of the red and blue infinite in which life pulses
at a given speed. Adjust yourself any way you please:
to regard the universe, or to interrogate your heart;
it cannot be done without fatigue. All ends with a red
lamp balanced against the wind, and later, the horses
having delivered the parcel, trotting briskly along the
pavement of the suburbs.
Sun of cries without reason, mad plants, the earth
flees we know not where and we press the tablets of
physical law against our vest-pockets with little
commendatory smiles. With what great ingenuity we
bind for ourselves with ribbon-formulae a bouquet of
marguerites and of roses, the functions of space and
time yielding indulgently to our will! In the meantime
1 am quite beautifully lost in duration, and my move-
ments are restricted from just here to there. But I feel
more and more, 1 almost said with every day, the
7
elements of my consciousness rotting and melting.
I have only to give utterance to a few more of such
notions and it is all over with my chances of getting
back to the land of clocks. And yet, it is the gradual
disintegration of my personality that I have the strongest
misgivings about. Since I am alone I cannot go mad.
The sponges of silence, the crystals of vacuum, where
was I amongst them? I hurry on, bicyclist lost after
the departure of the rear wheel, maintaining myself
miraculously by one perpetual revolution. Equilibrium
denotes nothing but unstable position, or habitual
difficulty, if you will. Yes, crawling fear has its little
day of terror. I choke now and then through forgetting
to breathe at regular intervals. Sensuousness in this
brothel-world! Best not to think of it. The geometrical
progression of lust is not conceived as apart from all
continuity. The four operations, very nice to talk about.
Fly in sticky-paper, inkwell of clouds, who will give
me back the fancy-cake with an Eiffel Tower relief,
the City of Light, as it is called.
LOUIS ARAGON
8
1
Do not sway thus from side to side thin young
woman with one breast the left, crushing a book against
this. I, utterly 'curious shall walk behind thee monster.
It will, doubtless, take many quibbling miles before I
have gulped thee, whole, into my system. Let us walk
a little further and all will be very simple.
2
If I, you, the mussels, the oysters, the ham, the
lobster, the artichoke, should all yawn and agree that
it were time to get up and march across the tables
form a procession and crawl thoughtfully into the
street order sunlight a flourish an electric baton a zebra
in advance an elephant supporting the rear — would
they then disagree with us? would they be willing to
consider another point of view and lay it before us
reasonably ? ^
Returning at evening to my dear door in the
courtyard my knees trembling with exhaustion, here
where* no flowers have begun burgeoning, nothing
commenced clasping my senses (I am about yearning
for the brown old streets again with the high walls
I have just left: the Street of the Honest Burgher, the
Street of the Wooden Sword, the Street of the Four
Daugthers as well as that of the Four Winds where
I promenaded modifying my conceptions to conform
with just and mild skepticisms), I am now burning to
test my knowledge of the way in their evening aspect
(could the method fail?) when the peaceful nunneries
of the grilled windows would pose new and arresting
riddles; thence to return to my door with my pausing
and reflective key to consider it all again and turn or
turn the key.
4*
I shall not grow bald; whatsoever,
1 shall hang on to my hair by the hair.
MATTHEW JOSEPHSON
* Dedicated to G. B. M.
9
APOLLINAIRE: OR LET US RE
TROUBADOURS
One of the first illusions to be rejected upon con-
tact with European letters in the flesh is that the
present generation consists of exthausted and disenchant-
ed young men. Nothing could have been more
unfounded. There is far more danger, I am told, of
the present American generation exhausting itself in
attempting to dent the stupidity of its art-patrons, its
censors, its inarticulate loosebrained prophets.
They are not exhausted, these young men who have
survived 1914—1918. Witness the excellent morale of
the writers of the avant-garde in France who, in iso-
lation from the rest of their countrymen, have com-
pletely forgotten the war. Talented, extravagant,
intolerant, fun-loving, these young writers whether of
Dada affiliations or not have broken with the direct
line of French literature. The fifty or sixty crowned
poets of the pre-war era from Mallarmé to Paul Fort,
all of whom de Gourmont treats with such encyclo-
paedic precision, and some of whom Amy Lowell
introduced belatedly and inaccurately to the American
public, — these have all been immolated. There is a
brisk inclination to forget the silver age of twenty
years or so preceding the war which was dominated
by such sterile traditions as those of de Regnier,
Barrés, Moréas, Anatole France, de Gourmont.
In the main line from the tendencies of yesterday
falls the group dominated by André Gide and associa-
ted with the Nouvelle Revue Française. In its most
characteristic contributors, André Salmon, Jean Girau-
doux, Paul Morand, there is a certain penchant for
mockery, a certain cleverness at the comedy of manners.
But in none of these writers has there been a clean
break with the artistic conceptions of the foregoing era.
Inasmuch as the majority of French writers are still
reiterating the a little frozen beauties of the Symbo-
lists or the vers-libre universitaire of Laforgue there
is very little to hope for. One meets with a great
many names in the throng of reviews and books pub-
lished and commented upon every day. They are
10
blurred with indistinctness in the recollection of them.
They scarcely ruffle the surface. The similarity of one
personality to another is significant, their divergences
unimportant.
The age has been at the mercy of the small tal-
ents and the war has scarcely sifted them into big or
little ones. What is worse, it has even placed false
stress on the mysticism of Peguy and Claudel, or
shifted attention to thé raucous insincere „modernism“
of Jean Cocteau. This last gentleman, a Maecenas of
the arts, an idol of the boulevards, a rastoquere, whose
poetry has the taste of bran and leaves a perfect blank
in the brain, — this person has been presented by
indiscriminate American interpreters as the last word... of
Paris.
In the turbulent „advance guard“ of letters there
is, however, something to be reckoned with. One meets
an unexpected sincerity, a desperate willingness to go
to any lengths of violence in opposing the old regime.
The young men who operated „Littérature" for two
years, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, André Breton
are certainly youthful as individuals and as a group
or „movement“ (in this nation of groups) and what
they have done has not altogether assumed permanent
value. But one takes much hope from their quick in-
telligence, their sensibility, their vigorous and fun-loving
disposition. They are inventive to an extreme degree
and are utterly without blague or snobbery. They are
bent frankly on unbounded adventures and experiments
with modern phenomena. They have been stimulated
by Rimbaud and Lautréamont, who demonstrated, for
instance, that although nature had always been painted
as a static landscape in literature it could be render-
ed in subjective motion or in any’ of a thousand states.
The Apollinaire strain is in these writers. One of
the last things that Guillaume Apollinaire wrote con-
cerned the field which was left to the poets of this age.
Apollinaire, arch-intransigeant and forerunner of almost
everything of importance, I fear, that will take place
in the literature of the next generation, urged the poets
of this time to be at least as daring as the mechanical
wizards who exploited the airplane, wireless telegraphy,
chemistry, the submarine, the cinema, the phonograph,
-
11
what-not. The innovations of the past generation, have
been astounding. The recent conquests of man over
nature have in many cases realized the fables of an-
cient times. It is for the modern poet to create the
myths and fables which are to be realized in suc-
ceeding ,ages.
„Is there nothing new under the sun ?“ asks Apolli-
naire. «Nothing — for the sun, perhaps. But for man —
everything !“ The poet is to stop at nothing in his
quest for novelty of shape and material; he is to take
advantage of the possibilities for infinite combinations,
the new equipment afforded by the cinema, phonograph,
dictaphone, airplane, wireless. What he creates out
of these new conditions, these new instruments, or the
re-percussions which these things have had on our life,
will be the material the folk-elements, if you will, of
the myths and fables for the future.
Touching definitely on the form or technique of
poetry Apollinaire regards vers libre as only a fraction
of the possible contributions to the media of poetry.
There is an infinite amount of discovery to be made, he
suggests, with alliteration, with assonance, with typo-
graphical arrangements such as give new visual and
auditory sensations to the reader.
Has anything more immediate been offered with
reference to the ways and means of modern art than
these enunciations of Apollinaire? He goes even
farther than the suggestions I have quoted. There is
the forecast of possibly some poet or super-artist, who
like a modern orchestra conductor will have at his
baton a hundred or a thousand different instruments,
or sciences, or mechanisms. This enormous army of
symphony (as I have always dreamed it, at least) would
fill a prodigious amphitheatre, against which the Grosses
« Schauspielhaus of Berlin would shrink in the comparison.
The audience of course would be one man, on
the stage . . .
We shall not discuss these bewildering possibilities
for the moment. It suffices that proceeding with the
conception of a modern folk-lore we are justified in
traversing all the ramifications of modern man, all the
far flung discordant exigencies of the present spectacle,
whether they be in an office building of New York,
12
in the grand hall of the Aquitania on the Atlantic, or
in an airplane volplaning felicitously down on Warsaw.
The literature of Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul
Eluard, Philippe Soupault, Tristan Tzara is an exhilarating
record. Tzara’s poems are as naturally expressive of the
beauty of this age as Herrick’s are of the 17 th Century.
With an utterly simple and unaffected touch they employ
all the instruments of the time, the streetcar, the bill-
poster, the automobile, the incandescent light, etc. The
poems are not modern because they indicate: „I was
riding in the tramway" (instead of a diligence), but
because the tramway gets into the very rhythm, form
and texture of the poems.
In the prose of Louis Aragon there is the speed and
vividness of the motion picture, a constant and uproarious
dialectic, and a volume and richness that is quite
distinguished after so much thin and lucid French prose.
The humor is not of human foibles so much as of
smoothly functioning swiftly moving modern devices.
The influences of the up-to-date detective and the
American cinema are strongly evident. There are marvel-
ous American films whose characters, out of all the
sincerity of the director’s heart, make the most pre-
posterous, imbecilic and imaginative gestures. There is
much of this terrifying beauty in Aragon’s stories.
Les Champs Magnétiques, which André Breton and
Philippe Soupault wrote in collaboration is another com-
manding book of prose. It rejects plot as completely
as Joyce’s Ulysses does, but goes even farther in
disavowing even such a precise and inchoate verisimilitude
as Joyce employs. The book achieves an upheaval of
methods. Take a single sentence or a paragraph and
it is, alone, rich-and-beautiful, but means nothing without
its context. For the writers instead of attempting to
express human drama by definite words or phrases
indicating so many incidents or details, work for an
effect of growth in their theme by a large continued
rhythm. The prose changes its blend and intensity of
light, spatters its broken tracts of conversation or cogita-
tion, gathering a large momentum through the succession
of chapters rather than sentences. This is simply another
case of literature coming abreast of modern painting
or sculpture or music.
13
The poems of Paul Eluard in Exemples, with their
bright hardness and their artfully chosen typographical
appearances suggest curious and tortured movements
a little beyond the reverberations of the words. They
are dominated by a piercing humor which is however
quite unlike Aragon’s or Jarry’s.
The conviction strengthens here and there among
the extreme young who are jealous of their liberty that
the modern folk-lore of which Apollinaire spoke is
taking shape. These young writers are of considerable
ingenuity and charm. Their work seems clean; they are
not tangled up in messy Parnassian paraphernalia; they
do not fumble with the old clichés. These observations
are the basis for my initial assertion that France is not
exhausted. Nor is Europe, in that case. One feels curiously
as if a great developing movement, a momentous front-
drive were getting under way.
On the other hand, the conviction comes that Ameri-
cans need play no subservient part in this movement.
It is no occasion for aping European or Parisian tenden-
cies. Quite the reverse, Europe is being Americanized.
, American institutions, inventions, the very local conditions
of the United States are being duplicated, are being „put
over“ daily in Europe. One has only to visit Berlin, for in-
stance, in 1922 to witness this phenomenon.The complexion
of the life of the United States has been transformed so
rapidly and so daringly that its writers and artists are
rendered a strategic advantage. They need only react
faithfully and imaginatively to the brilliant minutiae of
her daily existence in the big cities, in the great
industrial regions, athwart her marvelous and young
mechanical forces.
WILL BRAY
instant note brother
nothing rises nothing descends
no horizontal movement
he arises
nothing stirs neither being nor non —
being nor the idea nor the prisoner
chained nor the tramway
he hears nothing other than himself
understands nothing other than the
chairs the stone the cold the water . . .
knows to pass through solid
matter
having no more need of eyes he
throws them away in the street
last burst of blood in the
dusk
last flourish
he tears out his tongue — flame
transfixed by a star
quieted
autumn dead like a leaf
of red palm
and reabsorbs that which he denied
and dissolves the project in the other
hemisphere second season of
existence
as the nails and the hairs
cross and return
/
TRISTAN TZARA
Translated from the French by Will Bray
15
A BOW TO THE ADVENTUROUS
What is the attitude of the critic toward the range
of subject matter suitable for literature? What is the
attitude of other literary artists toward the same?
Isidore Ducasse does not directly raise these ques-
tions in the curious preface to his lost Poésies, but
they constitute the chief protuberances in my reflec-
tions upon his emphatic assertions. Here was a youth,
born in 1850 and dead in 1870, author of the Chants
de Maldoror, a legend about himself, and Poésies, who
based his violent reaction, against the poetry of his
century purely upon its subject matter. „Je remplace
la mélancolie par le courage, le doute par la certitude,
le désespoir par l’espoir, la méchaneté par le bien, les
plaintes par le devoir, le scepticisme par la foi, les
sophismes par la froideur du calme et l’orgueil par la
modestie." With a dauntless courage, he denounces
Chateaubriand, Sénancourt, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Anne
Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe, Mathurin, Gautier, Leconte,
Goethe. Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, Lermontoff, Victor
Hugo, Mickiewicz, de Musset, Byron, Baudelaire and
Flaubert. „Grands-Têtes-Molles,“ he dubs them, „Si
vous êtes malheureux, il ne faut pas le dire au lecteur.
Gardez cela pour vous." There is no discussion of the
manner in which these writers employed their subject
matter nor of the esthetic states they may produce.
They chose subject matter the temperament of Ducasse
detested. He erected his prejudices into general dog-
matisms and declared that, therefore, their poetry
would not endure. Lately, the Dadaists, partly through
some affinity with his views on subject matter, have
hoisted Ducasse from his obscurity.
The case of Ducasse gives, I think, a frequent
answer to our second question. A poet or a novelist
of specialized gifts seeks for subject matter which will
work like an explosive in him. Much leaves him cold,
but here and there he finds materials which heat him
into expression. Sorrow forces one poet to tearful
expression, praise of a beneficent god another to
joyful affirmatives; that which a naturalistic novelist
leaves out fires an idealistic narrator. Each, if he
16
knows what he is about, cultivates jealously his own
propensities: each narrows the field to his own
temperament and then digs as deeply as he can:
each, unless he happens also to be a critic, is tempted
to say that the subject matter which appeals to him
is tjie best and even the only subject matter for the
art he practices. We cannot quarrel with him.
But the answer to the first question is the reverse
of this. The critic works after the fact. The catholic
spirit, which has surveyed the staggering diversity of
literature vertically through the ages and horizontally
across the nations, which has noted the quality of
surprize which attaches to esthetic production, which
is in touch with the astonishing experiments of modern
writers, which has experienced good states of mind
from absolutely contradictory subject matter, can make
only one answer. The range of subject matter suitable
for literature is unlimited. In art as in love, so de
Gourmont said, everything is possible. To put restric-
tions on the range of subject matter is to be guilty
of provincialism both of time and of place.
Being human, the critic has his prejudices, of course.
I, for example, am more interested by the psychological
hesitations of the characters in a Henry James novel
than I am by the slow thinking of the hill-folk in
Knut Hamsum's Growth of the Soil. But that does not
prevent the perception that Hamsum has fitted his
diction to his dynamic realities, set his effects into
relief and balance, and otherwise forced his rude ma-
rerials into a significant esthetic organization. From
that I can extract enjoyment although in a more
moderate degree than if I had been of a temperament
more responsive to his subject matter. The primary
task of a critic is to make allowances for his preju-
dices, to examine the relation between a writer and
his dynamic reality (subject matter), and to ascertain
the quality of the state of mind induced by the pre-
cipitate of this relationship. Catholicity may be a vice
for a poet or fiction writer: it is always a virtue for
the critic.
One poem of this number, In A Café by the pre-
cocious Will Bray, serves admirably to knot this dis-
cussion into an example. Although the Bible refers
17
to the bodily necessity he has so cleverly understated
and Rabelais, Cervantes, Mark Twain (in „160T‘),
Huysmans and Apollinaire have made varying use of
it, Bray invades subject matter that most people and
most poets would condemn as unsuitable for literature.
Yet Bray saw a certain humorous significance in the
occasion which he conveys to us by rhythms, invent-
iveness and adroit evasions. We can perceive his loyalty
to his stimulus, note the manner in which this loyalty
has been made concrete, and experience an esthetic
satisfaction from the solution of his problem.
In sum, criticism says to the other arts: Use any
subject you wish. My concern is in the state of mind
you create with it.
Another poem printed here, that by Tristan Tzara,
will assist in developing this conclusion. (I do not, at
present, vouch for the bulk of Tzara’s activities but
he has written several indubitable poems.) In this poem,
Tzara contrives an abstract* organization. He departs
altogether from conventional coherent intelligible sub-
ject material and gives us instead a controlled series
of physical sensations. The effect is as unalloyed with
intellectual and extra-esthetic reactions as those of
music or cubist painting. Yet it cannot be defined in
terms of musical or painting criticism nor very well
by literary criticism since that is lamentably weak in
its own esthetic vocabulary. Tzara’s word arrangement
approaches mathematics. (There is some reason for
believing that the ecstasy arising from the solving of
a complicated mathematical problem is very much akin
to the esthetic emotion.) What he does here is, by
means of words, to make a pattern of sharp arrest,
dead calm, rising motion, developed calm, progress,
spreading out, contraction and final collapse that
leaves us physically satisfied. And emotionally satisfied.
His is an abstractness as devoid of idea-emotions as
music or painting can be but still belonging very <
definitely to words.
Satisfying as this is, it nevertheless causes speculation
upon the depth, solidity and interior organization of
* Abstract, like romantic and realistic, is an indicative finger
for certain readily perceived phenomena, but not a precise de-
fining term.
18
writing-. It brings us to a consideration of the esthetic
power of a writer’s material. The writer’s material?
Is it words filed as clean of all their connotations and
ideational meanings as a curve or a spread of color is?
Or is it precisely those connotations and meanings,
those idea-emotions, that are the writer’s material?
The sign or the things for which the sign stands?
Tzara is headed towards a sign esthetic. His poetry is
a challenge to further research in the esthetic nature of
words. My tentative belief, however, is that there are
very restricted walls for an art based on signs and that
the proper materials are those things which they
symbolize. Abstract painting does all the essential things
that representative painting, if it is of value, does. Both
are good for the same reason. But abstract literature,
to date, falls short of representative literature because
it has not yet conquered a literary third dimension,
cannot expand very far into an interior organization.
That is, 1 conceive the psychological, social, idea-
emotional, interpretative, etc., values of an organized
piece of writing to be the only means a novelist, let
us say, has to give a feeling of documentary solidity.
They can be detached from his design, but, if he uses
them as an artist, they serve to weight and energize
his scheme. Let us note, then, that there are certain
grandly serious elements of life and certain very trivial
constituents. This means that the power of subject
matter varies and leads to another tentative conclusion.
The more documentary solidity a writer can give his
work provided he can control surfaces proportioned to
this interior development, the deeper and fuller response
he can create.
With more certainty it may be said that there is a
shifting importance attached to the multitudinous subjects
which writers use and that there come periods when
even the grandly serious things are of less importance
for literary production than the minor facets of life.
This is, in part, due to the operation of a law of fatigue
upon esthetic emotion. Certain subject matter, let us
say doubt, melancholy, speculation upon insolubles,
exploited again and again in an era, gradually loses its
potency and calls forth weaker and weaker replies.
It is necessary to turn to other materials, courage and
19
I
certitude, minor moods perhaps, to evoke fresh strong-
responses. These assume for a time greater potency
than their mighty predecessors. The literary history of
France from 1830 to 1922 is replete with examples of
reactions of this sort, the last being the present brilliant
activities of Messieurs Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Soupault,
et al. The exhaustion of certain literary forms, as, for
instance, theFlaubertian novel-form seems to be exhausted
today also shifts the importance of subject matter.
Experiment and discovery of new methods can
often be conducted better if what the writer has to
say is not so overwhelmingly urgent that he must say
it at all cost. The presentation rather than the matter
must be his urgency and his attention is more efficiently
spent upon that if it is less distracted by the subject
matter. This reduces to the simple statement: in some
periods what a writer says is of supreme importance
to the esthetic emotion, in others the evasion of the
grandly serious is the most provocative.
❖ *
*
Secession exists for those writers who are preoccupied
with researches for new forms. It hopes that there is
ready for it an American public which has advanced
beyond the fiction and poetry of Sinclair Lewis and
Sherwood Anderson and the criticism of Paul Rosen-
feld and Louis Untermeyer.
Interested readers may look up an important origin
and a general program for Secession in an essay by
Malcolm Cowley entitled „This Youngest Generation,“
N. Y. Evening Post Literary Review, oct. 18, 1921.
G. B. M.
20
THE ANTIPHILOSOPHER
When the eyes transcend their orbit the cravat of
the branches strangles the English foliage dressed in
high silk hat white gloves and patent leather slippers
of ardent chlorophyl. What said my friend you do not
believe in the existence of parallels even though they
prolong and renew themselves. The finale of symphony
is hard the music cannot end without cutting up the
fragments of beauty into yet smaller pieces and be-
ginning over again. It is too bad said he again we
shall never know whether it is the wind that bends
the blade of grass or the blade of grass that bends
the wind. Put the grass in some place where there is
no wind — i believe in neither common sense nor
paradox. My plane has no wind no grass it has no
place it has no flies. Live without reaction without
moods without false tempests. My plane loves ennui and
the uncertain colors and the bisexual paths my plane
resembles all other planes and its men all other men
good God there is no happiness anywhere life passes
as it passes the only happiness is to know ennui the
poet-insects shut themselves up in their towers of choco-
late on the mountain of Zarathustra they are the gen-
iuses who with their secretaries go into town twice a
day to telephone to the printer and measure by the
scale of animal pride the results of their compromises.
My dear Tzara let us have done with the purity and
the impurity of the mind and the Parisian temperament
the Academy and Spain as well as all the Spanish
dead living anarchists or Indians indeed all such flip-
pancies cold and cynical as exist or do not exist in
coarse brains functioning like stomachs. The amassing
brain — bah ’tis nothing but a crab that stayed behind
in the chowder and made believe he was an emperor.
It was a brave chowder with brass music and travel-
pictures.
How do you do what already very well rescussitate
in the wind no matter where how are you says my
friend i am very well thank you do you want
a light he says the ruffled bird might pass as an
\
21
eyebrow for the dusk expiring- of so much beautiful
music said he how are you what already i am
very well thank you rescussitate in the wind any-
where how are you says my friend i am very
well do you want a light says he.
TRISTAN TZARA
Translated from the French by Will Bray
IN A CAFÉ
He — You are a sweet girl
and I shall throw you into the river
you are a sweet girl
and I shall buy you narcissi
you are a sweet girl
and I shall give you wormwood
you are a sweet girl
and I shall chew your ear
you are a sweet girl
and I shall leave you for a moment
She — I am going to leave you for a moment
He-----1 am going to leave You for a moment
leave YOU
leave YOU
a moment
a moment
oh well
oh !
WILL BRAY
^
22
EXPOSÉ No. 1
The Dial is, I suppose, generally considered to be
America’s leading magazine of literary expression. One
critic has even called it the recognized organ of the
young generation! True, there is not much competition
for these honors, and the career of the Little Review
has been sufficiently obscure for the réclame brought
by size, money, circulation and famous names to over-
shadow it in public esteem. What, then, is our „leader“
like?
It boasts: „We have freed ourselves from commer-
cialism and manifestos, from schoolmen and little
schools, from a little nationalism and a snobbish cos-
mopolitanism". That is, it has freed itself from a fixed
point for judging, the absence of which for morality
Pascal found so lamentable, but which happily exists
for art. It has liberated itself from a definite direction.
It feels no obligation to homogeneity. Naturally, its
chief effect is one of diffuseness. It is late Victorian,
Yellow Book, philosophic, naturalistic, professorial,
dadaistic, traditional, experimental, wise, silly, inter-
national and nationalistically concerned in a developing
literature. It prints Anatole France, Thomas Hardy,
Santayana, Yeats, Beerbohm, Sherwood Anderson,
Pierre Loving (!), professorial articles on German
literature and Thomas Moore, Kenneth Burke, E. E.
Cummings, James Oppenheim, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound,
Jean Cocteau, D. H. Lawrence and an article on
Higher Education in China! A stringent catholicity is
admirable, but where is the reconciliation here? With
this array of irreconcilables, it is no wonder a copy
of the Dial gives the impression of splitting apart in
one’s hand.
As an intellectual cable across the Atlantic, the
Dial has informed America that Remy de Gourmont
has lived and died. The news of Guillaume Apollinaire
is still * untransmitted.
It features a wallowing ox of a stylist who retails
each month acres of vague impressionistic excrement
on music, painting, and books. Still, his uncouth attempts
* February, 1922.
23
at new sentence rhythms, word‘coinage, and telling
inversions give more hilarity than pain. But this soft
place next to Marianne Moore!
The final seal has been stamped by the announcement
that the 1921 Dial Award has been bestowed upon Sher-
wood Anderson. It was stated that „the award will go to a
young American writer, one of our contributors, in
recognition of his service to American letters ... to
be given annually to one who has already accomplished
a service, yet has not completed his work . . . intended
for encouragement and opportunity4* for leisure, I infer.
It went to a man forty-five years old and by no means
in a seriously impecunious position. Inasmuch as the
royalties from six books and frequent payments from
several magazines eager for his work have, of late
years, enabled him to support a family, devote all his
time to writing, and take a summer’s trip to Europe.
An established writer, in short. The approach to arti-
culateness of this author I have traced in detail in an
essay now floating around somewhere in America. Let
me extract a few points without supporting them again.
1. The impulse which produced Windy Mac Phersons
Son and Marching Men was thin. Anderson, inBrentano’s
trade paper, spring of 1921, declares they were written
from an emulative desire worked up by reading other
novels. 2. I agree with his preface statement to Mid-
American Chants that he can do nothing as yet „but
mutter and feel our way toward the promise of song“.
3. The key-sentence to Winesburg, Ohio is „One
shudders at the meaninglessness of life while at the
same instant and if the people of the town are his
people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into
the eyes". This translates into „I have nothing to
oppose to the meaninglessness of life but a sentimental
attachment for my fellow townsmen". 4. Anderson has
no control of diction, not even the elementary man-
agement of sentence mechanics that syntax can give.
There are many examples. Witness one from Poor White.
„Standing on a high cliff and with a grove of trees
at his back, the stars seemed to have all gathered in
the eastern sky". 5. Anderson’s formula for writing is
a psychological, not an esthetic one. Vide Brentano’s
trade paper, spring of 1921. 6. He correctly regrets
24
in the Triumph of the Egg, „I have a wonderful story
to tell, but I know no way to tell it“, since his diction,
construction, characters, ideas, and emotions are in a
most hopeless sprawl. He is, literally, a monotonous
pilgrim on the road from nowhere into nothing. In
everything in writing that the generation under twenty-
five values, he is incomplete.
„ . . . what makes us understand the rack and the
wheel is the assurance from our friends that if we
dropped everything modern we should have a great
magazine. Possibly they are right. We will not say
that in that case we should have a great dead
magazine; but we are certain that we should be doing
half our job and no more“. — The Dial. The Dial
condescends to include certain young writers, some of
whom are both very promising and desperately
impecunious. Motives of safety, shall we say since its
editors have repudiated commercialism, lead it to
insulate them by the cooling remains of pre-war
literature and to assign its award to a man with an
influential public.
It would be less compromising to go one way or
the other. Stay on dry land like the Atlantic Monthly
or leap headfirst into the contemporary stream. If you
wish a good swim, take off your life-belt!
I should not like to see the Dial annihilated, but
I should enjoy seeing its pretences abandoned. Vulga-
rization is a legitimate business. Some large^American
publisher might well bring out the Dial as Emile Paul
Frères publishes Les Ecrits Nouveaux. That would be
a frank undertaking.
The existence of this Yale -Review- in -a- Harvard -
blazer is one of the bitter necessities calling for Secession.
G. B. M.
AN OLD SONG TO NEW MUSIC
The Director pledges his energies for at least two
years to the continuance of Secession. Beyond a two
year span, observation shows, the vitality of most re-
views is lowered and their contribution, accomplished,
becomes repetitious and unnecessary. Secession will
take care to avoid moribundity.
Secession is taking advantage of low printing costs
in the Central Powers. This means that, whereas most
magazines of the arts in America must appeal for thou-
sands of dollars in order to attain to any size or
distribution, Secession can equal them by the expen-
diture of a few hundreds.
This fact affords the sophisticated, regardless of
the size of the bank accounts in their names, an unu-
sual opportunity to resume the honored role of literary
patron — at present neglected by a leisure class with-
out the knowledge of enjoying their leisure.
By the gift of only five dollars (more, if you like)
towards the expenses of each of six successive numbers,
you may become a Patron of Secession. Patronage
gifts are payable upon notice from the Treasurer a
short time in advance of the publication of each num-
ber. Patrons receive two subscriptions, invitations to
Secession soirées, and whatever other special privileges
we can give them. A sufficient amount of patronage
will produce a larger, more handsome Secession, print-
ed ten times a year. It will enable us to make moder-
ate payment for manuscripts.
Enthusiasts are invited to address Peter K. Hurwitz,
Treasurer, 1361 — 46 Street, Brooklyn, New York.
r>OLUCrBH ZVÛ-lCN
S
Je ne permets à personne, pas même à Elohim de
douter de ma sincérité.
Isidore Ducasse
(Comte De Lautrémont)
V
Printed by Julius Lichtner, Vienna VIII