NETWORKS OF MODERNISM: TOWARD A THEORY OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION by MATTHEW N. HANNAH A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2015 ii DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Matthew N. Hannah Title: Networks of Modernism: Toward a Theory of Cultural Production This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Paul Peppis Chair Mark Whalan Core Member Helen Southworth Core Member Jenifer Presto Institutional Representative and Scott Pratt Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded September 2015. iii © 2015 Matthew N. Hannah This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (United States) License. iv DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Matthew N. Hannah Doctor of Philosophy Department of English September 2015 Title: Networks of Modernism: Toward a Theory of Cultural Production In “Patria Mia,” his 1913 series of essays in New Age magazine, Ezra Pound uses a metaphor for modernist cultural production that informs and structures this dissertation. “If it lie within your desire to promote the arts” he writes, “you must not only subsidize the man with work still in him, but you must gather such dynamic particles together; you must set them where they will interact, and stimulate each other” (Selected Prose 127). Salon hostess Mabel Dodge, in her autobiography Movers and Shakers, announces a similar transformation in interpersonal relations: “Looking back on it now, it seems as though everywhere, in that year of 1913 . . . there were all sorts of new ways to communicate, as well as new communications” (39). I argue that these new forms of communication and interaction described by Pound and Dodge not only characterize the early twentieth century but also empower transnational experiments in literature, art, and politics that we now call “modernism.” Because of dramatic and wide-ranging developments in communications and travel technologies, modernists in the early years of the twentieth century cooperated and communicated regarding their experiments in new dynamic ways that make modernism an especially collaborative project. Before the Great War casts a dark shadow over the promises of modernity, editors, writers, artists, political radicals, hostesses, and intellectuals met in small private salons, published in alternative periodicals, and joined avant- garde movements. Reading these collaborative events illuminates the interactivity that crystallizes modernism as a cultural mode of production. To analyze v collaborations in the development of modernism, I construct network graphs that visualize the webs of interaction I study. Rather than rely solely on diachronic readings of modernist texts, these visualizations provide a synchronic model for modernist cultural production as simultaneous connections, constituting a modernist totality. To analyze these network graphs, I apply concepts from network theory and sociology, two disciplines that begin in the modernist moment. Thus, this dissertation is both a theory of cultural production and an effect of that cultural production. The network is itself a modernist concept. vi CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Matthew N. Hannah GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2015, University of Oregon Master of Arts, English, 2011, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, English, 2008, University of Oregon AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: American, British, and Irish Modernism Twentieth-Century Literature Digital Humanities Cultural Studies Critical Theory PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Assistant Director of Composition, 2013-2014 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Graduate Teaching Fellowship, English, 2009 to present Sherwood Grant, 2015 Oregon Humanities Center, Dissertation Support Fellowship, 2014-2015 Center for the Study of Women in Society, Graduate Research Fellowship, 2014 vii Oregon Humanities Center, Graduate Research Support Fellowship, 2013-2014 Graduate Research Award, 2012 Cum laude, University of Oregon, 2008 PUBLICATIONS: Hannah, Matthew. “Desires Made Manifest: The Queer Modernism of Wallace Thurman’s Fire!!.” Journal of Modern Literature 38.3 (2015): 162-80. Hannah, Matthew. “Photoplay, Literary Celebrity, and The Little Review.” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 5.2 (2014): 223-44. Hannah Matthew. “‘A furtive lorry’: Colonial Things in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September.” Writing Difference: Nationalism, Identity, Literature. Eds. Girindra Ray, Jaydip Sarkar, and Anindya Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2014. 198-208. McGinn, Emily, Paul Bellew, Matthew Hannah, and Amy Leggette. “Comparing Marks: A Versioning Edition of Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall.’” Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing. Vol. 35 (2014). http://scholarlyediting.org. Zandstra, Robert, April Anson, Matthew Hannah, Taylor McHolm, Parker Krieg, and Daniel Platt eds. Sustainability: A Casebook for Writers. University of Oregon Composition Program, 2014. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Any significant piece of scholarship is the product of its own network, and this dissertation is no exception. When I began this project, I had no idea how challenging and rewarding it would turn out to be nor how many people would help me finish it. I have been blessed to have the support of the English faculty over the years, and I would like to thank them for their encouragement and collegiality. I also thank the members of the Modernist Reading Group for sustaining discussions and intellectual support, especially Professor George Wickes, and the members of my dissertation group, “Camp Modernism,” for insightful comments and criticism. Thank you Rachel Bash, Hannah Godwin, and Jenny Noyce. I would like to acknowledge the graduate affiliates of the Digital Scholarship Center during the 2014-2015 year. Our discussions proved stimulating to this work, and I especially thank John Russell and Jacob Levernier for their assistance with digital aspects. In the English department, I thank my cohort for their numerous comments, collaborations, and encouragements over the years. Our conversations in the hallway have proven incredibly useful. Thank you. I especially acknowledge my debts to Brian Gazaille, Joseph Griffin, Diana Martinez, and Rosalie Roberts. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation for their inspiration and friendship over the years and salute Brianna Bertoglio, David Craig, Natalie Kaftan-Brenner, Judith Lechner, and Erin Moberg. To the librarians and staff at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, Princeton University’s Firestone Library, and University of Oregon’s Knight Library, thank you for helping me navigate special collections. I appreciate your kindness and professionalism. For crucial financial support that greatly improved the quality of this project, I would especially like to thank the Center for the Study of Women in Society for awarding me a generous Graduate Research Fellowship, which funded ix important archival research, and the Oregon Humanities Center for their generous support through both Dissertation Support and Graduate Research Support fellowships, both of which made the completion of this project possible. In particular, I acknowledge the staff of the OHC: Julia Heydon, Melissa Gustafson, and Peg Gearhart, thank you for your help and for your continued support of the humanities. Words cannot express how much I owe to the tireless efforts of my dissertation committee in helping to bring this project into the world: Professor Jenifer Presto, thank you for being a part of this project. I value our engaging discussions around campus, and your wisdom is greatly appreciated. Professor Helen Southworth, thank you for sparking this project. You gave me the idea for this work, and I owe much to you. I’ve enjoyed our long conversations about digital humanities. Professor Mark Whalan, thank you for inspiring me to publish my work and for your unflagging efforts in reading and improving it. You have always treated me as a colleague, and I am grateful for your encouragement and intellectual energy. Professor Paul Peppis, thank you for many, many years of work in guiding me from student to professional academic. You have been a sympathetic colleague, mentor, and friend and have always challenged me with kindness and humanity to do better. You are an inspiration to every student you’ve taught, and I model myself by your example. I cannot thank you enough for your guidance. More than anyone, I want to acknowledge the immense support I have received from my wife, partner, and best friend Jessica. Your support and determination have sustained me over this long process. You have listened patiently and sympathetically when things didn’t go well, and you’ve celebrated with me when they did. You have been selfless and caring over the years, working hard to keep both of us going, and I could not have completed this Ph.D. without you. I am more grateful for you than I could ever express in words. x For Jessica, Mi media naranja. Without you, I am less… xi TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. MODERNIST TOTALITIES: NODES, EDGES, FLOWS, CONNECTIONS ................................................................................................ 1 Networks of Modernity ...................................................................................... 10 “Only Connect”: Network Theory and Methodology ..................................... 20 Ezra Pound, Symbolic Analyst ........................................................................... 26 Notes ..................................................................................................................... 37 II. SOCIAL NETWORKS OF MODERNIST SALONS ........................................ 42 Six Degrees of Modernism: Congregating in a Small World .......................... 56 The Modernist Room ......................................................................................... 67 Salon Capital ........................................................................................................ 78 Ego Hubs and Superconnectors ......................................................................... 92 Conclusion: Tea, Cakes, and Modernism ......................................................... 99 Notes ................................................................................................................... 101 III. PUBLISHING NETWORKS OF LITTLE MAGAZINES ........................... 108 Editorial Egos ...................................................................................................... 121 Publishing the Avant-Garde: Networks of Textual Modernism ................... 137 Political Engagement of the Activist Network .............................................. 149 “And Round About There Is a Rabble”: Readers in the Little Magazine ... 160 Conclusion: Printing the Network .................................................................. 169 Notes .................................................................................................................. 170 xii Chapter Page IV. GROUP DYNAMICS AND THE NETWORKS OF AVANT-GARDE MOVEMENTS ............................................................................................................. 179 Forming: Birth of the Movement ..................................................................... 195 Norming: The Rules of Art .............................................................................. 204 Storming: “The Punch and the Slap” ................................................................ 213 Performing: The “Parlez-vous” of the Avant-Garde ....................................... 223 Conclusion: Hoaxing and Spoofing ................................................................. 234 Notes ................................................................................................................... 237 V. WORLD WAR I AND SCRAMBLED MODERNIST CIRCUITS .............. 244 Notes ................................................................................................................... 252 REFERENCES CITED ............................................................................................... 254 FIGURES SOURCES ................................................................................................... 267 xiii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page Chapter I 1. Bonnie Kime Scott, The Gender of Modernism .............................................................. 5 2. London Underground Map (1910s) ............................................................................ 13 3. Advertisement for pleasure tour, London Times ......................................................... 14 4. “The Steerage” Alfred Stieglitz, Photogravure, 1907 ............................................... 14 5. Advertisement for Telephone Herald .......................................................................... 16 Chapter II 1. Natalie Barney’s salon, frontispiece Aventures de l’esprit (1929) ............................... 49 2. Postcard of Villa Curonia, Beinecke Library ............................................................ 59 3. Interior of 23 Fifth Ave ............................................................................................... 69 4. Toklas and Stein at 27, rue de Fleurus ........................................................................ 71 5. Stein’s location proximal to Vollard’s (top), Natalie Barney’s salon (middle), Shakespeare and Company (far right), and Luxembourg Gardens (right). .................. 75 6. Map of Violet Hunt’s Kensington location .............................................................. 77 Chapter III 1. Advertisement for The Egoist in The Little Review (May 1915) and for The Little Review in The Egoist (April 1915) .................................................................................... 121 2. Cartoon by Jane Heap, The Little Review (Sept. 1916) ............................................. 151 3. Advertisement, The Freewoman .................................................................................. 158 4. “The War,” The Little Review (April 1917) ................................................................ 161 Chapter IV 1. Tuckman’s taxonomy of group dynamics ................................................................. 195 2. “Bink’s Patent Futurist Scarecrow,” Punch (1918) .................................................... 198 3. Blast (1914) ................................................................................................................... 210 4. “The Rude Descending a Staircase,” New York Evening Sun (March 1913) ........... 230 5. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 ................................................ 230 6. Map of the Armory Show .......................................................................................... 232 xiv LIST OF GRAPHS Graphs Page Chapter I 1. Basic tripartite network ............................................................................................... 22 Chapter II 1. Salon overlaps Stein, Hunt, and Dodge’s .................................................................... 52 2. Same graph clustered around shared connections ..................................................... 53 3. The “small world” of Dodge’s salon ............................................................................ 58 4. Directed edges of invitation to Stein’s salon ............................................................ 62 5. Social capital of Hunt’s salon ...................................................................................... 91 6. Mabel Dodge, a “Species of Head Hunter” .............................................................. 97 Chapter III 1. Network of Contributors (1911-1919) to The Little Review, The Egoist, The New Freewoman, and The Freewoman ..................................................................................... 110 2. Weighted graph of contributors to The Little Review 1914-1915 ............................. 125 3. Overlapping nodes ...................................................................................................... 141 4. The larger network of interactions among The Little Review (top l), The New Freewoman (bottom l), and The Egoist (top r) ................................................................ 142 5. Article topics by weight in The Freewoman 1911-1912 .............................................. 146 6. Article topics by weight in The New Freewoman 1913 .............................................. 147 Chapter IV 1. Intergroup rivalries and relationships ...................................................................... 190 2. Example of typical life-cycle of avant-garde movements ...................................... 196 3. Forsyth’s Intragroup Conflict Cycle ......................................................................... 214 1 CHAPTER I MODERNIST TOTALITIES: NODES, EDGES, FLOWS, CONNECTIONS “Only connect” –E.M. Forster, Howard’s End1 In 1913, Ezra Pound publishes a series of essays in The New Age, advocating for the financial support of authors and visual artists by deploying a metaphor that encapsulates my project. “If it lie within your desire to promote the arts” he writes, “you must not only subsidize the man with work still in him, but you must gather such dynamic particles together; you must set them where they will interact, and stimulate each other.”2 Pound’s scientific vision of dynamic particles colliding and combining in reaction to one another serves as a resonant image for the network processes I examine in this dissertation. Unlike metaphors of networks as maps or trees, the “dynamic particle” metaphor captures the generative process of reaction, which brings the whole into being through a synthesis of colliding particles. As inhabitants of the 21st century, we easily imagine ourselves subject to these kinds of diffuse and vast relationships of which we are not aware, belonging to what Manuel Castells calls the “network society.”3 We can envision ourselves plugged into global systems of digital capital exchange, travel destinations, international organizations, social media, and conglomerates with which we have no tangible contact. But what does this network phenomenon have to do with modernity and, more importantly for this dissertation, what does it have to do with the cultural representations of modernity that scholars call “modernism”? Are networks and network concepts strictly applicable to our so-called postmodern moment or can they provide insight into the socio-cultural epochs out of which postmodernism derives? Pound captures the energy and flux of systems composed of living individuals whose relationships produce something larger than themselves, a totality of interconnections that 2 produce a cultural revolution through their simultaneous aesthetic and political experiments. To show the existence of modernist networks, I focus my study on the transactional aspects of modernist cultural production as it appears before World War I. Pound’s metaphor suggests this approach because it explains the generative power of networks, the way in which the whole is possible only due to the sum of its parts. Sociologist Mustafa Emirbayer makes the case for this methodology in the social sciences, arguing for what he calls a “relational” approach in which “the very terms or units involved in a transaction derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the (changing) functional roles they play within that transaction.” In other words, individuals within social networks exchange ideas, information, theories, and concepts via transactions, and it is only through their correspondences, in Emirbayer’s account, that individuals possess “value” as part of a larger whole. His relational method approaches individuals as “inseparable from the transactional contexts within which they are embedded.” However, these transactions work the other way too, assembling systems through decentralized and diffuse particles whose relations contribute to systemic totality. Just as individuals become meaningful through their role in transactions, so too systems “are empty abstractions apart from the several elements of which they are composed.”4 Modernism, as one such socio- cultural system, operates according to the same principles Emirbayer articulates for sociology. The particles—in this case, the practitioners of experimental art and literature and the institutions they form around those practices—which populate the modernist force field generate value through their participation in the field, thereby bringing that field into existence through the resulting networks they form. Modernism as a totality is born via these network dynamics and can best be understood in the multiplicity of those transactions—the dynamic interactions of particles—fostered by the forces of twentieth-century industrialized capitalist 3 modernity. Understanding this cultural moment as a whole means recreating and analyzing the networks of modernism that emerge, flourish, and perish. In short, studying networks requires a network methodology. Developments in modernist studies have paved the way for such a network analysis. Over the past two decades, the rise of the New Modernist studies has revisited accounts of modernism that characterize it primarily as an experimental and traumatic literary response to the First World War. In Bad Modernism, a seminal collection of essays rethinking modernist studies, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz describe the contours of this changing scholarly landscape: On the side of approaches, the new modernist studies has moved toward a pluralism or fusion of theoretical commitments, as well as a heightened attention to continuities and intersections across the boundaries of artistic media, to collaborations and influences across national and linguistic borders, and (especially) to the relationship between individual works of art and the larger cultures in which they emerged (emphasis mine).5 According to their conception, the New Modernist studies demonstrate increased awareness of fusion, connection, transaction, and relation; approaching modernism demands a sophistication and breadth of tools that facilitate analysis of intersectionality and simultaneity. Rather than focus only on individual productions, Mao and Walkowitz argue, we must also look at the larger systems in which these cultural productions appear. Ann Ardis illustrates the continuing need for this kind of research on collaboration and group dynamics in her introduction to the 2012 special issue of Modernism/modernity entitled “Mediamorphosis”: “The contributors to this special issue deepen our knowledge of transatlantic and transnational interactions and networks among writers, publishers, editors, artists, typographers, and craftsmen engaged in the production of print artifacts.”6 Analyzing these aspects 4 of modernism reveals that the cultural productions we celebrate as “modernist” are part of a larger system of interaction, transaction, and reaction. The New Modernist Studies paves the way for my intervention, and I base my research on their investment in connection and transaction. My project synthesizes the research of New Modernist scholars in order to argue that modernism is the product of multiple collaborations and combinations and that the networks formed by these connections provide a synchronic way to read modernism as the simultaneous relations among disparate nodes in a vast cultural constellation. Certainly, the venues I study in this project have been extensively researched over the years. Studies of modernist salons have been conducted by Shari Benstock and Janet Lyon; periodicals studies has offered invigorating analyses by Ann Ardis, Suzanne Churchill, Matt Huculak, Sean Latham, Adam McKible, Mark Morrisson, Andrew Thacker, and many others; and avant-garde movements have been theorized by scholars such as Peter Bürger, Matei Câlinescu, Clement Greenberg, Andreas Huyssun, Paul Peppis, and Renato Poggioli. As early as 1969, George Wickes’ capacious study of early modernism, Americans in Paris covered many of the cultural events I study here, and Bonnie Kime Scott’s diagram in the introduction to The Gender of Modernism anticipates my own emphasis on networks (fig. 1).7 And yet, modernism’s “communal style,” as Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane phrase it, has only recently become prominent in critical accounts of the period. Recent books and articles illustrate an increasing interest in collaboration. Fabio Durão and Dominic Williams’ Modernist Group Dynamics (2008), Helen Southworth’s Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (2010), and Catherine McLoughlin’s The Modernist Party (2013) are exemplary studies of group activity. As edited collections, these works address the importance of critical reconstructions and analyses of relationships in the formation and dissemination of modernist theory and practice, opening up possibilities for further theoretical 5 investigation into the larger systems to which these collaborations contribute. Networks of Modernism begins with theoretical investigation into the interactive nature of modernism but expands the range of study using tools newly available to humanities scholars. Rather than focus entirely on salons, magazines, or movements, I bring them all together with one overarching theoretical approach and visualize them in graphs. Analyzing these three driving engines of pre-war cultural production demonstrates that post-war “high” modernism is the direct result of collaborative transactions among a wide array of individuals working toward cultural revolution and transformation. It is in the welter of early modernist relationships where figures who now appear in anthologies such as The Norton Anthology got their start; these canonical figures are able to produce their masterpieces because they have help from hostesses, editors, and movements, and my project reveals the webs of interaction that made modernism possible. Fig. 1: Bonnie Kime Scott, The Gender of Modernism 6 My focus on networks and network theory derives from developments in digital humanities, which make visualization of interconnection possible for humanities scholars and allow for more sophisticated analysis of the network structure itself. Ground-breaking studies explicitly featuring network analysis, such as Richard So and Hoyt Long’s “Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism” (2013), and the special issue of The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies (2014) dedicated to visualizing periodicals networks, demonstrate new tools for modernist studies but have thus far restricted analyses almost exclusively to periodical networks, leaving the network model itself under-theorized. More work is needed to theorize the structure of the network concept as causative of modernist cultural production more generally; my dissertation remedies this critical gap by expanding network analysis to theorize how modernism as a whole appears as a series of encounters with the public sphere in which modernist practitioners congregate in specific ways to produce experimental works that later crystallize into canonical modernism. Creating visualizations of these connections reveals that modernism can be read as the result of simultaneous relationships rather than as a linear or teleological process. Unlike a text, which can only be read diachronically, as words inscribed from left to right, a network visualization provides a synchronic, less hierarchical text that illustrates the simultaneity that also characterizes early modernism. Creating visualizations reveals the vast galaxy of colliding and interacting particles, and demonstrates the imbrications of modernists with other sectors of early twentieth century radicalism, including political movements, publishing firms, galleries, and institutions. In my focus on non-textual forms of modernism, I am inspired by the work of Lawrence Rainey, whose groundbreaking Institutions of Modernism (1998) still provides the crucial model for institutional analyses of modernist culture and which I consider an important pre-cursor to my own project. Rainey describes the methodological difficulties he faces in his study. Unlike the traditional literary monograph, which 7 emphasizes analysis “derived solely from the reading of literary texts or artworks,” Rainey posits a reading of modernism in its “social reality, [as] a configuration of agents and practices that converge in the production, marketing, and publicization of an idiom.”8 Following Rainey’s lead, this dissertation analyzes not only texts but individual practices that converge in relations. While I apply literary analysis to my “readings,” I treat disparate and diffuse webs of modernist praxis as my texts, adapting what Franco Moretti describes as “distant reading.”9 Because I focus on cultural producers as subjects of my study, this project resembles social theory more than literary analysis, but I derive tools from many fields, following Raymond Williams’ description of the sociology of culture as “a convergence of methods and interests” which “must concern itself with the institutions and cultural formations of cultural production.10 My interdisciplinary approach, or as Mao and Walkowitz frame it, my “fusion of theoretical commitments,” allows me to rethink the network concept as constitutive of the very possibility of modernist praxis.11 In this dissertation, I examine and visualize the internal dynamics of modernism by charting a vast web of interactions and providing a theoretical model with which to approach modernism and modernity, practicing what sociologist Robert Merton calls “middle- range theorizing,” theory tied to historical praxis rather than total abstraction.12 Instead of focusing on an individual author or text in each chapter, I analyze a different type of network, and this method requires tracing the collisions of large numbers of “dynamic particles” because the subsequent reactions among them formed what we now call modernism. Charting these networks, and creating visualizations to show their internal operations, reveals that modernism’s beginnings are diverse and dynamic and the result of different forms of cooperation. The reactions that form the networks of modernism appear especially vibrant and frenetic during the first ten to fifteen years of the twentieth century. To accentuate this energetic, positively charged avant-garde activity, I use “modernism” 8 in this dissertation to signify pre-World War “early modernism.” This “early” modernism emerges in a fluid, experimental, and diverse spirit, and there exists a clear distinction between the temporal periods of modernism: pre-war or “early” modernism exhibits different contours than post-war “high” modernism. Wyndham Lewis marks this division in his autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering: “The War is such a tremendous landmark that locally it imposes itself upon our computations of time like the birth of Christ. We say ‘pre-war’ and ‘post-war’, rather as we say B.C. or A.D.”13 Christopher Butler lends credence to his point, claiming that “Early Modernism evolved in a very different context” than high modernism. Pre-war modernism can be seen as the flux in which particles began to interact, and post-war modernism can be read as the crystallization of these early experimental compounds into the now-canonical figures of high modernism.14 In this study, I retain such a division. As part of this flux, I consider political radicalism—movements like suffragism, egoism, feminism, socialism, anarchism, labor unionism—as a significant aspect of early modernism, and I characterize the major activists and practitioners of these radical political philosophies as crucial actors in the networks I study. Many of the practitioners of modernist aesthetics claim membership with these political organizations and remain deeply invested in these struggles even as they explore experimental literature and visual art. In my dissertation, radical politics exists as a form of avant-garde activity. My emphasis on early modernist networks should not suggest that modernist networks disappear after the war. On the contrary, many dense networks appear after the Great War as well. One thinks of the publication networks that coalesce around the publication in 1922 of those central texts of high modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, both of which require extensive “reactions” among a number of individuals and institutions to produce them. However, these later collaborations are often based in networks that formed before 9 the war and continued operating throughout. One could argue there would be no Ulysses without the print networks of The Little Review and New Freewoman to publish and circulate praise for the novel or that avant-garde activity throughout the twentieth century followed F.T. Marinetti’s model of aesthetic vanguardism. The networks that operate before the war are energetic, extensive, dynamic, and as such warrant their own analysis. These “traces,” as Peter Nicholls calls the sources of modernism, reveal the base on which subsequent cultural productions build.15 Early modernism provides the test-tube in which the dynamic particles begin to interact and high modernism begins to crystallize. Political movements, avant-garde manifestos, energetic periodicals, and coterie salons react to each other during these early years. Tracing the web of interactions in salons, little magazines, and avant- garde movements reveals the importance of sociability in the creation and dissemination of experimental forms of literature, painting, politics, and thinking. The totality of modernism only becomes visible when multiplicity can be shown. Unlike previous cultural moments, the modernist period embodies the importance of network dynamics in both the creation and imagination of culture. Certainly, other cultural periods have featured collaboration and interaction, but modernism is the first to feature such a massive constellation of individuals from different nations, backgrounds, gender identities, sexual orientations, and political alignments all fitting together into a larger totality marked by experimentation and revolution. Every network I study here can trace its lineage back to familiar forms in the eighteenth century. Salons begin among the French aristocrats, early periodicals such as The Spectator and Tatler revolutionize print in the public sphere, and the avant-garde begins with radical social philosophies of Frenchman Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon. Each of these early network forms become reconfigured in the modernist period, transformed into radically experimental systems that question the boundaries of society, art, politics, and writing. Cultural 10 networks spread internationally, bringing innovative ideas and theories, as new technologies allow modernists to coordinate more easily across vast distances. For the first time, experimenters in art and literature could collaborate on a large scale and begin to conceptualize their experiments as part of a larger revolution. Networks of Modernity This sense of large-scale connectivity begins to appear prominently in writing of the period. In his futuristic short story “With the Night Mail,” published in 1905, Rudyard Kipling sums up the advances in telecommunications and transportation infrastructures he had seen over the nineteenth century with the motto for his fictional organization, the Aerial Board of Control: “Transportation is Civilization.”16 The rapid pace of development that marks the latter half of the Victorian period and the dawning of the twentieth century demonstrates a shifting relationship between individuals and the world. New possibilities for intersubjective communications and movements rise to prominence, and an increasing population of travelers traverses vast distances with ease. Castell’s compelling argument, that we postmoderns live in a unique historical moment, the network age, obscures the earlier appearance of vast networks corresponding to the development and spread of capitalist, industrial modernity.17 Transportation and telecommunication technologies explode in quantity and complexity, connecting disparate populations in different countries to international metropolitan centers on a scale never before possible. These rapid changes alter the way individuals imagine and interact with their surroundings and each other, especially in large urban areas in which these changes appear most quickly and visibly. Nineteenth-century advances in technology and infrastructure transform the consciousness of individuals living during these years, intensifying a sense of global connection more pronounced than ever before. Stephen Kern describes how such drastic changes in technology had widespread effects on perceptions of time and 11 space. As individuals learn to navigate the complexities of modernity, they evolve new ways of negotiating their environment, which “suggests that a cultural revolution of the broadest scope was taking place, one that involved essential structures of human experience and basic forms of human expression.”18 In his 1916 manifesto for Cubism, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset describes changes of subjective orientation toward the objective world in terms that capture the disorienting processes of modernity while reflecting the multiplicity of the network: “The truth, the real, the universe, life . . . breaks up into innumerable facets and vertices, each of which presents a face to an individual” (emphasis mine).19 Cubism develops out of the juxtapositions and multiplicity of modernity. In literature, the response to modernity’s multiplicities emerges most visibly in Pound’s Imagism, which operates as a network aesthetic. His theory of superposition appears “In a Station of the Metro,” which configures Parisian commuters as leaves connected to the branching structure of the tree: “The apparition of these faces in a crowd / Petals on a wet, black bough.”20 Exemplary of Imagist poetics, the poem derives its power from juxtaposition between “petals” and “faces.” This layering of meanings connected to each other demonstrates a kind of network aesthetic, and the poem centers on a metaphoric image of petals connected to a single branch, a “wet, black bough.” As a statement of modern life, this image suggests a consciousness of connection among city-dwelling individuals as part of a larger whole. Each petal becomes part of the tree even as the tree only exists because of the petals. In a similar way, I argue, networks operate via the dialectical relationship between the part and whole. The changes to the ways people interact with their environment during the latter parts of the Victorian period produce new means of connecting and collaborating among artists, writers, intellectuals, philosophers, and political radicals who comprise the early-modernist cultural revolution. E.M. Forster chooses to begin Howard’s End, his novel of the Edwardian period, with the epigraph “only connect.”21 12 The alterations to the lifeworld affect broad segments of society in a profound way because these changes open up the possibility for a vast array of figures to interact, influence one another, and cooperate internationally. Unlike the Romantic and Victorian periods of cultural production, which are more constrained in terms of numbers, diversity, and range of practitioners, modernism, especially during the early years of development, explodes across national boundaries in an astounding number of connections. Advances in the transportation infrastructure increase dramatically over the nineteenth century as Great Britain and the United States crisscross their countrysides with railroads and the cities with subways and underground rails. By the mid-nineteenth century, railroads cross all of England, connecting the entire nation into a transportation network. In his 1910 novel Howard’s End, Forster instills in his protagonist Margaret Schlegel a sense of national cohesion and interconnection through these modern transportation circuits: Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and unknown . . . In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo.22 Margaret understands England as a series of railway stops identifiable by their terminals, which metonymically stand for geographical areas of the country. Each terminus serves as both a point on a map and a cipher for the area of England that lies beyond the physical station. National identity corresponds to the expansion of transportation infrastructures. The linkage between national identity and railroads is also evident in the United States by this time. The U.S. completes the transcontinental railway line in 1869, traversing the entire American continent and 13 providing a direct line from east to west, which links states via expedient travel and displaces indigenous populations in the name of “Manifest Destiny.” In 1909, Charles Carter describes the development of the American railroad as a key element in “making the Nation what it is to-day” by binding together the states “into one homogeneous whole,” although who gets included in that nation remains unsaid.23 Within metropolitan centers, transportation infrastructures in England and the U.S. develop at an exponential pace with underground trains installed in London (1863) and subways installed in New York (1904). A map of the London underground illustrates how visual codes begin to highlight the interconnected nature of modern urban living; seeing these lines connected by hubs provides a corollary image that represents the human consciousness of network dynamics in the period, and modernists begin to imagine their connectivity in similar terms (fig. 2).24 Nineteenth-century transportation advances ease international travel and shipping as well. The development of steam-powered shipping and the use of steel to construct light-weight vessels results in cheaper and quicker water travel. Transatlantic shipping and voyages improve with the implementation of steel ships beginning with the White Star Line’s Germanic in 1875 and the much larger Mauritania in 1909. Because of this increase in size and speed, more people traverse the Atlantic in less time, leading to increased tourism and travel. Rachel Vinrace, the protagonist of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), experiences an alteration in perspective as her ship the Euphrosyne steams from London for South America: “an Fig. 2: London Underground Map (1910s) 14 immense dignity had descended upon her; she was an inhabitant of the great world, travelling all day across an empty universe.”25 Even as these technologies denote national cohesion, they expand one’s sense of connection to the larger world. The London Times extensively advertises foreign tourist voyages aboard steamers, promoting exotic colonial destinations as a broadening of horizons (fig. 3).26 In the U.S., steamers bring not only tourists but immigrants, unloading masses of Irish and Eastern Europeans at Ellis Island. Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photograph “The Steerage,” taken in 1907, fascinates because it captures the lower-class quarters of the new steamer SS Kaiser Wilhelm II. The photograph juxtaposes the new technology of the steamer with the cramped, crowded lower decks where the poor travel and critiques different class levels using the layers of the ship to illustrate social hierarchy (fig. 4).27 Historian Norman Lee claims that historical developments in transportation over a period of less than one hundred years transform the world into “One World” united by “better methods of transport.”28 Transport technologies Fig. 4: “The Steerage” Alfred Stieglitz, Photogravure, 1907 Fig. 3: Advertisement for pleasure tour, London Times 15 create a world linked through networks of travel and facilitate collaboration in new and exciting ways. Because of these developments in transportation, communication technologies proliferate and become more important. The first telegraphs follow railroad lines, and the practical benefits of telegraphy are discovered when police use it to apprehend an American murderer who escapes on a ship by calling ahead to the London port where the ship docks.29 These communications facilitate a dramatic increase in long-distance connection, establishing the possibility for citizenship in Lee’s “One World.” The completion of the first transatlantic telegraph line signals a newly global world as President Buchanan and Queen Victoria exchange nearly instantaneous messages.30 Telephones and telegraphs revolutionize the possibilities for instantaneous interaction in ways never thought possible. A 1912 advertisement for Telephone Herald, a subscription service that provides the latest news and music, reveals that interconnection has become a prominent aspect of daily life by the nineteen-tens (fig. 5).31 In this ad, four different people appear connected to each other via wires that traverse the space of the ad itself. The Stentor at the bottom of the page, speaks into a microphone that transmits through the wires to a young girl, a woman, and a “busy man,” suggesting that various social circles are brought together by the experience of plugging in to the service. The lines connecting these people, “the acme of modern civilization,” suggests the network model in which lines connect disparate individual nodes. Advertisements such as this aim at a wide audience, illustrating that conceptualizations of social connectivity had become popular by the 1910s. Advances in technology and communication change the way people psychologically and socially imagine themselves in relation to one another, and artists and writers anticipate and adapt these modifications to their cultural experiments. 16 Alongside these developments in travel and communication, many people begin migrating to urban centers in large numbers, either to find work, to seek cultural opportunities, or, in the case of the American northeast, to escape the Jim Crow legal strictures, lynching, and racial oppression of the South. Over the nineteenth century, older models of community based on close ties among members of small familial groups balloon into newer models characterized by vast and diffuse “weak” connections among strangers within these densely populated cities. By the early twentieth century, the branching model of the network has been well implemented in subway and underground transportation infrastructures. These rapid-transit systems, combined with the massive populations of these cities, ensure that residents experience a wide array of relationships and interactions on a daily basis. In 1937, Lewis Mumford defines the city in such terms, as “a related collection of primary groups and purposive associations . . . a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity.”32 His description captures the collective sense of identity engendered by life in a major metropolis. As a “geographic plexus,” the city serves as a hub connecting individuals and groups together through proximity in space. Like all good hubs, the city acts as both a central point and a multiplicity, and the “primary groups and purposive associations” appear in the city precisely because the close, densely populated area provides opportunities for contact. In a similar fashion, Raymond Williams describes the evolution of these new urban centers as a site for transactions of various stripes: “It was now much more than the very large city, or Fig. 5: Advertisement for Telephone Herald 17 even the capital city of an important nation. It was the place where new social and economic and cultural relations, beyond both city and nation in their older senses, were beginning to be formed.” 33 The turn-of-the-century metropolis, in his formulation, is a crucible for new combinations and relationships among various individuals to form, and the networks I study all center in the densely populated urban centers of Paris, London, and New York. As artists and writers become aware of new work being done in cities, they migrate, but more importantly for my project, travel back and forth between metropolitan centers bringing their experiments with them in a transnational cross-pollination. One of the earliest practitioners of sociology to consider the effects of this “geographic plexus” on individuals, German sociologist Georg Simmel, provides a starting point for my analysis of social dynamics during the modernist period. In his groundbreaking essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), Simmel develops a theory of urban relationships based on “social circles” or “webs.” For Simmel, metropolitans develop “organs” of intellectual detachment from others in order “to preserve subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life.”34 Unlike small rural populations who traditionally live in intimacy with family and neighbors, the members of large urban populations experience an “intensification of nervous stimulation” brought on by overwhelming and potentially alienating city environments.35 According to Simmel’s analysis, urban residents react to each other with intellectual detachment as a psychological defense against constant exposure to stimuli. Habitual response to the metropolitan lifeworld, “the unity of disunity” as Marshall Berman describes it, resulted in the evolution of “reserve,” a preternaturally blasé attitude toward the shocks of city life.36 Unlike more conservative thinkers of the period who bemoan the alienating effects of urban living, however, Simmel posits that the “reserve” developed by individuals in city living engenders a unique freedom: “To the extent to which the group grows—numerically, spatially, in significance and 18 in content of life—to the same degree the group’s direct, inner unity loosens, and the rigidity of the original demarcation against others is softened through mutual relations and connections.”37 Belonging to multiple groups, in Simmel’s analysis, allows individuals to develop more nuanced identities through contact with others. The urban center produces psychological states altogether unique to cities, and his account of these urban psychological processes recognizes the power of social connection for the cultural expansion characteristic of modernism. In his early work Simmel attempts to define the psychological experience of the city by envisioning urban social webs as unique structures, and his later development of this theory extends his analysis to include the varying levels of involvement possible in metropolitan life. His discussion of social webs receives a more extensive treatment in 1922, that annus mirabilis of “high” modernism, when he completes The Web of Group Affiliations. Here, he expands his idea of social webs into an account prefiguring the later sociological work of network theorists, and he explicitly links the notion of the social web to modern culture. Every individual living in a major metropolitan area moves among different and often competing social groups, and the number of group affiliations an individual possesses, Simmel argues, can be considered “earmarks of culture.”38 The movement through these social webs of group affiliation constitutes an individual’s subjectivity as a personality that “combines the elements of culture,” in new ways. Rather than existing as an isolated monad, the modern subject becomes bound up in “a reciprocal relation between the subjective and the objective,” between one’s own individuality and one’s affiliations. Through participation in these various social webs, Simmel contends, the individual develops a new subjectivity: As the person becomes affiliated with a social group, he surrenders himself to it. A synthesis of such subjective affiliations creates a group in an objective sense. But the person also regains his individuality 19 because his pattern of participation is unique; hence the fact of multiple group-participation creates in turn a new subjective element.39 Simmel’s description of a new subjectivity based in webs of group-affiliation indicates that the individual and the group exist in dialectical relation: the individual’s multiple affiliations and interests create a uniqueness to that individual even as belonging to groups establishes the groups as such. The implications of Simmel’s theory can be elaborated as a theory of modernist praxis itself. Even as many modernists posture toward radical individualism, they join groups in which to explore their individuality, and these multiple groups, especially before the war, enable important connections and collaborations that make possible the movements of modernism. The starting point for charting this praxis—the associations, communities, and linkages that establish the networks of modernism—is the metropolis. Of course, modernism does not remain limited to large cities—one thinks of less urban locations such as the New Orleans home of The Double Dealer magazine or Mabel Dodge Luhan’s writer’s colony in Taos, New Mexico—but the city provides the best soil for the growth of networks. Most modernists begin forming groups, writing manifestos and periodicals, and attending salons in the large metropolitan enclaves. Raymond Williams makes such a claim for the metropolis, arguing that mixed populations in large cities such as London, Berlin, Paris, and New York produce an enhanced awareness of language and formal innovation among the avant-garde writers and visual artists: “For it is not the general themes of response to the city and its modernity which compose anything that can be properly called Modernism. It is rather the new and specific location of the artists and intellectuals of this movement within the changing cultural milieu of the metropolis.”40 Artists, intellectuals, and writers arriving in the city plug themselves into Simmel’s social webs by joining 20 movements, writing for little magazines, and attending salon meetings where they interact and collaborate with like-minded individuals. “Only Connect”: Network Theory and Methodology Approaching modernism as a network of individuals, institutions, meetings, salons, and periodicals models the way cultural practices operate in the social structures of industrialized, capitalist modernity. In my account, these diverse cultural practices contribute to a “totality” of early modernism, a concept akin to Georg Lukács’ concept of “totality” as social practices that “form a concrete social whole.”41 This concept of totality accounts for the disagreements and discordances that occur within it: when seen from the distance of the network visualization, these differences appear crucial to the formation of the whole. The visualization reveals the synchronic nature of modernism by revealing the multiple and overlapping networks that comprise the totality. However, it is perhaps more accurate to describe my conception of modernism as a “weak totality,” a small subsystem within a larger social whole that makes up social life in twentieth century U.S. and Europe. Modernist culture exists as a small part of early twentieth-century society, and characterizing modernism as a discrete sphere composed of numerous social practices in writing, painting, exhibiting, dancing, composing, and publishing provides useful ways to rethink the power of interrelationships for the specific cultural productions of modernism. Connecting to multiple networks, or in Simmel’s terms the “web of group- affiliations,” and moving among them, modernists traffic in the latest aesthetic theories, meet likely sources of money, and practice solidarity against potentially hostile publics like particles leaping from one atom to another. Milton Cohen claims that urban avant-garde groupings are generally defensive, and that groups’ “banding together amounted to pulling the wagons in a circle” against the “philistine bourgeoisie that reviled their art.”42 Cohen’s city provides a safe haven for the 21 struggling avant-gardist to find protection and encouragement against the demoralizing energies of an irate public and to generate readers and patrons from sympathetic colleagues: “This mutual support emboldened the group members to confront—even provoke—a hostile public in collective demonstration far more eagerly, and with better chances of success than they could have ever done as individuals.”43 While this militant antagonism toward the public remains a central aspect of avant-garde self-fashioning, and defensive grouping proves a benefit of urban living, artists, intellectuals, and writers need dense networks of collaboration enabled by metropolitan infrastructures to produce and support their work. As Pierre Bourdieu illustrates, avant-garde groups exist within overlapping socio-cultural complexes of seemingly antagonistic or unrelated fields that nonetheless rely on one another to function. His complex schematic of these fields of cultural production reveals that the vast social web which gives rise to modernist cultural production is multifarious and dense, containing individuals and institutions that may only be tangentially related to “high” modernism.44 This notion of cultural fields supplements the way I conceptualize modernism originating through a series of simultaneous connections among a cluster of experimenters in publication and social forms. If scholars have focused on the cultural fields that produce novels, plays, paintings, and poems, my project focuses on the smaller areas that facilitate the production of those texts and which have not been appreciated for their full significance. Recreating interconnections among the modernist particles that make up these social and publishing venues and that constitute the totality of modernism entails two distinct methodological paradigms, which I am calling macro and micro- modernism. The macro system of collisions and interaction is the domain of the network. As Guido Caldarelli and Michele Cantanzaro define the network, it features systems rather than the attributes of a singular entity. These systems can be 22 large or small but are necessarily multiple, consisting of at least two joined nodes. These nodes can be anything the analyst chooses: individuals, books, law firms, governments, cells, modernists, or any other discrete point of reference. When the connections among the nodes are charted, using a visual form known as a “graph,” a network system is created: “The network approach focuses all the attention on the global structure of the interactions within a system. The detailed properties of each element on its own are simply ignored.”45 Searching for the structural ties that hold the network together, the lines of connection or “edges” indicate a flow of information between any two nodes, and the network analyst constructs an image of the totality of the interactions (graph 1). The network system for my study is large, comprised of a constellation of modernist practitioners in salons, members of avant- garde movements, and editors of and contributors to periodicals. Because macro-modernism represents dynamic large-scale social structures, it requires visualization in graphs, comprised of lines connecting points. To create these graphs, I rely on new tools from the digital humanities to visualize the macro elements of the project.46 Matthew Jockers explains the importance of such macroanalysis: “A macroanalytic approach helps us . . . to see and understand the operations of a larger ‘literary economy.’”47 To create graphs that represent the literary economy Jockers describes, I input relational data into spreadsheets and use algorithms to visualize the data in a form that discloses important structural attributes only visible from a distance. Although I conceptualize my project as a theoretical investigation into how the totality of modernism itself functions as a network, these graphs visualize the internal dynamics I study. Visualization, as Richard So and Hoyt Long clarify, only Graph 1: Basic tripartite network showing nodes and edges. 23 provides “an interpretation, one that will need to be tested and improved on in coordination with close contextual analysis and a more comprehensive dataset.”48 Graphs are only one piece of the puzzle, providing images of the larger series of collisions and reactions that spark modernist cultural production. To analyze these graphs, I apply language specific to them, using terms borrowed from network theory like “edges” (lines of connection), “directed” (flow of information going one way), “undirected” (flows going two ways), “node” or “vertex” (individual point within a network), “structural hole” (blank spaces in a graph where nodes do not connect), “superconnector” (major node bridging structural holes), and “symbolic analyst” (node that is key to the network) to describe the internal processes of the network.49 This technical terminology describes the complicated processes of network relationships and, as I show, serves as a crucial analytical tool to analyze modernism’s myriad networks. Displaying the constellation of nodes reveals another way to read modernism, a horizontal synchronic text in which concurrent transactions play a crucial role in the production of cultural experiment. These graphs show how different nodes connect to each other, revealing key characteristics of the network in question: the density of nodes in different areas of the network, unexpected points of contact between nodes, flows of information and influence, and shared connections. These graphs may reveal, for example, that one particular node is a “superconnector,” a major point of contact bridging gaps between node groupings. These gaps, or “structural holes,” occur between clusters that exist in proximity to one another but remain disconnected within the larger network. Hostess Mabel Dodge, whose actual published works are comparatively sparse, appears in graphs of New York modernism joining together a large number of disparate nodes from cultural organizations as diverse as the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, who plan the Armory Show in 1913, to the Industrial Workers of the World, who perform the Paterson Strike Pageant in 24 Madison Square Garden in 1913. Despite the paucity of her publications, Dodge emerges as a critical producer of New York modernism by creating compounds of the particles that coexist in New York but only interact through her salon. Just as these visualizations can reveal prominent nodes, they also trace flows of information circulating among participants in modernism, following “directed edges”—lines of connection that only move in one direction—or “undirected edges” in which information moves in both directions. Tracing these lines of connection reveals significant data about the larger structure and affects the way we think about modernism as a whole. Rather than isolate individual achievements, we can see how relationships and connections play a more important role than has been previously acknowledged, and modernism’s inherently manifold nature becomes visible. Mapping modernism suggests that multiplicity is as important if not more significant than individual achievements, and social organizers and editors, who have been less idolized, appear much more prominent and indispensable in the development of experimental literature and art. Reconstructing these macro-modernist systems necessitates attending to the other methodological pole, to micro-modernism—the material papers and letters that fill the shelves of university archives. Whereas Caldarelli and Cantanzaro claim that the “detailed properties of each element [in a network] on its own are simply ignored,”50 working on cultural networks requires knowledge of relationships and interactions. I sift through archival materials, letters, postcards, memoirs, and other “ephemeral” documents, as Matthew Luskey describes them, in an effort to reconstruct the often fleeting relationships among modernists that occur in salons, in the pages of periodicals, and in avant-garde groups.51 Using letters, autobiographies, and memoirs as primary sources presents unique problems, and I recognize that these are highly constructed texts deliberately crafted by individuals with ulterior motives. I try not to mistake any of this material as “factual” in an objective sense, 25 yet I also use these accounts to reconstruct the networks I study. At best, I can only depend on this material insofar as I am concerned with the way modernists imagine their relationships within broader networks. I find it less significant that the actual historical events occurred exactly as described by an author’s autobiography or memoir than that those events are represented as occurring in specific ways. Like much modernist art and writing, I am more interested in the form of the modernist network than the content of what factually happened. In this dissertation, I oscillate between these two methodological poles, looking at the large picture of connections even as I turn to the archive to understand them better. In the chapters that follow, I ground my networks in Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere and in the critical reception of his theories by Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner. His account of the bourgeois public sphere, which appears in the eighteenth century as a somewhat idealized space for reasoned debate and discussion of politics, provides a structure for my analysis of the networks of modernism. In his attempt to move away from the post-World War II pessimism of the Frankfurt School, Habermas articulates a discursive public sphere in which the authority of the State is reclaimed by the newly emerging public52: The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publically relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.53 In this account, the public sphere operates as a site of contestation and dialogue regarding the administration of the State. In the public sphere, private citizens can engage with the rules and mores of society through discussion. Contemporary critics have expanded Habermas’s idealized version of the public sphere to include 26 “counter-public” spheres as well, sites of contestation and conflict with the predominant bourgeois public sphere. For example, Fraser argues that Habermas’s public sphere excludes non-white, non-male participants, and she poses the notion of a “subaltern” counter-public sphere in “order to signal that they are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”54 Michael Warner supports the importance of this alternative space, especially surrounding issues of gender and sexuality, arguing “some publics are defined by their tension with a larger public.” In these counter-public spheres, participants remain conscious of and may even celebrate their “subordinate status”: “A counterpublic, against the background of the public sphere, enables a horizon of opinion and exchange; its exchanges remain distinct from authority and can have a critical relation to power.”55 The counterpublic sphere provides a space in which to resist or attack the predominant public sphere, and Warner’s description of the two spheres as remaining in “tension” proves useful for my own adaptation of these theoretical approaches to the public sphere. Each of the following network formations responds to and modifies these conceptions of the public sphere to serve the aims of vanguardists who work toward new forms of art, politics, and literature. Ezra Pound, Symbolic Analyst Of all the modernist superconnectors, those individual figures who seem to know everyone and be a part of everything happening in the modernist universe, no one connects to others more than Ezra Pound. He acts as what network theorists call a “symbolic analyst”—a key to entire networks, a superconnector of superconnectors.56 In the many collisions among dynamic particles within modernism, Pound causes more reactions than perhaps any other node. He remains a central figure in the constellation of modernist culture, and any analysis of modernism must contend with his presence. It seems fitting, then, that Pound serve 27 as my guide through the descriptions of these chapters since he is centrally involved in every network I analyze and plays a crucial role in all of them. Chapter one, “Social Networks of Modernist Salons,” focuses on the social networks that form in the pre-war cultural salons of Gertrude Stein in Paris, Violet Hunt in London, and Mabel Dodge in New York. Pound and his cohort attend each of these salons and always manage to make an impression on the hostess. In her quasi-fictional account The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein writes that Pound comes to her house at 27 rue de Fleurus with Dial editor Scofield Thayer and falls out of a delicate chair, which Toklas had upholstered with Picasso prints, causing Stein to avoid him ever after. Upon meeting Pound suddenly in the Luxembourg gardens, Stein invents an excuse to avoid inviting him back: “I am so sorry, answered Gertrude Stein, but Miss Toklas has a bad tooth and beside we are busy picking wild flowers.”57 Pound’s energy better fits Hunt’s pre-war salon at South Lodge where he cuts quite a figure, organizing tennis parties in the neighboring lawn. Douglas Goldring, secretary to Ford Madox Hueffer during the English Review years, recalls that Pound “sallied forth in his sombrero with all the arrogance of a young, revolutionary poet who had complete confidence in his own genius.”58 Pound’s early years are spent attending such literary gatherings and experiencing the eclectic visitors made possible by the private space of the salon. Pound and other avant-gardists converge on these social gatherings because they generate cultural, social, and economic capital through the social networking afforded. Salons are usually held in the homes of well-to-do women who serve as patrons for the struggling avant-gardists and political revolutionaries who attend their meetings. These hostesses provide a comfortable, usually artistic setting in a fashionable part of the city wherein avant-gardists can hold intellectual conversation or impassioned debate regarding the latest trends in aesthetics, philosophy, and politics while enjoying the largesse of the hostess. The hostess convenes regular 28 evenings and often suggests a subject of conversation or prompts a speaker who can “hold forth” on various modern topics. Regular attendees to the salons include an eclectic mixture of people, and the meetings prove important sites for verbal interplay, experimentation, collaboration, education, and patronage despite the inherent ephemerality of the encounters. Although the hostesses of these salons are not considered as important as many of their visitors, salonnières facilitate crucial introductions and work to create unique social juxtapositions. Modernist salons exist as a remnant of a vibrant salon culture that originates in eighteenth-century France and is closely tied to the aristocracy. Habermas theorizes that out of these salons rises a bourgeois public sphere that evolves a critical “public” of rational, discoursing individuals: “While the early institutions of the bourgeois public sphere originally were closely bound up with aristocratic society as it became dissociated from the court, the ‘great’ public that formed in the theaters, museums, and concerts was bourgeois in its social origin.”59 In this chapter, I adapt Habermas’ notion of the public sphere, arguing that modernist salons serve as social networks—or coterie spheres as I call them—which operate outside the bourgeois public sphere and allow dialogic and social experimentation. Simultaneously public and private, these coterie spheres allow for exploration of radical ideas away from the restrictions of the public sphere, which remains hostile toward free thought. Within the modernist salons, activities, ideas, behaviors, politics, and aesthetic theories that spark hostile reactions from the bourgeois public can be tested. These tests occur within social networks of potentially sympathetic— and often wealthy or culturally important—visitors, promising the possibility of cultural or financial support, or both. Unique combinations of salon visitors reveal that hostesses actively create social collages in which juxtapositions are designed to produce interesting and significant reactions regardless of class position or political 29 orientation, and this manipulation is what gives twentieth-century salons their experimental and modernist character. Whereas modernists in enclosed salon coteries interact with a small number of like-minded visitors, chapter two, “The Publishing Networks of Little Magazines,” considers the more visible print networks of the little magazines. If salons feature intellectual and political conversations of the latest ideas, little magazines disseminate these ideas and package them for entry into the bourgeois public sphere. Because of their non-commercial nature, these magazines print the latest fiction, poetry, philosophy, visual art, and social theory and market this material to small numbers of intrigued subscribers. Pound publishes widely in these little magazines and serves on the editorial boards of many of them. His early work first appears in magazines like Ford Madox Hueffer’s English Review, A.R. Orage’s New Age, Dora Marsden’s New Freewoman, and Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, and his experiments with Imagism first get published in Harriet Monro’s Poetry. In his retrospective essay “Small Magazines” (1930), Pound underscores the significance of the modernist magazine for cultural production: “The value of fugitive periodicals ‘of small circulation’ is ultimately measured by the work they have brought to press. The names of certain authors over a space of years, or over, let us say, the past score years, have been associated with impractical publications.”60 Pound recognizes that the major figures among the modernists, who had become famous by 1930, first appear in low-budget, low-profit periodicals, and the non-commercial emphasis of these magazines allows the editors to choose material they find significant, and this freedom allows material to appear in public that would otherwise have been rejected. Chapter two focuses on the network dynamics around four major magazines begun before the war. The number of little magazines popping up before the outbreak of the war is staggering: Orage’s The New Age (1907), Hueffer’s The English Review (1908), W.E.B. DuBois’ The Crisis (1910), Douglas Goldring’s Tramp (1911), 30 Max Eastman’s The Masses (1911), Marsden’s The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist (1911-1919), Wyndham Lewis’ Blast (1914), Anderson’s The Little Review (1914), and Alfred Kreymborg’s Others (1915). My network analysis in this chapter provides a model that can be applied to other periodicals, and I create large graphs that will include data from four prominent avant-garde magazines central to the production of Anglo-American modernism: Margaret Anderson’s Little Review and Marsden’s Freewoman, New Freewoman, and Egoist. The conduit among these magazines reveals that early modernism relies on periodical hubs to anchor the various contributors and these periodicals in particular navigate the dangers of avant- garde activity in the public sphere as both editors struggle with censorship and suppression in their attempts to provide space for experimentation. Little magazines constellate periodical networks—networks that include the editors, readers, and contributors with advertisers and other magazines. Contributors appear in multiple magazines with different editorial platforms or goals, connecting different magazines to each other. These periodicals concretize a host of disparate contributors into more solid aggregates. Taking cues from So and Long’s network analysis of modernist poetry in little magazines and from the special issue of The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies (2014) focused on periodical networks, I construct a graphic of little magazines, showing how diverse particles orbit around the central, publically positioned hubs of the magazines. Some of these hubs maintain specific artistic orientations. For example, Blast was more a party journal for the Vorticists than a general interest magazine. Other magazines such as The Freewoman and The New Freewoman, The Masses, The Crisis, and The New Age marry modernist aesthetics and politics, illustrating that the linkages between radical experiments in art and politics greatly intertwine before the war. These hubs constellate a wide variety of orbiting particles, some which “react” to other magazines and some which “react” to other movements. Like bees circulating pollen in a field of flowers, the trajectories of 31 these particles transmit information throughout the cultural field of little magazines. The orbits of the particles provide a clearer picture of pre-war modernist production by revealing the ways in which subsequently canonical figures began publishing and by illustrating the particular challenges attendant on making such a space available in a censorious public sphere. Flows of information follow specific paths from authors who submit their work, to editorial boards who select the final materials, to readers who purchase or subscribe to the magazine, to potential notoriety or recognition for authors in the public sphere. Fredrick Hoffman, Carolyn Ulrich, and Charles Allen, in their seminal 1946 history of the little magazine, echo Pound in pointing out the potential benefits of exposure in these periodicals: “Though the best of our writers receive a wide enough acceptance through the little magazines to make them sought after by the conservative periodicals and publishing houses, one cannot help wondering what might have happened if these writers had not been offered a little magazine’s encouragement.”61 Circulating work, even among a small readership, publicizes the work. And although the magazines maintain small circulations, their readers are often “aspirant-intellectuals” who imagine themselves part of a broader coterie sphere of modernist innovations and participate in the “dialogic” world of the magazine. Especially before the war, these magazines offer opportunities for interaction between authors and their readers via letter columns and discussion circles. Unlike salons, which require knowledge of the meeting locations, little magazines invite readerly participation as a means of generating subscribers. What makes periodical networks so important for this project is how they congregate and constellate aspiring modernists and aspirant-intellectuals around the central magazine hubs, resulting in a complex system of individuals invested in exposing modernist ideas for the public. 32 To support the argument that the genre of the little magazine solidifies a periodical network around itself and cultivates a sphere of aspirant-intellectuals, I adapt Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” aggregated via print capitalism. In his now classic analysis of the modern newspaper’s role in nationalism, Anderson argues that diverse individuals become symbolically linked together through the “mass ceremony” of reading the news and that this community enables a belief in the abstract notion of citizenship in the State. Whereas reading itself is a solitary act, “performed . . . in the lair of the skull,” “each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.”62 This simultaneity of isolated individuals reading in time with other individuals in what Walter Benjamin calls “homogeneous empty time,” Anderson argues, leads to an imagined sense of collectivity and national identity despite the inherently abstract nature of these concepts.63 I argue that a similar process occurs among readers of modernist periodicals. Like Benedict Anderson’s newspapers, diverse audiences across time and space read modernist periodicals; at the same time, modernists submit work to these magazines and read the work of others creating a sense of simultaneity and participation in a current and public movement. The “print capitalism” of the little magazines establishes “imagined communities” made up of avant-garde practitioners, editors, and interested publics. This chapter traces the connections and flows of information that constellates these communities around Margaret Anderson and Dora Marsden’s journals. My third chapter “Group Dynamics and the Networks of Avant-Garde Movements” turns from the imagined communities of little magazines to the physical communities of avant-garde groups that sprout up in Paris, New York, and London before the war. After experiencing the blitz of publicity surrounding F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist lecture tour in London throughout 1910, Pound experiments 33 with his own avant-garde group, based on the group dynamic designed by the Italians. By 1911, Pound settles on the name “Imagist,” appending the title imagiste to poems H.D. had written and which he submits to Poetry magazine. For a time, the Imagists under Pound enjoy a certain level of celebrity, or at least notoriety, in London and New York. After publishing the first Imagist poetry anthology Des Imagistes (1914) under Pound’s more dictatorial leadership style, however, many of the members of the Imagist movement congregate around the more diplomatic and democratic Amy Lowell, leading to a mythic squabble between Pound and Lowell, which ends with Pound leaving the group. Dismissing the movement he began as “Amygism,” Pound co-founds Vorticism with Lewis in 1914 and publishes Blast as an aggressive manifesto more similar to Marinetti’s manifestos than Pound’s Imagist efforts had been. Avant-garde groups often represent themselves as islands beset by tidal waves of philistine bourgeois hostility; moreover, this hostile isolationism often extends to other avant-garde groups, and these groups define themselves against each other as much as against the public sphere. Whereas modernist salons operate as small coterie spheres that allow participants to experiment outside the strictures of the public sphere or the notoriety of committing to a counter-public sphere, and little magazines present modernist ideas in print networks of readers, editors, writers and intellectuals in the public sphere, avant-garde movements are aggressive conglomerations of artists and writers who deliberately adopt militant counter- public attitudes toward society. Despite the counter-public orientation of these assemblages and their hostility to competing groups, however, the inner workings of the various groups facilitate the spread of aesthetic theories via networks of transmission, lines of influence and collaboration that allow these groups to form in relation to one another but also through conflict with other movements. 34 To make this argument, I draw on Renato Poggioli’s analysis of the avant- garde as a series of “movements.” Rather than characterize these groupings as “schools” as was the case in the classical tradition, he argues that the modern avant- garde represent a shift to the movement, which “conceives of culture not as increment but as creation—or, at least, as a center of activity and energy.” Unlike the static school model, which “presupposes disciples consecrated to a transcendent end,” movements operate energetically and generatively toward their own ends. Poggioli concludes, “the followers of a movement always work in terms of an end immanent in the movement itself.”64 These movements, in his analysis, remain insular communities in which practitioners work toward the goals and objectives of the group. At the same time, the group dynamic he theorizes can be read as a “movement” in terms of transmissions and influence, of movement as the act or process of moving. The valence of motion provides me with a collaborative model for these insular groupings. Rather than reading the avant-garde as a fragmented cluster of isolated bubbles in which participants work, I chart the interactions among different groups: the movements of the avant-gardists, the transmission of core principles, and the mutual avenues for exhibiting work. This interactive quality among different and often combative movements is possible because these movements undergo a particular series of stages, which underlie the formation of any tight group network contra other groups. To illustrate the evolution of these movements, I chart the internal network dynamics of group formations. In this regard, I follow Bruce Tuckman’s helpful taxonomy of groups into four primary stages: forming, norming, storming, and performing.65 Charting these stages of group formation among key avant-garde movements, I reveal the internal and external processes by which these aggressive, militant avant-gardes operate. As Fabio Durão and Dominic Williams claim, “For decades the study of literary and philosophical modernism concerned solitary figures like the flâneur, the 35 exile, and the lonely genius, but recently the group formations that fostered modernist movements have emerged into view.”66 In the forming stage, these movements coalesce around a central leader and draft a manifesto that articulates the appearance of a new “ism.” From here, the movement goes through a process of norming in which rules are established and modes of acceptable behavior within the group defined. Manifestoes often provide some structure to the movement, establishing an aesthetic platform around which to maneuver. During the storming phase, avant-gardists may conflict with each other over norms of behavior or avant- garde movements may battle other movements or even, in some cases, the audience who comes to view them. Storming may produce new movements, born out of disagreement and factionalism but can resolve through a process of resolution and de-escalation. Finally, movements in the performing stage exhibit their paintings, declaim their manifestoes, perform in music halls, and publish their writings in magazines. These stages reflect the dynamic processes by which aggressively counter- public movements, far from being anarchic ephemeral groups, actually operate via a series of stages. The public visibility of these stages keep the avant-garde movements in the public eye, generating the lucrative attention required to maintain a movement’s importance. Each chapter emphasizes one particular Anglo-American network in operation before World War I. These webs of individual nodes, when congregated together, provide a picture, albeit incomplete, of the vastness of modernism as it begins to appear in the early years of the twentieth century. In the epilogue, “World War I and Scrambled Modernist Circuits,” I examine the disruptions to the modernist networks the war causes after it breaks out in August 1914. Although some of the networks I study continue to function throughout the war and for years after, the war scrambles the circuits of most of the networks I discuss in this dissertation. Salons stop meeting during the war, little magazines cease publishing 36 due to paper shortages, and avant-garde movements dissolve because of increasing patriotism or because members join the war effort. Many promising modernists who fight are severely wounded or killed in combat. The transgressive energy and political appeal of early modernism transforms into the more pessimistic traumatized works of high modernism as the full effects and after-effects of the technological horrors of World War I become part of the public consciousness. In “Networks of Modernism,” I argue that modernism appears as the ultimate result of dynamic processes of interaction and reaction before the upheaval of the Great War. As a cultural revolution in the early-twentieth century, what we call “modernism” consists of myriad individuals working in different media and toward different objectives; yet, they all share a discernible investment in “making it new,” in breaking away from the past, and this break with tradition occurs in a variety of places at about the same time. Painters in Paris reject representational and impressionistic art while London’s poets and political radicals initiate revolutions while bohemians in Greenwich Village attack American Puritanism in politics and art. The distinctions between theory and praxis, between art and politics appear less rigidly present as modernists discuss, clash over, and work on the new art, philosophy, and politics. In a surge of creative energy unseen since the Renaissance, particles bounce off each other and combine with other particles in a process of productive generation. These combinations yield vast networks of like-minded individuals working toward a new age. Magazines titles like The New Age, The Clarion, The Crisis, The Soil, The Freewoman, Others, Rogue, and The Masses illustrate the sense among these radicals that they live at the leading edge of a new dawn. Women such as Dora Marsden and Rebecca West fight for equality and disseminate the most experimental literature of the period. Poets such as Pound and Loy publish alongside 67egoists and socialists. Futurists such as Marinetti and Russian painter Kazimir Malevich command sold-out venues in which they assail tradition and history in 37 pursuit of a new order based on the machine. The Industrial Workers of the World perform a pageant in Madison Square Garden, assisted by Dodge and set designer Bobby Jones who subsequently joins the Provincetown Players where Eugene O’Neill first puts on his work. Modernists are regularly discussed and mocked in the newspapers, and crowds howl with rage or mirth at their experiments. The diversity of figures, and their involvement and recognition of each other results in a revolution made up of smaller currents and movements that make the radical changes possible. These are the networks of modernism. Notes 1 E.M. Forster, Howard’s End (New York: Penguin, 2000), n.p. 2 Ezra Pound, “Patria Mia,” Selected Prose 1909-1965 Ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 127. 3 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell P, 1996). 4 Mustafa Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 103.2 (1997), 287-88. 5 Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, Bad Modernisms (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2006), 2. 6 Ann Ardis, “Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic/Transnational Public Sphere(s),” Modernism/modernity 19.3 (2012), v-vii, v-vi. 7 George Wickes, Americans in Paris (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969); Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.), The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990). 8 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998), 4. 9 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees (New York: Verso, 2005), 1. 10 Raymond Williams, Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken, 1982), 30. 11 Mao and Walkowitz, Bad Modernisms, 2. 12 Merton describes his resistance to grand theories: “I believe that our major task today is to develop special theories applicable to limited ranges of data—theories, for example, of class dynamics, of conflicting group pressures, of the flow of power and the exercise of interpersonal influence—rather than to seek at once the ‘integrated’ 38 conceptual structure adequate to derive all these and other theories” (9). Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957). 13 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967), 1. 14 Christopher Butler, Early Modernism (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1994), xvii-xviii. 15 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), 1. 16 Rudyard Kipling, “With the Night Mails,” McClure’s 26 (1905), 33. 17 Of course, technological “progress” has continued unabated since the Industrial Revolution, often at the detriment of the planet’s systems, but the period I delineate here witnessed a series of brand new developments in travel and communication that were subsequently improved upon for many years until new innovations arrived. 18 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983), 6. For a recent account of modernism’s relation to technology, see Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life. 19 Qtd. in Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 151. 20 Ezra Pound, “In a Station at the Metro,” Imagist Poetry: An Anthology ed. Bob Blaisdell (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 103. Pound describes his theory of superposition in Gaudier-Brzeska, 89. 21 E.M. Forster, Howard’s End, n.p. 22 E.M. Forster, Howard’s End, 10. 23 Charles Carter, When Railroads Were New (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1909), 2. 24 “London Underground Map.” http://www.theundergroundmap.com/article.html. Retrieved 15 June 2015. 25 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), 27. 26 “Advertisement for Pleasure Tour,” London Times. (Nov. 1911): 2. Microform 27 Stieglitz, Alfred. The Steerage. Photogravure on vellum. . http://metmuseum.org. Retrieved 24 February 2015. 28 Norman Lee, Travel and Transport Through the Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1958), 180-1. 29 Qtd. in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, 30 Lee, Travel and Transport Through the Ages, 160. 31 “Advertisement for Telephone Herald.” Oregon Daily Journal (June 1912): 5. http:// http://earlyradiohistory.us/1912oth2.htm. Retrieved 15 June 2015. 39 32 Lewis Mumford, “What is a City?,” The City Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996), 93-4. 33 Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 2007), 44. 34Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, Ed. Richard Sennett (New York: Meredith Co., 1969), 49. 35 Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 48. 36 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 15. Simmel describes “reserve” on page 53 of “Metropolis and Mental Life.” 37 Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 54. 38 Georg Simmel, The Web of Group-Affiliations, Trans. Reinhard Bendix (Glencoe IL: The Free Press, 1955), 138. 39 Simmel, The Web of Group-Affiliations, 141. 40 Raymond Williams, “The Emergence of Modernism,” The Politics of Modernism (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 44. 41 See Raymond Williams for a discussion of Lukacs’ totality in “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” Culture and Materialism (New York: Verso, 2005), 35-36. 42 Milton A. Cohen, “‘To Stand on the Rock of the Word “We”’”: Appeals, Snares, and Impact of Modernist Groups Before World War I,” Modernist Group Dynamics Eds. Fabio Durão and Dominic Williams (Newcastle UK: Cambridge Scholars P, 2008), 1-26, 2. 43 Cohen, “‘To Stand on the Rock of the Word “We”’, 4. 44 Pierre Bourdieu, The Fields of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia UP, 1993). 45 Guido Caldarelli and Michele Cantanzaro, A Short Introduction to Networks (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 4. 46 Alan Liu has argued that the digital humanities tend to remain “missing in action on the cultural-critical scene,” instead focusing too extensively on “projects that amass the most data for the greatest number, process that data most efficiently and flexibly . . . and manage the whole through ever ‘smarter’ standards, protocols, schema, templates, and databases.”46 Although digital humanities projects can be useful in presenting important data, I agree with Liu that such projects benefit from rigorous cultural critique, and the digital elements of this project serve as cultural critique of the modernist moment (491). For more, see Debates in the Digital Humanities ed. Matthew Gold (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012). For a more 40 general introduction to digital humanities, see David Berry (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 47 Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2013), 28. 48 Richard So and Hoyt Long, “Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism,” boundary 2 40.2 (2013): 147. 49 For a more in-depth discussion of these concepts see Charles Kadushin, Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012). 50 Caldarelli and Cantanzaro, A Short Introduction to Networks, 4. 51 Matthew Luskey, Modernist Ephemera: Little Magazines and the Dynamics of Coalition, Passing, and Failure, University of Oregon Ph.D. Dissertation, 2003. 52 In his introduction to Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun describes Habermas’s role in relation to the Frankfurt School: “More specifically, it is part of Habermas’s lifelong effort to reground the Frankfurt School project of critical theory in order to get out of the pessimistic cul de sac in which Horkheimer and Adorno found themselves in the postwar era” (5). 53 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT P, 1991), 27. 54 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Habermas and the Public Sphere Ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT P, 1992), 123. 55 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 56. 56 See Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, “Network,” New Keywords (London: Blackwell P, 2005). The origin of the term “symbolic analyst is found in Robert Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Random House, 1992). 57 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Modern Library, 1980), 202. 58 Douglas Goldring, South Lodge (London: Constable, 1943), 47. 59 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 1991), 43. 60 Ezra Pound, “Small Magazines,” The English Journal 19.9 (1930): 689-704, 701. 61 Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich, The Little Magazine (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1946), 14. 62 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991), 35. 63 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 2007). 41 64 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-garde (Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1968), 20. 65 Bruce Tuckman, “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups,” Psychological Bulletin 63.6 (1965): 384-99. 66 Fabio Durão and Dominic Williams, Modernist Group Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), vii. 42 CHAPTER II SOCIAL NETWORKS OF MODERNIST SALONS “One led to another and they all seemed to have something in them that must be examined and understood, but they formed into different constellations that rarely touched each other, yet each one was a fragment in the same large puzzle that must somehow be solved.” –Mabel Dodge “What did you see in the Salon? I saw—that I was seen.” –Natalie Barney1 In 2003, The New York Times praised “social networks” as one of the year’s “new ideas.”2 Perhaps hyperbolically, the newspaper explains its celebration of social networks by pointing to the global spread of communication facilitated by social media; however, this assertion belies the existence of social networks throughout modern history. Ninety years before The Times’ article, salon hostess Mabel Dodge characterizes her experience of the nineteen-tens in similar terms, “Looking back on it now, it seems as though everywhere, in that year of 1913, barriers went down and people reached each other who had never been in touch before; there were all sorts of new ways to communicate, as well as new communications.”3 Like the new theories of art and literature percolating during the early twentieth century, Dodge imagines and advocates new forms of collaboration, unique to industrialized capitalist modernity. Steam power, railroads, and telecommunications increasingly connect distant locations in more direct ways and facilitate widespread, transnational social interactions. These changes have a direct effect on how people imagine themselves fitting into a social order. Hostess Violet Hunt sums up this transformation, “Since wireless—wonderful wireless—I have come to believe that some sort of receiving station can be set up under conditions of intense human sympathy.”4 Hunt turns to wireless technology as a metaphor to describe new possibilities for human connection, reflecting the social revolutions that occur during 43 this period. For good or ill, individuals no longer remain confined to small geographical areas, insulated from the larger world. The explosion in connectivity, which follows developments in transportation and telecommunication technologies, aligns historically with the rise of modernism in visual art, philosophy, music, and literature. Metropolitan centers in Paris, London, and New York become destination points for experimental thinkers who take advantage of developing technologies to leave their home countries and experience avant-garde communities across the Atlantic, plugging themselves into a large social network of other artists, writers, publics, and financial supporters. Alongside the expansions in physical movement, however, the need for somewhat private venues of like-minded people with whom to collaborate and communicate the new ideas of a burgeoning modernism becomes paramount. To provide such an outlet, modernist hostesses revive a version of the eighteenth-century French salon. Hosted by such figures as Gertrude Stein in Paris, Hunt in London, and Dodge in New York—whose salons represent the most experimental of the salons in operation before the war—these salons model alternative social networks which serve as hubs for traveling artists and writers to discuss and disseminate their work outside traditional media outlets. These social networks not only provide interesting enclaves in which the avant-garde can “play” but also perform a crucial role in the ideological construction of early modernism. Through private discourse, exhibition, encouragement, and the generation of economic and soci0cultural capital, the visitors to these salons establish a vast network throughout which to transmit their ideas and visions. This semi-private, alternative coterie sphere allows these early pioneers to collectively explore and collaboratively build modernism. Privacy affords hostesses an opportunity to collect under their roofs contemporary intellectuals, writers, and painters who need a place to collaborate and who provide their hostesses with cache as arbiters of culture. The urban context in 44 which these salons appear, while supporting the physical possibilities for collaboration, can prove estranging and necessitates a supportive space for discussion of revolutionary ideas. During the same historical period that industrialized, capitalist modernity eases connection among individuals, the forces of the market and the concomitant drive toward economic profits in the U.S. and the conflict between traditional, aristocratic culture and a newly emergent bourgeoisie both of which have little use for avant-garde art in the U.K., create conditions hostile to the radical cultural experiments of modernist artists and writers. During this period, England and the U.S. actively suppress radical political and aesthetic ideas that challenge traditional values. Although France seems more congenial to unconventional thinking than the U.S. or U.K. during the early-twentieth century, it is still surprisingly conventional in matters of taste. These alienating experiences of modernity, the sensation of “a unity of disunity,” as Marshall Berman describes it, exacerbate the need for alternative spheres of sociability localized outside the increasingly regulated and commercialized sociability rising to prominence in the early twentieth century.5 The frequency with which modernists travel between metropolitan hubs demands a corresponding expansion of their social networks outside the existing bastions of established art institutions and mainstream capitalist markets, which most of these figures deride in their pursuit of novelty. During the years leading up to World War I, the most viable and significant option for joining these alternative social networks resides in the modernist salon. Responding to the instrumentalizing forces of an increasingly bureaucratic modernity—what Max Weber describes as the “disenchantment of the world”— modernist salons operate as alternative sites of sociability that connect individuals to each other via their passage through the salon’s alternative location in the cultural field.6 Janet Lyon reads these unique social practices in the salon as a form of “re- enchantment” that she argues represents the “constitutive features of one of the 45 most important cultural formations of modernism: the bohemian salon.”7 These practices of sociability depend on what Lyon describes as “a fluid structure of intimacy” that “may be generated within certain settings where individualism is balanced by collectivity.”8 Even as the collective nature of the salon presupposes joining a group, each individual contributes to the overarching salon through their intimate contact with other visitors. Christine Stansell makes a similar observation regarding the power of the metropolis in enabling these alternative social circles to appear: “it was culture . . . a distinctly metropolitan network of affinities and institutions that provided the moderns the means to set themselves apart from others.”9 In her account, the city provides a fertile soil from which to create unconventional circuits of discourse, which rejuvenates individual moderns even as they join a vast urban network made up of hundreds of other points of contact. Because of its unique balance of individual and collective, the modernist salon appears the most convivial form for these alternative networks to take. Of all the networks of modernism, salons are the most sociable and the most ephemeral. Although these intellectual gatherings maintain some of the traditional elements of the eighteenth-century salon, modernist salons exhibit different contours and respond to different historical pressures. Eighteenth and nineteenth- century French salons, the tradition upon which many modern hostesses draw, are held in the homes of aristocratic women and remain the provenance of the upper classes. Steven Kale describes the sociability of these French salons as “a well- regulated practice embedded in a larger social formation, usually referred to as high society, or simply le monde, which itself was governed by rules and conventions.”10 French tradition requires careful guidelines for comportment within salons, and most of these regulations serve a larger function in imparting aristocratic social virtues. Classical salons provide valuable lessons in upper-class behavior and, due to the particular make-up of French society during this period, overlap the political, 46 private, and public spheres: “Based in the private domicile and maintained by unspoken rituals rooted in the practices of an aristocratic milieu, the salon was a powerful tool for linking private interests to political power and public influence prior to the rise of professional specialization and the bureaucratization of public life.”11 Bridging the political and public spheres of French society, classical salons serve an important function in terms of inculcating aristocratic traditions and establishing public connections. As nineteenth-century French writers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt phrase it, “good company in the eighteenth century was more than the mentor of civilized living; it not merely upheld such standards as derive from taste; it exercised a moral influence as well, by promoting virtues of custom and conduct, by entertaining a spirit of self-respect, by preserving a sense of honor.”12 Traditional salons operate as proving grounds for developing social manners and interiorizing aristocratic modes of behavior. Modernist salons maintain the traditional emphasis on inculcating values through sociability but alter the information and ethos transmitted through the salon. Instead of reproducing the social values of the upper classes, modernist salons modify the discursive elements of the classical salon to advance avant-garde ideas about art, literature, culture, and politics. These modernist salons provide key sites for mobile artists and writers to socialize, discuss their artistic experiments, plan their revolutions, and dream of new social orders, while visitors hail from a wide spectrum of class backgrounds, political movements, aesthetic orientations, and national contexts. Evenings feature discussions of the latest currents of thought on a variety of topics, and these debates prove significant for the dialogic development of modernism. Visitors to the modernist salon connect to an underground web of nodes existing outside the regular circuits of the public sphere. Although Jürgen Habermas positions aristocratic salons alongside coffeehouses as key sites for the development of the French bourgeois public sphere during the eighteenth century, modernist 47 salons do not map onto the twentieth-century public sphere in the same way.13 Because the theories, ideas, and values circulated within the modernist salon reflect an aggressively experimental and thus controversial position within the bourgeois public sphere, hostesses develop semi-private coteries, which provide space for experimentation and free discussion. The meetings remain open to visitors with the understanding that they are entering a different type of social space where bohemian experiment is the norm. Of course, these salons are discussed in newspapers and remain open to interested visitors, but the semi-private atmosphere of “coterie spheres,” as I call these alternative social networks operating in modernist salons, provides mutually beneficial opportunities for both avant-gardists and bourgeois attendees. For the bourgeois visitor, the coterie provides a mostly private, safe location to hear and discuss controversial topics. For the avant-garde writers, artists, and radicals, the attendance of bourgeois visitors, some of whom are invited by the hostess, provides social connections not otherwise available and possible sources of financial support from wealthy individuals.14 Rather than place value only on the attendance of aristocratic and wealthy visitors, modernist hostesses provide a space for poor, aspiring artists and radicals to mingle and talk on equal footing with wealthy bourgeoisie. Richard Aldington makes this distinction clear in a description of his first appearance at a “literary party” in London where he notices eighteenth-century social divisions were scrupulously enforced: “It was whispered to me that the inner room contained a Great Poet, and I gradually realised that in this salon there was an outer room for the unknown and an inner shrine for the illustrious.” By contrast, he remembers his attendance at Hunt’s modernist salon offers a different social milieu, which deliberately upends expected social norms of the previous encounter. “A couple of years later,” Aldington writes, “I met that Great Poet on more equal terms at Violet Hunt’s, and he had to listen to Ezra Pound, Gaudier, and myself playing verbal ninepins with the Post-Victorians, 48 the Royal Academy, and a variety of other pompiers’ institutions.”15 Aldington’s account of Hunt’s salon demonstrates the crucial element that distinguishes modernist salons from their eighteenth-century ancestors. Experiment, diversity, and heterogeneity, but most of all a leveling of social distinction, characterize modernist salons. Well-organized salon evenings feature an array of different people who may never meet outside the salon. Painters, poets, sculptors, and writers are frequently found in accounts of the salon, and, among the creative persons whom these hostesses see at their meetings, many represent the brightest and most innovative. For example, in the frontispiece to her autobiography, Aventures de l’esprit, Parisian hostess Natalie Barney includes a map of her literary salon, which goes to great lengths to demonstrate the broad array of visitors to “le salon de l’amazone” (fig. 1).16 The visitors listed here represent some of the most important Anglo-American literary figures visiting or living in Paris, including William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, publisher Sylvia Beach, Ford Madox Ford, avant-garde poet Blaise Cendrars, Virgil Thompson, novelist Mary Butts, and Symbolist poet Arthur Symons. These traveling and expatriate modernists appear alongside important Parisian artists and writers including poet Paul Valéry and Cubist painter Marie Laurencin. This drawing of the salon reflects my description of it as a social network. Barney draws lines that wind through the crowd, demarcating certain sectors of her salon and suggesting a path through the various groups. But in modernist salons, a variety of less artistic figures appear too. Not only did salons host the experimental poets, painters, and writers of the period but also political radicals, prominent intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, and the curious bourgeoisie. The heterogeneity of the visitors makes possible a wide assortment of potential connections, and important experimenters in various fields, whether art or politics, can collaborate and communicate. 49 Barney’s map of cultural figures at her evenings underscores as well the way such salons, like the hostesses’ accounts of them, represent a socio-aesthetic form centered on the hostess as a modernist artist in her own right, an artist whose medium is arranging social intercourse in the coterie sphere and juxtaposing interesting cultural producers. Sometimes, these juxtapositions yield humorous side effects, as when Henry James tries to prevent his hostess Ottoline Morrell from going downstairs to her own salon because he distrusts the bohemian visitors she has invited. Sometimes the confrontations intimate risk, as when Dodge hosts her “Dangerous Characters” evening in which she brings anarchists and socialists into direct confrontation.17 Either way, salonnières carefully craft these encounters to produce reactions and interactions. In this way, hostesses create a kind of social art, Fig. 1: Natalie Barney’s salon, frontispiece Aventures de l’esprit (1929) 50 a “multi-coloured” crowd as Dodge describes it, whose combined social intercourse provides the context for exploring and developing modernist concepts.18 Barney’s map foregrounds the internal dialectic at the heart of salons, visualizing the processes by which an individual renders herself in relation to the social network of her coterie sphere. Salons thus operate via a dialectical relation between the individual node of the hostess and the system constellated through connections to it. The synthesis between the individual and the group dynamically produces new forms of collaboration and social interaction unique to the world of modernism. Hostesses rely on such a dialectic to create social collages made up of the diverse participants they invite. Collage develops out of Picasso’s Cubism and serves as the avant-garde medium par excellence. As an art form, collage represents an art of juxtaposition rather than synthesis. Peter Bürger describes collage: “It is no longer the harmony of the individual parts that constitutes the whole; it is the contradictory relationship of heterogeneous elements.”19 Rather than diverse bits of different material pasted onto a painting, however, hostesses collect unique individuals. Stansell argues a similar point in her description of salon conversation: “The urbane, politically aware conversation was notable for its juxtapositions: it was a pastiche of speech, a bricolage, a collage.”20 Hostesses seek interesting and provocative individuals to join the social network because these individuals provide invigorating and dynamic reactions when they confront one another: novelty and experiment through social engineering. As Brigit Patmore, a friend to many London modernists, recollects regarding her own experience of social interactions at Hunt’s: “It was a fountain from which an entirely different stream of life sprang and I found it stimulating in contrast to the rather conventional life I led.”21 Attending a modernist salon means suspending judgment in favor of curiosity and a thirst for newness. Unlike stuffy salons that merely mimic classical traditions, modernist salons actively disrupt social conventions in order to further the experimental and exceptional. 51 However, such a thirst for innovation does not mean that these evenings are unorganized. On the contrary, salon hostesses, even in the most bohemian salons, work hard to ensure an interesting and enlivening mixture of individuals, efforts which lend the modernist salon its particular importance as a crucible for new ideas. The salon thus represents a social form of the collage aesthetic, in which multiplicity is deliberately crafted in an effort to highlight distinctions between elements.22 Moreover, the larger structure of nodes connected together brings about the totality of modernism as a process of social collaboration in these networks. As is evident in graph 1, the salons of Dodge, Stein, and Hunt, when visualized together, present a “tangled mesh of modernists,” to borrow Bonnie Kime Scott’s phrase, a massive and unreadable mess of overlapping connections and interactions.23 However, when we organize these relations based on clusters of connections, as in graph 2, we can see that each salon features its regular visitors. For example, Stein’s salon features a higher number of painters and sculptors operating in Paris whereas Dodge’s salon features more political radicals and journalists and Hunt’s features a mix of Edwardians and Vorticists with a few high society people mixed in. Certainly, these graphs are not entirely exhaustive, but they capture the different character of each salon based on the nodes in the cluster. Even though each salon features a unique atmosphere, each remains connected to the others. When visualized, these three salons demonstrate the horizontal interconnections among them. Many nodes connect to multiple salons, exchanging ideas and theories about modern art, literature, and politics as they enter each new salon. These conduits connecting the prominent cultural salons reveal that modernism is the product of hundreds of individuals trafficking in and out of social gatherings organized by hostesses. Because of the possibilities they provide for generating diffuse social webs, salons remain crucial loci for the collective building of European and American 52 Graph 1: Salon overlaps Stein, Hunt, and Dodge’s. 53 Graph 2: Same graph clustered around shared connections (bottom). The bottom graph features Stein (dark green), Hunt (purple), and Dodge (blue). Other clusters: Dodge’s Heterodoxy group (orange), Stieglitz’s 291 circle (green), Vorticists (yellow), and less affiliated (red). 54 modernism, connecting the circuits of the avant-garde to central meeting places— hubs—and providing the economic and social capital crucial for modernist writers and artists to produce experimental works. Typically, modernist salons are held in the home of a sympathetic bourgeois woman whose wealth affords a certain level of comfort yet supports the bohemian lifestyle of the attendees. Although some bourgeois men do host salons—Walter Arensberg and Ford Madox Hueffer as prominent examples—women organize most salons, and these hostesses are often interested in new ideas and topics and provide a space for discussion of them. Among some male modernists, the social function of the hostess is emblematic of silliness and frivolity. Most visibly, Pound derides these women in his poem “Portrait d’une Femme” (1912): You are a person of some interest, one comes to you And takes strange gain away: Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion; Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two24 For Pound and his cohort, hostesses and the social occasions they provide offer little to the serious work of producing literature. He represents these hostesses as vacuous backdrops, on the verge of saying something interesting. Instead of intelligent conversation, however, his speaker receives the “strange gain” of frivolous gossip, the “trophies fished up” that produce nothing new. These hostesses often remain subdued when participating in the salon, negotiating their gender roles by allowing others to steer conversations. Dodge, for example, describes her philosophy toward her evenings in passive terms: “The share I had in bringing people together was inspired not at all by any conscious realization in me, for I was at that time really more essentially an instrument.”25 In her autobiography, she glories in being an inspiration to male intellectuals and providing a space for their genius. Yet, reading the autobiographies of these hostesses reveals that they self-consciously negotiate 55 these roles. Each woman represents herself as removed and distant from direct involvement, yet each hostess maintains and organizes a vibrant site for crucial social collaboration. Despite Pound’s dismissal of women as vapid and uninteresting, reading these memoirs reveals that salonnières demonstrate an important and neglected form of modernist self-fashioning. Under the auspices of reporting a life story—or in Stein’s case, narrating someone else’s life story—in which important events are “objectively” recounted, these modernist hostesses fashion themselves as key nodes at the center of salon hubs through which important social networks form and connect. These autobiographies and memoirs thus provide an account of the hostess as a modernist artist in her own right, crafting social spaces in which the dialogic development of modernism is possible. Most of these major salon facilitators possess significant economic resources, which makes holding a salon possible. Dodge generates financial resources both through her family’s wealth and her marriage to architect Edwin Dodge, and Stein, although not extravagantly affluent, lives comfortably with support from her brother Michael’s wise investments in the railroad. Of the major salon hostesses, Hunt remains relatively less wealthy in strictly economic terms, but her Pre-Raphaelite ancestry invests her with a certain amount of cultural capital nonetheless, and she circulates among the wealthier members of London society. In this regard, the salon itself appears a contradiction in terms: the hostess reaping the financial benefits and enjoying the comforts of capitalist modernity, while the avant-gardists, radicals, and artists struggle for recognition within or against the market system. Yet, the bourgeois class position of the hostesses provides key monetary and cultural support for struggling artists producing avant-garde art because these hostesses maintain social connections ensuring that the more sympathetic and wealthy members of the upper classes will be present at the meetings. Modernists and political radicals rely on this sponsorship from wealthy elites to further their activities, and connecting to 56 the social network of the salon expands the possibilities for crucial patronage and funding. Six Degrees of Modernism: Congregating in a Small World The most important aspect of these salons is the opportunity they provide writers, artists, philosophers, intellectuals, and radicals to interact in person. Whereas little magazines might organize clubs or host meetings at editorial offices, and bookstores might hold readings of authors’ works in the shop, salons remain the most social of the networks of modernism. The evenings provide entertainments, lectures, discussions, and activities to expand personal horizons. Congregating at regular intervals, attendees connect to larger circles of friends, patrons, colleagues, activists, and other participants. Information, influence, and patronage flow through such personal interactions, and most of the salons remain open to new visitors. Even hostesses with more rigid attendance policies rarely enforce them very closely, and, due to the attendance of so many different individuals, boundaries between people that exist in the larger social world can be significantly circumvented. This clustering of participants within salons corresponds to a structure of society that Georg Simmel posits as a “web of group affiliations.” Despite a popular belief that people in cities are hopelessly alienated and isolated, Simmel notices that individuals in large metropolitan areas often associate with other individuals based on shared interests or views. He contends that one individual can belong to multiple, layered groups with different demands on him or her, and that this sense of affiliation to multiple circles is a uniquely modern phenomenon: Today someone may belong, aside from his occupational position, to a scientific association, he may sit on a board of directors of a corporation and occupy an honorific position in the city government. Such a person will be more clearly determined sociologically, the less his participation in one group by itself enjoins upon him participation 57 in another. He is determined sociologically in the sense that the groups ‘intersect’ in his person by virtue of his participation with them.26 Determining an individual’s social role in modernity becomes complicated, Simmel claims, because individuals operate in overlapping spheres with different demands; a sociological study of these modern individuals must therefore account for intersections and connections as part of an individual’s social being. In a similar vein, visitors to modernist salons represent a wide array of circles: political affiliations, aesthetic theories, social backgrounds, philosophical orientations, national identities, and group memberships. Despite the localized nature of the salon, the diversity of these groups establishes a dynamic and far-reaching web of interconnections based on the multiplicity of the other social circles to which the participants belong. This variety of participants means, not only that a broad swath of social interests are represented in each salon, but also that connections to other attendees produces even more diverse communities both inside and outside the actual meetings. Webs of association spiral outward from salons into the broader community, emphasizing the closeness of alternative groups within a larger social milieu. Dodge compares her correspondence during these years to “tentacles stretching in all directions,” connecting her salon with all sectors of New York society and connecting those disparate sectors together.27 Network theorists describe this phenomenon as the “small world,” the conjunction of disparate and unconnected individuals due to the number and diversity of the individuals involved (graph 3). Guido Caldarelli and Michele Cantanzaro define the characteristics of the small- world property as “the fact that the average distance between any two nodes (measured as the shortest path that connects them) is very small.”28 The short path between two seemingly unrelated nodes results from the closeness of so many individual artists and writers within salons, a proximity that can easily connect 58 Graph 3: The “small world” of Dodge’s salon. 59 disparate individuals, if not directly, then within a few links; moreover, the presence of non-artistic figures such as the royalty which attend the Steins’, the governors and lawyers who occasion Dodge’s, or the Pre-Raphaelite circle related to Hunt, provide circuits of relation between modernists and non-modernist cultural spheres and arenas. Modernists often attend more than one salon, establishing linkages between them. For example, Stein attends Dodge’s Villa Curonia salon in Florence. A postcard with an image of the Villa Curonia invites Stein to come to lunch, lamenting “the cold weather in July” (fig. 2).29 This card represents a connection between these two discrete salons but also between the Steins’ salon and Dodge’s subsequent New York salon. Despite the different continents, visitors to Dodge’s salon could connect with the Steins’ and vice versa through letters of introduction or other forms of recognition. And this is only a map of the “first-order zone” or direct connections between individuals, defined by Charles Kadushin as “The set of nodes directly linked to any given node.”30 That is, a node such as Dodge or Stein possesses a cluster of contacts to whom she is “directly linked,” as, in this case, Stein and Dodge connect to each other. However, networks extend beyond this first-order zone of direct contact. Although the salons are usually composed of small, dense clusters of individuals attending regularly, every person who attends belongs to wider circles composed of other people and institutions. For example, extending Dodge’s network to the second-order zone reveals that attendees to her salon connect to major publications such as Collier’s and McClure’s, alternative magazines such as The Masses, artistic institutions such as the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, Fig. 2: Postcard of Villa Curonia, Beinecke Library 60 major newspapers such as The New York Press and The Globe, and leaders of political movements such as Emma Goldman (graph 3). The sheer number of different participants attending the meetings swells when considering the various social circles to which the attendees belong, demonstrating that social forms of modernism pervade a wide array of interactions, spreading awareness of aesthetics and politics to individuals who would not have access to modernism otherwise. Despite occurring in a discrete space, the social webs within salons spread information through the meetings to much wider social circles. This interconnection of different social circles is a major feature in Stein’s salon, as regulars frequently bring friends or relations or, in lieu of physical introductions, write letters introducing newcomers. Stein’s reputation before World War I is slow to build despite her publication of Three Lives in 1909, but she gains notoriety among moderns for her art collection during these early years. Many come to see the strange modern pictures and interact with the painters themselves. In the Autobiography, Stein repeatedly describes her salon in terms of who brought whom: “The idea was that anybody could come but for form’s sake and in Paris you have to have a formula, everybody was supposed to be able to mention the name of somebody who had told them about it.”31 Of course, the Autobiography is not a factual document nor can the narrator be considered reliable—Stein writes from the perspective of Toklas—yet the fascination with invitation pervades the book and offers a way to read the Stein salon as a series of contacts between the first-order zone of direct contacts and the second-order zone of their friends and relations. As a typical example, Stein characterizes a complex series of connections: “Derain and Braque became followers of Picasso about six months after Picasso had, through Gertrude Stein and her brother, met Matisse. Matisse had in the meantime introduced Picasso to negro sculpture.”32 This confusing series of connections borders on paradox. Beginning with Derain and Braque following Picasso, the 61 description shifts temporally to six months in the past in which Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude and Leo. Yet, here the temporal markers become confusing. Where and when does “in the meantime” signify? Does this phrase interrupt the “following” of Picasso or the six months following the meeting between Picasso and Matisse via the Steins? As a measure of temporal passage, “in the meantime” suggests Matisse introduces Picasso to this style of sculpture during some other series of events, but Stein leaves it unclear what exactly those events are. This uncertainty reveals a larger fascination in the Autobiography with the complexity of social connections and overlappings. Throughout the Autobiography, Stein draws attention to the vastly different types of people who come to see her collection. By visualizing this list of visitors mentioned in the Autobiography, we can reveal social connections in her salon between unknown visitors and now well-known modernists (graph 4). Each directed edge represents an invitation from one person to another (the arrow represents the inviter > invitee relation). For example, the graph predictably shows that Picasso invites a variety of different modernists including avant-garde musician Erik Satie, poet Blaise Cendrars, and Italian Futurist Gino Severini. At the same time, this graph reveals that journalist Kate Buss, a little-known figure in the history of modernism, introduces important American modernists Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Alfred Kreymborg to the Stein salon. Connections we might expect to be direct turn out to follow digressive routes through unfamiliar relationships. Individuals long relegated to the background of modernist studies, it turns out, occupy key positions in the social web of invitations and introductions that characterize the Stein salon. Applying macroanalysis to Stein’s salon reveals that relationships among prominent modernists during this period rely on connective tissue that we reconstruct by looking at all the linkages rather than the ones we recognize. Modernism thus takes 62 Graph 4: Directed edges of invitation to Stein’s salon (described in The Autobiography) 63 on a “thickness” and complexity and suggests avenues for close analysis of these unknown figures. Stein’s representation of the connections leading outward from her salon illustrates her efforts to transform it into the principal site for modern art in Paris and into a transatlantic destination for visual artists from England, Germany, Russia, Spain, and North America. Mellow emphasizes Gertrude and her brother Leo’s deliberate self-positioning within an international art scene: “the Steins had so placed themselves at the center of the network of journalists, publicists, advocates, and collectors who were spreading the gospel of modernism that, sooner or later, anyone interested in modern art would find his way to the rue de Fleurus.”33 The spreading influence of Stein’s salon, as Mellow further notes, is not restricted to the borders of Paris: “It was at once democratic and congenial, an international meeting ground buzzing with transcontinental gossip.”34 During the “heroic days” of the pre-World War salon, as Wickes dubs that period at the rue de Fleurus, British and North American devotees travel across the Atlantic to visit the Stein salon and mix with the practitioners of the avant-garde who appear at the meetings.35 These visitors often arrive with ideas about modern art and literature developed in London or New York, and they transmit the new visions of modernism forming in Paris back with them when they return home. Information flows back and forth among these metropoles, following the paths of travelers. By promoting modern art to her visitors, Stein makes her Saturday evenings a quintessential site for encountering modernism in Paris, propelling Stein into the spotlight she so desires. Modern ideas about art in Europe are thus disseminated through the social gatherings at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Salon social networks encompass a wide range of individuals and groups, establishing and sometimes forcing connections where none had existed before. The heterogeneity of Dodge’s “Evenings” presents a living collage, much like the modern 64 art Dodge champions in New York. Van Wyck Brooks describes Dodge’s salon in terms of this eclectic mix: Mabel Dodge and her rooms were a focus of the new illuminati, writers, artists, agitators, philosophers, eugenists, feminists and all who had flair or a notion that characterized the moment. Only Hippolyte Havel’s ‘bourgeois pigs’ were barred there, and Big Bill Haywood led a debate on the question whether the art of the future was not to be of the proletariat as well as for it.36 In this passage, Brooks captures the discursive juxtapositions that Dodge’s salon fosters. In the energetic and often violent world of pre-war New York, Dodge imagines herself as a facilitator, bringing disparate ideologies into dialectical and dialogical confrontation. Marjorie Perloff defines a similar effect in her analysis of collage: “no item is necessarily related to the adjacent one even as that item finds its proper analogues somewhere else in the painting. The effect of such scrambling is to impel the viewer to make his or her own connections.”37 Whereas painters mix different materials in their paintings, Dodge “scrambles” expected social relationships, pushing people into unfamiliar contact with others in the hope that inequality and discord could be combated through recognition and familiarity. Her organization of these connections operates on juxtapositions and discordances that provide an energy and dynamism to the proceedings and produce new social combinations. “I saw quite soon in my New York life,” Dodge claimed “it was only the separations between different kinds of people that enabled them to have power over each other.”38 In an age where radicals plotted insurrection, Dodge believes her salon could spark a revolution of a very different sort: a change in consciousness through dialogue. “The time of the voice is at hand,” she announces in an interview with The New York Press in 1914.39 65 As Dodge recounts, journalists Hutchins Hapgood and Lincoln Steffens encourage her to systematize these diverse figures and movements through her “Evenings.” “Why not organize all this accidental, unplanned activity around you” Steffens suggests, “this coming and going of visitors, and see these people at certain hours. Have Evenings!”40 In response to Dodge’s demurral at the prospect of “organizing,” Steffens modifies his proposal: ‘Oh, I don’t mean that you should organize the Evenings,’ he flashed at me with a white smile beneath his little brown bang. ‘I mean, get people here at certain times and let them feel absolutely free to be themselves, and see what happens. Let everybody come! All these different kinds of people that you know, together here, without being managed or herded in any way! Why, something wonderful might come of it! You might even revive General Conversation!’41 Steffens suggests that the Evenings operate with as much individual freedom and as little outside organizing as possible. In a modern reinterpretation of the classical salon, he imagines dialogic performance, “General Conversation,” a necessary component to such a project. Because of the free-speech fight, this atmosphere of dialogic freedom in the salon proves enticing to many of New York’s more controversial figures. The social possibilities of a salon open to anyone mean that Dodge’s “Evenings” would provide an excitingly heterogeneous environment. Dodge describes these encounters in terms that emphasize the sheer number of connections her salon made possible: Socialists, Trade-Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, ‘Old Friends,’ Psychoanalysts, I.W.W.’s, Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern-Artists, Clubwomen, Woman’s-place-is-in-the-home Women, Clergymen, and just plain men all met there and, stammering in an unaccustomed 66 freedom a kind of speech called Free, exchanged a variousness in vocabulary called, in euphemistic optimism, Opinions!” Dodge’s list stresses the variety of the salon, both in terms of social class and political affiliation. Many of these people exhibit antipathies toward the others but mingle politely at Dodge’s. The only prerequisite for attendance seems to have been an interest in attending and talking freely through difficult ideas. These interactions could be confrontational or humorous, but Dodge always provides a space in which to explore and debate the current ideologies and politics. Her salon exemplifies the ways in which these social gatherings provide a form of modernist sociability, a totality that operates via confrontation and discord rather than seamlessness. Attending these salons provides avant-gardists the unique opportunity to mix socially with a wide variety of people from different social strata. The diversity of the crowd affords new lines of connection that would not have developed outside the confines of the salon. Hostesses deliberately try to cut across social strata in an effort to foster just such combinations, linking radicals with bourgeois socialites, journalists with avant-garde painters, or royalty with poets in surprisingly unique formations. Because of the heterogeneity and openness of these salons, and their semi-private nature, visitors can listen to ideas and theories that they otherwise would not have heard. Thus, salonnières provide a coterie sphere, external to the regulative power of the State and the press, in which modernists can meet and experiment through private discussion and supportive debate. These coterie spheres allow distinctive sectors of society to convene regularly in a fashionably located, private yet roomy space, with food and drink offered, and an enlightening evening of discussion. These social events, rather than existing as frivolous bits of literary gossip, instead perform an important function in the fostering and maintenance of modernism. Having the private space in which to collaborate allows modernists some measure of freedom. 67 The Modernist Room “There they were, safe, shut in with Mabel Dodge—all feeling secure except her.”42 Dodge describes her salon as providing security for individuals to speak freely without fear of legal suppression or censorship, demonstrating that the most crucial component in fostering social networks is provided by the availability of physical space separate from prying eyes. “Imagine, then,” she continues “a stream of human beings passing in and out of those rooms; one stream where many currents mingled together for a little while.”43 These rooms contain and direct the flows of visitors and provide a space for the hostess-artist to create. Salonnières require semi-private spaces in which to host evenings on a regular basis, and their living quarters usually serve the purpose. Although the press occasionally tried to enter salons to report on social events, hostesses often ask them to leave, preferring the freedom of privacy. Unlike the other networks I examine in this study, the salon occurs over time in one interior location, physically bringing together disparate individuals in an intimate space unlike the abstract and less personal spaces of little magazines and the aggressively counter-public demonstrations of avant-garde movements. In order for salons to function, the meeting-place must offer a private, comfortable, and roomy location, and the street address should afford proximity to urban centers, especially to the fashionable, artistic parts of the city. Salons differ from looser social circles in cafés, restaurants, and clubs that modernists frequent because they offer the privacy and space to exhibit, perform, or collaborate away from the public social scene.44 The combination of these characteristics—central physical setting, private space, fashionable location, and stylized décor—encompasses what I am calling “the modernist room,” a container which houses and sustains the coterie sphere. Just as a modernist poem, play, or novel innovates on traditional forms and demonstrates an experimentally aesthetic quality, these rooms reveal experimentally modernist techniques in the ways the hostess imagines, styles, and juxtaposes visitors and décor. 68 Establishing the atmosphere for the salon requires an aesthetic eye and sensitivity to a unique style. Each salon crafts this experimental interior differently, yet all of them manifest the conscious choices of the hostesses to create a distinctive environment. Interior design plays a significant part in establishing the modernist salon as a space for avant-garde experimentation and for suspension of bourgeois pretensions and mores, demanding equal parts style and functionality. Inviting intellectuals, artists, and radicals into one’s home requires décor that mirrors the passionate creative atmosphere of the discussions. However, décor is balanced with facility of interaction: rooms must be spacious enough to allow participants to mingle or lecture, depending on the evening’s program. Among the rooms that hold modernist salons, perhaps none appears more stylishly designed than Dodge’s apartment in Greenwich Village. Here, wall-space and decoration are carefully designed to create an intimate space for visitors. She opens the second volume of her autobiography Intimate Memories with an extended description of her apartment’s interior decoration, which emphasizes her sense of this lightness: I had every single bit of the woodwork painted white, and had all the walls papered with thick, white paper . . . It seemed to me I couldn’t get enough white into that apartment. I suppose it was a repudiation of grimy New York. I even sent to the Villa for the big, white bearskin rug and laid it in front of the white marble fireplace in the front room.45 The minimalism of white lends a modern atmosphere to the room. Steven Watson describes this apartment as a “tabula rasa,” a sparse negation of the “formality” of Dodge’s sumptuously Florentine Villa Curonia.46 This style serves a specific function as a source of power for Dodge’s transition back to the New World. She repudiates all that is “ugly, ugly” about the city, as she describes it to her son on their arrival in 69 New York harbor.47 The chandelier in her apartment, she says, “hung from the ceiling in the living room, fresh as morning while the streets outside were dingy gray and sour with fog and gasoline. It overcame the world outside those walls. It made exquisite shadows on the white ceiling and altogether it acted as a charm with which to conquer cities.” Unlike the stark modern ugliness of New York, Dodge’s rooms offer a clean space like a museum or gallery in which to exhibit her social connections. The ability of her room to overcome the gray practical ugliness of the city leads Dodge to assert, “I have always known how to make rooms that had power in them.”48 Dodge’s white cocoon serves as a site for birthing her aesthetic vision of modernity as rejoinder to the grim cityscape. The distinctly modern interior of her apartment exemplifies an avant-garde sense of style and decoration, especially evident in the radical juxtaposition between the room and its visitors. In a famous photograph of the room, the high ceilings and white walls suggest eclectic style and design (fig. 3).49 The chandelier hangs high above the large open area, and the low modern couches are the most cluttered objects in the room, adorned with pillows of various shapes and sizes. A series of small objects line the alcove above the door and add an exotic yet elegant atmosphere to the room. The design of the room sharply contrasts with the list of visitors to Dodge’s “Evenings,” which includes all manner of people interested in making New York modern, producing confusion and mirth from the New York press, which often lampoons visitors to the Dodge salon. In March 1914, Chicago newspaper The Daybook derides New York’s Fig. 3: Interior of 23 Fifth Ave. 70 upper-class faddishness by playing up the juxtaposition of society people and labor leaders together in the salon: “Society was in evening dress and the I.W.W. leaders wore sweaters and the social question as discussed by the I.W.W. men kept the friends of Mrs. Dodge entertained for the evening. A pleasant time was had by all.”50 Dodge’s rooms prove humorous precisely because they refuse distinction. There is no separate room, as with Aldington’s first literary party. Instead, the room fills with different combinations and possibilities for collaboration among New York’s vanguard and old guard. However, the attendees to Dodge’s salon are more than just revolutionary window-dressing for a bored society woman. The visitors give the rooms a purpose beyond simple habitation. Dodge displays a typical ambivalence toward her decision to begin a salon in this room, but her statement belies her own investment in these social gatherings: No matter whether I would or not I had to have human beings in order to be myself. But the setting I had made was never a suitable background for the life that presently surged into it, for no sooner was this peaceful fortress completed than I opened the door of it and let the town pour in! But why was it, I wondered, that, in my life, the actors and the settings never belonged together?51 Despite her passivity, in keeping with her role as a society woman, Dodge compounds her description of the apartment’s interior with her growing interest in a particular kind of social interaction. So much of the design for her apartment remains inextricably linked with her need for sociability. She designs a stylish roomy apartment located near the cultural center of Greenwich Village and subsequently chooses to organize a salon which aimed to position herself at the center of New York modernism, with her salon as the major hub, bringing the most diffuse group of individuals into the space she creates. The concurrence of these events is more than 71 coincidental, revealing that the completion of her stylish apartment demands an audience. Whereas Dodge’s rooms in New York feature sparseness and expanse, the rooms that hold the Stein salon in Paris emphasize modern painting as an interior style. Stein and her brother Leo cover every inch of wall space with the latest paintings and drawings of the avant-garde. Whereas Dodge decorates her apartment and subsequently decides to host a salon inspired by her décor, Stein begins to collect modern paintings which results in a salon as people come to see the art. James Mellow characterizes the influence of Stein’s art collection as a draw for admirers or the curious: “A visitor to the studio at 27, rue de Fleurus in the early years of the twentieth century might well have believed he had been admitted to an entirely new form of institution—a ministry of propaganda for modern art.”52 Stein carefully organizes this “ministry of propaganda” as the essential site for European developments in art, and her position as an expatriate provides a bridge connecting Anglo-American travellers and expatriates. Located in a two-story pavillon, Stein hangs her avant-garde collection of paintings in an adjoining atelier or studio with separate entrance. Stein describes these pictures in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as “so strange that one quite instinctively looked at anything rather than at them just at first” (fig. 4).53 Covering the walls of the studio, these paintings at first cause merriment among Stein’s French neighbors but quickly turn into a local attraction, sparking a Saturday evening salon she later characterizes as a “nuisance.”54 Fig. 4: Toklas and Stein at 27, rue de Fleurus 72 Even Dodge seems initially suspicious of Stein’s taste in art when she first sees it, although she later converts wholeheartedly to the cause of modernist painting. Rather than collect assorted individuals, as Dodge does, Stein collects paintings, but the availability of such dynamic art begins to attract visitors. Violet Hunt’s Kensington salon initially resembles a formal dinner party, lacking the bohemian flavor typically associated with the avant-garde. Douglas Goldring recalls that, “Up to 1914 young men who paid formal calls or went to tea parties, had to wear top hats and ‘London clothes’ and to carry gloves and canes. At South Lodge—before the incursion of Ford [Madox Hueffer], Wyndham Lewis, and Pound—these proprieties were rigidly enforced.”55 As modernists increasingly enter the salon, they bring vitality to it. Initially, the interior of South Lodge reflects the pre-Raphaelite past rather than the modernist future. Pink and blue wallpaper designed by William Morris covers the inside, the furniture is chintz-covered, and portraits of Violet dressed in Victorian and Greek costume decorate the walls.56 Patmore describes the drawing room at South Lodge during these years as having a “frozen quality” reminiscent of “something Victorian.”57 Nonetheless, Hunt brings the latest artists and writers to her home, resulting in the regular presence of figures crucial to the advancement of British modernism. Hunt and Hueffer act as consummate networkers, constellating around them the most innovative contemporary artists London offers. Lewis characterizes the character of his hosts as a kind of social imperative: “These intellectual hosts were of that valuable kind of human, who shuns solitude as the dread symbol of unsuccess, is happiest when his rooms are jammed with people (for preference of note).”58 The attendance of newer visitors “of note” on the London scene alters the dynamics of the salon. Joan Hardwick marks the change in 1913 after the death of Violet’s mother: “The nature of South Lodge and its salon began to change. If the old and the self-consciously respectable gave it a wide berth, the young and ‘charming artist rabble who were on 73 top of the vogue’ were happy to attend parties there.”59 British modernism revolutionizes Hunt’s Edwardian “at homes” by infusing an energetic, rebellious spirit into the proceedings. Located across the street from Hueffer’s English Review offices and living quarters at 84 Holland Park Ave, South Lodge appears to be an unassuming apartment in the Campden Hill neighborhood of London from the outside. Inauspicious within a gray stucco exterior surrounded by a high wall, Hunt holds a weekly salon initially attractive to Edwardians John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. Hunt’s interest in modern writers, however, soon draws “les jeunes” as Hueffer calls them. Meetings begin to boast the attendance of the most experimental modernists living in England during the nineteen-tens. Converging on South Lodge’s tennis courts, Pound, Lewis, Rebecca West, sculptor Jacob Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, and British Futurist C.R.W. Nevinson transform the gatherings from stodgy black-tie affairs into a dynamic modernist salon.60 Goldring describes the impact of these young modernists, “In retrospect, what I chiefly remember in connection with Ford and Violet about the crowded years between 1910 and 1914 are the exciting series of art movements in which, through our association with Percy Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, we all became, to some extent, caught up.”61 The salon invites discussion and exploration of the latest art and poetry, which energizes the visitors with an awareness of their newness. From 1913 through the beginning of the war, modernists dominate Hunt’s meetings. Les jeunes quickly make their influence known, modifying the interior and exterior of South Lodge. Hunt “modernizes” the interior, transforming the outdated living room into a modernist masterpiece by commissioning Lewis to do a massive abstract painting on the wall. To match this painting, Hunt replaces the Morris curtains with brick-red tapestry curtains and paints the woodwork red. In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek portrayal, Hunt describes the particular tint of red 74 favored by the Vorticists: “And the particular tone of red affected by this Society and in harmonies of which Joseph Leopold [Hueffer] commissioned Mr. Lewis to paint the study in which I sit now—is of the tint of venous, not arterial, blood.”62 Distinguishing between the types of red favored by the Vorticists at once pokes fun at them while explaining the aesthetic dimensions. And, as if interior design is an insufficient declaration of modernism, Hunt places a phallic marble bust of Pound in her garden. Pound had donated marble to Gaudier-Brzeska with which the sculptor fashions the massive “Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound” and which Hunt subsequently volunteers to exhibit much to the consternation of the neighborhood.63 Hunt even goes so far as to adopt a Vorticist style of dress: “The very clothes we rejoiced to wear made us feel like it; they coarsened us, I think. Non-representational art makes for hardness, enjoins the cynicism that likes to look upon the crudeness, the necessaries of life merely—the red of beef, the blue of blouses, the shine of steel knives in a butcher’s shop.”64 Dressing in Vorticist clothing provides a way to revolt against traditions received from the Victorian period, and for a brief moment, Vorticism becomes a highly visible avant-garde movement in England. Central to its development during this brief period from 1913 to 1914, the South Lodge salon becomes a key site for the development and dissemination of Vorticism. Rooms that hold salons become synonymous with their geographical locations, in many cases transforming a less-than-fashionable area into a more stylish one through the notoriety or popularity of the meetings. Because modernist salons function as centers of gravity for experimental producers, the areas in which they are hosted take on cache as cultural areas. A prime location within the city is crucial to a salon’s success. When Leo Stein moves to Paris in 1903, he seeks out the most fashionable quarters for an aspiring artist and asks his uncle Ephraim Keyser for help. Keyser had already obtained the best location, so Leo takes the next best, number 27 rue de Fleurus, located just a few blocks west of the Luxembourg Gardens (fig. 5). The 75 street is less than fashionable at the time, located on the Left Bank close to the beautiful gardens and the center of Paris, but this location quickly becomes synonymous with modern art as Gertrude and Leo begin purchasing and displaying unknown artists such as Cézanne and Picasso.65 Living on the rue de Fleurus positions the Steins near some key locations important for their salon. Their apartment is only a few miles south from Vollard’s shop on the rue Laffitte where the Steins purchase their first Cézannes. Vollard’s shop proves an important site for beginning the art collection that forms the impetus for the Saturday evenings. Stein’s rooms at 27 rue de Fleurus are close to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop Shakespeare and Company to the east, and Natalie Barney’s classical Greek salon at 20 rue Jacob, less than a mile to the northeast. The major sites for disseminating new cultural ideas are all located in the same general area on the Left Bank. Dodge’s rooms at 23 Fifth Avenue place her at the center of New York’s vortex of modern energies. From here, she commands a central meeting point where New York’s various groups meet, connecting to each other via her salon. Held downtown at the corner of Fifth Ave. and Ninth St., her salon is located twenty-one Fig. 5: Stein’s location proximal to Vollard’s (top), Natalie Barney’s salon (middle), Shakespeare and Company (far right), and Luxembourg Gardens (right). 76 blocks from Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291, two miles from the 69th street National Guard Armory where the Armory Show is held, and right at the edge of Greenwich Village, which attracts the most avant-garde thinkers and eclectic residents from both North America and Europe. In his poem The Day in Bohemia, Reed describes the thriving Village scene: Yet we are free who live in Washington Square, We dare to think as Uptown wouldn’t dare, Blazing our nights with argument uproarious; What care we for a dull old world censorious When each is sure he’ll fashion something glorious?66 Reed’s poem emphasizes the fight for free speech that characterizes much of the radical undercurrent in the Village and proves significant to the exploration of modern ideas in Dodge’s salon. Reed juxtaposes this freedom to “a dull old world censorious,” emblematic of the remnants of the Puritan ideology many believe would be dissolved by “glorious” new art. The Village, represented in the poem by Washington Square, stands in stark contrast with “uptown,” the realm of the wealthy elite, and is characterized as a haven for the dispossessed, radicals, and artists. Floyd Dell dubs the Village “a tiny refuge for desperate young lovers of beauty, in the midst of the rushing metropolis.”67 Its perceived status as a harbor for the ideas of modernity that are too dangerous or threatening to the more respectable world indelibly links those who lived in the Village with the belief in free thought and speech. Because of these bohemian challenges to established orthodoxy in the nineteen-teens, Brooks describes New York as “fermenting in 1912 on a scale that was no longer provincial but continental” and, central to the upheaval, “Greenwich Village swarmed with the movers and shakers who were expressing the new insurgent spirit.”68 For American modernists, Greenwich Village represents a beacon for 77 liberality and bohemian notions, and Dodge’s salon taps into this energy in an effort to attract the “movers and shakers.” South Lodge’s location in Kensington reflects similar geographical importance as the center for British arts and culture. Located in central London, Hunt’s salon occupies the center of literary activity. Pound describes Kensington as “SWARming” with writers and rents a room at nearby 10 Church Walk to be close to the Campden Hill area, where Hunt lives, and to the offices of The English Review.69 Within two square miles in London, Hunt holds her salon at South Lodge, Hueffer publishes The English Review, and Pound sets up residence (fig. 6). Further to the east in the map, Bloomsbury modernist Virginia Woolf lives in Fitzroy Square, Roger Fry runs the Omega Workshop, and Lewis leads the Rebel Art Centre in Great Ormond Street. Finally, only a few miles from the Rebel Art Centre, Madame Strindberg opens her modernist nightclub, The Cave of the Golden Calf, the interior of which is designed by Lewis and which hosts avant-gardists of all stripes. This particular square of London proves an especially significant location for the development of British modernism as the major practitioners congregate Fig. 6: Map of Violet Hunt’s Kensington location. 78 geographically, and the hub of Hunt’s salon resides at the center, with her as a major node in London’s social modernism. Rooms and their geographical positions within the metropolitan center prove significant for the function of salons. The location of the salon on the larger map reveals that salonnières plant themselves at the center of cultural innovation taking place in the city. This cultural centrality proves important for offering a kind of cultural credential and authority for the salon: occupying a proximal position to the most advanced areas of the metropolis allows hostesses to tap into the contemporary cultural scene. But these rooms allow more than access to the fashionable parts of town; they offer a space in which radicals, artists, and writers can talk through their ideas without fear of suppression. Successful salon meetings require rooms that inspire the attendees, and every salon features a different setting conducive to this end. These modernist rooms experiment with interior design in order to facilitate and stimulate the coterie sphere and provide the context for the discussions and debates that coalesce into an awareness of modernism. Without rooms, these coterie spheres would not exist in the same way. Thus, even as these quarters appear on a map, they remain circumscribed, closed off to the outside world, with the hostesses serving as “sphinxes,” as one newspaper describes Dodge, keeping the secrets of the salon safe within the walls of the modernist room.70 Although salons remain open to any visitors curious enough to visit, the sense of security in these rooms encourages collaboration and cooperation. Inside these rooms, theories can be fruitfully explored with collective enthusiasm, and the private space of the salon allows for the free flow of information, ideas, and patronage among those who attend. Salon Capital Attending these modernist salons, avant-gardists access a broader assortment of possible donors and patrons who are often upper class, either through the hostesses’ connections or through wealthy visitors. For example, political radicals 79 and societies of various sorts bombard Dodge with letters seeking money for various causes or platforms. Her extended network of friends among New York’s elite prove useful for radicals trying to generate support for major events such as the Paterson Strike Pageant—the dramatic recreation in Madison Square Garden of the Paterson, New Jersey silk-workers’ strike. Nor are the benefits of joining a salon’s social network solely financial. Stein’s purchase and display of modern art leads to a Saturday evening salon that promulgates the artists’ reputations throughout the Paris community and promises acolytes for the new art. Stein describes the genesis of her salon in terms of this art collection—and her own collection of artists: “Little by little people began to come to the rue de Fleurus to see the Matisses and the Cézannes, Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began.”71 Her salon crystallizes around her display of the modern art that was yet in its infancy, while her insistence on the value of these works, and her connections to the artists, proves instrumental for increasing the value of their artworks. As Pierre Bourdieu theorizes, the avant-garde requires a foundation of economic capital despite its anti-establishment rhetoric: “The propensity to move towards the economically most risky positions . . . seem[s] to depend to a large extent on possession of substantial economic and social capital.”72 Being an avant-gardist requires either sacrificing financial stability or possessing some independent financial resources. Joining a salon provides one significant avenue to increase what I am calling “salon capital,” a unique mixture of socio-cultural and economic capital readily available within the walls of a salon. Most visibly, generous visitors donate economic capital to artists, writers, or political radicals. In the coterie network, these transactions follow directed edges between giver and receiver, establishing a unidirectional, unequal power relationship. Because of liberal attendance policies in modernist salons, impoverished artists or 80 marginalized political radicals can interact with wealthy bourgeoisie interested in the latest artworks, bohemian styles, and ideas. The potential bourgeois presence in these salons—the faddish, upper-classes interested in modern movements attending because of the class position of the hostesses—means that regulars might derive economic support from such monied visitors; in short, the salon provides an alternative network of economic circulation specifically productive for the support of such radical aesthetic or political experiments. Belonging to the salon’s social network raises the possibility that a motley collection of artistic and political radicals might benefit financially from wealthy elites who remain sympathetic and interested in modernism. Usually, this economic support takes the form of small financial investments in artistic or political movements, the radical nature of which presupposes financial scarcity. Dodge is beset by requests for economic support from New York’s various radicals. For example, the Executive Board of the Conference of the Unemployed sends her a letter in 1914 signed by Berkman, who had been imprisoned for his attempt to assassinate businessman Henry Clay Frick, requesting “your financial assistance” in supporting the unemployed.73 French journalist Edward Mylius requests $500 to revive his I.W.W. paper The Social War. “I shall not start the paper again” he suggests, “without the above mentioned sum. Can you help me?”74 These requests for support are by-products of connections facilitated by the salon’s social network. Requests may come from individuals who have heard about Dodge from the regulars. In a letter, a man named Paul Munter advertises himself as a “revolutionary socialist” who has “done short-hand writing for most of the undesirable citizens of the island of Manhattan” in an effort to provide his journalistic services to Dodge. He prefaces this proposal by highlighting his connections to anarchist Emma Goldman, labor leader Big Bill Haywood, and Hapgood, all regulars to the Dodge salon and members of one of her overlapping 81 social circles. Interconnections among the visitors of the salon thus allow possibilities for economic patronage and support outside established institutional avenues of funding. Financial support facilitated in the salon takes the form of direct purchase of cultural commodities as well. Unlike Dodge, whose economic donations usually go to radical political movements or institutions, Hunt and Stein divert financial support to artists and authors by introducing them to wealthy visitors, facilitating support indirectly via salon networks. For Hunt’s, this means using the salon network to market issues of Lewis’s Vorticist journal Blast among the British bourgeoisie connected to Hunt via her Pre-Raphaelite familial legacy. Because of social connections to the more established members of London society, many of whom come to the meetings, and Hunt’s own position as a rare member of the older generation supportive of Vorticism, she circulates the magazine among them as an insider and outsider at the same time. Hunt recalls that Blast—“the dashing advertisement poster” she describes it75—appears in conjunction with the Rebel Art Centre and that the magazine generates a stir among many who attended her salon. The magazine includes a list of individuals who are either “blasted” or “blessed.” Predictably, figures who represent bourgeois respectability or who experience popularity usually find themselves in the “blasted” category. Hunt recalls that, Mr. Wyndham Lewis was at great pains to create a new inferno where, like Dante, he remorselessly placed all those who had despitefully used him and, with him, all good artists and true . . . The fun was to open the volume and quickly see where your own name appeared. It seemed to be a matter of dubiety in which column you preferred to find it.76 Hunt discerns a personal motivation in Lewis’s magazine, characterizing him as harboring grudges against bourgeois London and creating Blast as a kind of hell in which to place his enemies. However, Hunt pokes fun at Lewis’s rage by immediately 82 evacuating his “hell” of significance by describing it as fun. Hunt reveals that the magazine intrigues some of those who are “Blasted” because they find it diverting. Because of Hunt’s own class and age, she mingles with many of the individuals Lewis finds offensive, and ironically, she uses her connections in the salon to sell copies of the journal at a discount to many of those attacked in its pages, circulating the issue among her visitors while simultaneously generating some sales revenue for the Vorticists: Well, three of four out of those painfully designated in the Blast Comminatory List came to my party, where I was selling Blasts at half price. ‘Some of my family in it?’ Mr. Thesiger said. ‘Oh, I must have one.’ Lady Aberconway, finding herself blest, was no longer eager, also the lady Sargent painted, the Mrs. Leopold Hirsch. She bought one, but returned her copy next day with a nice letter pointing out that I might perhaps doubly benefit the author by re-selling it to someone who hadn’t daughters.77 The salon network circulates the magazine via private sales at the meetings and circulates the reputation of the magazine among the very people Lewis blasts. Certainly, Hunt’s characterization of the reaction of the “blasted” among the salon visitors suggests that the radical posturing of Blast lacks the power the Vorticists imagined it to have. Purporting to “blast” the “God Prigs” of British snob society, and including a list of those blasted by name, results in bemused, even interested, support from the very people named, but this financial support is gained by Hunt’s position as intermediary.78 Without her salon, the magazine would not circulate among this population and earn money from bourgeois readers, and this paradox of bourgeois interest in avant-garde aesthetics reveals that the militarism and violence of modernism provides an intriguing spectacle. 83 However, as Goldring points out, Lewis and Pound fully understand the lightness and gaiety of their experiment. At the inaugural tea party at which the Vorticists draw up the list of those blasted and blessed, Goldring claims, the meeting lacks earnestness despite Blast’s aggressive appearance: “It was a solemn occasion except, I suspected, for the two prophets—who when unobserved by the disciples, occasionally exchanged knowing grins—and for myself, who had frequently to suppress irreverent giggles.”79 Lewis describes Vorticism as “replete with humour.”80 The development of Vorticism, while an important development in modernism, is an example of the complexity of the avant-garde. Even as these revolutionaries overthrow tradition in print, they understand the humor behind the journal. This complexity is visible in the selling of the journal to the very salon visitors the magazine lampoons, revealing a reflexive element of the salon network to account for radical difference and turn that to profitable account via sales. The novelty of Blast serves as a marketing tool among the least expected readers because of their familiarity with Hunt. She uses her position as society woman to package and market the magazine, facilitating interest in a journal that would have been ignored or denigrated if encountered on the newsstands. Thus, in some ways, she operates as a double agent in that she exposes the bourgeoisie to critique by using her insider status to sell Blast to them. Stein links her salon to financial support via her purchase and investment in the works of experimental modernist painters working in Paris. In 1905, the Steins— Leo, Gertrude, Michael, and Sarah—begin collecting modern paintings, purchasing their first Matisse, the brightly colored Femme au Chapeau which launches Fauvism at the Autumn Salon despite Leo’s description of it as “the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.”81 Many of the artists whose work Stein collects live in poverty during the early parts of their careers. Stein recounts a story of Matisse painting with the windows open in winter to preserve his model, the bowl of fruit, because he could 84 not afford to buy more.82 For these artists, Stein’s patronage proves essential for their continued ability to paint, and she becomes an important patron for all of the key modernist artists in Paris, purchasing and displaying their artworks in her salon. Further, Stein’s reputation as a tastemaker facilitates sales of art to others who probably would not have purchased otherwise. Stein recruits her Baltimore connections, the sisters Claribel and Etta Cone, to finance Picasso in the early days: “She [Etta] was taken there by Gertrude Stein whenever the Picasso finances got beyond everybody and was made to buy a hundred francs’ worth of drawings. After all a hundred francs in those days was twenty dollars. She was quite willing to indulge in this romantic charity.”83 Stein’s friendship with Picasso means he has an ally among wealthy foreigners with money to spend who listen to Stein’s recommendations. Despite finding the Picasso paintings distasteful, the Cone sisters are heavily influenced by their relationship with Stein and support the painters she promotes. Such connections convey economic benefits upon the artists as visitors to the salon are encouraged to buy the new art. However, salon capital appears in other, more intangible yet still important forms. By bringing such wide-ranging social circles into intimate contact within the space of the salon, modernist hostesses establish possibilities for different forms of capital, conduits rerouted outside the public sphere through the salon. In tracing the different exchanges of capital within these salons, I draw on Bourdieu’s analysis in “The Forms of Capital.” His sociological account of capital’s different instantiations recognizes that “Economic theory has allowed to be foisted upon it a definition of the economy of practices which is the historical invention of capitalism . . . it has implicitly defined the other forms of exchange as noneconomic, and therefore disinterested.”84 For Bourdieu, capitalism historically recognizes the market exchange of commodities as the only form of transaction. Capitalism’s ideological obscurantism conceals other possible forms of exchange that exist, and Bourdieu 85 urges us to investigate “the laws whereby the different types of capital (or power, which amounts to the same thing) change into one another,” a project he pursues in “The Forms of Capital” by mapping the contours of cultural and social capital and the dynamic transubstantiation into economic exchange.85 Salon capital, the circulation of alternative forms of capital, proves crucial for supporting avant- gardists. In order to survive, the modernist avant-garde depends on the circulation of alternative forms of capital. Stein’s salon circulates what Bourdieu theorizes as “cultural capital,” a less obvious form of capital because it is linked to hereditary transmission via the family, to material objects and media, and to institutional authorities. Bourdieu characterizes these three forms of cultural capital as embodied, objectified, and institutionalized states, and contends that each of these states has different properties. For example, embodied cultural capital corresponds to lineage or family connections such as the royalty who occasionally visited the Stein salon, objective cultural capital is found in physical things which possess value in their materiality such as rare paintings, and institutional cultural capital appears as the authority of socially esteemed organizations to confer recognition. Despite their discrete categories, in Boudieu’s account, these three forms of cultural capital are mutually constitutive and interactive. In salons, cultural capital appears more generally in embodied and objectified states because institutionalized forms often work at cross- purposes with the avant-garde coterie nature of the salons. Vanguard artists, thinkers, or writers find modernist salons attractive precisely because they offer alternatives to the institutional support of mainstream culture. In Stein’s salon, cultural capital appears in the objectified form of the paintings she displays and which generate an audience. Yet, Bourdieu points out that “Cultural capital, in the objectified state, has a number of properties which are defined only in the relationship with cultural capital in its embodied form.”86 Because of her unique 86 position in Paris at that particular historical moment, Stein is able to collect the experimental paintings of the new schools and, at the same time, affiliate with the painters as they produce these modern aesthetic theories. Wickes captures this imbrication of embodied and objectified cultural capital in his assertion that the “Steins collected painters as well as paintings.”87 In The Autobiography, Stein describes how she and Leo hold a lunch for the painters whose paintings are hung on the wall, an event which emphasizes this mutual interaction between forms of cultural capital: “It was at this lunch that as I have already said Gertrude Stein made them all happy and made the lunch a success by seating each painter facing his own picture.”88 Embodied and objectified forms of cultural capital enter into a reciprocal relationship, figured in this moment by the juxtaposition of artists seated across from their own paintings. Overlapping forms of cultural capital are visible in the interactions between individuals in different social circles as well. Dodge uses her embodied cultural capital as a society woman in New York involved in organizing the Armory Show to promote the objectified cultural capital of Stein’s pamphlet “The Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia.” Dodge appeals to Stein’s desire for recognition by writing that the show would “explode” on the New York art scene. “There will be a riot and a revolution” she declares, “and things will never be quite the same afterwards.”89 A pamphlet printed on Florentine wallpaper, “The Portrait of Mabel Dodge” becomes an object containing cultural capital, which Dodge uses to generate publicity for Stein in the U.S. Published in 1912, “The Portrait of Mabel Dodge” is a strikingly experimental collage of impressions representing Dodge’s essence. Lois Rudnick describes Stein’s word-portraits as an effort to “being” the individuals she depicted through “a combination of the raw data of her subject’s behavior and attributes and the transforming eye and ear of the artist.”90 Rather than forming a linear narrative description of Dodge, Stein crafts a word map of phrases and images 87 that call the person into presence. Despite the discordant series of non-sequiturs, there is a discernable thread running through the portrait. When the “Portrait” is composed, Stein is visiting the Villa Curonia and shares a wall with Dodge who is visited in the middle of the night by her son’s tutor while husband Edwin was away. Much of the portrait seems to be alluding to this illicit liaison. For example, Stein writes “There is not wedding introduction. There is not all that filling . . . Gliding is not heavily moving. Looking is not vanishing. Laughing is not evaporating. There can be the climax.”91 Beginning with the negation of matrimony, the “not wedding introduction,” this passage moves through a series of verbal nouns that are explicitly described as “not” functioning as other gerunds. Thus, gliding is not moving, looking is not vanishing and so on. This series of positive negations suggests a sort of yes/no give and take, a sexual deferral which Rudnick suggests “must have been torture for the poor young tutor.”92 By endorsing and circulating Stein’s pamphlet, Dodge markets Stein’s relationship to the burgeoning modern art forms developing in Paris and arriving in North America during the teens. Dodge describes Stein’s style in art magazine Arts and Decoration as an adaptation of Post-Impressionism into language forms: “Gertrude Stein is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint . . . she is finding the hidden and inner nature of nature.”93 Delighted with Stein’s representation of her in “The Portrait of Mabel Dodge,” Dodge celebrates the American art public’s expanding interest in Stein in a letter dated Feb 18, 1913: “The show is a terrific success! We are all wild over it—and everyone in N.Y. is saying ‘Who is Gertrude Stein?’”94 Dodge exchanges the objectified cultural capital of the pamphlet for some measure of recognition and notoriety among the intelligentsia in the U.S. in a way that Stein had not been able to do on her own. Dodge is able to trade the embodied cultural capital of the pamphlet because of an earlier exchange of social capital in Stein’s relationship to Post-Impressionism. The quality of Stein’s 88 social capital among the modern painters in Paris helps Dodge circulate the objectified cultural capital of the pamphlet, which, in turn, enhancess Stein’s embodied cultural capital as a producer of modernist literature. Unlike economic and cultural forms of capital, social capital is inextricable from the social network itself and is thus most important for a definition of salon capital. Tom Schuller, Stephen Baron, and John Field define “social capital” as shifting “the focus of analysis from the behaviour of individual agents to the pattern of relations between agents, social units and institutions.”95 By this definition, social capital is produced by collectives made up of individuals. In their interactions, where the particles interact as in Pound’s metaphor, reactions are sparked. Bourdieu describes the product of these reactions as an inherently collective form of capital that relies on associations among individuals: Social capital is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition—or in other words, to membership in a group—which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity- owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word.96 Social capital by its very nature relies on the network of recognition and interaction, and for many modernists this network exists in material form in the salons. Unlike cultural and economic capital which circulates in a physical form either in human bodies imbued with education or in commodities and money, social capital comes into being only through the linking operations among the various artists and thinkers, what David Halpern labels “everday networks,” that cluster around and within different salon environments.97 89 Thus, social capital is the most crucial aspect of salon capital. Because of the large number of individuals who might attend even one meeting of the salon, connections can be forged among a wide array of persons, quickly establishing the “small world” phenomenon. However, these networks also establish a horizon of possibility, a series of links and connections which, when taken together, result in gains for any individual node plugged into the larger network. It is this larger structural totality, I argue, that welds together not only modernist salons but modernism as a whole. Despite the discrete times, geographies, cultural, and sociopolitical coordinates of various modernist salons, they all share a structure of interconnection which, in itself, gives value to the members of each social network (see graph 1). The benefits of each salon’s social capital are not restricted to that individual salon, however; the borders of these salons seem permeable and accessible, and members travel between them. Thus, a writer or painter with means to travel accesses social capital by moving among the different salons. As Jouni Häkli and Claudio Minca point out, social capital appears as “an unevenly distributed resource that depends on individuals’ ability to enact the power potentials that reside in their membership in social networks.”98 Some modernists activate this social network to a high degree of profit whereas others struggle to generate social capital. Stein, Hunt, and Dodge create and deftly manage their social networks and generate significant social capital important for the development of modernism from the totality of relationships therein. Even restricting this study to the pre-World War I salons of Stein, Hunt and Dodge, and focusing on the small group of people who regularly participate in those salons, reveals significant amounts of dissimilar social capital available in the various meetings. Stein’s Saturday evenings are characterized by investments in the modernist art of Fauvism, Post-Impressionism, and Cubism, and attendees interact with the painters and paintings that Stein collects. Regular visitors earn social capital 90 within the modern art world by attending the salon and taking their place in that network. As Stein writes regarding the Saturday evenings, “it was like a kaleidoscope turning.”99 The mixture of different artists from different backgrounds, when interacting collectively, sparks some of the most innovative art and writing. Hunt’s salon, although much more constrained and muted, perhaps because of its hostesses’ belonging to an older generation, still generates impressive social capital. The last years of her salon before the war and her breakup with Hueffer ends it (1912-1914), witnesses the development of Vorticism at South Lodge, and Hunt’s evenings play a major role in bringing the contributors to Blast together. Hunt remembers that she arranges the appearance of West’s short story “Indissoluble Matrimony” in Blast: “I was instrumental in procuring for its pages the first short story of a young lady since better known. Rebecca West in her teens, with her tongue in her cheek, taking up the whole problem of man’s life and making a delectable joke and parody of it!.”100 Despite her seemingly tangential role in the development of modernism, at least according to male modernists, Hunt recognizes West’s genius and arranges for her insertion into Blast, adding a prominent female voice to the male-dominated Vorticists. Hunt’s social network produces significant improvements to a modernist project.101 The salon’s social capital, the pooled talent of the participants in totality, facilitates the production of one of the most vibrant and militant modernist masterpieces before World War I, and visualizing her salon’s social capital reveals an impressive array of English modernists throughout, as well as Hunt’s connections to society people and non-modernists such as Bram Stoker and Arnold Bennett (graph 5). Even the tight network of South Lodge offers significant social capital for those interested in British culture and modernism. Salon capital, the combined socio-cultural and economic capital generated by and available in the salon, enables political and aesthetic modernists to plug into alternative forms of support. Whether garnering patronage from fellow visitors who 91 Graph 5: The social capital of Hunt’s salon 92 become interested and thus invested in one’s work or drawing on the combined resources of the whole group, avant-gardists benefit from the opportunities provided by salon capital. Some salon capital takes the form of straightforward economic contributions, money which would have remained unavailable without the possibility for personal contact. Other forms appear less concrete but are nonetheless significant. The cultural form of salon capital provides objects and relationships that improve both the hostesses’ reputations and cache of the visitor. Salon capital flows bi-directionally between artists and bourgeoisie. The artists receive financial support in the forms of donations or sales whereas the bourgeoisie gain access to and cache from the latest cultural trends. Network connections benefit individual nodes within the network. In the development and marketing of modernism, coterie spheres enable a crucial site outside established markets for both poles of the modernist social dialectic—the avant-garde and the bourgeoisie—to benefit mutually, but the formation of these coterie spheres is oriented around the central node that makes them possible: the salonnière. As a crucial node in the networks of modernism, she establishes the salon hub to which modernists connect. Ego Hubs and Superconnectors Whereas visitors to Stein, Hunt, and Dodge’s benefit from the salon capital found through the web of social connections in the meetings, salonnière benefit from hosting the meetings. The distinction between regular social gatherings and salons can be found within the role of the hostess in organizing the meeting and linking disparate individuals together. Whereas a dinner party or club may include conversation about events of political or aesthetic importance, the surroundings may prove restrictive regarding content, interlocutors may be actively hostile or dismissive of certain attitudes, and attendees are from the same social class. In contrast, salons usually exist for the primary purpose of enabling intellectual discussion on diverse contemporary issues among interesting people, with the 93 hostess serving as instigator. Although organizing and hosting weekly meetings requires a significant amount of personal energy and labor, each hostess acquires cultural capital from the meetings. The visitors who come to these salons attend because they recognize that attending provides opportunities beyond the simple pleasure of socializing. Hosting meetings with the most daring artists, thinkers, writers, and political radicals provides the hostess with an arena to stage debates and discussions and thus shape modernism through their salons. These hostesses become socially central to the pulse of modernism. Like modernist writers who focalize their novels through the subjectivity of a protagonist, salonnières focalize their salons around their own egos. By choosing themes, organizing meetings, inviting guests, holding court, and speaking with press, hostesses stamp their salons with their personal character. Because these hostesses invite a diversity of visitors from various sectors of society, they bridge holes in larger networks between disparate clusters of nodes. The hostess is the most important node for charting the social networks of modernism. Hostesses connect various social circles through their organization of the meetings. Because they occupy the central position in the salons and maintain a broad array of relationships outside the salon, hostesses facilitate connections among diverse nodes or clusters of nodes that had been previously unconnected despite existing in the same network. Any given network graph is marked by what are called “structural holes,” which represent gaps among clusters within the larger network. Network theorists label “superconnectors” significant, central nodes that link these clusters and bridge these holes. Superconnectors link together smaller networks that exist within the larger network. If an individual salon’s coterie sphere represents one small network within the larger system of modernism, the salon’s superconnector links that coterie sphere to other circles in that larger network. These linkages prove important for the larger argument I am making in this dissertation because they 94 demonstrate how the simultaneous and horizontal connections operate. Multiple small networks exist in isolation until a superconnector such as Stein, Hunt, or Dodge bridges the structural holes that separate them and provide linkages that make the totality of modernism possible. Hostesses, by the very nature of their sociable role, serve this function yet remain less idolized in accounts of the creation of modernism. Superconnectors link disparate groups among the modernist vanguard. Stein describes this combination in the Autobiography: “But at that time every little crowd lived its own life and knew practically nothing of any other crowd.”102 Avant-garde groupings in Paris before the war included such luminaries as Matisse and Picasso. Stein claims she brings these two painters together. Before her introduction, the two had never met: “It may seem very strange to every one nowadays that before this time Matisse had never heard of Picasso and Picasso had never met Matisse.” Despite selling their paintings in the same bric-a-brac shop, the two figures never encounter one another. This meeting later results in the flow of information and influence from Matisse to Picasso through the conduit formed by Stein’s introduction. “In any case,” Stein claims, “it was Matisse who first was influenced . . . by the african statues and it was Matisse who drew Picasso’s attention to it just after Picasso had finished painting Gertrude Stein’s portrait.”103 Picasso’s famous paintings, derived from African masks, are inspired by Matisse, but this line of connection is facilitated by Stein as mediator. Stein connects to every major painter in Paris during those years, and many in other countries as well who visit Paris and return home flush with new ideas and inspirations, and her linkages reveals the vast series of connections she enables. The collaborative nature of European art is owed in large part to Stein’s salon. Dodge, too, serves this role of bringing together disparate clusters in her network. As she describes it in her autobiography, she seeks out unique and 95 different individuals for her salon. “I kept meeting more and more people” she recalls, “because in the first place I wanted to know everybody and in the second place everybody wanted to know me. I wanted, in particular, to know the Heads of things. Heads of Movements, Heads of Newspapers, Heads of all kinds of groups of people. I became a Species of Head Hunter, in fact.”104 Unlike other parts of her autobiography, in which she appears as a passive society woman, this self- representation reveals that Dodge takes an active role in collecting, imagining the “heads” as prey to be hunted. Because she seeks out the leaders of movements, her salon becomes the center of New York’s vortex of radical politics and aesthetics because these leaders brought their groups with them. Major modernists visit her salon alongside those involved in radical political movements. On one evening, Dodge describes Haywood advocating a socially realistic Proletarian Art to avant- garde painters Andrew Dasburg, John Marin, Frances Picabia, and Marsden Hartley.105 Her salon bridges the gaps among these different groups, and although these groups remain dedicated to their own projects, this confrontation in the salon results in new combinations. For Dodge, this diverse dialogic component is crucial to the hub of her salon. She characterizes it as a modernist collage: “It was very confusing to me that though they were all part of one picture, they were so jumbled and scattered that they never made a discernible pattern; they were in groups that did not meet, yet in each of these groups would be found one or more who had had some contact with those in other groups.”106 Like the paintings being created in these early years, Dodge crafts her social gatherings to operate via juxtaposition and dissimilarity. Within her salon, distinctions drive the social gathering, and she consciously attempts to bridge different sectors of activity. The conversation in her salon fills gaps among dissimilar groups, and Dodge envisions a totality of New York modernism, a “large puzzle” in which every piece though scattered would fit. Dodge’s position as hostess crosses 96 structural holes between major sectors of avant-garde activity. Graph 6 illustrates the connections facilitated through her salon. The four major sectors of avant-garde politics along the right-hand side of the graph—the group of socialists surrounding Max Eastman and The Masses, the leadership of the I.W.W., Goldman’s anarchists, and the Heterodoxy group—link to the salon and thus to each other as I mention above. But, these radical political modernists also connect to aesthetic modernism along the left of the graph. Dodge’s salon bridges the gaps that exist between these various movements, bringing them into contact with one another. Hostesses operate as centers of gravity drawing the smaller particles into relationship with each other and with the hubs of the salon meetings. Because of their heterogeneous constituents, modernist salons crystallize around the hostesses, key individuals linking the other nodes in the network. Hostesses are the central points that constellate the salons’ affiliations around themselves, transforming their salons into what network theorists call, an “ego hub,” a central space that serves as the perimeter for the specific social network and which determines its character. Caldarelli and Catanzaro claim that ego hubs generate particular networks, “composed of a set of nodes with direct ties to a central one (the ego), as well as ties linking them to each other.”107 The hostess is this central node, and her ego forms the contours of her salon as a hub for cultural production. Graphing the Hunt salon, for example, reveals a strong number of edges directly connecting individuals to Hunt herself with fewer edges connecting individuals to each other (graph 4). The most successful salons gravitate around strong central figures who direct the meetings either through force of personality as in the case of Stein, through surrendering of control to others as with Hunt, or through behind-the-scenes puppeteering as with Dodge. The hostess requires an impressive social acumen and awareness of her individual salon’s contours. Orchestrating the interactions and connections among a diverse crowd of intelligent individuals tests the limits of one’s 97 Graph 6: Mabel Dodge, a “Species of Head Hunter” 98 abilities as hostess, and the success of the salon depends on these abilities to navigate complicated social circles. For example, as an ego hub, Stein’s meetings mirror her position as an expatriate and her interests in internationalism. She travels widely in Europe with Toklas, and her salon interests different nationalities living in Paris. American modernists attend her salon before the war—although not as many as attend after— but she prefers the international contingent of visitors because they provide her with a renewed appreciation for the English language. “One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english.”108 Encouraging an international population enhances Stein’s perceptions of English, which she uses in her writing. Stein characterizes the linking operations of her network, which circulates the fame of her salon among these international visitors: The room was soon very full and who were they all. Groups of Hungarian painters and writers, it happened that some Hungarian had once been brought and the word had spread from him throughout all Hungary, any village where there was a young man who had ambitions heard of 27 rue de Fleurus and then he lived but to get there.109 Hyperbolically, Stein points out the way in which her salon attracts young artists who have heard of her and want to attend a Saturday evening. Mellow describes these international visitors as “invaders” of a sort, “A few went away converted, spreading the gospel of modernism among the heathen, sending fresh troops for later visits.”110 Simply by hosting a Saturday evening salon, Stein spreads avant-garde theories around the world. In a reflection of Stein’s own cosmopolitan ego, the hub of her salon attracts the diverse crowds of travelers and circulates among them the reputations of painters fortunate enough to excite the Steins’ interest. 99 Ego hubs and superconnectors fuel the connective drive of salons. Nodes may connect through other circuits, but most remain isolated within a particular area. Entering the space of the salon guarantees an eclectic series of relationships, and hostesses deliberately foster such heterogeneous combinations in an effort to bridge the gaps that exist in vanguard movements. Because these hostesses act, in many cases, like superconnectors that bring diffuse nodes into some kind of relation, the individual salons begin to take on the salonièrres’ personality, transforming into an ego hub in which the hostess can enact her particular social projects. These ego hubs provide the character of the salon, its unique properties and contours, and oscillate between the individual and the collective in ways that make modernist salons particularly dynamic clusters within the networks of modernism. Despite the tight nature of the connections, contained within the modernist room, these social collages produce relationships that remain structurally important to the totality of modernist cultural practices, and hostesses, although less praised in critical accounts of the period, play one of the central roles in the development of modernism. Conclusion: Tea, Cakes, and Modernism Revived from the French aristocratic tradition, modernist salons provide dense social networks for modernists, those interested in modernism, and even tourists to discuss the welter of new ideas cropping up at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hostesses such as Stein, Hunt, and Dodge organize and hold weekly meetings, featuring the most innovative thinkers of their day. Within the coterie sphere of the salon, thinkers expound their theories of new art forms, their visions of new societies, and their ideas about modernity. Unlike the public sphere in which newness requires either a militant, counter-public positioning against an often repressive society unready for change or a negotiation with the public sphere through print documents that may be suppressed, these salons allow visitors to discuss the experimental and new without fear of censure, spreading modernism to those who 100 come to the meetings. But the salon does more than just spread new ideas. Because of the tightly knit networks that arise in these coterie spheres, avant-gardists generate salon capital from other visitors or friends of visitors. And this much- needed support attracts the most innovative among the avant-garde’s aesthetic and political movements to the salon. The next chapter turns from the coterie sphere of the salon to the public world of print modernism. Whereas salons serve as private sites wherein to meet and discuss the latest ideas, little magazines stage and negotiate modernism in public, developing extensive periodical networks that construct a sense of modernist identity by establishing an “imagined community” of avant-garde writers and readers. By modifying cultural tastes through publishing the latest literature, art, philosophy, and political essays, little magazines enter an often hostile or suspicious public sphere; nonetheless, they generate small but loyal readerships of aspiring intellectuals tired of Puritan morality and Victorian sensibilities. If salons provide outlets for discussing modernist developments, little magazines supply print versions of those discussions. Periodical networks constellate writers, editors, reviewers, philosophers, painters, political radicals, and readers around the central hub of the magazine and maintain complex relationships with their subscribers: bullying, cajoling, dismissing, praising, and, most importantly, printing their complaints or compliments. The next chapter considers two particularly rich and experimental periodical networks: Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s The Little Review and Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver’s series of magazines The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist. While not the only avant-garde magazines in print before the war, to be sure, these are key hubs to negotiate and disseminate early modernism. 101 Notes 1 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1985), 23; Natalie Barney, A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney (Norwich, VT: New Victoria Publishers, 1992), 102. 2 Jon Gertner, “The Third Annual Year in Ideas,” The New York Times, 14 Dec., 2003, Sunday, p. 92, quoted in Charles Kadushin, Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 4. 3 Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 39. 4 Violet Hunt, I Have This to Say: The Story of my Flurried Years (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), 15. 5 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 15. 6 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism NEED 7 Janet Lyon, “Sociability in the Metropole: Modernism’s Bohemian Salons,” ELH 76 (2009): 687. 8 Lyon, “Sociability in the Metropole,” 689. 9 Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 73. 10 Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2004), 2. 11 Kale, French Salons, 12. 12 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, The Woman of the Eighteenth Century Trans. Jacques Le Clerq and Ralph Roeder (Westport, CT: Hyperion P, 1928), 44. For more on French salon culture, see Dena Goldman, The Republic of Letters and F.W.J. Hemmings, Culture and Society in France 1789-1848. 13 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT P, 1991), 33-34. 14 These salons serve other important functions beyond the circulation of economic and social capital. They also supply discrete spaces for congregating, communicating, and discussing the current thoughts, ideas, movements, and theories outside the potentially repressive public sphere. In an era when free speech could be severely condemned or curtailed, salons provide a discrete space for modernists and others to speak without restrictions, safe from potential threats of censure or imprisonment; furthermore, these hubs enable congregating and collaborating within a network of connections routed outside the circuits of authorized mores and ideas. In New York, one of the more culturally advanced cities in the U.S., free speech is severely regulated by Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which works to suppress any materials deemed lewd or lascivious from being sent 102 through U.S. mail. One of Greenwich Village’s most active reformers, John Reed, is arrested on trumped-up trespassing charges during a strike in Paterson, New Jersey. Police often resort to brutal violence in breaking up these strikes, beating and sometimes shooting unarmed strikers such as Valentino Modestino whose death inspired the Paterson Strike Pageant. Nor is this repressive State activity limited to the U.S. In England, suppression and censure are also common during this turbulent period. Before the world war, this policy of suppression leaves suffragists and other radical groups feeling that vandalism is their only recourse. Many women are imprisoned, force fed, and, in some cases, killed in the ensuing struggles. In a letter to editor and anarchist Dora Marsden in 1910, M. Solomon describes the treatment she receives at a deputation: “I was very severely handled and hurt by the police. Their brutality was execrable, and it seemed as if hell were cut loose upon the women!” (M. Solomon to Dora Marsden, Box 1, Folder 28, Dora Marsden Collection; 1907-1961 (mostly 1909- 1914), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library). Suppression reveals the conservative nature of the British public sphere even under the auspices of the more progressive Liberal Party of Prime Minister Asquith. This essentially conservative public sphere necessitates the desire for an alternative space wherein to explore radical new ideas through dialogue between writers, artists, thinkers, and political activists of various stripes. 15 Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake (New York: The Viking P, 1941), 100-1. 16 Natalie Barney, Aventures de l’esprit, (Paris : Émile-Paul Frères, 1929), front matter. 17 Lady Ottoline Morrell, Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell (New York: Knopf, 1964), 125. 18 Qtd. in Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939), 197. 19 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), 82. 20 Stansell, American Moderns, 74. Although she is describing the particularly American free speech of Greenwich Village, I believe the modernist salons all foster some version of this speech collage. After all, Gertrude Stein is notable precisely for this kind of linguistic play. 21 Brigit Patmore, My Friends When Young (London: Heinemann, 1968), 57. 22 A parlor game played in the Surrealist salons emphasizes this “individual within the collective” character of social networks. In this now familiar game, graphically titled “Exquisite Corpse,” each individual writes a poetic fragment on a slip of paper and passes it to the next person, who writes the next fragment, and so on and so forth. By the end of the game, every individual in the circle contributes a piece to the poem, yet none has any idea of the totality. This experiment in automatic writing epitomizes the structure of the social network I am describing. Each individual node, or point of contact, contributes something to the larger web of the salon’s structure, and the various nodes further connect the salon to a large number of other nodes, which may include other salons, institutions, periodical presses, publishing houses, or patrons. 103 23 Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.), The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), 10. 24 Ezra Pound, “Portrait d’une Femme,” Personae: the Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1990), 57. 25 Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 39. 26 Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations, Trans. Kurt Wolff (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1955), 150. 27 Dodge, Movers and Shakers, 151. 28 Guido Caldarelli and Michele Cantanzaro, Networks: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 50. 29 Mabel Dodge to Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, YCAL MSS 76, Box 115, folder 2397, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 30 Charles Kadushin, Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 33. 31 Stein, The Autobiography, 13. 32 Stein, The Autobiography, 63. 33 Mellow, Charmed Circles, 8. 34 Mellow, Charmed Circles, 13. 35 George Wickes, Americans in Paris (Garden City, NY: De Capo, 1969), 17. 36 Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years (New York: American Book-Stratford P, 1952), 477-8. 37 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986), 63. 38 Brooks, The Confident Years, 59. 39 “‘The Printed Page Will Soon Be Superseded by the Spoken Word,’ Declares Mrs. Mabel Dodge, Who Has Been Holding a New York ‘Salon’ for Free Speech,” The New York Press, June 7, 1914, 2. 40 Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 81. 41 Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 81. 42 Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 89. 104 43 Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 83. 44 This is not to suggest, however, that these salons are elitist coteries. In fact, many of the most impressive salons are open to visitors from a variety of backgrounds. Even Stein admits that her question to newcomers, “de la part de qui venez-vous” (by whom do you come) is merely a formal question and does not preclude any or all visitors from attending. 45 Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 5. 46 Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows (New York: Abbeville P, 1991), 129. 47 Mabel Dodge Luhan, European Experiences (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935), 453. 48 Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 6. 49 “Interior of 23 Fifth Avenue.” In Watson, Steven. Strange Bedfellows. New York: Abbeville P, 1991. 50 “Society Comes to Bat, But Doesn’t Make a Hit,” The Daybook, March 12, 1914, n.p. Retrieved from Chronicling America: 51 Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 6. 52 James Mellow, Charmed Circles (New York: Praeger P, 1974), 3. Image of “Toklas and Stein at 27, rue de Fleurus” in Watson, Steven. Strange Bedfellows. New York: Abbeville P, 1991. 53 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Modern Library, 1980), 9. 54 Stein, The Autobiography, 41. 55 Douglas Goldring, South Lodge (London: Constable and Co, 1943), 46. 56 Goldring, South Lodge, 113-14. 57 Patmore, My Friends When Young, 51. 58 Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (London: Hutchinson), 122. 59 Joan Hardwick, An Immodest Violet (Great Britain: André Deutsch Limited, 1990), 122. 60 Goldring, South Lodge, 211. Of course, the salon’s transformation was also helped along by the scandal of Ford and Hunt’s “marriage” while Ford was still legally married. The Throne reported the story, and Ford and Hunt foolishly sued for libel and lost. Goldring describes the effect this scandal had on the composition of the salon: “Meanwhile, if old intimacies lapsed, if ‘stuffy’ relatives behaved in a Victorian manner, if ‘circles’ which had once seemed so indestructible were broken up by the scandal resulting from the libel action, the effect on the social activities of South 105 Lodge was outwardly only one of change and rejuvenation.” In Douglas Goldring, Trained for Genius (New York: E.P. Dutton Co., 1949), 163. 61 Goldring, South Lodge, 62. 62 Hunt, I Have This to Say, 214. 63 Hardwick, An Immodest Violet, 122-3. 64 Hunt, I Have This to Say, 217. 65 See James Mellow for a description of the area in Charmed Circles, 51. 66 John Reed, The Day in Bohemia, or Life Among the Artists (Riverside, CT: privately printed, 1913), quoted in Granville Hicks, John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary (New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1968), 78. 67 Floyd Dell, Love in Greenwich Village (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1926), 296. 68 Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years (New York: American Book-Stratford P, 1952), 475. 69 Qtd. in Pound/ Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship Ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (New York: New Directions, 1982), 5. 70 “Fair Society Woman Defends I.W.W.; Is Neither an Anarchist Nor Socialist, But Thinks Unemployed not to Blame,” The Evening World, March 27, 1914, n.p. 71 Stein, The Autobiography, 41. 72 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), 67. 73 Alexander Berkman to Mabel Dodge, Mabel Dodge Luhan Collection, YCAL MSS 196, Box 3, folder 78, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 74 Edward Mylius to Mabel Dodge, Mabel Dodge Luhan Collection, YCAL MSS 196, Box 24, folder 674, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 75 Violet Hunt, I Have This to Say: The Story of My Flurried Years (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), 216. 76 Hunt, I Have This to Say, 214. 77 Hunt, I Have This to Say, 215. 78 Wyndham Lewis, Blast (Santa Rosa, Black Sparrow P, 2002), 15. 79 Goldring, South Lodge, 68. 106 80 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1967), 36. 81 Qtd. in George Wickes, Americans in Paris (New York: De Capo, 1969), 20. 82 Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 38. 83 Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 52. 84 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 242. 85 Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 243. 86 Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 247. 87 Wickes, Americans in Paris, 18. 88 Stein, The Autobiography, 65. 89 Mabel Dodge to Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, YCAL MSS 76, Box 115, folder 2398, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 90 Lois Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1984), 47. 91 Gertrude Stein, “The Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia,” The Collected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York: Random House, 1946), 466 92 Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds, 50. 93 Qtd. in Wickes, Americans in Paris, 31. 94 Mabel Dodge to Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, YCAL MSS 76, Box 115, folder 2398, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 95 Tom Schuller, Stephen Baron, and John Field, Social Capital (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 35. 96 Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 249. 97 David Halpern, Social Capital (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 2. 98 Jouni Häkli and Claudio Minca, Social Capital and Urban Networks of Trust (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2009), 1. 99 Stein, Autobiography, 89. 100 Hunt, I Have This to Say, 216. 107 101 And Hueffer, Hunt’s lover and erstwhile host of the salon, submits “The Saddest Story,” an early draft of his best novel The Good Soldier due to his proximity to the planning. 102 Stein, Autobiography, 53. 103 Stein, Autobiography, 63. 104 Dodge, Movers and Shakers, 84. 105 Dodge, Movers and Shakers, 90. 106 Dodge, Movers and Shakers, 23. 107 Caldarelli and Catanzaro, Networks, 83. 108 Stein, Autobiography, 70. 109 Stein, Autobiography, 13. 110 Mellow, Charmed Circle, 8. 108 CHAPTER III PUBLISHING NETWORKS OF LITTLE MAGAZINES “[I]f I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer.” —Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War “There is a tangled and delightful sense of contradiction in the total picture.” —Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography1 In his 1930s retrospective essay “Small Magazines,” Ezra Pound describes these ephemeral print objects as collective projects facilitated by writers working together. “Where there is not the binding force of some kind of agreement, however vague or unanalyzed, between three or four writers,” he explains, “it seems improbable that the need of a periodical really exists.”2 This statement comes from an expert. Early in his career, Pound recognizes he needs little magazines to promote and publish the circle of writers he constellates around himself. Because these periodicals are one of the few outlets publishing experimental writing, he uses his connections as editor to many of them to provide venues for his friends to place their work during the pre-war period. But Pound’s statement represents more than a simple retrospective on the world of early twentieth-century avant-garde publishing. It provides a model for analyzing the internal workings of modernist periodicals as a collective project, a series of reactions among individuals, a network. Without a “binding force,” as Pound claims, little magazines of both literary and political orientation would not hold together. Out of the “agreement” among writers, editors, thinkers, and artists who contribute, the totality of a periodical originates. The variety of combinations among these individual nodes establishes an atmosphere of experimentation through transnational periodical networks, which generates a sense of modernist community among the writers who participate and the readers who follow the latest developments. 109 Reading these magazines reveals the substrata of early modernist community and culture comprised of interaction and multiplicity. This sense of collectivity can be located in the etymology of the word “magazine” itself, which originally signifies “storehouse” but is adapted in 1731 to the periodical genre as “a storehouse of the wisdom and life of the age.”3 Editors collect contributors who appear in unique constellations within each magazine. For modernist periodicals, this collection of contributors possesses an experimental character. Theodore Peterson characterizes little magazines as “laboratories” for experimentation, a claim which exemplifies the dynamic interactions in little magazines and echoes Pound’s argument in “Patria Mia” that modernism coalesces out of “dynamic particles” that “interact, and stimulate each other.”4 We can imagine the editors of little magazines testing different combinations of participants, manipulating unique combinations within the magazine in order to produce unique reactions. Although Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and John Plunkett situate the genesis of the little magazine in Victorian tensions between elite cultural producers in small-subscription quarterlies and higher- circulation, popular “penny fiction” magazines and argue that modernists such as Pound draw on this “overdetermined binary” to craft a mythos of the heroic little magazine, modernist magazines coalesce in a particularly dynamic way that fuels a subsequent explosion of Anglo-American experiment.5 Because these magazines emphasize experimentation with avant-garde art and literature, the genre of the little magazine “may be one of modernism’s most durable contributions to Western print culture” as Mark Morrisson argues.6 Literary experimenters use the periodical genre to disseminate their work, and these journals become key sites for the development and expansion of modernist culture. Because of the eclectic mixtures of individuals fostered by the submission and subscription process, experimental journals function as hubs around which modernist “particles” orbit, and the circuits of their particular orbits bring them into contact 110 with other journals, connecting transnational modernisms together via magazine contributors. As visible in graph 1, contributors to the four magazines central to this chapter—The Little Review, The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist— predictably form clusters around the central hubs of the respective periodicals. Also visible, however, are smaller groupings of nodes representative of contributors who publish in multiple magazines. Like electrons circling a nucleus, these modernists loosely orbit the little magazines in which they appear and, like electrons, “jump” to other magazine nuclei, forming new bonds between hubs. Canonical figures circulate their best early work among a few key magazines willing to publish them, and these texts appear alongside other writers’ works, artists’ paintings, literary reviews, political essays, advertisements, and readers’ correspondence. Information flows back and forth between these various nodes and the central magazine hubs in which they appear. Some writers traffic in multiple magazines, connecting two or more periodicals together via multiple affiliations. The clustering of writers, artists, and thinkers around dense central hubs generates what Lucy Delap labels “periodical communities,” “the material, cultural, and intellectual milieu of a periodical or group Graph 1: Network of Contributors (1911-1919) to The Little Review, The Egoist, The New Freewoman, and The Freewoman. The Egoist The Freewoman New Freewoman The Little Review 111 of related periodicals.”7 These communities extend beyond individual magazine runs, establishing larger webs in which journals “identify each other as important players, promote debate and controversy between each other, exchange material, share contributors and generally inhabit the same intellectual milieu.”8 Periodical communities form via lines of exchange along which travel flows of information— contributors, debates, influences, material. Circuits connect the various periodical hubs together into a larger network of international cooperation and cultural production. Scholars have long demonstrated the value of returning to periodicals as important modernist texts. Extensive studies focusing solely on periodicals have even spawned an entire area of academic inquiry known as “periodical studies.”9 Many of these critics have pointed out that unique network formations exist among these periodicals. For example, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker describe the interrelationships of little magazines in terms of “an urban network across which individual writers and artists moved or formed groups or associations.”10 However, periodical studies have not examined the network concept fully, applying network theory and visualization to the analysis of the texts. It is only with the recent special issue of The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies (2014) that scholars have created visualizations exploring and analyzing the complicated dynamics of periodicals networks, and this analysis does not position magazine networks in relation to other possible modernist networks. I position magazine networks within the larger structure of other modernist networks, examining both how periodical networks operate but also how they fit into a larger constellation of modernism. Visualizing these relationships in network graphs allows us to see the larger structure of this shared orientation toward culture, which reveals that modernists publish simultaneously in multiple magazines. By picturing the larger web of interactions in a graph that shows nodes and edges, I demonstrate that Anglo- 112 American modernists feature prominently in alternative and transatlantic publishing venues. Rather than reading their entries in a diachronic medium, as print documents in little magazines, my network diagrams represent the synchronic nature of multiple publications, attending to the simultaneity of interactions among these modernists. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker describe the network structure as necessitating “a shift in scale, one in which the central concern is no longer the action of individuated agents or nodes in the network. Instead what matters more and more is the very distribution and dispersal of action throughout the network” (emphasis mine).11 Their account of the network dynamic reveals that networks are read as a simultaneous text in which all relations are presented at the same time and where importance is measured by distribution rather than production over time. Reading graphs of little magazine contributions, I analyze the concurrent appearance of specific nodes between 1911, when The Freewoman appears, and 1919, the end of World War I. This “distant reading” demonstrates another way to approach little magazines. Like salons, nodes in the periodical networks congregate around the dense central hub of the magazine, and the editors direct flows of information. However, unlike the nodes constellated in the salons, the webs of connection in these periodical communities are larger and more loosely connected. The looseness of connection among the constellation of nodes in the periodical communities provides a wider sphere of influence. Visualizing periodical communities reveals an underlying and international “imagined” community produced by the print collaborations and discussions among political and aesthetic modernists, readers, editors, anti-modernist detractors, and skeptics. In his now- classical theory of nationalism, Benedict Anderson argues that modern cultural practices such as reading the newspaper—a “mass ceremony” in his expression— produces a feeling of simultaneity in space-time, an “imagined community” of readers connected to one another through shared cultural practices: “[Reading] is performed 113 in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.”12 The simultaneity of reading about the same events in the daily newspaper, which operates in the same synchronic way networks do, creates a sensation of belonging to some larger entity: the democratic nation-state. Despite differences in location, citizens “imagine” their national identity through such processes of parallel activity. The same experience of simultaneity and identification occurs in avant- garde publishing networks. Publishing experiments in little magazines headquartered in Europe and America, avant-gardists contribute to a transatlantic modernist culture, which coalesces before the cataclysm of World War I leaves a more established, pessimistic, and strictly aesthetic high modernism in its wake. Early modernists engage in public dialogues about literature, art, and politics, and these magazines facilitate the appearance of new schools of literature, politics, and art, assembling disparate clusters of innovators into a loosely linked superstructure of cultural production. Without the networks of little magazines, now-canonical texts like Ulysses and The Waste Land may not be celebrated today. Similar to the necessity of salon networks for the development of modernism, periodicals generate and circulate the exposure and interest that makes modernist literature visible in public. Periodical networks thus produce an “imagined community,” marked, not by a sense of national identity, but rather modernist identification. Belonging to a tiny coterie readership paradoxically crystallizes into a larger identification with modernism because factions form out of a mutual interest in experimentation and modern culture. For example, Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review, explains Pound’s joining the magazine’s staff to her readers using the language of commonalities: “Pound didn't slip up on us unaware. A mutual misery over the situation brought us together.”13 This statement, explicitly describing the sympathy 114 between Anderson and Pound, insinuates sympathy between Anderson’s magazine and its readership. Subscribing to a magazine like The Little Review invites readers to imagine themselves part of the group of people who feel “misery” over the lack of cultural sophistication in modern society. These journals, I argue, constitute awareness among readers, writers, artists, and intellectuals of belonging to a “modernist” community by linking together individuals in parallel channels of modernist experimentation. The loosely linked clusters of modernist innovation, when visually represented in graphs, show the equivalent avant-garde activity taking place in the public sphere. This sense of collective belonging to a modernist community and the rhetorically constructed “misery” over the degradation of cultural sophistication cultivated in little magazines should not occlude the imbrications of modernist cultural production with forms of popular mass media. As periodical scholars argue, modernists adapt marketing tactics from mainstream magazines while at the same time denigrating popular culture as part of a conscious strategy of cooptation and self-fashioning. Patrick Collier points out, “the attractiveness of newspapers as a rhetorical enemy” plays a central role in fashioning a sense of modernism despite the fact that many of the major modernist detractors publish in them. “The issue of mass journalism offered these writers an arena, an existing field of discussion with ready terms and arguments,” Collier argues, “in which they could work out their questions and anxieties about the public, democracy, and the artists, and the individual writer’s or artist’s potential influence over them.”14 Thus, accounts of modernist suspicion or hostility toward journalism mask a more complex and nuanced set of tensions and intersectional relations. Many modernist experimenters in these early magazines rhetorically align themselves against mass culture even as they partake of the benefits of the magazine form as a means of marketing themselves as “vanguard.” Scholars such as Lawrence Rainey and Timothy Materer contend that even the most elitist 115 and anti-mass culture figures like Pound or T.S. Eliot rely on complex systems of self-presentation and branding derived from popular culture.15 The newspaper press often publicizes modernist exhibits and exhibitions, which spreads the sense of modernism as community beyond the small readerships of little magazines while reinforcing the idea of a public modernism to those same readerships. The Futurists’ arrival in London (1909), the Post-Impressionist exhibit in London (1910), and the Armory Show in New York (1913) introduce the Anglo- American world to modernist experiments. In the next chapter, I will return to public displays of vanguardism, but, because avant-garde magazines simultaneously advocate similar trends in art, thought, politics, and literature, and because they overlap with each other in presenting the same materials, they invite readers and contributors to imagine larger, abstract communities of modernistic association across the Atlantic and encourage interested bystanders to join that community by reading little magazines. Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible contend that periodicals “provide loci of identification and difference, allowing us to recover lines of connection, influence, conflict, and resistance that entangle the many strands of modernism.”16 Little magazines establish an atmosphere of experimentation in literature, politics, and culture by funneling and circulating early modernist ideas among a limited but vital community of artists, writers, political radicals, patrons, and readers. Unlike literary salons, in which a diverse group of people socializes privately in someone’s home and experimentation can be discussed among sympathetic listeners in a safe setting, little magazines package experimental ideas for public consumption. Many magazines explicitly dedicate themselves to innovation or controversy and invite subscribers to imagine themselves as intellectuals interested in the latest ideas, crafting an imagined community of modernist readers. Advertisements, manifestoes, and leader articles in these little magazines appeal to 116 aspirant-intellectual readers using a discourse of the aggressively “new.” For example, Max Eastman includes an editorial policy for his socialist magazine The Masses, which claims to “do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers—there is a field for this publication in America. Help us find it.”17 At once inviting and dismissive, these types of manifestoes suggest that the editors and contributors feel unconcerned with wider public opinion toward their magazine. For the interested reader, this dismissive posture titillates deeper interest in modern movements hostile toward tradition. Thus, the editors usually include some invitational portion: “Help us find” a particular niche for a magazine that “conciliates nobody, not even its readers.” Simultaneously supercilious and inviting, this statement advertises a particular kind of magazine modernism. Radical magazines deliberately risk alienating some readers by adopting a stance superior to them, gambling that such a stance would entice new subscribers who could thus imagine themselves “helping” the magazine find its niche thereby manipulating the type of reader who subscribes. These tactics demand that readers measure up to the magazine’s standards even as they suggest the way to do that, demonstrating a modernist reflexive technique by representing the ideal reader in the magazine itself. In ridiculing their subscribers, editors dare them to measure up, crafting the imagined community of modernist readers. At the same time that magazines invite readers to imagine themselves members of an elite audience by subscribing, editors struggle against an often-hostile public sphere and the economic challenges that come with it. Many editors begin little magazines to provide venues for revolutionary political ideas, innovative art, and contemporary literature not deemed appropriate by the mass-market periodicals and subject to suppression by censorship laws. But, because these magazines enter the public sphere, these editors must balance this controversy with restraint.18 Some readers react with hostility toward editors who publish avant-garde material because 117 the material challenges status-quo conceptions of art and writing. The general public considers many of the more prominent little magazines controversial and ridicules the most avant-garde. For example, Alfred Kreymborg’s Others, which promotes itself as a “magazine of the new verse,” opens its first issue in July 1915 with Mina Loy’s avant-garde poem “Love Songs,” a shocking assault on the very concept of sentimental verse: “Pig cupid / his rosy snout / Rooting erotic garbage.”19 Loy’s poem sets up an expectation for a particular kind of poem by using the simple title “Love Songs.” However, the poem immediately empties the title of any romantic subtext by depicting the god of love as “Pig cupid,” an embodied, filthy animal. Readers immediately encounter “Love Songs,” which evacuates poetry of the rhetoric and sentimentality of love. Little magazines provide venues for radically experimental literature, but the negotiation with the public sphere that ensues can cause problems for editors who publish materials that are too controversial, and several editors experience serious litigation because of something they published. Publishing avant-garde material, editors face difficulties from economic and social pressures. Brooker and Thacker describe these challenges as the “economic and cultural plight” of little magazines, “at once dogged by the costs of production, haunted by the threat of censorship, at loggerheads with more conventional publications, and at war with the philistinism of a prevailing business culture.”20 Publishing a little magazine requires extensive efforts on the parts of the editors, contributors often submit manuscripts for free, and the venture rarely pays the costs of publishing. Most magazines never sell enough copies to pay the bills and rely on external sources of funding such as patronage. Both Margaret Anderson and Dora Marsden receive funding from wealthy bourgeois friends John Quinn and Harriet Shaw Weaver respectively, and Pound’s involvement in any little magazine is welcomed as much for his access to funds as for his literary acumen. But economic struggle represents only one struggle in publishing little magazines. Avant-garde 118 editors face social pressures in their quest to publish new material. In the worst cases, legal actions censor magazines such as Anderson’s The Little Review, or publishers refuse to print the magazine for fear of censorship as with Marsden’s The New Freewoman. Editors put themselves at personal risk of litigation when publishing experimental work, but the cultural benefits of putting out a quality literary or political magazine outweigh the risks, at least as long as the money continues. Although modernist little magazines continue publishing after the Great War and throughout the rest of the twentieth century, the period before and during the war witnesses the birth and proliferation of especially vital periodicals, which respond to the energy of the times by providing important venues in which burgeoning modernists could publish. As such, they exercise a particularly important function in solidifying an early sense of modernistic community. Morrisson describes a “sense of optimism that British and American modernists felt before the war about the public nature of art.” The public nature of art and literature aligns with political movements operative during the same period, and the “sense of optimism” about art’s public function, Morrison contends, means that American and British modernists “felt that new forms of publicity adopted by radical political groups and cultural institutions offered them the opportunity to help reshape the social function of literature.”21 Modernism’s early practitioners actively take part in broader political currents and public discussions, and early modernism exhibits “a fusion of unorthodox aesthetics, politics, and personal style,” as Mark Whalan phrases it.22 The pre-war magazines and journals provide natural venues for exposing these innovations to a select readership’s eye and for inviting that readership to interact with and critique this burgeoning modernism. Anderson and Marsden serve as exemplary representatives of this intellectual ferment during the pre-war years, both producing avant-garde journals in the years before World War I that afford snapshots of the cultural revolutions taking place in 119 America and England. Their magazines offer particularly rich sites for exploring the periodical networks of modernism because both editors design outlets for aesthetic and political modernisms. Both women begin their publishing careers with strong political convictions, which inspire the publication of little magazines, yet both remain committed to philosophical rather than actual revolution and reject narrow political orthodoxies. Both women develop crucial outlets for early modernism to appear alongside the political essays and literary reviews. Canonical modernist works first appear in these little magazines, and the circulation of reviews and positive endorsements of avant-garde literature provides much needed support to writers who are initially denigrated by the press. Without these editors, who recognize the value of these early experiments, some of the material now considered canonical may have remained obscure. Anderson and Marsden concretize a modernist “imagined” community around their magazines, and the conduit between the two magazine networks establishes a larger sphere in which the constellation of radical political figures and experimental writers and poets interconnected, forming a large web of transatlantic modernism in print. Most visibly, this web appeared in advertisements for the magazines, which links American and British modernism for readers into a transatlantic flow of information (fig. 1).23 The public nature of this magazine modernism provides key opportunities for modernists to experiment in print. Experimental ideas must eventually enter the public domain, and little magazines provide the entry point. Rather than simply receive rejection notices from decidedly middle-brow publishing venues, modernists can submit their poems, prose, essays, artworks, and manifestos to alternative presses, which allows them to see their work in print and provides encouragement. In such alternative publishing networks, editors like Marsden and Anderson play the crucial role in deciding how the magazine will effect that entry into public. Without a committed editor willing to sacrifice time and money to a venture that will almost 120 certainly not return a financial gain, little magazines cannot function. Both Anderson and Marsden work tirelessly to maintain their magazines, often fighting legal reprisals, hostile publics, and cranky contributors all in the service of providing a venue for unorthodox thinking. Their efforts establish a vast network of revolutionary nonconformists in politics and literature whose collaborations create a transnational atmosphere of freshness and innovation during the early twentieth century. Thus, each magazine takes on the characteristics of the editors, and each magazine hub has unique properties because of this editorial oversight. In many ways, these editors serve as the public representative of political and aesthetic modernism, organizing their magazines as gateways for experimental or unorthodox intellectual conversation in print. These editors constellate a wide variety of contributors and commentators in the pages of their magazines, and these editorial nodes form massive, diffuse networks of political activists and avant-garde artists and writers whose submissions link the magazine hubs to much larger webs of interactions. The totality of nodes linking to these little magazine hubs forms a Fig. 1: Advertisement for The Egoist in The Little Review (May 1915) (left) and advertisement for The Little Review in The Egoist (April 1915) (right). 121 transnationally public manifestation of modernist publication during the pre-war years and underscores the vastness and heterogeneity of early modernism. Like hostesses, editors operate as crucially active nodes in the constellation of nodes reading and writing to little magazines, but they organize and disseminate essays, poetry, fiction, and philosophy. Whereas hostesses attract nodes to the salon, editors attract submissions in order to distribute them. Anderson and Marsden curate this material and craft a particular and unique aesthetic for each of their magazines. Editorial Egos In the production and publication of little magazines, editors play the crucial role of choosing literary material and political statements, dealing with legal challenges such as censorship or suppression in court, and reaching out to contacts and readers for financial support. To characterize the editor’s job in abstract mathematical terms, the little magazine operates as a “function” of the editor who facilitates the production and dissemination of new material by her action on the print object. Journalist Louise Bryant describes the importance of these magazine editors during the nineteen-teens, and their prominence in the public sphere, in a 1917 editorial for the New York Tribune entitled “Are the Editors In? They Are.” In this article, published the same month and year Pound joined the staff of The Little Review, Bryant describes visiting the headquarters of various magazines in New York including The Century, McClure’s, Good Housekeeping, Pearson’s, The Smart Set, La Parisienne, The Masses, The Seven Arts, Munsey’s, Saucy Stories, and The Little Review because “War or no war, everybody is interested in the magazine editor.” 24 Bryant correlates a public interest in magazine editors to the dissemination of cultural material in a list of both eclectic and mainstream journals. The rhetorical weight of this piece delegates pseudo-celebrity status to magazine editors as exalted purveyors of culture to the public. Unlike the editors of the more middlebrow magazines listed by Bryant, however, the editors of modernist little magazines assume further 122 responsibility in publishing controversial material that would not sell elsewhere. Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich describe the “ideal” editors of little magazine in terms that capture this more marginal position in the public sphere: Such a man [or woman] is stimulated by some form of discontent— whether with the constraints of his [or her] world or the negligence of publishers, at any rate with something he [or she] considers unjust, boring, or ridiculous . . . Often he [or she] is rebellious against the doctrines of popular taste and sincerely believes that our attitudes toward literature need to be reformed or at least made more liberal.25 Like many writers of modernist literature, editors of the avant-garde little magazines adopt antagonistic positions toward mainstream culture, and their magazines allow them to articulate and produce an oppositional, or at least marginal, outlet for cultural production. As the final say on submitted material, modernist editors avoid the strictures of mainstream publishing, which remains constricted by the necessity of appearing decidedly middle-brow and retain a greater freedom of choice with regard to submissions.26 Running these magazines, these editors could express their discontentment with contemporary culture by constellating others seeking outlets for their own personal revolutions. Like the salon hostesses who design the rooms in which they host their salons, these editors select and determine the material appearing in every issue, thus little magazines possess a unique atmosphere derived from the editor’s control. George Bornstein describes the editors of modernism as setting “the field of literary study, both by deciding what works came to the public and by determining the form in which these works appeared.”27 In this account, Bornstein describes major modernists who edit their own work: Pound, W.B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, H.D., Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and William Faulkner. However, Bornstein’s characterization of the editor’s central role captures the importance of little 123 magazine editors. Adapting Bornstein’s description of an editor’s role, I contend that these magazines operate, in large part, as “ego-centric” networks because the editors oversee all aspects of the magazine’s production. Charles Kadushin defines ego- centric networks as “those networks that are connected with a single node or individual.”28 An individual node becomes a point of contact for the other nodes in the network, constellating the rest of the nodes around itself. Inasmuch as we associate a particular little magazine with its editor, we can see from the network graphs that there is a high order of centrality—or clustering of nodes—around the central hub of the magazine (graph 1). These editors form alternative ego-centric networks of their own, paralleling the social networks in the salon. There, the central node is the hostess who creates an ego hub in her salon, but, in these modernist magazines, this central node is an editor who selects and curates submissions and the hub is a magazine in which chosen contributors appear in print. Unlike the male ego-centric networks of Pound, Lewis, Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway, whose published works constituted critical recreations of high modernism for decades, the major nodes in little magazine ego-centric networks are predominately women. Jayne Marek, Shari Benstock, Suzanne Clark, Bonnie Kime Scott, and others have drawn attention to this phenomenon in modernist scholarship, effecting recovery efforts that have filled a problematic hole in modernist scholarship before the 1990s. Marek argues, in Women Editing Modernism, that no matter which “list one might compile of the ‘masterpieces’ of the early twentieth century, it will include a high proportion of pieces for which women provided the forum for first publication, the impetus, the monetary support, or the initial critical reception, which was extremely important because so much experimental writing was going on.”29 Anderson and Marsden play indispensable roles in bringing modernism into the public consciousness, and their periodical outlets establish a transatlantic consciousness of modernist community before the 124 concretization of canonical high modernism. These women editors and salon hostesses are no less integral to modernism, and the production of modern art and literature is the result of their heroic efforts in a male-dominated culture. Anderson and Marsden’s editorial statements reveal a deft control over the modernist traffic in and out of their respective magazines. Unlike the modernist editors analyzed by Bornstein, whose editorial work “has come to occupy the position often assigned to hegemonic ideology by literary theory—invisible because the choices generated seem natural and inevitable,” magazine editors visibly negotiate and update their editorial policies and platforms vis-à-vis the readership and editorial staff.30 Both Anderson and Marsden play active roles directing and publicizing their magazines, publishing their own reviews and leader articles, commenting on the material in the magazine, appealing for subscribers, and responding to readers’ correspondence. Issues frequently open with an article or comment from the editor, as well as editorial commentary sprinkled throughout. For example, when graphing the contributions to The Little Review during its first year of publication, according to number of submissions, the amount of Anderson’s input becomes visible, illustrating the way editors actively shape the material of the magazine hub (graph 2). Only one other node is as large as Anderson: George Soule, who wrote a regular column and book reviews. But Anderson appears the most; her contributions, editorial comments, and essays fill the magazine. This graph represents the variety of The Little Review’s community during its first year, and reflects the early Chicago modernism of the magazine. Many of the nodes featured in this graph represent the Chicago Renaissance, featuring such writers as Conrad Aiken, Floyd Dell, DeWitt Wing, and Maxwell Bodenheim. 125 Graph 2: Weighted graph of contributors to The Little Review 1914-1915 126 Anderson’s first editorial in The Little Review conjures an avant-garde magazine invested in upending conventional notions and stodgy traditions in favor of youthful rebellion. In her opening “Announcement,” she rejects the “paternal friend” who argues that life is more important and interesting than art. Instead, Anderson announces in her manifesto, “since THE LITTLE REVIEW, which is neither directly nor indirectly connected in any way with any organization, society, company, cult or movement, is the personal enterprise of the editor, it shall enjoy that untrammelled liberty which is the life of Art.”31 Describing the magazine as the personal project of the editor, Anderson deploys the language of capitalist investment but uses that rhetoric to assert independence from the market, which reflects what she sees as a masculine demand for practicality. Anderson rejects the masculinist claims that real life is more important than artistic expression, asserting instead an “eager panting” approach to Art, with a capital “A.” Because of the unique power of her individual ego, the editor provides a forum for like-minded artists and writers to appear in the public sphere. Anderson militantly advocates for a form of modernist engagement that eschews a particular ideology or group affiliation, which would shield her behind an “ism.” Instead, she sponsors an individualist approach in keeping with her own interests in anarchistic ideas, and ties this approach to the concept of youthful rebellion against patriarchal traditions. “And now that we’ve made our formal bow,” she continues, “we may say confidentially that we take a certain joyous pride in confessing our youth, our perfectly inexpressible enthusiasm, and our courage in the face of a serious undertaking.”32 Marek points out that scholars have considered Anderson’s work with regards to her personality and have “dismissed [her work] as a limitation,” a striking dismissal that Anderson seems to have already predicted in her rejection of “paternal friends.”33 However, Anderson’s response reveals that, despite her refusal to espouse a modernist “ism,” she maintains the language of the “we” 127 adapted from the avant-garde manifesto. Here, the “we” is youth, a much less organized “we,” but she still crafts a collectivity of youthful rebellion within her magazine. In keeping with my claim that these little magazines remain loosely connected and diffuse networks, Anderson poses a loosely affiliated group dynamic. Throughout the life of the magazine, Anderson maintains a strong, visible editorial presence. Unlike little magazines such as Poetry or Others in which the editors mainly publish others’ writing, Anderson establishes a dialogue with her readers, cajoling, encouraging, and berating them when necessary. In August 1916, Anderson returns to her discussion of the life and art dichotomy she raises in the first issue with a leader article entitled “A Real Magazine.” “I am afraid to write anything. I am ashamed,” she begins in typically blunt fashion, “I have been realizing the ridiculous tragedy of The Little Review.”34 Anderson articulates a renewed investment in publishing good writing and art regardless of movement or group, berating herself and her readers for the lack of quality. According to her, the magazine has compromised on submissions and published merely good work, not art. Anderson ends this indictment with a promise: “I loathe compromise, and yet I have been compromising in every issue by putting in things that were ‘almost good’ or ‘interesting enough’ or ‘important.’ There will be no more of it. If there is only one really beautiful thing for the September number it shall go in and the other pages will be left blank. Come on, all of you!”35 Anderson ends her appeal with an invitation to readers, inviting them to test their mettle in the world of her magazine by submitting manuscripts. Her appeal thus proves inviting and admonishing at the same time. In the next issue, Anderson flexes her editorial muscles, printing an issue with twelve blank pages because quality submissions are not forthcoming. The magazine’s first page includes only the statement, “The Little Review hopes to become a magazine of Art. The September issue is offered as a Want Ad.”36 Anderson adapts and parodies the language of advertising, a mass-market medium, to her coterie 128 publication, requesting good art from any interested readers. This advertisement operates as a mechanism of both exclusion and inclusion, restricting future publications and inviting new ones at the same time. Anderson concludes this statement on the next page, printing the page with only the words: “. . . The other pages will be left blank.”37 Printing a page with only enough words to state that the rest of the pages would remain blank emphasizes the paradox of what Anderson is doing. Rather than continue to publish substandard material, she sells the magazine with blank pages in a display of editorial power. Exercising editorial control over the contents allows her the freedom to make statements about her own magazine, shifting the responsibility to her readers to produce good art and writing by advertising for good artists and writers with the title “A Want Ad.” Soliciting quality manuscripts insinuates the possibility of publishing to readers who may be aspiring writers, keeping them interested, even as the want ad crafts a particular kind of artist or writer. Anderson makes this statement by selling a blank magazine to her readers in a display of verve and antagonism. Even as she relies on sales to keep the magazine going but uses that reliance as a goad to solicit better material by selling a blank magazine. The only materials Anderson prints in this issue are two political essays on a San Francisco bomb case, letters from readers, and a cartoon entitled “Light occupations of the editor, while there is nothing to edit.”38 This cartoon by Anderson’s partner, Jane Heap, depicts Anderson engaged in various activities such as breakfasting, horseback riding, swimming, “suffering for humanity at Emma Goldman’s lectures,” “converting the sheriff to anarchism and vers libre,” and playing her Mason and Hamlin piano.39 Heap’s cartoon constructs a bohemian persona for Anderson in this cartoon, depicting her using free time to pursue art, beauty, and political equality. But the cartoon also suggests that Anderson could be doing other things than publishing a magazine. While this cartoon lightens the critique of 129 American art leveled by the blank pages, it underscores the fun Anderson could be having if she were not so dedicated to The Little Review. This cartoon serves two functions at once: it both castigates the low quality of submissions and obviates its own critique through humor. Anderson’s editorial maneuvers reveal that she possesses intelligence for marketing her magazine even when she is complaining about the quality of the material it publishes. She crafts a mythos for herself in which she represents the paragon of artistic sensibility waiting for America to catch up, and she uses this persona as an editorial presence in the magazine both to construct and define the modernist readership she seeks. Whereas Anderson adopts an energetic yet superior persona in her editorial presence, Marsden’s role in the two London magazines she edits, The Freewoman and The New Freewoman, remains more tied to espousing particular philosophical ideas. Whereas Anderson consistently insinuates herself into the dialogic exchanges in The Little Review even as she allows those discussions to grow organically, Marsden adopts a subtler editorial presence, preferring to leave her leader articles without a name attached while using them to prompt debate and controversy. Bruce Clarke describes Marsden’s systematic approach as a deliberate aggravation, opening with “an extreme, provocative declaration on a given issue, generating some surprise, some shock and resistance, followed by reflection, redefinition, and dialectical development of the issue, at the price of alienating portions of the audience.”40 In The Freewoman and The New Freewoman, this editorial policy often consists of attacks on mainstream suffrage politics, mass-movements, and especially the Pankhursts’ votes-for-women agitating. In Clarke’s analysis, “Marsden began to write out a theoretical program for a liberation feminism.”41 Many of her leader articles take the form of densely philosophical rejections of her early suffrage training, promoting instead anarchistic individualism, in The Freewoman and New Freewoman, and egoism derived from the philosophical writings of Max Stirner in The Egoist and always 130 generating interest and controversy among readers. This demonstrates the extent to which Marsden maintains editorial control over her magazines, using them to disseminate her theories of egoism and individualism.42 In the inaugural issue of The Freewoman, Marsden makes known her position regarding the W.S.P.U. and traditional suffrage politics in a leader article titled “Bondwomen.” In this opening salvo in what would be a protracted conflict with the Pankhursts, Marsden defines a new category of feminist, the “freewoman,” who manifests individual power, and she juxtaposes these freewomen to what she calls “bondwomen”: “Bondwomen are distinguished from Freewomen by a spiritual distinction. Bondwomen are the women who are not separate spiritual entities—who are not individuals.”43 Although somewhat mystical regarding this distinction, Marsden clearly rejects the notion that women are being oppressed by patriarchy, which remains the party line of the suffrage movement. Instead, she argues that true individuals can never be truly oppressed. Even more controversially perhaps, Marsden maintains that “bondwomen” experience oppression because they are unable to manifest their individuality fully: “It is quite beside the point to say women were ‘crushed’ down. If they were not ‘down’ in themselves—i.e., weaker in mind— no equal force could have crushed them ‘down.’”44 Unlike the suffragettes, who claim that the best tactic for winning the vote is demanding Parliamentary reform, Marsden claims that women should strive to be not suffragists, feminists, or joiners of causes but individualists. Bondwomen have given up their freedom in exchange for security and protection, according to her argument: “For this protected position women give up all first-hand power. Really, the power to work and to think. All the power they achieve is merely derivative.”45 These claims for female individualism as a means of generating personal power contradict the political maneuvering of suffrage organizations and illustrate Marsden’s early interests in forging her own political philosophy in contrast to the political movements in which she has been trained. 131 In the second issue of The Freewoman, Marsden doubles down on her pronouncements in the first issue. In “A Commentary on Bondwomen,” she describes the response to her leader article of the previous week as a series of letters accusing her of advocating a philosophy of genius and proposing a cult of the extraordinary that could not encompass rank-and-file, everyday women. “To be a freewoman one must have the essential attribute of genius,” Marsden replies. “Last week we implied it, and this week we state it.”46 In typical Marsden fashion, she does not retreat from claims that her philosophy appears undemocratically superior to common people. However, her definition of “genius” suggests a subtle invitation to her readers and detractors: “Genius is an individual revelation of life-manifestation, made realisable to others in some outward form. So we hold that anyone who has an individual and personal vision of life in any sphere has the essential attribute of genius, and those who have not this individual realisation are without genius.”47 By this definition, freewomen are geniuses because of a will to power, a conscious realization of their full potential and their “revelation of life-manifestation.” Every issue begins with one of these unsigned editorial pronouncements. Marsden uses her editorial position to attack what she sees as the misplaced focus of mainstream suffragism, but she deploys these pronouncements as aggressive stimuli for debates in the public sphere. Her leader articles mince no words in espousing the editor’s opinion, but Marsden ensures that much of The Freewoman and New Freewoman is reserved for correspondence and discussion of her theories. Even as magazine editors use their periodicals as platforms for their own interests and philosophies, they take upon themselves the responsibility for keeping their publications operating in the face of a potentially hostile, censorious, and litigious public sphere. Because of the controversial material printed in The Freewoman’s pages, Marsden suffers a boycott from W.H. Smith and Sons, a company that owns a string of merchandise stalls in railway stations, which sell 132 copies of The Freewoman. E.S.P. Haynes, a lawyer and writer who contributes frequently to The Freewoman, writes to Marsden in February 1912 to raise the alarm that friends have been unable to buy the paper at the tube station in Knightsbridge and encourages Marsden to find out if W.H. Smith and Sons were still purporting to sell it: “I am not at all sure that the firm do not try to boycott papers occasionally without openly announcing that they will not sell them. In fact I believe that they pursued this policy for some time with the English Review.”48 H.G. Wells writes with some concern regarding the increasing rarity of finding copies on the stands: “Has The Freewoman stopped or what has happened? I am a subscriber & it seems ages--. Also, since I gave you three weeks of placards and my sacred name I will want a return.”49 These letters show that the magazine has aroused interest in readers. Wells even writes Marsden to say “I love the Freewoman.” Yet, the boycott takes its toll on the sales of the magazine because readers can only get it through direct requests to the publishers. The magazine only runs from November 1911 to October 1912, and the final issue of The Freewoman appeals to subscribers to send in requests for the magazine and states that, although the magazine would cease publishing, it would reappear if enough interest were aroused. This outspoken editor also generates a hostile reaction in the public sphere from mainstream suffragists who attack the editors for the magazine’s anti-W.S.P.U. rhetoric. A letter from one reader, sent November 1911, condemns Marsden for soliciting readers from among the W.S.P.U. membership: “I fail to see what justification you can possibly find for having asked support from members of the W.S.P.U. when you proposed to insult (in one or two sentences of your amazing criticism) one of their leaders.”50 A letter from another reader, sent the same month, put the matter in more clear language: “Your vile attack on Miss Pankhurst in The Freewoman fills me with amazement and disgust too deep for expression.”51 Marsden’s co-editor Mary Gawthorpe publishes a letter in the third issue of The 133 Freewoman, “To the Women’s Social and Political Union,” which responds to these accusations and clarifies her position. “I emerge for a moment from the impersonal attitude of joint-editorial responsibility,” she wrote, “in order to clear up certain seeming anomalies in a vivid situation.” Responding to claims from readers that she has abandoned the suffragist cause, Gawthorpe claims, “There are many roads to Rome. There are many roads to a fuller realisation of the varying aspects of that ideal we call Truth.”52 Essentially disagreeing with Marsden’s denigration of Parliamentary reform as the ultimate goal, Gawthorpe attempts to navigate between the Scylla of Marsden’s individualist radicalism and the Charybdis of the W.S.P.U. faithful. These exchanges reveal the potential threats attendant upon editing a controversial magazine. Editors and joint editors serve as touchstones for the ideas they express and, when those ideas run afoul of the public, experience the backlash. Anderson feels this phenomenon of legal repression from the public sphere more severely. From its inception, The Little Review publishes experimental material, which often offends public sensibilities. Anderson publishes a sample of the negative letters she receives from hostile readers, and, like the correspondence surrounding The Freewoman, these letters foreground the public furor often aroused by these magazines. For example, a clergyman writes to The Little Review in November 1914: “I earnestly request you to discontinue sending your impertinent publication to my daughter who had the folly of undiscriminating youth to fall in the diabolical snare by joining the ungodly family of your subscribers.”53 Describing the magazine as “diabolical” and “ungodly” no doubt delights Anderson, and she publishes this letter to underscore the conservative nature of her resistance and reinforce the importance of revolutionizing aesthetic appreciation in America. The clergyman, whose moralistic sermon condemns the magazine, only serves to represent the backwardness of traditional values. His concern with his daughter’s purity exemplifies a particularly controversial aspect of The Little Review: its attraction for 134 the young and its ability to arouse the protective rage of the older generation. Other readers send curt messages dismissing the editor’s project altogether. “I am going to ask you to please discontinue my subscription to THE LITTLE REVIEW,” one Chicago reader wrote Anderson in 1914, “as your ideas which you set forth in your leading articles are so entirely crude and so vastly different from my own that I do not care to be responsible for its appearance in my home any longer.”54 This correspondent dismisses the magazine because its pursuit of avant-garde material seems “crude,” although it is unclear if this crudeness signifies lack of sophistication or crassness. Editors receive enthusiastic messages too, but readers who dislike little magazines find editors an easy target and are usually vociferous. Editors publish these letters both to show their willingness to listen to even hostile correspondence and to energize their supportive readers by illustrating the provincial boorishness of segments of the American population. After Pound joins The Little Review in April 1917, the magazine ramps up publishing experimental literature using his European connections. Anderson recognizes Pound’s genius for publicizing the group of writers with whom he affiliates, the “Men of 1914” as Wyndham Lewis calls them.55 Pound writes to Anderson that, should he accept the post of foreign editor, he would want a place to publish his friends: “I want an ‘official organ’ (vile phrase). I mean I want a place where I and T.S. Eliot can appear once a month (or once an ‘issue’) and where James Joyce can appear when he likes, and where Wyndham Lewis can appear if he comes back from the war.”56 Two of these, Lewis and Joyce, prominently publish longer pieces in The Little Review, and both earn the magazine the dubious distinction of legal reprisal. Lewis’s short story “Cantleman’s Spring Mate,” which appears in the October 1917 issue, features descriptions of a brief sexual encounter between a soldier and a young farmer’s daughter. In the next issue, Anderson explains to subscribers that the October issue was seized by the Post Office for obscenity. 135 “There is nothing lewd or obscene in that story,” Anderson complains, “It is a piece of literature. I can't find a word or phrase or sentence in it that anyone could dream of distorting into indecency.”57 Despite her promise to fight the charges in court, the judge rules that the story includes indecent elements, and the court suppresses the issue. A subsequent advertisement shows that a clever editor could turn even suppression into a plea for subscriptions: “It was an especially good number, from which we hoped to get a lot of new subscribers. Won't you help us now by renewing your subscription promptly, if it has expired, and by urging your friends to subscribe at once?”58 Anderson’s publishing of Joyce, however, provokes the authorities to censure the magazine’s editors for printing immoral material. The result of the Lewis debacle merely prevents postal circulation of the magazine, whereas the litigation surrounding the publication of Ulysses indicts the editors of peddling indecent material. During the early twentieth century, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice under the leadership of John Sumner actively investigates and prosecutes materials deemed lewd. After Anderson publishes the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses in the July-August 1920 issue, she and Heap face accusations of producing and disseminating obscene materials, and Anderson hires attorney John Quinn, a noted art collector and patron of the magazine, to defend them. As recounted in Anderson’s autobiography, Quinn’s strategy revolves around Anderson and Heap appearing meek and humble while he pursues a defense based on the quality of The Little Review in publishing contemporary literature. However, despite “expert” testimony from Scofield Thayer, editor of the quarterly The Dial, Phillip Moeller of the Theatre Guild, and poet John Cowper Powys that Ulysses should be evaluated as a piece of literature and has no corrupting influences on young people, the three judges find Anderson and Heap guilty and require them to pay $100.00. In January 1921, Anderson takes to the editorial page to decry the decision: “The trial of the Little 136 Review for printing a masterpiece is now over—lost, of course, but if any one thought there was a chance of our winning . . . in the United States of America.”59 Central to the defense and subsequent verdict, the defenders of Ulysses claim it as an aesthetic representation of subconscious processes. The guilty verdict supports the beliefs long held by Anderson and Pound that America remained too provincial for good art and maintains the idea that the magazine provided an alternative imagined community to that of the nation. Packaging modernism for the public sphere provokes reactions from readers and the legal system. Publishing these magazines requires editorial verve, and legal suppressions only reinforce the need for alternative publishing networks. And yet, even as these editors refuse to compromise their investments in contemporary ideas, they remain committed to providing public venues for authors to publish for the small numbers of readers who feel these experiments are necessary for breaking down the edifices of traditional values that crush the younger generation. These magazines appear on bookshelves in stores where they can be purchased thus providing a key connection between the alternative publishing networks and the public who eventually develop an interest in the latest ideas and writings. Editors provide the magazine, in which these modernist ideas are packaged, while contributors further develop the parameters of a modernist community through reviews. These networks operate as ego-centric networks orbiting the major connecting node of the editor. Thus, these magazines not only reflect the editor’s individual interests in cultural revolution but package that revolution for readers, operating as tastemakers of modernism, a function of the periodical network that delimits the contours of early political and aesthetic modernism for a public readership. 137 Publishing the Avant-Garde: Networks of Textual Modernism Before the war, little magazines provide public sites for distributing the more experimental artists and writers, and their editors facilitate the appearance of important avant-garde literature. Pierre Bourdieu’s characterization of the avant- garde as part of a larger cultural field of power, in which every agent takes a position vis-a-vis other agents, underscores the need for coterie publication avenues. As Bourdieu describes the position-taking of the avant-garde, “‘Making one’s mark’, initiating a new epoch, means winning recognition, in both senses, of one’s difference from other producers, especially the most consecrated of them; it means by the same token, creating a new position, ahead of the positions already occupied, in the vanguard.”60 Taking a position of difference from the socially sanctioned cultural producers, vanguardists “self-create” new positions. Both Anderson and Marsden provide a space for these vanguard position-takings to appear, even if they also offer space for less controversial work, and the simultaneity of a text’s appearance alongside other materials enables individuals to distinguish themselves from each other. These magazines operate as a space for the works of artists and writers to appear against the backdrop of materials submitted by similarly vanguard- minded individuals. Readers and subscribers find themselves exposed to a wealth of avant-garde ideas, artworks, and literature. As Joyce Wexler demonstrates, modernism relies on a rhetoric of hostility toward the bourgeois public sphere even as it negotiates with that sphere’s more sanctioned positions and position-takings in order to market the controversial.61 Both Anderson and Marsden publish and market controversial avant-garde material in their magazines, appealing to a small readership of individuals who remain interested in discovering new aesthetic ideas and expressions. Determining how the “consciousness” of modernist community may have come about requires ascertaining the sphere of overlap between these magazines. I 138 inserted into a dataset all the contributors to the The Little Review, The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist between the years 1911-1919. Each contributor appears as a node connecting to the central magazine hub (see graph 1), producing four clusters of highly centralized activity around each. I entered each contributor only once, despite multiple contributions, in order to illustrate the total number of unique contributors. My visualization shows that The Freewoman and The Little Review publish the widest array of contributors between these years, with The Egoist closely following and The New Freewoman falling far behind—due, no doubt, to its limited run but also because it tends to publish the same core group of writers. The graph shows a substantial cluster of overlap between each of these magazines but very little overlap between The Freewoman and New Freewoman, despite their similar titles and readership, and the largest contributor overlap between The Little Review and The Egoist. Clusters of shared activity that I expected to appear, such as between The Freewoman and New Freewoman, are absent, revealing that Marsden’s rejuvenation of The Freewoman after the boycott was actually more akin to creating a new magazine. The regular contributors to The Freewoman stop publishing in The New Freewoman, either because they lose interest or because Marsden stops accepting their submissions. The strong linkages between The Egoist and The Little Review demonstrate once again that these two magazine hubs provide key sites for modernists to publish transnationally and supports my claim for an imagined modernist community of participants. These graphs reveal a significant number of overlapping nodes among the four magazines. The nodes that appear in all four magazines, and especially among The Little Review, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist represent the core of this transnational modernist imagined community because these writers spread their works throughout the public spheres of the U.S. and England. During this time period, as can be seen in the large network (graph 3), the nodes who figure 139 prominently in each of these three magazines become the central writers of Anglo- American modernism, more specifically, the Imagists: William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, F.S. Flint, and Amy Lowell. There appears only one non- Imagist literary figure, French Symbolist poet Remy De Gormount, and only one person who did not experiment with literature: Alice Groff. She appears in the letter columns of all three magazines, and her enthusiasm for modern art and literature means she frequently corresponds with the editors of these magazines.62 Looking at these other clusters reinforces the role literary experimentation played in the networks among these little magazines because the space of overlap is occupied by subsequently major modernists, and they spread notions about modern art and letters through these little magazines. The cluster formed between The Little Review and The Egoist (center left, graph 3) features other modernists who do not appear in the cluster formed by all three periodicals, including T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Alfred Kreymborg (modernist poet and editor of Others), Maxwell Bodenheim (Greenwich Village poet), Witter Bynner (Greenwich Village poet and one of the perpetrators of the Spectrist Hoax in Others), Aldous Huxley, Mary Butts (popular novelist), May Sinclair (novelist and critic), Conrad Aiken (psychoanalytic poet) , Harriet Monroe (editor of Poetry), Helen Hoyt (poet and assistant editor of Poetry), Nicholas Beauduin (founder of Paroxysm), Edward Wadsworth (Vorticist artist and signer of the Blast manifesto), Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (Vorticist sculptor), Evelyn Scott (American modernist playwright and novelist), Max Michelson, Iris Barry (film critic), and Harold Monro (British poet, proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop, and publisher of the first Imagist anthology Des Imagistes). Almost all of these figures are invested in literary and artistic experiments, with the exception of Mary Butts, Max Michelson, and Iris Barry. This signifies the public prominence of experimentation in the pre-war period, and constructs a community of international vanguardism. 140 Many of the people who published in the magazines I study here edit or appear in other avant-garde little magazines, most notably Poetry, Others, and Blast, and their linking The Little Review and The Egoist reveals that there exists a strong transatlantic exchange of modernist literature and art during these early years, an exchange that contributes to a sense of collective experiment and innovation. Seeing the same writers, poets, and artists in multiple avant-garde magazines lends weight to their work as the most innovative. Despite their different editorial staffs and orientations, these little magazines feature the same core contributors in small clusters of modernist publishing, and these different loci for new work allows modernists to publish different material. For example, publishing in The New Freewoman means one’s work will be contextualized differently than if the work is submitted to The Little Review or The Egoist. The notion that different contexts surround the literary texts is most visible in the transition from The Freewoman to The New Freewoman. In an effort to propagate quality literary material in The New Freewoman, sub-editor Rebecca West solicits avant-garde writers and literature, who begin appearing alongside the political modernisms already prominent. As shown in the network graph of the small cluster of shared nodes between The Freewoman and New Freewoman, most of the connecting individuals are political modernists such as socialist Reginald Wright Kauffman, spiritualist writer Frances Grierson, lawyer and social reformer E.S.P. Haynes, and William Foss (center right, graph 3). This prominence of political modernism reveals that the major writers and artists who form the linkages between The New Freewoman and The Egoist (center right, graph 4) first appear only in The New Freewoman under the co-editorship of West. She encourages Marsden to reach out to Pound and his Imagists, and, in a short essay published in August 1913, mirrors Pound’s techno- scientific literary vision, describing the Imagist school as introducing technical efficiency to poetics: Referring to American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 141 Graph 3: Overlapping nodes (l-r) The Egoist, The Little Review, The New Freewoman, and The Freewoman 142 Graph 4: The larger network of interactions among The Little Review (top l), The New Freewoman (bottom l), and The Egoist (top r) 143 experiments with labor efficiency maximization in the United States, West attempts to define an Imagist poetic based on a similar system of scientific and technical precision. “Just as Taylor and Gilbreth want to introduce scientific management into industry so the imagistes want to discover the most puissant way of whirling the scattered star dust of words into a new star of passion.”63 West packages the appearance of Imagism in England by reviewing the movement’s core principles for readers, and this description provides readers with a way to read Imagist experiments. Little magazines such as The New Freewoman negotiate modernist experiments for entry into the public sphere through reviews and special issues, which inform readers how to receive the material. West’s analysis of Imagism is followed with Pound’s “Contemporania” as though to say that readers can now appreciate Pound because they have read West.64 Her essay on Imagism reveals, once again, that the women of modernism play central roles in the production and spread of modernist ideas of even the most masculinist figures. Pound involves himself in the magazine, at the request of West, and his letters to Marsden reveal a preoccupation on her part with his political and philosophical commitments. Having changed the subtitle of The New Freewoman to “An Individualist Review,” a move that presages the emphasis of her final magazine The Egoist, Marsden apparently inquires about Pound’s commitments. “Dear Miss Marsden,” he replies somewhat exasperatedly, “The seven minutes at my instant disposal is hardly enough to define my philosophical credentials adequately. I suppose I’m individualist, I suppose I believe in the arts as the most effective propaganda for a sort of individual liberty that can be developed without public inconvenience.”65 This letter reveals Pound’s suspicion about the political and philosophical orientation of the Marsden magazines yet reflects his willingness to follow some philosophical concepts in order to gain access to the periodical. He tries 144 to bridge the individualist anarchism of Marsden’s philosophy with a vision of art as propaganda, and, although he “supposes” himself an individualist, this philosophical orientation is one he can at least support nominally. However, he really wants the paper to focus on literary production rather than Marsden’s increasing interest in Stirner’s egoism and her own philosophy. As he confesses to Quinn in 1916 about his role in The Egoist, “I am not keen on her part of the paper, but after all it is her paper and she made it so one can’t ask her to retire, besides she gets in a good part of the subscriptions—why I don’t know.”66 Despite Pound’s ambivalence toward Marsden’s philosophy, he grudgingly acknowledges that she knows how to attract readers, even if he does not understand why. During the brief life of The New Freewoman, however, Pound’s Imagists appear with increasing frequency. A comparison of the topics being written about in The Freewoman (graph 5) with prominent topics in The New Freewoman (graph 6) reveals how dramatically Marsden allows her magazine to be influenced by West and Pound. When weighted based on number of submissions, the nodes for poetry (50 entries), fiction (29), and book reviews (24) are much larger than in the graph of Freewoman topics: feminism (66 entries), social issue (52), suffragism (27), labor (19), philosophy (16), socialism (11), fiction (18), poetry (29), and literature reviews (28). The diversity of topics covering political modernism in The Freewoman ranges among a much wider array of topics whereas The New Freewoman emphasizes poetry and fiction much more frequently. Reviews occupy about the same number of entries for both magazine runs, but this is deceptive because The Freewoman run includes 47 issues whereas The New Freewoman only contains 13 issues. Comparing the numbers on these two magazines shows that the diverse political modernism of Marsden’s first magazine begins to transform dramatically into less diverse literary modernism in The New Freewoman. If The New Freewoman shifts from exclusively political modernism to include more aesthetic modernism, The Egoist leaves no doubts about its investments in 145 avant-garde literature. Weaver takes over as head editor shortly after the magazine begins, with Aldington and briefly Leonard Compton-Ricketts as assistant editors. The first issue opened with Wyndham Lewis’ “The Cubist Room,” in which he criticizes Futurism and advertises his paintings and those of Vorticist Edward Wadsworth, British Futurist C.R.W. Nevinson, and the sculpture of Jacob Epstein as part of the Cubist tradition. Strikingly, this essay presages his formation of many of this same group under the title Vorticism in the same year, a movement from which Nevinson would be excluded for his adherence to Futurism. Claiming that this group formed “a vertiginous but not exotic island,” Lewis characterizes their formation in terms quite similar to his later use of the vortex: “This formation is undeniably of volcanic matter, and even origin; for it appeared suddenly above the waves following certain seismic shakings beneath the surface.”67 This essay positions The Egoist as part of an explosive revolution in English art and writing, which seems borne out by the new work dominating the magazine. However, the literary modernism that increasingly fills Marsden’s magazines also appears in Anderson’s American avant-garde publishing network, reflecting the conduit of exchange between London and Chicago. Many of the Imagists appear in The Little Review, establishing a transatlantic conduit of avant-garde poetry and generating a sense of imagined modernist community. George Lane reviews the second volume of Imagist poetry Some Imagist Poets, edited by Amy Lowell and excluding Pound, concluding that the movement remains important despite Pound’s “jejune maledictions and assertions”: “It is hardly necessary to rehearse here the Imagist creed. It has been discussed, with more or less hostility, in many reviews. But certainly, in reading this preface, the hostility suddenly vanishes, and the reviewer finds himself wondering if perhaps, after all, this movement is not one of most unusual significance.”68 Lane registers the hostility attendant on publishing as part of a school or movement and blames Pound for some of this hostility. Lowell appears in 146 Graph 5: Article topics by weight in The Freewoman 1911-1912. 147 Graph 6: Article topics by weight in The New Freewoman 1913 148 September of the same year, attempting to elucidate the beauty of Aldington’s poetry. Claiming that his poetry has received good reviews in England, Lowell complains about the American love of noise and clatter: “It is as though we were tone-deaf to all instruments save those of percussion, and colour-blind to all except the primary colours.” For Americans, Lowell claims, the poetry of Aldington appeared too delicate and elusive, a condition she finds “inconceivable.”69 And she points to H.D. as an American who has been under-appreciated by her fellow citizens until Aldington reviewed her work. Thus, Lowell castigates Americans for lacking the sensual capacity to appreciate modern literature but, like West, packages experimental literature for readers suggesting ways to interpret the new work being published in these magazines. The shared atmosphere of avant-garde activity in England and the U.S. appears even more explicitly in the publication by both editors of Lewis and Joyce’s early work. Pound uses his connections to promote two writers he feels are crucial to modern literature. His involvement in The New Freewoman, The Egoist, and The Little Review means a dedicated commitment to push the writers he feels represent the best of modern literature. As he writes Marsden regarding his role in The Egoist: “I’ve got to do the selecting. I’ve a fairly complete program already. It is not so much that I ‘won’t’ as that I ‘can not’ work on any other terms. I have certain standards and the work printed would have to come up to them.”70 This demand for autonomy mirrors Pound’s similar letter to Anderson in January 1917: “I want an ‘official organ’”71 The Egoist begins serially publishing both Lewis’s novel Tarr and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, two novels that exemplify modernist literature. Anderson also publishes both Lewis and Joyce, the coincidence of these publications by two of the best writers in the pre-war period, both whose novels become canonical modernist texts, illustrates the shared atmosphere of experimentation occurring in both magazines. Without Anderson and Marsden, these masterpieces would not have 149 appeared in a censorious and hostile public sphere in which the press ignores or dismisses innovative writing. As Anderson complains in her autobiography, the press hated Ulysses until long after she had published and promoted it at personal loss. However, these magazines balance aesthetic and political discussion, suggesting two particular and overlapping networks operative in these magazines. Even as these magazines establish cultural tastes in matters of aesthetics, they enable forums for political networks to form in which activists connect to one another around particular issues such as suffragism, feminism, sexuality, labor, Marxism, anarchism, and other vanguard political struggles. In some cases, little magazines operate as activist networks, which enable radicals to learn about contemporary political issues and discuss the contours of those issues with similarly minded- individuals through the hub of the magazine. Political Engagement of the Activist Network When considering the political investments of modernists, many immediately think of the proto-fascist sympathies of Pound and Lewis after World War I. Working to rectify such reductive accounts, scholars such as Michael North, Michael Tratner, Paul Peppis, Jessica Berman, and others have reconsidered the conceptual pairing “modernism” and “politics.”72 Peppis illustrates the importance of understanding these politics when analyzing pre-war modernism, which is “ultimately intended as a means of continuing to open up the study of modernism and modernist politics to new possibilities.”73 Early modernism remains indelibly wedded to the radical politics of the dynamic pre-war period when revolutions seemed imminent, and many of these political movers and shakers publish widely in periodicals of various stripes. Editors often accept and invite writers who promulgate political modernism: the latest ideas, theories, and philosophies that circulate among the aspirant-intellectual and intellectual segments of the population. The imbrication of these two spheres can be clearly illustrated by the cartoon Jane Heap draws of 150 Anderson converting the sheriff to vers libre and anarchism (fig. 2).74 In her magazine, both discourses exemplify radical ideas. As Raymond Williams demonstrates, radical political groups and the artistic avant-garde maintain reciprocal relationships through a shared posture of mutual hostility to bourgeois values and tastes: “Alternative and oppositional artistic groups were defensive attempts to get beyond the market, distantly analogous to the working-class development of collective bargaining. There could thus be at least a negative identification between the exploited worker and the exploited artist.”75 Small wonder that many of the early twentieth-century venues for avant-garde writing and art are, at the same time, outlets for radical political activism and theory, philosophical treatises, social programs, and organizations. Readers opening the pages of the early Little Review or Freewoman would be guaranteed an encounter with a radical critique of social mores and with proposals, sometimes utopian in nature, of new ways of living and thinking. Reading these magazines reveals that the “imagined community” of modernism comprised a more expansive network than simply avant- garde aesthetic experimenters but extended through linkages to diverse political organizations and movements. I take up Peppis’ challenge to “open up” the study of modernist politics and political modernism, and I claim that the political aspects of these magazines should be read as more than just background noise out of which we listen for the familiar voices of modernism or for political ideologies that some modernists may have espoused; instead, I consider the Freudians, Marxists, socialists, anarchists, Fig. 2: Cartoon by Jane Heap, The Little Review (Sept. 1916) 151 feminists, syndicalists, Nietzscheans, Uranians, suffragists, Bergsonists, and Stirnerians who publish in these magazines as part of a broader “modernism of politics”: radical activist networks that revolutionize the way individuals imagine themselves in relation to one another, to themselves, and to the State. Although many of these groups have no particular interest in avant-garde aesthetics, and, in some cases, may even be hostile towards them as decadent and solipsistic, their political activism should be read as a part of the larger avant-garde challenge to the status quo.76 Modernist political movements form branches in the networks of modernism connected to avant-garde writers and painters via the central hubs of the magazines I study. Editors like Anderson and Marsden find ways to educate interested readers in both political and aesthetic modernisms, creating a community of engaged subscribers in England and the U.S. Their little magazines confirm early modernism draws little distinction between politics and aesthetics, and many key participants traffic between these two loosely defined concentrations. Certainly, aesthetic modernism should not be simply conflated with modern political movements. As Whalan reminds us, some “modernists decided to position themselves at the fringe of—or above—the social scene, rather than engage with the political machinery of reforming it.”77 Many of the important modernist literary figures such as Pound steer clear of or even denigrate political convictions when possible. Yet, even Pound first publishes in magazines such as The New Age and The Freewoman, journals dedicated to radical politics that provide a broad-based network of political activism through the magazine hub. In London, literary and artistic modernism before and during the early parts of the Great War existed as one of numerous other revolutions in social consciousness occurring in the public sphere. Virginia Woolf chooses December 1910, the date of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition, as the moment of transformation when “human character changed.”78 Although reacting to changes in 152 aesthetics, Woolf describes an England that has witnessed broader political challenges as well. As Tratner points out, Woolf herself participates in some of the radical movements struggling to transform that human character. Indeed, Bruce Clarke sees early London modernism as integrally embedded in a matrix of new ideas and forms: “Modernist ideology . . . thrived on the polemical confrontation of sociopolitical discourses with aesthetic forms.”79 Sociopolitical discourses about political movements such as anarchism, Fabian socialism, syndicalism, feminism, and suffragism overlap with discourses about Cubism, Imagism, and free verse. Artists and writers adapt a variety of contemporary political theories to their work, and many subsequently important modernists get their start in radical political movements. Modernist periodicals like The Little Review and The Freewoman provide a base for launching nascent revolutionary ideas, and modernist experiments often appear alongside essays espousing new political theories and movements. Overlapping agendas form a collage of pre-war radicalism and aesthetic innovation taking place in the public sphere. Multiple trade unions go on strike during these years; workers in 1911, the same year The Freewoman first appears, were on strike a combined 38,000,000 hours. From that pivotal year 1910 onwards, Garner points out, “major sections of the economy—in the docks, the mines, and in transport—were hit, and hit hard by strike action.”80 Suffrage organizations such as the Women’s Social and Political Union, the Women’s Freedom League, and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies agitate for universal suffrage, publishing and disseminating myriad pamphlets and periodicals in favor of votes for women. Emmeline Pankhurst describes a typical suffrage outing: “We had a lot of suffrage literature printed, and day by day our members went forth and held street meetings . . . What happened, of course, was a lively suffrage speech, and the distribution of literature.”81 Many suffragists break windows and slash museum paintings in an effort to force Parliament to enact women’s ability to vote. An anti- 153 war pamphlet published in 1914 by British anarchist Guy Aldred characterizes the upheavals of these early years: “Our duty to the red-flag is to remain under the threatening shadow of the Union Jack, until the crisis is past.”82 Against this background of pamphlets and fliers, little magazines dedicated to radical politics appear and elevate discussions of social change. Although Delap claims that Marsden imagined her feminist journals to occupy a “highbrow” position above political papers such as The Vote and The Herald of Revolt, which remain dedicated to a specific cause and set of practices, Marsden uses her early experiences editing similar suffrage journals in the service of The Freewoman. Magazines such as The Freewoman remain “open” to a variety of contemporary topics and transform political praxis into a sustained theoretical and political modernism debated in public. The magazine’s broad base of political activism can be visualized by graphing the contributions to The Freewoman over its lifetime, which allows us to analyze the most active political activists in Marsden’s network (graph 5). This graph shows the topics on which contributors to The Freewoman publish, weighted based on number of entries and divided into political categories such as feminism, socialism, anarchism, suffragism, sexual politics, and labor and other categories such as reviews, poetry, and fiction. The dark circles in the graph represent the topical clusters and the most frequent contributors. Feminism appears as the largest node by far (66 entries, left). Some of the other major topics include: social issue (52)—which I use to describe topics that advocate a general social issue outside a particular political ideology—suffragism (27), labor (19), philosophy (16), and socialism (11). This graph shows that the major topic discussed in The Freewoman is non-suffragist feminism, in keeping with the subtitle of the journal “A Feminist Review.” Indeed, suffragism occupies less space than we might assume given Marsden’s war with the Pankhursts. Graphing these contributions further underscores the position of the magazine as a location for radical modernist political discussion. Even in this political magazine, 154 the nodes for fiction (18), poetry (29), and literature reviews (28) appear fairly large, supporting my claim that literature and politics often occupy the same space in the public sphere. Certainly, the poetry and fiction generally tended to be topical, but the presence of significant numbers of book reviews reflects West’s insistence on literary submissions, which would inform format changes in the transition from The Freewoman to The New Freewoman. The graph illustrates the number of contributors to The Freewoman. The four biggest contributors over the two-year run of the magazine are Notes of the Week (45 entries presumably written by Marsden), Marsden (28 with her name attached), West (17), and anarchist Selwyn Weston (12). Because of this high number of anarchist writers, I expected philosophical anarchism to be a frequent subject, yet the node for anarchist writing appears small compared to other topics. Some of this is due, no doubt, to the challenges of cataloguing entries when the subject is not clear, but the relative lack of material on anarchism reveals that The Freewoman covered a wide range of political material despite the political interests of the highest contributors. Even granting some leeway in cataloguing categories, suffragism and anarchism occupy less space in the magazine than feminism. The other political players in The Freewoman include Charles Whitby, who writes regarding homosexuality; C.H. Norman, a Marxist writer; Ada Nield Chew, a radical suffragist; Barbara Low, a psychoanalyst and translator; Dr. Charles V. Drysdale, an advocate for Malthusian ideas about population control; Harry J. Birstingl, who writes several articles about “Uranianism” (homosexuality) inspired by Edward Carpenter’s controversial treatise The Intermediate Sex; Upton Sinclair, who publishes on the need for progressive divorce laws; and Marsden herself, whose leader articles cover everything from critiques of suffragism to philosophical treatises on the role of women to reportage on labor strikes.83 Each of these writers generates interest from 155 readers who debate the various issues in the correspondence column and in discussion groups. Issues covered in The Freewoman generate enough controversy to spark correspondence from a number of interested readers, and Marsden features this correspondence centrally in the format of the magazine. For example, Charles V. Drysdale publishes a series of Neo-Malthusian articles, entitled “Freewomen and the Birth-Rate,” in which he argues for population reduction through birth regulation. Beginning in the second issue, he argues that, “While marriage was only compatible with unlimited maternity, freedom was practically impossible. But science has given to women the power to break their chains, to marry the men of their choice without degrading themselves to passive annual maternity, and enveloping their loved ones in their ruin.”84 Rather than condemning the declining birthrate, as many British cultural critics were doing, Drysdale claims that women should celebrate the decline in population as it signals a new freedom from economic hardship and “passive maternity.” For the Neo-Malthusians, controlling population proves essential to ensuring liberation and equality for women. After the publication of Drysdale’s article, the correspondence columns explode with readers’ opinions on the matter of population growth and control. Isabel Leatham, a correspondent, praised Malthus as “the first feminist” while quibbling with Drysdale’s whole-hearted approval of the Neo-Malthusian system.85 Coralie Boord writes a letter in response to Drysdale’s article, posing the question of national defense in the event of population reduction: “Assuming that such limitation would bring about in this nation (and others) the desirable results Mr. Drysdale thinks it would, is there not a likelihood that the nation, having got so far, would be swallowed by a bigger, coarser, less civilised Power, as France will probably be swallowed by Germany, and England by–?”86 Boord deploys a familiar narrative about the decline of British masculinity as a national security threat, paradoxically citing Britain’s “civilized” status as a hindrance to 156 stopping the “coarser” barbaric nations. Drysdale addresses the concerns raised by readers, responding to each of his detractors in the fourth installment of his essay. His response emphasizes the interactive atmosphere in which readers and subscribers could debate radical political theories within the pages of The Freewoman. Other debates rage around questions of sexual emancipation, divorce, legal prostitution, labor struggles of different orientations, and issues of importance to radicals, aspirant-intellectuals, and curious readers. K.D. Scott publishes an exposé on the developing labor struggle at the Huntley and Palmer biscuit factory and calls for the British public to join a “sympathetic strike” boycotting biscuits. Pointing out that the Huntley and Palmer biscuit company has hired an increasing number of women, Scott appeals to other working-class constituencies to refuse to purchase biscuits: “Miners, sailors, dockers, railway-men, farmers, and cow-keepers are all needed for the great work of finding biscuits for the public and profits for biscuit manufacturers. They could very soon insist upon proper treatment for the men and women in Reading.”87 Thus, The Freewoman features more than simple philosophical treatises on the various political ideas cropping up in England; many of these articles and letters foment activist engagement with social problems in the public sphere, whether through letter-writing, debate, or direct action. Members of the Freewoman Discussion Circle even go so far as to form an “Actionist Group” to look for ways to get actively involved in political struggle.88 In keeping with this activist orientation, advertisements in The Freewoman prominently features materials and activities designed to educate the portion of the population interested in activism. For example, advertisements for the International Suffrage Shop suggest the presence of a location to get more involved with radical political groups or more acquainted with the ideas discussed in the magazine (fig. 3).89 Whereas little magazines construct networks of avant-garde artists and writers, these periodicals also form activist networks that use the tools of print capitalism as a way to organize political action. 157 Early political radicals manipulate mass media forms to support revolutionary struggles. The Little Review contains a similar fusion of avant-garde political activity, responding to and taking part in the political activism of pre-war New York and Chicago. Public intellectuals and cultural critics such as H.L. Mencken, Randolph Bourne, Floyd Dell, and Van Wyck Brooks increasingly rebel against the genteel tradition inherited from America’s “Gilded Age.” In many ways, this tradition derives from two factors: America’s Puritan history and the insistence, by more traditional critics, that “civilized” discourse originated in Victorian English conventions. In his account of New York’s “little renaissance,” Arthur Wertheim describes a bourgeois investment in political and cultural conservatism derived from Britain’s Victorian period.90 As cultural centers, New York and Chicago especially attract radical thinkers and artists who appreciate the cultural opportunities available. Anarchists led by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman advocate revolution against what they believe to be the repressive social order under American capitalism. Goldman writes that anarchism “destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life’s essence of society.”91 Responding to cultural myths about bomb-throwing anarchists, Goldman claims that violence is necessary to destroy the vampires of capitalism and the State. Her description repositions the debate on anarchistic violence to account for the damage inflicted on “healthy tissue” by U.S. economic policy. Other radicals agitate against the exploitation of labor under the structures of capitalism. The syndicalist labor union, the Industrial Fig. 3: Advertisement, The Freewoman 158 Workers of the World, recruits workers into “one big union” and prepares for a general strike against the owners of industry. Feminists and suffragettes such as Margaret Sanger fight for access to information about birth control methods, and discourses about the New Woman become increasingly pervasive. Radical figures of the nineteenth century such as Walt Whitman and Nietzsche serve as touchstones for this rebellious spirit, and many revolutionaries believe they are about to witness the dawn of a new utopian society. The period’s political atmosphere can be adduced from the simple fact that Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate for president, earns nearly a million votes in the 1912 election.92 Older belief systems become increasingly threatened by these new philosophies, writing, and artworks, and the alchemists of the new need little magazines to circulate their materials to sympathetic, if small, audiences. Like Marsden’s Freewoman and New Freewoman, Anderson’s Little Review starts with a special focus on the modernist politics of the pre-war United States, especially advocating and defending the anarchistic philosophies of Goldman and the feminist politics of the New Woman. In these heady early issues of The Little Review, Anderson wades into political controversy with characteristic aplomb. She stages debates about new trends in philosophy or politics, using her correspondence columns as a staging ground for readers to voice their opinions. Contributors submit manuscripts on a wide array of topics including anarchism, feminism, current political actions and activism, philosophical revolutions, and literature, and readers respond with letters to the “Reader Critic” wherein they express their views. However, Anderson crafts the correspondence section to allow readers a space outside official submissions to see their views in print. Even the name of the correspondence column, “Reader Critic,” suggests a space for readers to try their hand at social criticism. Anderson inaugurates these readers as “critics,” encouraging subscribers to imagine themselves part of the modernist community. 159 The political community in Anderson’s magazine argues about two issues central to American politics in Chicago and New York: anarchism and critique of State propaganda. She broadcasts her anarchistic views in an essay called “The Challenge of Emma Goldman,” published in the May 1914 issue of The Little Review: “Emma Goldman preaches and practises [sic] the philosophy of freedom; she pushes through the network of a complicated society as if it were a cobweb instead of a steel structure.”93 Anderson describes modernity as a bewildering network that average people cannot navigate but that Goldman dissolves thereby revealing the simplicity of complicated steel girders to be nothing more than “cobwebs.” Her metaphor reinforces my claim that early moderns conceptualize their lives as interconnected networks. Anderson positions herself, and by extension The Little Review, in the political camp of Goldman in praxis and Nietzsche and Stirner in theory. In Anderson’s interpretation, this means eliminating “spooks” such as religion and moral convention. Quoting extensively from Nietzsche in her defense of Goldman, Anderson clearly enunciates a radical political position remarkably similar to Marsden’s and destined to stir up controversy in the repressive public sphere of nineteen-teens America. In keeping with Anderson’s anarchism, the magazine adopts a strongly pacifist stance on the outbreak of war. After August 1914, when the war begins in Europe, issues of the magazine promote anti-war statements. Lawyer and labor supporter Clarence Darrow, who had successfully defended I.W.W. leader “Big” Bill Haywood in court against charges that he dynamited Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905, wrote a treatise in 1914 for The Little Review, arguing that the nascent World War will destroy property, redistributing wealth among the working classes who would be in great demand to rebuild.94 “The destruction of property,” he claims, “together with its re-creation means only a re-distribution of wealth—a re- distribution in which the poor get a greater share.”95 Even more concisely, Anderson 160 publishes a protest of the war, a blank page bearing only the words, “The War” at the top and “We will probably be suppressed for this” in brackets across the bottom (fig. 4).96 During a period when paper is being rationed due to the need for war resources, Anderson’s publishing an entire page blank with simply this caption makes a public statement about her views on the war. Printing a page with only these two words on it sends a clear message about the periodical’s orientation toward militarism and press coverage of the conflict. Attaching her name to this title as though this is an article symbolizes Anderson’s refusal to discuss the issue as though the war is below comment. She uses the paper as a simple yet effective protest. These little magazines may publish literature, but they engage in political activism as well. Early modernist literature thus appears as just another voice in a welter of voices calling for changes to society and culture in England and America, and little magazines provided one outlet through which these voices can speak. The transnational networks among these magazines indicate the need for forums to express opinions about politics, culture, society, and identity. “And Round About There Is a Rabble”: Readers in the Little Magazine As has become clear, modernism does not exist in isolation, divorced from the public sphere. Publishing little magazines, even magazines as apparently dismissive of the public as The Little Review, “Making no Compromise with the Public Taste,” and The Egoist, “An Individualist Review,” requires paying attention to the small readership who help fill the pages of these magazines with their correspondence.97 None of these magazines retain large readerships even at their height, and keeping the readers they manage to attract requires a measure of cajolery. Fig. 4: “The War,” The Little Review (April 1917 161 Editors could not afford to alienate all of their readers even as they could not afford to appeal to the popular public sphere. This paradox requires a delicate balancing act, in which editors both insult readers for their bourgeois tastes and, at the same time, invite them to develop a more modern consciousness through exposure to the latest materials. Paying the printer’s bills and renting office space requires readers and patrons willing to pay. This paradox produces a strange necessity wherein editors appeal to readers through various subscription schemes, advertisements, clubs and reading groups to further interest in and subscription to the magazine. Relying on tactics of print capitalism to undermine the structures of capitalist publishing places Anderson and Marsden in contradictory positions. Even a cursory glimpse at the correspondence columns of The Freewoman and The New Freewoman reveals the amount of controversy and interest aroused by Marsden’s philosophical pronouncements and her very visible war with the Pankhursts. Because these magazines include discussions of provocative topics such as suffragism, socialism, divorce, sexual freedom, population, eugenics, and homosexuality, readers often carry debates over to the correspondence section. For example, frequent contributor Harry J. Birnstingl replies to a letter from Jane Craig in January 1912: “Does your correspondent, Jane Craig LL.A., seriously imagine that with the advent of the vote (I crave her pardon for writing the word with a small “v”) prostitution is, ipso facto, to cease?”98 Debating the effect of winning the vote over several issues of the magazine, contributors argued with each other within the letter columns. Nor were all the contributors to these debates dedicated to radicalism. Mrs. P. Sherwen responded with horror to Upton Sinclair’s article “Divorce” wherein he argued in favor of birth control and a scientific approach to sex and marriage: “I regret to see such a low standard of ideals and morals. I wonder if some of your women readers will feel as I do about it.”99 Sherwen appeals to other women readers in her denunciation of Sinclair’s immorality, and her appeal is designed to raise 162 questions with the editors about publishing Sinclair, but Sherwen’s attempt to construct a community of morally outraged women betrays that she is a new reader as many of Marsden’s subscribers agree with Sinclair. Despite their debates or disagreements, little magazines facilitate discussion of the latest modern issues among the readers and general public. In printing detractors, these editors advertise their radical currency while negotiating the more controversial issues for entry into the public sphere by using more conservative reader responses. Responding to lively debates and discussions carried on in the correspondence section, Freewoman readers begin requesting participation opportunities beyond the magazine’s pages, as evidenced in a 1912 editorial appeal for subscriptions: It has been pointed out to us by friendly critics that THE FREEWOMAN contains each week matter so highly debatable, and of such serious human import, that it is difficult to digest all that it contains, and to find one’s bearings, in view of the many articles which express opposing points of view. It has been suggested, therefore, that FREEWOMAN clubs, or informal gatherings of men and women, should be started for discussions, of which the weekly FREEWOMAN would form the basis. Of this suggestion, coming from several readers, we highly approve, and pass it on to other readers for their consideration.100 The magazine serves as the hub through which interested readers can engage new ideas through discussion. By March 1912, Marsden advertises the establishment of “The Freewoman Discussion Circle,” a forum where readers could meet, hear lectures derived from topics in the magazine, and engage in debate about important contemporary issues. Under the heading “A Discussion Circle” in the March 28th issue, she presents her reasoning for expanding the magazine into a discussion group: 163 “Many of the readers are now feeling the need of some circle or society at which people could meet and thresh out some few, at least, of the topics already touched upon.”101 From the beginning, the readers’ desires for increased access to the intellectual world of the magazine establishes the idea for Discussion Circles, and these meetings enable reader participation, both in the Discussion Circle and The Freewoman itself. Requests from readers facilitate the creation of the circle, but, more importantly, the club is organized around the magazine rather than kept separate from it. As Clarke contends, “the Discussion Circle was an example of spontaneous, gregarious sociality, an anarchistic collectivity in counterpoint to Marsden’s growing egoism and increasing reclusiveness.”102 Despite Marsden’s increasing focus on her own philosophical writings, she and West facilitate the creation of a club designed to physically recreate the discussions taking place in the magazine. The Discussion Circle offers a chance for interested readers to join the magazine’s activist network rather than simply read about it. The existence of this readership reveals that Marsden’s individualist mentality did not deter subscribers from participating and may, in fact, have served as a draw for certain sections of pre-war London’s population. The combination of an appeal for subscribers with the notices for the Discussion Circle exemplifies this twin function. Due to the financial losses of maintaining “philosophic journals of a revolutionary nature,” Marsden appeals to her readers’ sense of intellectual superiority as “thinking men and women” to secure further subscriptions. The language she uses to request these subscriptions underscores the individualistic inclusiveness she promotes: “we feel we are justified in making a very special appeal to the fourth party concerned in the paper, i.e., the general reader of THE FREEWOMAN. We ask that every existing reader should get at least two new subscribers, and so break the strain which at present weighs upon our financial resources.”103 Readers who subscribe are symbolically inducted into the 164 company, solicited to petition others on behalf of thinking people in London. Because The Freewoman could “never find its readers among the general public,” this advert pleaded for coterie readers to recommend the paper and secure subscriptions. Pairing this appeal with the announcement for the “Freewoman Clubs” weds the notion of fourth-party investment in the “concern” to collaboration in the world of The Freewoman. The physical space of the Discussion Circles stimulates collaboration and interaction among the attendees. Extending her activist network from the pages of The Freewoman to the walls of the International Suffrage Shop, Marsden re- conceptualizes the parameters of her magazine from the figurative space of a magazine to a series of physical locations in the center of London. The Freewoman venture now includes a geographic location available to anyone who has access to the page with the address: It is proposed, therefore, that any London readers of THE FREEWOMAN who feel interested in the idea of such a discussion circle, shall meet together on Thursday, April 18th, at 8.15, at The International Suffrage Shop, 15, Adam Street, Adelphi, Strand, W.C.104 Located on the Strand, this venue in the center of London provides a central physical hub for the various members to congregate. The first meeting is so successful that the subsequent meeting has to be moved to Eustace Miles’ vegetarian restaurant located several blocks to the northwest. Low records that “in spite of the larger room, the meeting was again crowded out” and the gatherings are once more moved to Chandos Hall to accommodate all the participants.105 The discussions become so involved that smaller assemblies are proposed to continue the conversations. Twenty-eight group members who want to continue their discussion on “Sex 165 Oppression and the Way Out” meet at the home of Mr. Beresford, and Low recommends that “It is in the development of local sub-groups that the most useful work of the Circle, probably, can be done.”106 Low herself offers to host a small meeting, “limited to about a dozen,” at her house in Temple Fortune Hill. Nor is the area around the Strand the only hub; Miss A.E. Taylor of Dover tries to get a local group started. The Freewoman Discussion Circle transforms into an expanding network of participants interested in the intellectual possibilities of The Freewoman. The large networks of the periodical hub produces intimate, physical meetings more akin to the social networks of the salon. Attending these clubs provides the same benefits that a salon does: a semi-private location to discuss radical and revolutionary ideas outside the public print world of the magazine. Like Marsden’s magazines, passionate American readers of The Little Review call for more engagement in the periodical hub. Anderson uses this interest to suggest possibilities for reader participation. For example, she uses her “Reader Critic” to allow readers to raise questions about avant-garde aesthetics through correspondence with the magazine. As the central hub for the dissemination of avant-garde art and literature, The Little Review occupies center stage in discussions about key aesthetic movements. The “Reader Critic” functions as an access point for commentary from both modernist and anti-modernist readers. In the January 1915 issue, Edward O’Brien submits a manifesto of Paroxysm, a French avant-garde movement that operates with a dynamic conception of literature.107 Rex Lampman, a reader from Portland, Oregon, responds to O’Brien’s aesthetic theories of industrial energy in March of the same year by referring to his own particular geographical location as non-conducive to Paroxysm: “Here in Portland the skyscraper is pre- empting one by one our views of the evergreen hills and the snowy mountains.” Lampman questions the faddism of new movements: 166 But do we accept them? Beyond the skyscrapers are the quiet hills, and however we throw ourselves into the vortices of cities, however often we go down among the red-mouthed, roaring furnaces, however we may acquiesce in, and even exult in and exalt, the materialistic horrors that multiply around us like monsters in a steamy primal fen, deep in ourselves we know that all these things are vain and vanishing, and that the actual and enduring lie outside and beyond, or within ourselves. The skyscraper is a monument to the Moloch of Rent.108 Here, Lampman proposes an alternative to avant-garde fascination with technology by advocating a return to Romantic pastoral. Whereas O’Brien adopts the typical avant-garde position of publishing militant manifestoes, Lampman adopts an oppositional stance toward unreserved praise of modernity. The “Reader Critic” facilitates this debate by publishing both sides, and, although Anderson supports avant-gardists, she encourages potential readers who may be more tentative to participate in the dialogue. Overlapping and competing views of modernity form the complicated fabric of the little magazine when readers can participate in the discussion. Anderson encourages involvement in the magazine through contests and reading groups, highlighting the dialogic nature of the magazine while maintaining the atmosphere of a selective organ of contemporary literature. The Little Review simultaneously announces itself as elitist with arrogant pronouncements concerning the aesthetic theories of a select group while, at the same time, advertising the possibility for a non-elite audience’s involvement in the magazine’s discourse. For example, in August 1916 The Little Review sponsors “A Vers Libre Prize Contest” in which readers submit manuscripts to be judged by William Carlos Williams, Zoë Aikens and Helen Hoyt with winners awarded cash prizes. In April 1917, The Little Review announces the winners of the contest, including the names of all the poems in the table of 167 contents. Anderson mentions the last poem, “A Mother’s Sacrifice” alongside all the others, but she singles it out to mock its provincial patriotism and failure to follow formal requirements: “This last one may be printed as a sample of the rest of the contest, and speaks for itself. It came with a little note saying ‘I hope it may win one of the prizes in the contest, being original free verse and very patriotic.’” Consisting of rhyming quatrains made up of alternating lines of tetrameter, this poem demonstrates the author’s ignorance or disregard of free verse: Now honor calls you to be true, To the dear flag, red-white-and blue Long may it wave o'er land and sea— Thou sweet land of liberty.109 The author expresses maudlin patriotic themes with lines like these, seriously misjudging the audience. The Little Review opposes World War I from the beginning, publishing editorials and poems deriding the war. Thus, Anderson dismisses “A Mother’s Sacrifice” on the grounds that it does not follow the formal conventions set forth in the contest, a move calculated to provide a sense of community among the poetry contest’s contributors—subtly invited to laugh at the woman who understood neither vers libre nor the political stance of the editors— while maintaining the façade of critical editors interested only in good art—which invites the audience in the know to feel part of the group. The combination of an open invitation to submit poems to “A Vers Libre Prize Contest” with the derisive comments on “A Mother’s Sacrifice” illustrates the complex position The Little Review negotiates in providing a public arena for readerly involvement. Like Marsden’s Discussion Circles, The Little Review offers opportunities to join small physical networks of interested and like-minded readers. Advertised to the people who are “vitally interested” in The Little Review, this invitation reveals that many of the regular readers want to attend gatherings where they can discuss the 168 modernist ideas they read in the magazine outside the publically visible print forums of the “Reader Critic”: There is no more vivid thing in life. All those people who are vitally interested in THE LITTLE REVIEW and its idea, its spirit and its growth, may want to become part of a group which has just been suggested by several of our contributors and readers . . . Such an opportunity is planned in a series of gatherings—the first to be held in 917 Fine Arts Building at eight o'clock on Saturday evening, October 10. For further details, address The Little Review Association, 917 Fine Arts Building, Chicago.110 This advertisement indicates that Anderson wants to coordinate relationships between contributors and readers. She publicizes this gathering in the “Reader Critic” because the gathering literalizes what the “Reader Critic” already symbolically performs: participation in an avant-garde magazine. By hosting these gatherings in the offices of The Little Review, Anderson incorporates aspirant- intellectuals into a broader public discussion about art in Chicago and focalizes that discussion through the hub of her magazine. As she remembers in her autobiography, “Everybody came to the studio.” Attending these meetings ensures one’s access to poets and artists appearing regularly in the magazine. Even more striking, Anderson claims that the idea for a group attempting to influence art and literature in Chicago originates with “several of our contributors and readers.” 111 Thus, these editors respond to their readers’ desires and investments even as they adopt supercilious attitudes toward the common person who does not understand art or culture. This tactic invites the most dedicated readers to join the magazine network, thereby imagining themselves part of the modernist community, even as it constructs the kinds of reader needed to continue publishing avant-garde material. 169 Conclusion: Printing the Network Little magazines establish transnational networks, which spread modern ideas throughout a large web of collaborators and interlocutors. Anderson and Marsden’s ventures, in particular, negotiate with an often-censorious public sphere in printing both political and aesthetic modernism. Putting avant-garde political treatises and literature in a print form and selling it on newsstands involves certain hazards, and these editors constantly navigate between publishing revolutionary material and facing State suppression or company boycotts. But, their heroic efforts in these pre- war years produce a transnational sense of something new taking place. Trading writers, artists, and thinkers across the Atlantic produces a sense of imagined modernist community among the aspiring intellectuals who subscribe to and read these magazines. For these readers, Anderson and Marsden provide interactive forums within their magazines to participate in the debates around avant-garde politics, literature, and art. More than anything else, staging this interactive component in publicly available periodicals establishes a sense of community, and even hostile readers find themselves engaging with these new ideas. Pound praises both The Egoist and The Little Review in his essay “Small Magazines” for working to publicize modernism. “The Egoist,” he wrote, “serialized Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist; and Wyndham Lewis’ Tarr. It printed more information about French and other Continental writers than other British reviews would carry.”112 He praises The Little Review more explicitly: “The Little Review had had the pure heart à outrance. Its editors never accepted a manuscript save because they thought it interesting, and their review remains the most effective of any that we have yet had.”113 Pound touches on something crucial about these two editors. They keep their fingers on the pulse of modernity during the pre-war period, and their publications package some of the most iconoclastic and modern writing of the period for a public readership. Much of this writing would come to represent high modernism after the war, and 170 reading these early periodicals reminds us that post-war modernism descends from extensive transatlantic networks of individuals trafficking in the latest ideas, theories, literature, politics, and art before the war. These networks circulate information in such a way as to generate an imagined community of modernists at a moment when such experimentation is still in its energetic and optimistic youth. If little magazine hubs organize the transmission and circulation of diverse individuals within vast, loosely connected networks, crystallizing a sense of modernist community through the openness of the magazine for reading publics, avant-garde movements adopt tight militant clusters that adopt oppositional stances to the public in visible displays of aggression. The next chapter investigates the enclosed, aggressive, and comic avant-garde movements of the pre-war period. These movements deploy militant and often violent rhetoric against the public sphere while at the same time sensationalizing modernism through tactics derived from popular culture. Beginning with F.T. Marinetti’s Italian Futurism, which blasts onto the London scene in 1909, I analyze the group dynamics by which these movements form counter-public spheres in order to attack bourgeois conventions in art and culture, battle with one another for supremacy in the public’s attention, and develop aesthetic projects designed to radically rethink art and literature. Of the networks of modernism, few operate more collaboratively than the movements of the avant-garde network to promote new art and literature to a hostile public. Notes 1 Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War (New York: Covici, Friede Publishers, 1930), 35; Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947), 4. 2 Ezra Pound, “Small Magazines,” The English Journal 19.9 (1930): 689-704, 703. 3 Daniel Fader and George Bornstein, British Periodicals of the 18th and 19th Centuries (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1972),viii. 171 4 Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1968), 417; Ezra Pound, “Patria Mia,” Selected Prose 1909-1965 Ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 127. 5 Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and John Plunkett, “The Pre-History of the ‘Little Magazine’” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Vol. 1 Eds. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 50. 6 Mark Morrisson, Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2007), xv. 7 Lucy Delap, “The Freewoman, Periodical Communities, and the Feminist Reading Public,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 61.2 (2000), 234. 8 Qtd. In Ann Ardis, “Democracy and Modernism,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Eds. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 217. 9 Some of the other key scholars and texts in this area of modernist studies include: Sean Latham, “The Rise of Periodical Studies”; Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier, Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms; Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-garde; George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page; Jayne Marek, Women Editing Modernism: “Little Magazines” and Literary History; Adam McKible, The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York; Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman. Modernism and the Magazines. 10 Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, “General Introduction,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 2. Other scholars such as Bonnie Kime Scott, Jason Harding, and Helen Southworth have applied the network concept to publishing networks as well. 11 Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007), 157. 12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 35. 13 Mrs. O.D.J., “Fear Not.,” The Little Review, 4:2 (June 1917), 27. 14 Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2006), 6-7. 15 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998). 16 Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible, “Introduction,” Little Magazines and Modernism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 4. 17 Max Eastman (ed.), The Masses 4.7 (April 1913), 2. 18 In Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere, Philosopher Jürgen Habermas argues that the notion of the public sphere represents a possible way to describe the dialogic nature that marks the growth of democratic society. The eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere represents an ideal moment of mediation, wherein private 172 individuals reasonably debate and negotiate power relations in public venues. Little magazines engage with a version of Habermas’s public sphere. 19 Mina Loy, “Love Songs,” Others 1.1 (July 1915), 6. 20 Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, “General Introduction,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 1. 21 Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2000), 12. 22 Mark Whalan, American Culture in the 1910s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010), 24. 23 “Advertisement for The Egoist.” In The Little Review 2:3 (May 1915): back pages. “Advertisement for The Little Review.” In The Egoist 2:4 (April 1915): 64. 24 Bryant begins her editorial by paradoxically pointing out the ubiquity of the magazine industry with the relatively low profile of editors. Louise Bryant, Are the Editors In? They Are,” New York Tribune (April 22, 1917) 5. The Library of Congress (searchable database). http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. The Evening Public Ledger published a similar spread regarding film stars in 1915 entitled “Moviefolk that the Artist Met at the Exhibitor’s Ball” and accompanied by caricatures of the celebrities. In The Evening Ledger Amusement Section (Dec 11, 1915) 2. Library of Congress (searchable database). http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. 25 Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich, The Little Magazine, 3-4. 26 Virginia Woolf serves as an example of modernist disdain for the middle-brow, writing in a letter for the New Statesmen (but never sent): “Have I then made my point clear, sir, that the true battle in my opinion lies not between highbrow and lowbrow, but between highbrows and lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between?” “Middlebrow,” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), 176-186, 185. 27 George Bornstein, “Introduction: Why Editing Matters,” Representing Modernist Texts ed. George Bornstein (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991), 2. 28 Charles Kadushin, Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 17. 29 Jayne Marek, Women Editing Modernism (Lexington KY: U of Kentucky P, 1995), 12. See also, Bonnie Kime Scott, The Gender of Modernism; Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank; and Suzanne Clarke, Sentimental Modernism. 30 Bornstein, Representing Modernist Texts, 2. 31 Margaret Anderson, “Announcement,” The Little Review 1.1 (March 1914), 2. 32 Anderson, “Announcement,” 2. 33 Marek, Women Editing Modernism, 8. 173 34 Margaret Anderson, “A Real Magazine,” The Little Review 3:5 (Aug. 1916), 1. 35 Anderson, “A Real Magazine,” 2. 36 Margaret Anderson, The Little Review 3:6 (Sept. 1916), 1. 37 Anderson, The Little Review, 2. 38 The San Francisco bomb case refers to a bomb that had exploded at a Preparedness Day parade, parades organized to “prepare” citizens for war. A suitcase bomb killed several people, and authorities arrested two prominent labor leaders. Anderson maintained they were innocent and inserted a description of the events and a request for funds to be sent to their lawyers to ensure they received a fair trial. Nonetheless, two of the accused were hung and two were acquitted. 39 Jane Heap, “Light occupations of the editor, while there is nothing to edit,” The Little Review 3:6 (Sept. 1916), 14. 40 Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996), 58. 41 Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism, 3. 42 Michael Levenson describes the predominance of egoism in the subsequent journal, “The New Freewoman’s principal and overriding concern was to trumpet Stirnerian egoism, and the rhetoric was deafening.” Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 66. 43 Dora Marsden, “Bondwomen,” The Freewoman 1.1 (Nov. 1911), 1. 44 Marsden, “Bondwomen,” 2. 45 Marsden, “Bondwomen,” 2. 46 Dora Marsden, “Commentary on Bondwomen,” The Freewoman 1.2 (Nov. 1911), 1. 47 Marsden, “Commentary on Bondwomen,” 1. 48 E.S.P. Haynes to Dora Marsden, Series 2: Correspondence; 1909-1917; Dora Marsden Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Box 3, Folder 1. 49 H.G. Wells to Dora Marsden, Series 2: Correspondence; 1909-1917; Dora Marsden Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Box 1, Folder 25. 50 Edith Berstingl to Mary Gawthorpe, Series 2: Correspondence; 1909-1917; Dora Marsden Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Box 2, Folder 25. 174 51 Ayrton to Mary Gawthorpe, Series 2: Correspondence; 1909-1917; Dora Marsden Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Box 2, Folder 25. 52 Mary Gawthorpe, “To the Women’s Social and Political Union,” The Freewoman 1.3 (Dec. 1911), 42. Interestingly, the scanned copy contained in the Modernist Journals Project database includes a penciled note with two capital letters, “NO!,”written in the margin next to Gawthorpe’s admission that she was aware of Marsden’s attacks on the W.S.P.U. 53 Rev. A.D.R. to Anderson, “The Reader Critic,” The Little Review 1.8 (Nov. 1914), 69. 54 H.G.S. to Anderson, “The Reader Critic,” The Little Review 1.6 (Sept. 1914), 56. 55 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (Berkeley: U of California P), 1967. 56 Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson, Pound/The Little Review (New York: Faber and Faber, 1988), 6. 57 Margaret Anderson, “To Our Subscribers,” The Little Review 4.7 (Nov. 1917), 43. 58 Margaret Anderson, “Will You Help?,” The Little Review 4.8 (Dec. 1917), 59. 59 Margaret Anderson, “Ulysses in Court,” The Little Review 7.4 (Jan.-Mar. 1921), 22. 60 Pierre Boudieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), 60. 61 Joyce Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence (Fayateville: U of Arkansas P, 1997). 62 Alice Groff pestered Anderson and Heap so much that Anderson began publishing her letters to the “Reader Critic” with humorous titles such as “Officer, She’s in Again!” (Nov. 1916) and “Alice Groff Again!” (March 1917). 63 Rebecca West, “Imagisme,” The New Freewoman 1.5 (Aug. 1913), 86. 64 West’s essay drawing on Taylor’s efficiency discourses in reference to Pound’s Imagist poetry appeared alongside political essays such as “The Claims of Women” and “The Latest Freaks in Taxation” by American anarchists Clarence Lee Swartz and Benjamin Tucker respectively. Frequent contributor to The Egoist, Benjamin Tucker, first translated Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own into English. This text had a profound effect on Marsden 65 Ezra Pound to Dora Marsden, Series 2: Correspondence; 1909-1917; Dora Marsden Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Box 1, Folder 23. 66 Ezra Pound to John Quinn, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn 1915- 1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1991), 60. 175 67 Wyndham Lewis, “The Cubist Room,” The Egoist 1.1 (Jan. 1914), 9. 68 George Lane, “Some Imagist Poets,” The Little Review 2.3 (May 1915), 27. 69 Amy Lowell, “Richard Aldington’s Poetry,” The Little Review 2.6 (Sept. 1915), 11. 70 Pound to Marsden, Box 1, Folder 23. 71 Pound to Anderson, Pound/The Little Review, 6. 72 For more on these debates regarding the linkages between modernism and politics, see Paul Peppis, Literature, Politics and the English Avant-garde; Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air; Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Yeats, and Eliot; Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism. 73 Paul Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-garde (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 19. 74 Heap, Jane. “Light occupations of the editor, while there is nothing to edit,” The Little Review 3:6 (Sept. 1916): 14-15. 75 Raymond Williams, “The Politics of the Avant-garde,” Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 54. 76 Georg Lukács is the most obvious example of a certain type of Marxist intellectual invested in radical, vanguard politics who distrusts the abstract nature of modernist aesthetics in favor of objective realism: “Only in the interaction of character and environment [i.e. bourgeois realism] can the concrete potentiality of a particular individual be singled out from the ‘bad infinity’ of purely abstract potentialities, and emerge as the determining potentiality of just this individual at just this phase of his development.” Realism in Our Time (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971), 24. For many on the political Left, literature must represent faithfully the workings of industrial capitalism on the workers in order to spark outrage and eventual revolution. 77 Whalan, American Culture in the 1910s, 24. 78 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays I (London: Hogarth P, 1966), 320. 79 Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996), 2. For more on Woolf’s role in the radical movements of her day, see Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995). 80 Qtd. in Garner, A Brave and Beautiful Spirit, 78. 81 Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (New York: Heart’s International Library, 1914), 62. 82 Guy Aldred, “A Call to Manhood,” A Call to Manhood and Other Studies in Social Struggle (Glasgow: the Strickland P, 1944), 10. 176 83 These individuals are described in Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science; Les Garner, A Brave and Beautiful Spirit: Dora Marsden, 1882-1960; and Barbara Green, the Introduction to the Freewoman on the Modernist Journals Project. 84 Charles Drysdale, “Freewomen and the Birth-Rate,” The Freewoman 1.2 (Nov. 1911), 37. 85Isabel Leatham, The Freewoman 1.3 (Dec. 1911), 52. Leatham disagreed with Drysdale over the implementation of Neo-Malthusian birth-control methods: “It seems to me that whether we take the Christian or the hedonistic view of marriage, we are equally faced with the difficulty of preserving, in that state, the emotional spontaneity and the uplifting sense of Beauty which should be the very substance of all sex-relations.” 86 Coralie Boord, The Freewoman (Jan. 1912), 130. 87 K.D. Scott, “Biscuits!” The Freewoman (Jan. 1912), 138. 88 The Freewoman 2.34 (July 1912), 153. 89 “Advertisement for Suffrage Shop.” The Freewoman 1:7 (Jan. 1912): 133. 90 Arthur Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908-1917 (New York: New York UP), 3. 91 Emma Goldman, “Anarchism,” Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), 50. 92 For more on this period, see Mark Whalan, American Culture of the 1910s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010). 93 Margaret Anderson, “The Challenge of Emma Goldman,” The Little Review 1.3 (May 1914), 6. 94 See William Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book (New York: International Publishers, 1929) and Francis X. Busch, Prisoners at the Bar; an Account of the Trials of the William Haywood Case, the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, the Loeb-Leopold Case, the Bruno Hauptmann Case (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1952). 95 Clarence Darrow, “The Cost of War,” The Little Review 1.8 (Nov. 1914), 6. 96 “The War.” The Little Review 3:10 (April 1917): 4. 97 This anti-public sentiment appear concisely in Pound’s “Contemporania,” published in The New Freewoman 1:5 (Aug 1913). In “The Garden,” he describes poor children: “And round about there is a rabble / Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very / poor. / They shall inherit the earth” (87). In “Salutation the Second,” Pound rails against the public readership of his poems: “Watch the reporters spit / Watch the anger of professors / Watch how the pretty ladies revile them: / ‘Is this,’ they say, ‘the nonsense / that we expect of poets?” (88). 177 98 Harry J. Birnstingl, “Correspondence,” The Freewoman 1.9 (1912): 173. 171-3. 99 Mrs. P. Sherwen, “Correspondence,” The Freewoman 1.10 (1912): 192. 190-2. Strikingly, Sherwen abhorred Sinclair’s frank discussion of birth control much more than his essentialist notions of “woman’s nature” or his problematic assertion: “It is true that prostitutes are low people, and we don’t care very much what happens to them. Their average life is only about five years, and the potter’s field is ample.” See Upton Sinclair, “Divorce,” The Freewoman 1.9 (1912): 165. 164-6. 100 Dora Marsden, “An Appeal,” The Freewoman 1.13 (1912): 244. 101 Dora Marsden, “A Discussion Circle,” The Freewoman 1.19 (1912): 373. 102 Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism, 75. 103 Marsden, “An Appeal,” 244. 104 Marsden, “A Discussion Circle,” 373. 105 Low, “Freewoman Discussion Circle,” The Freewoman 1.2 (1912): 514. This account can also be found in Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver (New York: Viking P, 1970), 48. 106 Low, “Freewoman Discussion Circle,” The Freewoman 2.36 (1912): 193. 107 Edward O’Brien, “A Note on Paroxysm in Poetry,” The Little Review, Vol. I, no.10 (Jan, 1915) 15. 108 Rex Lampman, “Another Note on Paroxysm in Poetry,” The Little Review, Vol. II, no. 1 (March 1915) 57. This is not the only debate published in The Little Review. In the June/July double issue in 1915, Huntly Carter and Richard Aldington engage in a debate over the merits of free verse. See The Little Review, Vol. II, no. 4 (June/July, 1915) 54-5. 109 Margaret Anderson, “A Mother’s Sacrifice,” The Little Review, Vol. III, no. 10 (April 1917), 23. The full poem is as follows: A Mother’s Sacrifice The day has come, beloved son— When duty's call resound, Your father fought, and laurels won He firmly held the ground. Now honor calls you to be true, To the dear flag, red-white-and blue Long may it wave o'er land and sea— Thou sweet land of liberty. I thank the God who gave to me, So true, so brave a son— Who on the field prefers to be. 178 Until the battle's won. The God on high alone doth know. The torture and the nag— In sacrificing all I own, To help protect the flag. Fare-well dear boy of loyalty, To country and to home— God will reward you royally, Wherever you may roam. And when the war is o'er—Oh joy, How proud I then shall be— To find my darling soldier boy, Come home unscathed to me. 110 Margaret Anderson, “To Serve an Idea,” The Little Review, Vol. I, no. 7 (Oct. 1914). 58. 111 Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, 59. 112 Pound, “Small Magazines,” 693. 113 Pound, “Small Magazines,” 697. 179 CHAPTER IV GROUP DYNAMICS AND THE NETWORKS OF MOVEMENTS “It was then that Jean Metzinger, moving towards Picasso and Braque, founded the city of Cubists.” –Guillaume Apollinaire “We worked separately, we found an underlying agreement, we decided to stand together.” –Ezra Pound “And then I assumed too that artists always formed militant groups. I supposed they had to do this, seeing how ‘bourgeois’ all Publics were—or all Publics of which I had any experience.” –Wyndham Lewis1 In his biographical study of avant-garde sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who had been killed during World War I in a charge at Neuville St. Vaast, Ezra Pound describes the contours of Vorticism, the art movement he co-founded with Wyndham Lewis and to which Brzeska had belonged. Central to Vorticism’s aesthetic, Pound claims, is the image as “radiant node or cluster; it is what I can and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”2 Characterizing the image as a radiant node or cluster reveals a dynamic multiplicity at the heart of avant-garde praxis, a constellation of formal features that produce dynamic new cultural forms. Pound’s metaphor of the image as a cluster into which ideas pour like a whirlpool contains symbolic associations relevant to the larger aim of my study. Avant-garde movements operate much like Pound’s radiant cluster: they coalesce in tight, often defensive and always aggressive clusters around a central node and operate as funnels into which the innovative and experimental artists and writers pour their ideas. Analyzing the group dynamics of the avant-garde illustrates the power of and need for the organized chaos of movements to instigate cultural revolution through the processes of group formation. “Groups of friends encouraged each other in daring, sometimes scandalous ventures” Fabio Durão and Dominic Williams argue, “which, in turn, bore the marks of more than a single creative design, as modernists imagined and 180 theorized group life in a period of growing alienation and atomization.”3 In the networks of modernism, avant-garde movements appear, coalesce, flourish, and die in unpredictable patterns and with varying results, yet these movements serve important functions in the production and spread of modernist ideas via tactical assaults on the public sphere. The territorial aggressiveness of these movements, and the protective shield they provide their members in the invention of new cultural forms, reveal that the apparently unstable flux of early avant-garde modernism actually operates systematically as small, tightly organized networks crystallized by group dynamics. Although scholars have long recognized the power of the avant-garde for disseminating modernism through a cult of violence and aggression, analysis has neglected the particular dynamics of these movements in relation to other modernist networks. Renato Poggioli, Peter Bürger, Matei Câlinescu, Clement Greenberg, Marjorie Perloff, Janet Lyon, Milton Cohen, and Martin Puchner have demonstrated the importance of the early avant-garde for the history and development of modernism. However, their research remains focused on the avant-garde exclusively. I build on their research to analyze the interrelationships that again illustrate the vastness of modernism and the need for analysis of the simultaneity of modernist associations through network theory and visualization. Positioning the study of avant-garde movements within a network theory of modernism that accounts for other social and print networks demonstrates the inherently diverse nature of modernism, its development through a process of interaction and mutuality. Like salons and little magazines, the nodes in an avant-garde movement orbit around strong central nodes which anchor the network and provide its organizing principle. However, the contours of collaboration in these groups are different than the shape of interaction in salons or little magazines. Where salon social network visualizations reveal the synchronicity of disparate individuals who traffic in 181 modernism in private without necessarily knowing one another very well, and where little magazines visualizations constellate a large, loosely connected web of contributors, readers, and editors who package modernism for a public readership and whose very distance from one another evidences the wide reach of modernism, visualizations of the collaborative nature of avant-garde movements represent tightly organized clusters who move as conglomerates. These movements appear in contrast to each other, opposed to the key nodes in the other avant-garde networks to say nothing of the public. Because of their militancy, the avant-garde movements remains the most tightly organized of the networks I analyze. The members of a movement invest themselves in the life of the group, and proponents often fight for their ideals and at times against other groups. Membership in these movements provides safety and encouragement, and the leaders function as both organizers and salesman for the movement, ensuring notoriety and recognition for their followers. Despite their aggressive response to the public sphere, the leaders of movements negotiate their anti-public sentiment with careful marketing of controversy. The development of these modernist networks relies on this duality. It might be objected that my inclusion of avant-garde movements as part of the networks of “modernism” collapses two different forms of cultural production. Avant-gardes appear beyond the bounded historical period that scholars call “modernism” and continue to attack cultural norms even until our current moment.4 This fact alone suggests that the terms “avant-garde” and “modernism” should not be simply conflated but that they represent different though related concepts. Critics and theorists have debated possible distinctions between modernism and the avant- garde, and some have simply used the terms interchangeably or applied modifiers such as “historical” to describe modernist avant-gardes. Peter Bürger describes the dissimilarity of modernism and avant-garde as the difference between individual depersonalized art with the ultimate goal of institutional sanction versus collectivist 182 assaults on the very institution of art in the hopes of changing one’s relationship to art.5 Responding to critical slipperiness with the terms “modernism” and “avant- garde,” Jochen Shulte-Sasse characterizes the distinction between the two as theoretically different relations to the public sphere: “Modernism may be understandable as an attack on traditional writing techniques, but the avant-garde can only be understood as an attack meant to alter the institutionalized commerce with art. The social roles of the modernist and the avant-garde artist are, thus, radically different.”6 In this argument, modernism seems inherently embedded in a paradoxical duality: on the one hand, modernism attacks received methods of presenting culture, but, on the other, modernism remains committed to culture as an institution, only wanting to change the products within that cultural institution. This paradox at the heart of modernism can be demonstrated in the example of that arch- experimenter Pound, whose early writings largely reproduced classical Italian forms such as Provençal poetry and whose work insistently draws on classical traditions. Recent Anglo-American scholars instead equate avant-gardism with the experimental and transgressive facets of an early modernism. In his book Poetry of the Revolution, Martin Puchner deconstructs the distinction between collective avant- gardes and individualist modernism by calling into question the straightforward representation of the latter: “However, modernist depersonalization was itself driven by a submerged desire for collectivity, the hope that bracketing the individual would somehow, via negative, allow a new collectivity to emerge.”7 He turns supposed modernist solipsism into a Nietzschean form of group dynamic, a negative construction of the group based on the individual. In his formulation, modernists become a kind of clandestine avant-garde, and he reformulates modernism as a collective aesthetic movement that establishes its own collectivity through pursuit of the opposite. Some scholars see the distinction as more a matter of temporality. For example, Paul Peppis describes a historical genealogy from early avant-garde activity 183 to what we now call “modernism”: “Indeed, this thing we think of when we think ‘modernist poetry’ was constituted out of the artistic, social, and political ferment of the avant-garde.”8 In his account, the term “modernism” is one that has been imposed post hoc on the welter of experimental avant-gardes operating in the public sphere, but the concepts behind the terms “modernism” and “avant-gardism” overlap for a moment during the early twentieth century. In this account, “avant-garde” operates as an orientation or attitude toward cultural production rather than as a cultural movement in its own right. While I agree that the concept of the “avant-garde” should not be simply folded into the concept of “modernism,” and while I see Bürger’s point about the need to differentiate between these concepts, I position myself in the latter camp of scholars, affirming the transgressive power of early modernism as an avant-garde moment. I characterize artists and writers who join avant-garde movements as modernists possessing an avant-garde attitude toward cultural production, an attitude they may have lost as time passed. Thus, I find a more positive, less pessimistic strand of pre-war modernism that energetically rooted out bourgeois cultural conventions leading up to the war.9 Peter Nicholls characterizes this positive strand of early modernism as less determinate than high modernism, “a matter of traces rather than of clearly defined historical moments.”10 These “traces” intertwine with other movements, both political and aesthetic, and interact with one another in looser and more energetic ways than we may imagine of post-war modernism. I have already outlined this “early” modernism in my introduction, but I return to it here to suggest that certain strands of avant-gardism correspond, in my analysis, to early modernism. That is, early modernists possess avant-garde attitudes toward modernity, responding with positive, aggressive action within group formations and displaying earnestness about the possibilities for cultural transformation that could not be sustained through the war. Early modernists experiment with new forms and 184 oppose themselves to older traditions, drawing on one another for ideas, strength, and support. As Georges Braque famously describes his relationship to Picasso during the formative stages of Cubism: “We were like two mountain climbers roped together.”11 This image, of being roped together, gets at the very nature of this early, avant-garde modernism: in their efforts to forge new experiments and explore new cultural territory, such artists rely on support and collaboration to facilitate the exploration and, at the same time relish the danger and precariousness that such a position entails. Being roped together provides a safety net, which allows a solitary individual to take risks more than in isolation. But Braque highlights this danger too, celebrating the risks of belonging to the adventurous vanguard. Avant-garde daredevils appear as part of a powerful cultural counterforce in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a reaction to the stultifying traditions of the nineteenth century: namely the Victorian period in England and the Gilded Age in the United States, both of which had advocated classical ideals about art and notions of mimetic realism in literature. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, new schools of art and writing advocating a separation of art from life praxis began appearing. Bürger traces the origins of the avant-garde to the appearance of Aestheticism, the “art for art’s sake” philosophy that exemplified the ultimate separation of art from society. In the development of Aestheticism, Bürger sees the coming into fruition of a longstanding gap between bourgeois art and what he calls the “praxis of life.”12 The separation between art and life praxis, in his account, draws attention to the institutional nature of art, its acceptance and authorization by bourgeois social norms and its ideological divorce from life praxis. Despite the idealized representations of life in bourgeois visual art, the working classes suffer brutal working conditions. The separation between the masses and the world of art means that ideal visions of what the world could be in bourgeois art do not spark revolutions against the harsher reality. Instead, the very things that 185 should serve as a critique of ideology, the paintings and writings that demonstrate the vast distance between the bourgeois imaginary and the rest of the population’s lifeworld, actually serve as ideology itself. In Bürger’s formulation, “The citizen who, in everyday life has been reduced to a partial function (means-end activity) can be discovered in art as ‘human being.’”13 Because Aestheticism represents the ultimate unfolding of this separation as a category, avant-garde groups respond to the bourgeois institution by politicizing and deploying their work against the institution itself in an effort to recombine art and life praxis. “Aestheticism turns out to have been the necessary precondition of the avant-gardiste intent,” Bürger claims. “Only an art the contents of whose individual works is wholly distinct from the (bad) praxis of the existing society can be the center that can be the starting point for the organization of a new life praxis.”14 The efforts of the avant-garde to reconnect art with life praxis, in other words, expose categories of bourgeois art in a historical sense. This is due to the shift from period style to ‘means’, marked by increasing focus on form over content during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Avant-gardists took it upon themselves to “self-criticize” art by turning to matters of form as content for their work. This self-criticism threatens the institutional nature of art, prompting censure and resistance from cultural authorities and the public alike. Early modernism becomes political critique of the institutional nature of art and literature. Because of the militantly self-critical nature of avant-garde art, clusters of experimenters operate in more dynamic and unpredictable ways than other artistic communities or groupings. Unlike a cenacle or school, avant-gardists adopt militant formations, phalanxes advancing their own visions of cultural revolution. Renato Poggioli, one of the earliest theorists of the avant-garde, differentiates the concept of “movement” from “school” in his influential study The Theory of the Avant-Garde: “The school, then, is pre-eminently static and classical, while the movement is 186 essentially dynamic and romantic . . . the followers of a movement always work in terms of an end immanent in the movement itself.”15 Unlike the “static” classicism of the school, in which disciples sit at the feet of the master who teaches them the particular methods of that school, the movement is dynamic and energetic, marked by opposition to the cultural order through action: “The movement, instead, conceives of culture not as increment but as creation—or, at least, as a center of activity and energy.”16 In language similar to Pound’s “radiant node or cluster,” Poggioli illustrates the central role of the avant-garde to create new forms in an energetically visible fashion, and he claims these movements reconceptualize “culture” as aggressive action rather than augmentation, the key difference being one of energy. Rather than accreting static objects in museums and libraries, avant-gardes advocate movement as creative energy. In an apt metaphor for my project, Poggioli envisions the movement as a “laboratory and proving ground” for artistic training and experimentation. If artists and writers are “dynamic particles,” as Pound claims, the avant-garde movement is the laboratory in which they form experimental bonds.17 It is precisely the public sphere’s resistance to the avant-garde that makes their tactical maneuvers and groupings significant. Whereas my first chapter focuses on the world of coterie modernism formed by the semi-private social networks of the salon, and the second chapter analyzes the little magazine’s mediation of modernism for aspiring intellectuals and the reading public, this final chapter turns to the counter-public advanced guard of modernism. Expanding Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of an idealized seventeenth-century bourgeois public sphere to account for groupings that define themselves oppositionally, recent scholars advocate the existence of counter-public spheres. Michael Warner depicts the members of these counter- public spheres as “socially marked by their participation in this kind of discourse; ordinary people are presumed not to want to be mistaken for the kind of person who would participate in this kind of talk or be present in this kind of scene.”18 The 187 discourses that circulate within counter-public spheres appear hostile to the predominant bourgeois public sphere and work to destabilize it, making these counter-publics controversial or even dangerous to established social norms. To publicize their aims, counter-public clusters create violent manifestoes decrying social conditions and articulating the need for a “we” to rise up and tear down the edifices of tradition and normalcy. F.T. Marinetti, the progenitor of modernist avant-gardism, in his “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” describes revolutionary artists and writers as “the gay incendiaries with charred fingers” who will “set fire to the library shelves!”19 The violent imagery and rhetoric of rupture with received values and traditions remains central to the avant-garde mission. And yet, as Nancy Fraser reminds us, “the concept of counterpublic militates in the long run against separatism [of spheres] because it assumes a publicist orientation. Insofar as these arenas are publics, they are by definition not enclaves, which is not to deny that they are often involuntarily enclaved.”20 Although movements try to appear as isolated clusters of militants, they remain connected to the public they denigrate, maintaining a “publicist” strain. The activities of the avant-garde thus have a decidedly public function despite the violent renunciations of their members. The concept of the counter-public allows us to account for the dual nature of the avant- garde as at once an “enemy” of the bourgeois public who, at the same time, needs its bourgeois foe as its raison d’être. These groups crystallize as counter-public spheres within the larger structure of what Pierre Bourdieu describes as the “field of cultural production.”21 Bourdieu’s notion that culture operates as a series of intersecting fields within a social system— fields in which actors take positions vis-à-vis one another—and that these fields are delineated based on principles of hierarchization, explains the institutional position of the avant-garde as one part of a larger cultural milieu. Rather than operating as unstable random assortments of militants who manage to organize themselves 188 briefly, the avant-garde exists as a more complex organism, in Bourdieu’s analysis, as a system of tight networks that coalesce according to predictable patterns outlined by theorists of group dynamics. Bourdieu takes seriously the idea that the avant- garde operates in a structural way within larger cultural fields, and avant-garde position-takings correspond to increased autonomy of aesthetic principles, which produces a marginalized position within the cultural field of power. Because of this marginalized position, according to Bourdieu, avant-gardes adapt tactical responses to bourgeois institutions: The most heteronomous cultural producers (i.e. those with least symbolic capital) can offer the least resistance to external demands, of whatever sort. To defend their own position, they have to produce weapons, which the dominant agents (within the field of power) can immediately turn against the cultural producers most attached to their autonomy.22 This depiction of avant-gardists as those with the least symbolic capital explains the reciprocal reactions of the avant-garde counter-public sphere toward the bourgeois public sphere. Even as these vanguards—who have very little symbolic capital due to their rejection of the symbolic economy they inherit—attack bourgeois institutions, the agents representing the field of power—the press, the academies, the museums, conservatives and so forth—retaliate in the public sphere. Thus, avant-garde movements engage in running battles with traditional institutions and with other groups. Perloff reminds us that the term “avant-garde” was originally a military term: “it referred to the front flank of an army, the forerunners in battle who paved the way for the rest.”23 These front ranks face the cannons of hostile public opinion as they publish, paint, and perform experimental works and establish themselves as groups precisely so that they can oppose themselves to the public while retaining a protective shield within the group. Operating against and within the field of power 189 as a counter-public sphere requires a series of oppositions and can only be sustained by joining the protective sphere of a movement. At the same time, the members of these movements negatively define their parameters against one another, carving out unique platforms of aesthetic innovation by engaging in “putsches” and “counter-putsches” as Wyndham Lewis describes them.24 Bourdieu’s theory of cultural fields elucidates how these “position-takings” operate within the field of power as just such a series of confrontations: “The fact remains that every new position, in asserting itself as such, determines a displacement of the whole structure and that, by the logic of action and reaction, it leads to all sorts of changes in the position-takings of the occupants of the other positions.”25 Russian Expressionist painter and theorist of visual abstraction Wassily Kandinsky describes a similar process in the development of new aesthetics, characterizing the cultural field as an “acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts”: “The whole triangle is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow . . . At the apex of the top segment stands often one man, and only one.”26 These leaders exercise power over their movements, and many form these groups contra other groups. If Picasso and Braque are painting in a static analytic Cubist style in France, then Marinetti urges motion and technology in Italy, causing a sensation that Russian painter Kazimir Malevich transforms into Cubo-Futurism, Pound capitalizes on with the creation of Anglo-American Imagism, and Lewis attacks with his British Vortex. After the war, Swiss Dada appears and “demolishes” its predecessors with a turn to anti-art, and French Surrealism melts all boundaries between waking and dream worlds. These “putsches” and “counter-putsches” demonstrate that, even within the counter-public sphere, groupings and movements operate in friction with one another, defining their own agendas against their compatriots in the avant-garde and modifying the field of cultural production with each new volley. Graph 1 represents 190 Graph 1: Intergroup rivalries and relationships 191 the tight clusters of avant-garde movements and the internal dynamics that make them unpredictable. Plus signs reflect lines of positive relation such as influence or inspiration whereas minus signs denote conflicts, which are forms of connection in the networks of movements. Even negative relations produce important new partnerships as evidenced by Amy Lowell’s fight with Pound, which sparks his collaboration with Lewis. Every avant-garde grouping that appears in relation to another movement resonates throughout the field of avant-garde cultural production, and these pulsations are necessary by-products of ceaseless confrontations and innovations. These confrontations manipulate the marketability of controversy. Even as counter-public spheres oppose bourgeois values and traditions, the members of these movements generate publicity in their attacks. Lawrence Rainey points out that audiences react to the avant-garde with both hostility and adulation, and he describes the effect of Marinetti’s publicity as “ephemeral seduction, the powerful allure of art conceived as public practice,” which instigates similar experiments in group formation among Anglo-American vanguards.27 The instigators of these new movements discover there are reputations to be made in creating programs of their own that effect an “ephemeral seduction.” As Lewis remembers, the notoriety and publicity available before the war occupied the center stage of public interest: “The Press in 1914 had no Cinema, no Radio, and no Politics: so the painter could really become a ‘star’.”28 Avant-gardists court both hostility and controversy, benefitting from the salability of such controversies to promote their experiments. Joining complex networks in which relations can be at once negative and fruitful allows these movements to succeed outside of and in opposition to a hostile public sphere. While these collaborations form around the experimentation and technical innovations by artists, the function of the avant-garde movement is not simply to produce new art but to attack social norms through a direct frontal assault made by 192 the group rather than the individual. Analyzing these movements as collaborative deployments or clusters illustrates the social dynamics within them, the structures formed by individuals joining and participating in experimental movements. These structures can be charted as participants join groups, write manifestoes, fight with other movements, attack social mores, and denigrate the public. Cohen argues that joining these movements “intensified modernist innovation by enabling otherwise isolated artists to develop aesthetic ideas collectively . . . and, most important, to dare to present their innovative art to a hostile, yet potentially curious public.”29 Groups thus play a crucial role in providing safe spaces to experiment and support systems to present their work to an audience. By deploying a rhetoric and praxis of violent renunciation of the bourgeoisie and an invitation to join the avant-garde, these groups enable artists and writers to adapt an arrogant attitude toward detractors more difficult to maintain in isolation, and this opposition plays a central role in the operation of the group. For example, in 1910 Marinetti’s Futurists print 800,000 fliers and drop them from Venice’s Clock Tower in which they compare the city to a “magnificent sore from the past” and exhort Venetians to reject tradition: “Venetians! Venetians! Why do you always want to be faithful slaves of the past? The seedy custodians of the greatest bordello in history, nurses in the saddest hospital in the world, where mortally corrupted souls languish in the pestilence of sentimentality?”30 To visit a city as part of a traveling art exhibition, only to insult and demean that city’s traditions, captures the radically aggressive nature of the avant-garde, and Marinetti’s antics create the paradigm for future avant-gardes to follow. In the following sections, I analyze the internal organization that makes these assemblages possible and that characterizes the group dynamics of the avant-garde. At the centers of these movements exists processes that govern the formation, solidification, and dissipation of movements. A logic of group dynamics operates in 193 the formulation of the movement as a base of schematic actions underlying the production of avant-garde cultural objects themselves. The theories of group dynamics on which I draw in this chapter are originally modernist because they initially appear in and respond to the same social developments that give rise to the networks of modernism. French cultural theorist Gustave Le Bon publishes the first study of group psychology, The Crowd, in 1898. English social psychologist William McDougall, in The Group Mind (1920), and Sigmund Freud, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922), expand Le Bon’s ideas about group dynamics during the period of high modernism. Freud describes the development of the group as a psychological process of identification, which captures the reciprocal nature of the group: “If the individuals in a group are combined into a unity, there must surely be something to unite them, and this bond might be precisely the thing that is characteristic of a group.”31 The group is thus configured as an assemblage of individuals that unite around a common investment, which dialectically produces something larger than the sum of its parts. McDougall makes this point especially clear: “each unit, when it becomes a member of a group, displays properties or modes of reaction which it does not display, which remain latent or potential only, so long as it remains outside that group.”32 Each individual node or participant within the avant-garde group, by virtue of uniting in common interest, evolves beyond her or his own potential, transforming into something else by virtue of joining the group, and this fact makes group dynamics useful in analyzing avant-garde clusters as entities unique in themselves. The process of joining a group is not static but dynamic and often unpredictable. Poggioli describes the process of movement mobilization as a dialectical process in which external and internal relations synthesize positive results that characterize the movement.33 His analysis provides a schema for approaching movements based on their essential motivations and missions, but I depart from his 194 theory by mapping the structure of internal interactions that lead to such movements. For this analysis, I turn to a schematic tool developed in the study of group dynamics. In his now-classic analysis of groups, Bruce Tuckman (1965) determines that all groups undergo some variation of four stages, which he called a “developmental sequence,” in which individuals negotiate the internal structure of the group: forming, norming, storming, and performing.34 These stages correspond to two sets of data: the internal structure of the group and the task activities of that group (fig. 1). Like a life cycle, each stage features certain characteristics and behaviors that effect the position-takings of those movements and their members (graph 2). Each stage reflects an energetic interrelationship among the various individuals in the group, especially in a militant vanguard group with conflicting opinions and theories. Analyzing the different stages of these groups reveals the internal structure by which cultural producers operate within movements as both individuals and collectives to innovate and design new aesthetic theories, artworks, and texts. Although Tuckman’s analysis suggests a teleological structure I do not fully endorse, his model does reveal the basic internal dynamics of movements: the way they coalesce, stabilize, enact, create, and operate as a whole. Certainly, his dynamics Stage Structure Task Forming Testing and dependence Orientation to tasks Norming Roles become solidified, rules established, new standards evolve Exchange of interpretations and opinions Storming Conflict, Resistance Emotional Response Performing Roles functional Display of tasks Fig. 1: Tuckman’s taxonomy of group dynamics 195 do not always happen in the sequence presented here nor do they necessarily happen one after the other. For example, in his essay, Tuckman positions “norming” as the third stage after “storming,” but, in my adaptation of his schema, I have switched the two because, in my version, “storming” occurs between groups, meaning it naturally follows from norming. Whereas he constructs a particular narrative in which storming is the stage in which norms become worked out, this does not make sense for avant-garde movements because they already come together with some organizing principle, some norms, which they negotiate through storming. Certainly, these stages are not entirely prescriptive, so I decided to modify them to fit my argument better. Stages may overlap or remain absent altogether; however, all groups go through some version of his stages and begin when the group forms as a network. For the avant-garde movement, which results from a particularly energetic form of group dynamics, these stages provide a way to approach the productive work of the collective. Tuckman’s taxonomy effectively charts the sometimes bewildering interactions among volatile and unpredictable nodes and offers an optic with which to analyze the small dense networks that form the girders of avant-garde groups. Using the theory of group dynamics to clarify how these clusters facilitate the collaborative creation of the most innovative cultural objects of the twentieth century, I construct a network of networks in this chapter (table 1), a structure of nodes huddled together whose interrelationships are often lines of influence and conflict rather than direct relationships. Forming: Birth of the Movement If we look for the beginnings of many canonical modernist vocations among the “traces” of the early twentieth century that Nicholls describes, we find many visual artists and writers begin by either joining or creating a vanguard movement to disseminate their radical experiments.35 In some cases, figures are annexed to a movement without a real desire to commit wholeheartedly to the group, as with 196 Graph 2: Example of typical life-cycle of avant-garde movements 197 James Joyce’s appearance in Les Imagistes, the first anthology of Imagism. But many find the collaborative atmosphere of a counter-public movement to be a formative and nurturing experience in developing their own unique art. During the pre-war period especially, numerous “isms” populate the public consciousness to the extent that popular magazines and newspapers from the period regularly satirize the advent of avant-garde movements as part of daily events. One of the most notorious of these appears in The New York Times around the appearance of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 at the 1913 Armory Show exhibition. Describing Duchamp’s painting as an “Explosion in a shingle factory,” the review lampoons Duchamp’s angular portrait. In England, magazines such as Punch often include cartoons from the period mocking the faddism of the Cubists and Futurists, including this drawing from 1918, featuring “Bink’s Futurist scarecrow” which promises to keep birds away, “specially designed by an eminent Cubist” (fig.2).36 Fig. 2: “Bink’s Patent Futurist Scarecrow,” Punch (1918) 198 These parodies and dismissals reflect the ubiquity of avant-garde groups and theories during this period. The mockery of avant-garde groups that fuels the mainstream press of the period results from the prominence of these movements before World War I. Groups popped up all over Europe and America during these early years, including such movements and pseudo-movements as French Cubism, Paroxysme, Post- Impressionism, and Surrealism; Italian Futurism; Russian Cubo-Futurism; Anglo- American Imagism; British Vorticism; German Expressionism; American Photo- Secession and Dadaism; and Swiss Dadaism, each with its own aesthetic principles and cadre of dedicated adherents. These movements supplement the already existing welter of political “isms” described in the last chapter: socialism, feminism, anarchism, egoism, and suffragism. Many of these groups maintain nationalist allegiances despite their international cross-pollinations. For example, Peppis has shown the paradoxical position of Vorticism after the outbreak of World War I, both resisting traditional British mores and the generally anti-modernist government while retaining a patriotic view that Germany must be stopped by military force.37 For the general public before the war, the sheer number and variety of these “isms” constitute a bizarre series of exchanges and linkages that remain inscrutable to the average bourgeois or proletarian individual. Yet, these movements provide entertainment and generate quite a bit of attention both despite and because of the mockery and puzzlement, and this notoriety proves useful for marketing the avant- garde group in general. As Rainey points out, some of the more serious modernists in London, such as Pound and Lewis, only realize the potentials of avant-garde posturing after Marinetti’s Futurist invasion generates a remarkable amount of controversy in the mainstream press.38 The initial stage known as “forming” marks the genesis of the movement, in which it coalesces around a leader and aesthetic platform, creates its own unique 199 myth of origins, and articulates its position contra the public and other movements via a manifesto. Although the other stages can occur in a different order than suggested here, every group must begin with the forming stage, which makes it particularly important and fraught. Starting in 1909, when Marinetti and his cohort appear in London for a series of public lectures regarding Italian Futurism, the model for creating a modern avant-garde becomes a visibly militant, group-oriented dynamic in keeping with radical political movements. Central to the formation of these groups is the role of the domineering, powerful leader. The leader node in the avant-garde network provides the anchor for the rest of the nodes in the network. Similar to the salon hostess or the magazine editor, the leader of a movement constellates the other nodes around himself (usually, these leaders are male). But, unlike these other central nodes, the leader of an avant-garde movement exercises control over the group in an effort to maintain the life of the movement, directing flows of information and capital and organizing platforms for cultural production. The heads of movements lead their groups whereas salon hostesses and little magazine editors serve more supportive roles as facilitators for modernist cultural production.39 Without masterminds such as Marinetti, Pound, Lewis, Malevich, Kandinsky, Stieglitz, Picasso, and Nicholas Beauduin, who serve as pitchmen, organizers, and military commanders all rolled into one, the survival of avant-garde movements beyond the planning stage would be doubtful if not impossible, and the groups would probably collapse under the pressure of public opinion if they did manage to get started. Despite the potentially alienating personas of these avant-garde leaders, they play a crucial role in establishing the collaborative space of their counter-public spheres in which artists and writers can openly experiment and influence one another. In theories of group dynamics, leaders possess power, but it is a social form 200 of power, a “power with people rather than over people.”40 As Cohen characterizes the avant-garde structure, the leader and group maintain a reciprocal relationship: If leaders needed groups to realize their aesthetic compulsions and megalomaniacal impulses, groups obviously needed leaders, the visionary dynamos who organized the group, gave it a purpose, a program, often a membership; who arranged its exhibitions, publications, and presentations; who publicized it and shaped its public persona; and who led it into verbal and sometimes physical combat at these same events.41 Leaders may exercise power over their followers, but submitting to a “visionary dynamo” provides benefits to burgeoning artists and writers in the form of publicity, aesthetic collaborations, education, exhibition opportunities, publications, and mutual support against a hostile public. Having a group of followers provides the leader with a supportive enclave in which to build his or her aesthetic theories. Lewis describes this mutuality in his account of forming the Vorticists: “I concluded that as a matter of course some romantic figure must always emerge, to captain the ‘group’. Like myself! How otherwise could a ‘group’ get about, and above all talk. For it had to have a mouthpiece didn’t it?”42 For Lewis, this issue of recruiting and retaining followers under the Vorticist banner remains significant because he feels excluded from other groups, most notably the Bloomsbury social circle. Thus, the group and the leader rely on each other in order to make the movement run, establishing a dialectical relationship between them that yields avant-garde creative energy. However, the leader’s style of leading could destabilize the group just as easily as it could bring the group into being. A delicate balance of leadership exists that the head of a group has to maintain in order to keep from angering the members and dissolving the cohesion among the other nodes in the network. Cohen describes this 201 delicate balance of leadership, using a familiar metaphor: “like subatomic particles that carry their potential dissolution as antimatter, each leadership quality that energized the group could also help dissolve it.”43 In the avant-garde movement, according to Cohen’s metaphor, certain “particles” remain particularly unstable, containing the very quality that could dissolve the force binding the other particles to them. For example, in a 1915 letter sent from Imagist poet F.S. Flint to Pound, Flint ascribes the breakup of Imagism to this exact imbalance: “But where you have failed, my dear Ezra . . . is in your personal relationships; and, I repeat, we all regret it. You had the energy, you had the talents . . . you might have been generalissimo in a compact onslaught: and you spoiled everything by some native incapacity for walking square with your fellows. You have not been a good comrade, voila!”44 In Flint’s account, the breakup of Imagism has less to do with Amy Lowell’s coup d’état, and more to do with Pound’s overbearing control over his followers, and he turns to military metaphors to describe Pound’s failure to “walk square.” Marching together, Flint suggests, the Imagists would have followed Pound as an army would follow a general, but, because Pound does not manage his Imagist network properly, they desert him. In investigating this leadership principle, Freud describes a duality of allegiances in terms of a libidinal economy that operates both vertically and horizontally, in which “each individual is bound by libidinal ties on the one hand to the leader . . . and on the other hand to the other members of the group.”45 Even alienating one member can have disastrous consequences because each node is linked to all the other nodes. Every leader must work to maintain the relationship with the other members, solidifying connections even while commanding. As part of their solidifying function, leaders pen manifestoes as a textual articulation of the group. In order to embody their aggressive counter-public orientation, avant-garde movements rely on manifestoes, ephemeral publications or pamphlets that establish a rhetorical “us versus them” dichotomy in which the 202 advocates of revolution are configured as soldiers waging battle against an established order. Publicizing such “provocations of the modern,” as Janet Lyon terms them, brings into being the new order described in the manifesto through its enunciation, operating as what J.L. Austin defines as a perlocutionary speech act.46 Manifestoes make manifest the possible cultural alternatives as prescribed in the counter-public sphere through articulation of their grievances in a highly stylized form and articulate the collective nature of these movements, the strangely social world that operates outside the public sphere and chafes against its restrictions. They declare a militant collectivity, a “we” operating as one in the war against bourgeois complacency and taste. To supplement this collectivity, the genre of the manifesto typically features a series of prominent points or short declarations that serve to structure the group’s theoretical platform. Edward O’Brien’s “Note on Paroxysm,” presenting a French avant-garde movement to American readers of The Little Review (1915), for example, features a list of declarative sentences, each punctuating a central feature of the Paroxyst theory of poetry. Each line reflects a contour of what makes Paroxysm a unique movement, and the presence of this particular congregation of tactics and beliefs make up the whole. Thus, these manifestoes possess their own generic structures as literature, but these structures produce practical effects in a more direct way than many literary texts. Perloff argues that the modernist manifesto represents a “new literary genre, a genre that might meet the needs of a mass audience even as, paradoxically, it insisted on the avant-garde, the esoteric, the antibourgeois.”47 The manifesto operates both to represent, in a straightforward yet literary form, the central mission of the particular group and to serve as the starting point of group formation, operating in two registers concurrently: bringing the movement into being through textual authorization in the manifesto. Often, manifestoes include a myth of origins as part of the process of self- creation. Such narratives perform the formation of the group as part of an 203 authorizing initiation, a creation story that illustrates how and why the movement has come into being. For example, Marinetti chooses to include “founding” in his title “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” published in Parisian paper Le Figaro, and his founding narrative introduces the more schematic points of what constitutes Futurism in the manifesto. In this “founding” of Futurism, Marinetti crafts a narrative arc, what Perloff calls a “master stroke,” a creation myth with a beginning, middle, and end that validates his manifesto’s theses.48 The narrative launches with a sense of imminence that something will happen: “We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits.” Presenting this creation myth against an exotic background, Marinetti sets up a sense of expectancy. “Suddenly we jumped,” he continues, “hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled by outside.”49 The stereotypically bohemian setting, complete with a coterie of artists debating new theories in an exotic café, is interrupted by the liberating noises of modernity, the trams rumbling by, which has the effect of sparking the formerly passive group into action. The artists cease discussing art and instead embark on a high-speed automobile drive through the streets until Marinetti crashes his auto into a drainage ditch, which he apostrophizes as the mother figure: “Oh! Maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse. . . . When I came up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!”50 Using an erotic image of an ecstatic penetration, demonstrating the linkage between sexuality and violence that characterizes the avant-garde, Marinetti enacts a transformation. The ditch represents the ultimate symbol of modernity, the industrial waste typically to be avoided or decried but here reconfigured as a womb and baptism into a modernist aesthetic. Marinetti’s swimming to the surface from under his car creates a temporal 204 dissonance, as we are transported back to his childhood with its attendant colonial trappings—the Sudanese nurse who provides milk to nourish him—but this memory serves to link the automobile crash to the birth of his movement. As if to reinforce the Futurist emphasis on automobiles and technology, he parallels his own baptism/birth with the birth of his car, the “beautiful shark,” from the ditch, and the description of his car as such reflects the metaphoric language of the Futurist aesthetic. In this way, the leader launches the movement by infusing it with mythical significance. Avant-gardes appear through a process of formation in which a leader organizes a group of followers who will create a movement. This process produces a new grouping around a central leader, who takes charge of the collective mission. In turn, forming requires textual authorization in order to publically distinguish the grouping from both other movements and from the bourgeois public sphere. Manifestoes make visible this process of group formation via a narrative description of the foundation of the movement and an almost poetic series of aesthetic proclamations. As disparate artists and writers crystallize into a movement, they begin to negotiate the terms of belonging to the group. Launching a movement represents only the initial stage, and leaders and groups must establish guidelines and norms for the movement to function. Psychologist Marvin Shaw points out that the “formation of a group is a continuous process . . . the group during its existence is in a never-ending process of change.”51 Forming a group begins the life cycle, but internal processes determine if a group will flourish or perish. Norming: The Rules of Art If avant-gardists come together around a central leader and manifesto during the forming stage, the norming stage is where individual roles solidify, rules begin to appear, and standards evolve. During the norming stage, members may share opinions or ideas about what the movement should do, and the group begins to 205 imagine itself as a collective rather than a group of individuals. Tuckman describes this phase of group formation as a process of cohesion: “The group becomes an entity by virtue of its acceptance by the members, their desire to maintain and perpetuate it, and the establishment of new group-generated norms to insure the group’s existence.”52 The norming stage reflects the development of investment in the group by individual members, solidifying the fragile early relationships into a coherent formation with which to launch attacks against traditional values and organizations. Norming takes place in two phases: 1. the creation of a print document that either lists and/or performs the major aesthetic standards of the new movement; 2. the discussion, debate, or negotiation about aesthetics that accompanies the founding of a group. Usually, the creation of manifestoes accompanies a pronouncement announcing the genesis of a movement, but the founding manifesto may be followed by other manifestoes and solidifies the movement while launching it. This part of the process always happens in the public eye whereas negotiations about rules of behavior usually occur among members within the group privately but can still result in some avant-gardists leaving the movement out of disagreement with the leaders or other members. In the first phase of norming, groups publish a manifesto to indicate the group is “going public,” that the leader and his or her lieutenants have recruited enough members to form the group, ironed out an aesthetic doctrine, and begun to cooperate in furthering the movement. As argued earlier, the manifesto represents a moment of manifestation that initializes the formation of the group through textual articulation, yet, at the same time, the manifesto represents the organization of norms or rules of behavior as a list of compact points and standards of aesthetic practice around the manifesto’s central platform. In this way, manifestoes bridge the “forming” and “norming” stages, marking both the movement’s beginning and its solidification. Some groups do not survive long after the manifesto stage, but, then 206 again, most avant-garde groups are distinctly ephemeral even under the best conditions, starting and dissolving within a few years of frenzied activity. Manifestoes establish textually the norms of the groups who publish them, articulating those principles in staccato statements of intent and resolution and demanding that their axioms be accepted, but packaging these demands in an aesthetic document that represents the norms of the group. The first prominent instantiation of this type of manifesto, the Futurist manifesto, lists a series of pronouncements about what the “we” of Italian Futurism represent, which are presented in an aesthetic document. “The novelty of Italian Futurist manifestos,” Perloff contends, “is their brash refusal to remain in the expository or critical corner, their understanding that the group pronouncement, sufficiently aestheticized, can, in the eyes of the mass audience, all but take the place of the promised art work.”53 This document, in other words, both enunciates the aesthetic principles binding Futurists together and enacts those same principles. Under a series of numbered points, Marinetti includes punchy aphorisms that categorize the parameters of Futurism. These maxims reveal, often in an absurdly heightened and comic rhetoric, the particular investments of the group. For example, point 1 states, “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.” Using the pronoun “we” articulates the formation of the group, but the statements also define the norms, the dedication to violent and energetic revolution. This dedication takes the form of aesthetic pronouncements such as point 4: “A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot—is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”54 Juxtaposing the hood ornament of his racing car to the sculpture of the goddess Nike, Marinetti designs these types of declarations to épater la bourgeoisie, but they serve as more than simple shock tactics. These assertions define the nature of the movement itself through the staccato maxims. The eleven points that make up the manifesto of Futurism praise 207 modern technology and speed and establish a set of norms for being part of the movement. Even as these points make clear that Futurism opposes the bourgeois public sphere in specific ways, they clarify expectations regarding group behavior and aesthetic practices. In militant avant-garde movements, leaders configure these normalizing lists of precepts as tactical assaults that define the group through its alliances and enemies. Lewis’s Vorticist journal Blast (1914), for example, includes several manifestoes as part of its first issue. Among these is contained a manifesto in line with Marinetti’s list of ten aggressive maxims such as “We set Humour at Humour’s throat. Stir up Civil War among peaceful apes.”55 These establish the “we” of Vorticism even as they attack their enemies. In “Manifesto I,” the Vorticist agenda is more explicitly established through a list of “Blesses” and “Blasts,” organized in different-sized typefaces, which define the values of the movements through insult and praise (fig. 3). Unlike the Imagist manifesto, which lists a set of aesthetic procedures, this Blast manifesto works to attack and defend, with tongue in cheek, establishing Vorticism in relation to other cultural figures and institutions. “BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND” the manifesto begins and, in a gesture of hilarity, lists the individuals and organizations who exemplify the worst of English society according to the Vorticists, including: The Post Office, Edwardian novelist John Galsworthy, Fabian socialist Sydney Webb, popular Indian poet Rhabindraneth Tagore, Bloomsbury stalwarts and writers such as Lytton Strachey, philosopher Henri Bergson, the British Academy, cod liver oil, and a host of other individuals, objects, and institutions.56 These “blasts” appear on a single page, but the manifesto includes a section with phrases designed to articulate Vorticism’s avant-garde credentials such as point number 3: CURSE WITH EXPLETIVE OF WHIRLWIND THE BRITANNIC AESTHETE 208 CREAM OF THE SNOBBISH EARTH ROSE OF SHARON OF GOD-PRIG OF SIMIAN VANITY.57 Statements such as this define the parameters of Vorticism through its enemies; here, these enemies are listed as British Victorians, Bloomsburies, popular public figures, traditions, and the bourgeois snobs who only dabble in culture (people who Pound had tried to court when he first arrived in England).58 However, the manifesto balances these attacks with a list of “blesses” that offset the “blasts” as seen here: BLESS ENGLAND! BLESS ENGLAND FOR ITS SHIPS which switchback on Blue, Green and Red SEAS all around the PINK EARTH-BALL.”59 Manipulating typographic layout and font produces a dramatic aesthetic, and the manifesto uses this to visually attack the reader. But these typographic details also play with the form. This portion blessing England for its ships, for example, resembles a ship. The manifesto both blasts and blesses England for different reasons. Peppis explains that this ambivalence reflects Vorticism’s attempt to sell itself as a nationalist modernism, an invigorator of the British public sphere through avant-garde aesthetics: “Not surprisingly, BLAST’s polemics expose tensions generated by this attempt to promote radical forms of art and life using official nationalist tactics.”60 Like the Futurists before them, Vorticists use their manifestos to critique aspects of the nation even as they sell their movement as a nationalist front in culture and aesthetics. Blasting the parts of English culture that represent anti-modernist traditions or ideas and blessing the aspects of Britain that are 209 modern, the Vorticists define their movement as anti-popular, anti-traditional, and aggressively modern. Whereas the production of manifestoes marks the public manifestation of the group, the negotiation and normalization of the movement occurs in behind-the-scenes discussions, debates, and arguments about the particular aesthetic platform that characterizes the movement. In many cases, the members Fig. 3: Blast (1914) 210 may join the group and adapt their aesthetics to those of the leader or principal figure, but, in other cases, members work out their aesthetics together. This dialogic negotiation of avant-garde production serves to concretize the feeling of belonging among the individual nodes within the group to expel members who cannot consign themselves to practicing the aesthetics that form the group’s platform. Cohen points out that this discursive norming is key for the individual, but his point applies equally to the movement: “For young artists still uncertain of their artistic identity, the opportunity to discuss technical problems with talented colleagues . . . was exhilarating.”61 Douglas Goldring, secretary and assistant to Ford Madox Hueffer, editor of the English Review, which published Lewis and Pound’s early work, describes a similar process in the founding of Vorticism. In his description, about twenty people met at Lewis’s studio for a tea party “at which the editorial policy was laid down and a list of the people to be blasted and blessed drawn up.”62 The most notoriously disdainful part of the journal, as Goldring clarifies, is the result of a dialogic process of negotiation among individuals. A prominent example that illustrates the importance of discursive norming within the avant-garde movement can be found in the early relationship between Picasso and Braque, the founders of Cubism. Picasso and Braque meet in October 1907—introductions by Apollinaire—and begin a collaboration that would develop a new avant-garde movement and bring other innovative artists such as Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay, and Marcel Duchamp into the “city of Cubists.”63 The two men begin a friendship in which their respective artistic experiments find a foil. Apollinaire describes Picasso as “almost single-handedly” starting a revolution in art, and he calls Braque “the verifier” who has “verified all the innovations of modern art and will verify still others in future.”64 The conversations and interactions between Picasso and Braque during the four years between this first meeting and the Salon des 211 Indépendants of 1911, in which the Cubists first exhibit as a movement, establish guidelines and procedures for a recognizable style called Cubism. Pierre Daix describes this early collaboration as crucial to working out their aesthetic platform: “in the course of an initial campaign together, devoted to breaking down and reconstructing the image, the two friends realized the full importance of the cerebral conditioning of vision. By refining on perception, by dividing up volumes into facets . . . they created an independent material reality.”65 The early experiments and collaborations between the two men culminate in the 1911 exhibition, which marks the first collective manifestation of Cubism as a radical group. “The Cubist rooms at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants had the character of a collective demonstration,” Daix points out. “What the 1911 Indépendants showed was that a new generation of painters no longer shrank from the scandalousness which had hitherto weighed on the avant-garde, and that in fact they courted it and sought to turn it to account.”66 In this description of Cubism, the groundwork done by Braque and Picasso during their early “campaigns”—Daix’s use of a military metaphor is apt because it reflects the aggressively militant orientation of the vanguard—produce the norms that make the movement more confident to assault the public sphere with their experiments. Planning their campaign, Braque and Picasso establish norms of aesthetic behavior unique to the movement they started. Establishing norms—rules of behavior and aesthetics—occupies the heart of avant-garde group dynamics. Although it seems paradoxical that avant-gardists dedicated to disrupting received traditions would need standards in order to do so, individual experimenters need these movements to provide shelter and inspiration while they experiment, and joining the group requires collective norms. This notion that movements follow a structure even as they stay anarchic and anti-authoritarian remains one of the central paradoxes of the avant-garde. Apollinaire, in one of his essays on Cubism, speculates what would have happened without normative 212 negotiation: “who can say whether the mockery directed against Georges Braque might not have deflected Picasso from the difficult path along which he first walked alone?”67 Even the two-person movement beginning with Picasso and Braque provides this much-needed support because movements operate with more tactical confidence than individuals. Pound well describes this need for collaboration during the early years: “We worked separately, we found an underlying agreement, we decided to stand together.”68 From the beginning, avant-garde movements establish their unique position against other movements and against the bourgeois public sphere, and shared norms allow these groups to cohere and operate. Whether publishing a manifesto that launches and solidifies the movement or discursively working out the theories and principles of the movement, these avant-gardes establish principles that guide their anarchic, violent, and hilarious military campaigns against each other, the public sphere, and traditional values. However, establishing norms for avant-garde movements can prove complicated. Many artists and writers join the group only to chafe under the requirements of working collaboratively or resent the leadership. When this happens, individuals are faced with two choices: leave the group or battle for more recognition within it. These conflicts become even more pronounced among an early twentieth-century avant-garde milieu, the very praxis of which is marked by combat. Because of these necessarily aggressive attitudes toward the bourgeois public sphere and toward one another, avant-garde group dynamics are marked by a conflict stage, known as “storming,” in which individuals fight with one another inside a group, even as the movement battles other movements for public attention or deliberately provokes conflicts with audiences in an effort to stir up controversy. The storming stage reflects the avant-garde at its most active and exciting, and radical cultural producers realize that controversy can sell an aesthetic as effectively if not more so than can their innovations in aesthetic production. 213 Storming: “The Punch and the Slap” In establishing and solidifying their movements, avant-gardists organize around a leader or leaders and central aesthetic platform, generate a manifesto articulating the group’s identity, and establish a set of rules and guidelines for the members, which concretize the movement as such. Often concurrent with the norming stage of group formation, avant-garde movements undergo what Tuckman calls “storming,” the aggressive inter and intra-group conflicts that occasion social interaction in such charged circumstances. According to Tuckman’s taxonomy, storming reflects “resistance to group influence and task requirements” on the part of members as the group normalizes behavior and tasks.69 As groups begin to coalesce around a leader and develop norms of behavior through manifestoes and internal debates, some members may disagree with aesthetic projects or feel excluded from the group projects. In avant-garde movements, in which group dynamics are especially unstable due to the energetic interactions among members, discord occurs even more violently and frequently. These divisions do not remain contained, like a tempest in a teakettle, within the individual group but occur between groups for control over the public space for avant-gardism. If the internal conflicts become too intense, the storming cycle may produce new movements or alliances, as members leave one group for another or decide to establish their own movements as in the conflict between Marinetti and Lewis diagrammed in graph 2. In many cases, these battles escalate beyond the typical avant-garde ideological belligerence into physical confrontations, and some leaders encourage these public battles as yet more publicity for the group. Marinetti even includes the threat of violence in his manifesto, which helps explain why Italian Futurism is especially violent: “We intend to exalt aggressive action . . . the punch and the slap.”70 This section will examine the two aspects of avant-garde storming that are central to the interactions during this stage: intragroup conflict among the members of a group 214 that can threaten the cohesion of the collective project and intergroup conflicts between different movements that can produce renegotiation of the group’s totality vis-à-vis other groups. Social psychologist Donelson Forsyth identifies six stages that comprise intragroup conflicts (graph 3).71 Members of movements who find themselves at odds with the leader or other group members undergo this cycle of disagreement, confrontation with the objectionable members, escalation of the disagreement which may include leaving the group or fighting, some form of de-escalation in which the principal conflict is mitigated, resolution of the conflict, and return to the routine in which members cooperate in their avant-garde activities. For example, British painter Christopher Nevinson exhibits with Lewis as part of the “Cubist Room” Graph 3: Forsyth’s Intragroup Conflict Cycle 215 cadre at the Campden Town Group and Others show at Brighton Public Art Galleries in December 1913. Richard Cork describes this exhibition as an attempt to bring together the various avant-garde movements of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism under one umbrella as a meta-group.72 Previous to his establishment of Vorticism, Cork points out, Lewis oscillates between identifying as Cubist and Futurist and uses these labels as opportunities to increase his reputation.73 However, as Lewis forms Vorticism as a native British avant-garde movement opposed to the vogue of Italian Futurism, Nevinson begins to disagree with him over the direction for avant-garde British art. Even in his autobiography decades later, Lewis describes the escalation of his disagreement with Nevinson as a form of betrayal. After Marinetti tries to force Lewis to acknowledge that he belongs to the Futurist movement, Lewis claims that Marinetti’s British advocate, Nevinson, “attempted a Putsch against the ‘great London Vortex’”: He selected a sheet of ‘Rebel Art Centre’ notepaper. The ‘Rebel Art Centre’ in Great Ormond Street, founded by Miss Lechmere and myself, was the seat of the ‘Great London Vortex’. Upon this notepaper Mr. C.R.W. Nevinson expressed Futurist opinions; he too, I think, went over into the Press, and I had to repudiate him as an interloper and a heretic.74 Lewis sees this moment as treason, a form of heresy against the true Vorticist gospel, on Nevinson’s part, characterizing his use of the Rebel Art Centre’s notepaper as a military maneuver requiring a tactical response. It amounts to an invasion, in Lewis’s opinion, and he draws on both military and religious metaphors in his repudiation. But, this response reveals the humor inherent to avant-garde storming too. Lewis’s repudiation of Nevinson as an “interloper and heretic” represents the hyperbole by which avant-garde movements laugh at the seriousness of the press and general public. The de-escalation and return to normal behavior of these groups only occurs 216 when Nevinson breaks with Lewis and the two men work in different movements. Quiet moments remain brief, however, as even avant-gardists in the same circles may devolve to infighting. Lewis describes some of these ancillary quarrels: Gaudier- Brzeska threatens painter David Bomberg at Ford Madox Hueffer’s, and Lewis grabs T.E. Hulme by the throat only to end up dangling from Hulme’s hands over a railing in Soho Square.75 These battles typify the internal negotiations of movements as complicated and ambitious vanguardists attempt to make names for themselves. Of course, not all individual putsches take the form of violent physical confrontations or press repudiations. One of the more notorious examples of Anglo- American avant-garde intra-group conflict occurs when Pound and Amy Lowell disagree over the direction of Imagism. After Pound forms the Imagists as a new movement in poetry, the movement begins to generate significant attention in the mainstream press. The San Francisco Call reports in 1913: “Just now we are enjoying a wonderful crop of artistic isms, of which at least one seems to be well larded with sound sense. This bears the unpromising name ‘Imagisme,’ a small but evidently highly, self-conscious literary ‘movement’ in England of which the redoubtable young expatriate, Ezra Pound, is a leader.”76 However, Pound’s leadership of Imagism is short-lived. After he organizes the anthology Les Imagistes, Pound finds himself at odds with Lowell over the selection process he employs, which he characterizes as control over submissions, writing to her in August 1914, “I should like the name ‘Imagisme’ to retain some sort of a meaning. It stands, or I should like it to stand for hard light, clear edges. I can not trust any democratized committee to maintain that standard.”77 In this and subsequent letters, Pound tries to convince Lowell to use a different name for her anthology to no avail. Richard Aldington remembers that Lowell held what he calls a “Boston Tea Party” for Pound in which new norms get established for the Imagist movement: “With her usual energy and vivacity she had been battling valiantly for us all, but was fed up with Ezra . . . There was to be no 217 more of the Duce business, with arbitrary inclusions and exclusions and a capricious censorship. We were to publish quietly and modestly as a little group of friends with similar tendencies.”78 The Imagists collectively decide to replace Pound as “Duce” with Lowell as democratic leader who allows authors to collaborate, and to make Imagism less a movement and more a “publishing consortium,” in J.B. Harmer’s phrase.79 After she continues to use the name “Imagism” for this new democratic program, Pound writes her again: “I don’t suppose any one will sue you for libel; it is too expensive. If your publishers ‘of good standing’ tried to advertise cement or soap in this manner they would certainly be sued.”80 Despite his threats and remonstrations, Lowell takes charge of the movement, and they reappear as a group without Pound in a special issue of The Egoist featuring the poetry of its new core members: Lowell, Richard Aldington, H.D., F.S. Flint, and John Gould Fletcher.81 In part as a result of this conflict, Pound joins Lewis in forming Vorticism. These internal conflicts and discords reveal that the storming within avant-garde groups may radically alter movements and produce new collaborations and groupings. Pound’s leaving Imagism allows him to participate in Vorticism, and his being ousted reflects the often-unstable nature of group dynamics among avant-gardes. Such internal conflicts may generate critiques from within of a movement’s primary orientation. For example, British poet Mina Loy enters into sexual relationships with both Marinetti and Giovanni Papini, members of a movement notorious for its aggressive masculinist stance. “I am in the throes of conversion to Futurism” Loy confesses to Mabel Dodge early in 1914.82 Yet, despite her early enthusiasm for Futurism, she butts heads with Marinetti and Papini over the movement’s treatment of women. Marinetti’s manifesto “Let’s Murder the Moonshine,” for example, spews misogynistic rants against women as part of an attack on a specific concept of sentimental femininity: “Yes, our nerves demand war and despise women, because we fear supplicating arms that might encircle our knees 218 on the morning of departure!”83 Although some critics argue that the existence of female Futurists suggests that Marinetti may have only been attacking sentimentality rather than women, Loy, an ardent feminist, scorns and satirizes the misogyny in poem such as “Lion’s Jaws,” in which she refers to thinly disguised characters Raminetti (Marinetti), Bapini (Papini), and Nima Lyo (Mina Loy): “Raminetti / . . . / possesses the women of two generations / except a few / who jump the train at the next station.”84 This characterization represents Marinetti as a hapless lothario who women like Loy try to escape. Jumping out of trains undermines the Futurist fetishization of technology. Women, in Loy’s account, may be attracted enough to get on the train but quickly disembark, suggesting that Futurism itself is little more than a passing fad. Although the speaker’s position toward “Nima Lyo” remains ambivalent—she characterizes herself as “secret service buffoon to the Woman’s Cause”—her portrayal of Marinetti and Papini evacuates both men of their arrogant masculinity, shortening their names to “Ram:” and “Bap:” who “avoid each other’s sounds.” Shortening their names enacts a symbolic emasculation of both men, reducing their avant-garde aesthetic theories to a silly child’s game. Loy’s skeptical position regarding the masculinist tendencies of Futurism appears even more explicitly in her “Feminist Manifesto,” written five months after Blast. In this document, she adopts a similar typographic experimentalism to Lewis’ but deploys it for a feminist cause: The feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate Women if you want to realise yourselves—you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval—all your pet illu- sions must be unmasked—the lies of centuries have to go— are you prepared for the Wrench—? There is no half- 219 measure—NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition, will bring about Reform, the only method is Absolute Demolition85 Aggressive and militant, this manifesto for total liberation from traditional patriarchy mirrors the manifestoes of Marinetti, Lewis, and Pound through its use of different size fonts, typographical experiments, a list of demands for change, and a messianic tone. Unlike these avant-garde men, however, Loy uses her manifesto to attack bourgeois patriarchal values that many of the most radical among the Futurists and Vorticists still share: the notion that women are inferior and should be patronized in both sexual and belittling registers. Lewis, for example, includes a statement to British suffragettes in Blast: “A word of advice. In destruction, as in other things, stick to what you understand. We make you a present of our votes. Only leave works of art alone. You might some day destroy a good picture by accident.”86 Referring to the slashing of some paintings by suffragettes fighting for the vote, Lewis’s disdain for feminist politics seeps through his claims of alliance, and he assumes that women cannot appreciate good art even as he condescendingly “makes a present” of his vote. Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” opposes such avant-garde paternalism and advocates radical feminist opposition to traditional strictures, including the elimination of virginity through surgical removals of the hymen. Recognizing that virginity is commodified and reified in British culture, Loy’s manifesto advocates destruction of that commodified object, a radical political act that evacuates the concept of symbolic value.87 In many ways, this manifesto operates in the same way Marinetti’s does but adapts the form to critique the misogyny that underlies the avant-garde. Thus, Loy occupies a complex position within Futurism, both attracted to and repelled by the men who lead the movement, and her manifesto suggests that 220 even members within a group such as Futurism can disagree with or even outright oppose some aspects of the movement. More visibly and violently, storming takes the shape of physical battles among avant-garde groups or between groups and other individuals. Inter-group conflicts occur in public, and some avant-garde movements espouse physical combat as part of their publicity-generating schemes. Other avant-gardist theorists ascribe these conflicts to competition over recognition and success. Kandinsky describes the impulse that causes avant-gardes to battle one another as just such a material motivation: “Competition arises. The wild battle for success becomes more and more material. Small groups who have fought their way to the top of the chaotic world of art and picture-making entrench themselves in the territory they have won. The public, left behind, looks on bewildered, loses interest and turns away.”88 Kandinsky recognizes the inherent violence of these pre-war movements. They energetically and enthusiastically battle one other for territory, in this case public recognition, and art transforms into internecine warfare for top position in the counter-public sphere. Kandinsky argues that such conflicts characterize the “chaotic” search for new methods or theories that will gain public attention, even if the reaction is hostile. Ironically, even as they gain attention, these public battles run the risk of over saturating a public sphere with displays of hostility and aggression. If experimenters fought with one another inside the group, they battled against other groups with equal if not more ferocity, providing entertainment and publicity, even as these squabbles solidify the movements themselves. Of the movements in operation before the war, perhaps none provokes more physical conflict than the Italian Futurists. Because they praise violence and aggression as key to a modern aesthetic, they often put these ideas into practice. In the manifesto initiating the movement, Marinetti announces, “We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch 221 and the slap.”89 Accordingly, their public appearances often culminate in just such physical violence. Apollinaire describes a typical Futurist melee: “Together they read their manifesto . . . At that point, a great uproar broke out in the theater. There were fist fights, duels with canes, the police were called, etc.”90 Following an attack on a Futurist exhibition in the magazine La Voce by critic and former Futurist Ardengo Soffici, Marinetti and his followers engage in what has become known as “the great Punch-Up of 1912.” When Boccioni encounters Soffici in a café, he knocks him down for his bad review, resulting in a running fist-fight among the Futurists and Soffici’s group, described by Marinetti: While we were buying tickets, Palazzeschi arrives and tells us that the enemy is in ambush at the station. I lead. Boccioni follows two meters behind. Two meters after him, Carrà. Behind a pillar we see Soffici with a bandaged head and a raised cane. Prezzolini behind a second pillar. Other pillars hide Slapater and other vociani. Prezzolini hurls himself on me. I receive him with open arms, flail his head with blows, bite him, and find a tuft of hair in my mouth . . . As all this was going on, a train pulls up.91 These battles literalize the Futurist credo of the “punch and the slap,” transforming avant-garde theory into practice. Marinetti and his followers relish the opportunity to engage in such public displays because these fights generate notoriety and controversy. Of course, this aggressive action results from Futurism’s cult of violence. Marinetti calls for war as “the world’s only hygiene,” a statement that reflects the naïve theories of the pre-war avant-garde before global war eclipses calls for “violence and precision”.92 These displays demonstrate that militant avant-garde movements undergo stages of storming in which conflicts begin, escalate, and resolve in unpredictable ways. Marinetti concludes his account of the “great Punch-Up of 1912” by noting that the battle resolves with new friendships being formed among the 222 combatants, as though the fighting and subsequent arrest de-escalate and resolve the disagreements as predicted by Forsyth’s model of intra-group conflict cycle (graph 3). During the stages of group formation and solidification, avant-garde movements often undergo a period in which members, negotiating the norms of craft and behavior, disagree with one another. This may result in individuals leaving the group and forming a separate group—as with Pound’s ousting from Imagism and co-founding of Vorticism—or defecting from one alliance in favor of another—as with Nevinson’s preference of Futurism over Vorticism. Such disagreements within the group often follow cycles in which members announce their displeasure, escalate their positions and find some resolution through conflict. Similar processes characterize the inter-group conflicts between movements, which battle one another for possession of accolades and publicity in the competitive public sphere. Even as these groups scorn the bourgeois philistinism of public opinion, they court mainstream society’s attention through very visible disagreements and physical public battles. In large part, this paradox results from particular historical circumstances in which the modern avant-garde appears. Modernity is marked by increasingly predominant shocks to perception and consciousness, especially in metropolitan centers. In order to get attention, avant-gardes must stage increasingly shocking displays for the public. Thus, storming marks a crucial phase in the creation and perpetuation of movements. But, this storming is only part of the avant-garde’s efforts to get and keep public attention for their projects. Storming may provide entertainment, but disseminating the cultural products of the avant-garde requires the similarly public phase of performing. If the storming stage represents the unstable negotiation of position, avant-gardists generate interest in their work through various public displays such as exhibitions and performances, which operate in a similarly aggressive but more constrained way to propagate new aesthetic ideas. Performing: The “Parlez-vous” of the Avant-Garde 223 Whereas the other stages of group dynamics I have charted reflect the social processes by which groups articulate their self-creation, solidify the rules of behavior and aesthetic platforms, and undergo the intense conflicts attendant on consolidating these counter-public groups, the stage of performing represents the actual production and dissemination of cultural objects: paintings and sculptures are exhibited, manifestoes declaimed, poems or novels published, collective pieces performed, and notoriety earned. During the performing stage, artists and writers produce their works for a public audience, usually provoking hostile criticism or incredulity. Belonging to the group makes this public ridicule tolerable and even a badge of pride, and some groups turn performance into an aggressive form of its own. These performances prove especially significant for manifesting both the group’s vision of the future and the individual author or artist’s experimental work. In Charles Russell’s analysis, “each avant-garde movement reflects the writers’ and artists’ desire that art and the artist may find or create a new role within society.”93 For Perloff, this orientation toward the public begins with Futurism, and she characterizes the “Futurist moment” as “the brief phase when the avant-garde defined itself by its relation to the mass audience.”94 In this characterization, avant- garde performance provides a concrete representation of the more abstract, theoretical aims of the movement and stages that representation in public view, infusing the daily consciousness of people with avant-garde ideas. The networks of groups and individuals who constellate the various platforms and artworks of these different movements come together most importantly in the variety of exhibitions and performances that appear with especial frequency and energy during this period. Avant-garde performances can be divided into two categories that reflect the twin impulses of avant-gardists toward anarchistic display and, at the same time, cultural recognition. Performances typically involve ephemeral presentations of avant-garde movements in front of audiences and are designed to generate as much 224 controversy as possible through aurally attacking audiences using various instruments. These performances can be especially exciting if members from other avant-garde movements attend, and avant-garde leaders “plant” hecklers to ensure an exciting show. Thus, performances of this first type appear as carefully designed chaos, generating attention for the movement. The second type of avant-garde performance occurs in the exhibitions of artworks. As these movements crystallize around leaders and aesthetic platforms, they begin to appear in art shows, readings, and exhibitions, which often provoke attention from the bourgeois audience for art and writing and from the press reviews. Group exhibitions generate controversy and shelter new artists and writers, and individuals who exhibit alongside other avant- gardists promote experimentation across movements and geographical boundaries. The first type of performing--the ephemeral actions that go into an avant- garde spectacle—directly assault audiences, generating controversy through self- conscious hostility toward viewers. The Futurists especially favor this type of performance, using aggressive public displays to disrupt bourgeois conceptions of attending a performance as passive, undisturbed consumers. Using Futurist noisemakers, intonarumori, as they call them, these performances reverberate with an onslaught of noise. Marinetti describes these noisemakers in his memoir as a “bizarre orchestra made up of . . . the hardly praiseworthy sounds of running water rainfall wind leaves insects and cars.”95 Futurists combine this barrage with blatant verbal assaults on the viewers. Insulting the audience, as a way to get attention in the newspaper reviews, proves so successful that Marinetti leads full-fledged publicity tours, visiting England in 1910 for a series of lectures in which he insults the British audience to their faces. At the Lyceum Club, Marinetti delivers his “Futurist Speech to the English” in which he states, “One of our young humorists has said that every good Futurist should be discourteous twenty times a day. So I will be discourteous with you, bravely confessing to you all the ill we think of the English, after having 225 spoken much good of them.”96 Marinetti deploys a frontal assault on the British audience, insulting their national customs and characteristics according to Italian notions, but the humor of such a performance delights attendees despite its aggressive nature. Russian Futurists led by Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova hold a similarly bellicose performance at the Pink Lantern cabaret in 1913: Larionov appeared with a painted face and insulted the audience by referring to them as “jack-asses of the present day.” Balmont added fuel to the fire by declaring: “Long live Larionov! Long live all the idiots who have sat in front of him!” . . . Mayakovsky declaimed his insulting poem ‘Nate’ while Goncharova struck an army officer. The audience went wild with anger.97 These types of public displays produce dramatic effects through the insulting of audiences. These performances demonstrate the disregard and disdain of the avant- garde toward the very people who come to see them perform, but the hyperbolic spectacle proves stimulating. Perloff describes this phenomenon as the avant-garde “gesture” par excellence, instantiated by Marinetti and spread to every subsequent group in which the performance is as much one of aggression as it is of authenticity. Rather than try to sell the audience on the new ideas and experiments, these performances glory in the movement’s disdain for the public while performing the very ideas and experiments in that display. This arrogant hostility produces the desired publicity by appealing to audiences “ready to applaud the poet or artist who can épater le bourgeois” as Perloff describes it.98 In an effort to keep controversy prominent in the public consciousness, some performances feature violent conflicts as part of the program. These avant-garde performances prove controversial both because of the efforts of some members to sabotage their own performances and through conflict with other avant-gardes, engaging in the “parlez-vous” as Lewis calls it.99 Marinetti claims that, during a 226 Futurist performance at the Lyric theater in Milan, some of the Futurists begin chanting “enough, enough” in order to stir up their own audience.100 Embedding critics who will shout or interrupt the performance reveals the need for controversy in the form of angry audiences to sell the movement as a spectacle in the public sphere. These spectacles compete with the increasingly distracting stimuli inherent to modernity itself, in which new technologies such as the automobile dramatically jockey for attention in the metropolis where the avant-garde operates. Lewis, during his counter-putsch against Futurism, recalls that he and a group of Vorticists went to a Futurist performance with the intent to disrupt it: Marinetti had entrenched himself upon a high lecture platform, and he put down a tremendous barrage in French as we entered. Gaudier went into action at once. He was very good at the parlez-vous, in fact he was a Frenchman. He was sniping him without intermission, standing up in his place in the audience all the while. The remainder of our party maintained a confused uproar.101 Although it remains unclear how adding noise to the usual Futurist barrage disrupts it, adding uproar to such a show provides a public spectacle, and avant-garde movements use such over-the-top polemic and energy to generate attention and market their groups. Providing an entertaining product results in ticket sales, and performing as a group serves to gel the movement’s identity as a collective. Collective performing in the visual arts takes the form of group artistic or literary exhibitions as a unified movement. These collective performances serve to demonstrate to the public that a movement indeed has developed a unique aesthetic and identity. French painter Albert Gleizes captures the importance of showing as a group in his description of Cubists displaying their work in a larger exhibition: “In all probability we would be dispersed to the four corners of the salon and the effect produced on the public by a group movement would be lost. It was necessary that it 227 be produced. We had to be grouped; that was the opinion of all.”102 Gleizes registers the belief that appearing as a group of like-minded painters affects the viewers, that seeing multiple works with a similar vision solidifies the movement behind that vision in a way that exhibiting separately does not. The benefits of collectivity become even more explicit in the 1911 Cubist exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants. This exhibition marks the first appearance of Cubism as a group, rather than restricted to two painters working together. Reviewing the exhibition, Apollinaire points out the sense of innovation he finds in Rooms 41 and 43 where the Cubists are located: “A striving for composition has now taken precedence over impressionist efforts, and hardly a trace of impressionism remains in Rooms 41 and 43, which contain all that is energetic and new in this year’s Salon.”103 Praising the new work by Gleizes, Metzinger, Delaunay, Laurencin, Fernand Léger, and others, Apollinaire makes clear their affiliation with Picasso as a group. This “city of Cubists” exhibits at the Salon d’Automne later in 1911 to “the mockery of critics” Apollinaire reports, and Cubism is launched.104 Exhibiting together congregates the artists as a movement, defined against other artists and paintings in the exhibition. Apollinaire’s insistent refrain that the most exciting work is displayed in rooms 41 and 43 underscores how a collective exhibition negatively defines the movement against the rest of the exhibition. Because these artists appear together in one section of the exhibition, their shared aesthetic projects appear more clearly, and their affinity with the movement’s ideals become apparent. Collective manifestations of a group’s identity and aesthetic vision through exhibitions, although less aggressive and confrontational than the violence of the performances, can still provoke enraged public responses in the form of angry viewers, bemused press reviews and satirical cartoons. André Salmon describes viewers’ reactions to a Futurist exhibition featuring experimental paintings by Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini: “They were overwhelmed before Russolo’s 228 Memories of Night; they stamped their feet with rage in front of the Funeral of the Anarchist Galli by Carrà; they shrieked in front of Pan Pan at the Monico by Severini.”105 Belonging to a group allows these artists to present a united front against such audiences and produce work calculated to provoke such reactions. Some audiences go so far as to hold public renunciations of art. Students at the Art Institute of Chicago express their displeasure toward modern art by holding a mock trial for “Henry Hairmattress” (Matisse) with the charge of murdering art in his Post- Impressionist painting The Blue Nude, reproductions of which are burned.106 The press joins the fun, often mocking the experimental aesthetics of the avant-garde. Cartoons appear in newspapers lampooning the disruptive aesthetics of the avant- garde isms in operation. For example, New York papers publish a plethora of cartoons following the most important avant-garde exhibition during the pre-war period, which takes place in a National Guard Armory in New York and features a preponderance of individual avant-gardists from Europe. These satiric cartoons play to public mirth, confusion, or hostility toward “high” society. For example, in July 1913, Life publishes a cartoon entitled “A Futurist Home Run,” which depicts a baseball field as though drawn by a Futurist, underscoring the distance between sport and art. Frederick Opper draws a cartoon called “The ‘New Art’ Fest” in New York American, which depicts “recent work by ‘Nuttists’, ‘Dope-ists’, ‘Topsy-Turvists’, ‘Inside-Outists’, and ‘Toodle-Doodle-ists.’”107 Some of these cartoons attack individual artworks. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (fig. 5), for example, gets famously reconfigured as “The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)” in the New York Evening Sun (fig. 4).108 In this particular cartoon, the distinction between the rarified art world and the everyday lives of commuters in the subway appears most explicitly. The average commuter, the cartoon insinuates, has more immediate concerns than abstruse theories of art, a sentiment that prevails today. 229 Not all exhibitions reflect artists’ solidarity with a movement, but even the more diffuse exhibitions still demonstrate an element of avant-garde performance. For example, the Armory Show lumps all the experimental art into a few rooms in the back with less regard for movement affiliation. However, the appearance of these radical European artists from so many different “isms,” alongside the few American avant-gardists in Alfred Stieglitz’s avant-garde circle, launches an all-out avant-garde assault on America where the avant-garde is just beginning to appear in Stieglitz’s 291. Salon hostess Mabel Dodge helps organize the show and remembers feeling revolution in the air: “I felt as though the Exhibition were mine. I really did. It became, over night, my own little Revolution. I would upset America; I would, with fatal, irrevocable disaster to the old order of things . . . I was going to dynamite New York” (original emphasis).109 Using the revolutionary language of the anarchists who attend her salon, Dodge describes the way modernist art could be deployed as a political weapon, a form of explosive designed to explode contemporary notions about aesthetics. Despite her insistence that she only facilitates modernism, this pronouncement reveals Dodge’s direct involvement in modernism. In an effort to épater le bourgeois, the “old order of things,” the avant-garde brings a new conception of social order based on experiment, play, aggression, and dynamism.110 Her statement reveals that the organizers of the Armory Show know that this exhibition will shock New York. Among the 1,270 items listed in the catalog, the show features a striking assortment of avant-garde painters and sculptors, including works by Europeans Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Picabia, Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Delaunay, and Léger and Americans John Sloan, Arthur Davies, Andrew Dasburg, John Marin, and others associating with the “Ash- can” school of American modernists. The most controversial painting, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (fig. 5), generates a reaction from the press, but all the works in the back room assault established American sensibilities about art. 230 The Armory Show demonstrates that an avant-garde group remains tactically effective even when an individual member shows work in an eclectic exhibition. Although these mixed exhibitions do not promote the movements in as cohesive a manner as a group exhibition, the coexistence of avant-gardes in a show such as the Armory Show can still drive the aims of the group. For example, a map of the Armory Show illustrates the plan to save the European avant-garde for the last surprise, demonstrating that these different artists appear as part of a larger structure of avant-garde experiment (fig. 6).111 Steven Watson points out that this section of the Armory Show remains the most popular, “the first to fill up and would be the last Fig. 4: “The Rude Descending a Staircase,” New York Evening Sun (March 1913) Fig. 5: Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending A Staircase No. 2 231 to empty out a month later.”112 This popularity shows that avant-garde art provokes interest even when that interest is based on derision. Attendees to the Armory Show come for the radical European experiments even if they do not understand or appreciate those experiments. Restricted to the “chamber of horrors” as some in the press label the back rooms, avant-garde paintings and sculptures from various artists create a sense of experimental energy despite the varying aesthetic theories present. Despite being labeled the “Cubist Room,” this back room provides a variety of different approaches to art. Because the artworks of the “Cubist Room” connect to the different movements from which they derive, this small area reflects some sense of the avant-garde as a whole. In order to exhibit their work effectively, however, avant-garde movements require propagandists familiar with their aesthetic principles. The figure of the propagandist remains central to the performing of avant-garde movements in exhibitions and shows. Without some explanatory material, these avant-garde movements seem incomprehensible, and the press often mocks movements precisely on this point. Thus, promoters such as Marinetti, Pound, Apollinaire, Kandinsky, Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, and others serve as educators of the public audience, exposing and explaining to philistines the aesthetic principles behind the art and demonstrating that there is a guiding principle at work. For example, in “Futurism Today,” Mayakovsky describes how to interpret the movement’s poetry: “The Futurists’ work, as with any poetic work, must be viewed with perspective. If Futurism were approached in this way, then it would become clear that in contemporary literature there are no other movements which are as significant as Futurism.”113 This statement both informs the reader of the central principle of the Futurist aesthetic, perspective, but it also serves to promote aggressively the movement as most significant. Apollinaire is one of the most prolific of these propagandists, publishing widely on avant-garde art, especially Cubism. “By 232 Fig. 6: Map of the Armory Show 233 representing reality as it is conceived,” he claims in 1912, “the artist can produce a three-dimensional effect; he can, in a sense, cubify his subject” (original emphasis).114 Apollinaire explains that analytic Cubism is the product of conception rather than mimeticism, that a painter can “cubify” anything he or she sees. Because the avant- garde performances in exhibition or music halls are so contemporary, these movements need educators and promoters who can explain the principles that organize the cultural production in an effort to explain to readers or viewers what they should take from the literature or art. The performing stage is marked by this kind of performing as much as any other kind. These types of exhibitions and performances, coupled with the subsequent reviews and public dismissals of modernist art as a result of them, serve to generate publicity for the artists themselves, and controversy proves to be a hallmark of being part of an avant-garde movement. This is why the performing stage occupies such an important position in the life-cycle of an avant-garde movement. Performing allows experimental work to appear in public exhibitions, shows, or readings, and belonging to a group enables many new experimenters to enjoy the benefits of being in the vanguard. However, performing takes on many different aspects. Some performances occur as violent, personal assaults on an audience’s senses. These performances feature energetic exhibitions of aggression, insult, and wit in which the goal is to enrage the viewer to action thus consolidating the movement as such. Sometimes, these collective manifestations produce conflict with neighboring groups, enhancing the controversial nature of these public spectacles. But, movements need more than fisticuffs to perpetuate their aesthetic platforms. They need some form of quasi- institutional recognition, even if that recognition occurs as hostile reviews. Thus, movements may choose to exhibit together as a group in order to demonstrate their collectivity or individuals may perform in an eclectic exhibition that serves to underscore the presence of a multitude of vanguards. Either way, performing plays a 234 crucial role for the avant-garde movement, even as it often marks the beginnings of many artists’ subsequent solo careers. Conclusion: Hoaxing and Spoofing The birth of movements during this period becomes so common that several hoaxes and parodies of avant-garde “isms” pop up. The popularity of membership in the avant-garde provides an outlet for some poets and artists to spoof the vanguard, but these parodies often blur the lines between imitation and authenticity as do the antics of the avant-garde movements at times. Rather than revealing the futility of the avant-garde, these hoaxes illustrate the fun and benefit of joining such movements, even for those who remain skeptical. The difficulty in discerning the parodic from serious movement suggests that both spoofs and serious movements operate with the same energy and enthusiasm and that such movements play a crucial role in the collaborative yet humorous negotiation of new art and literature. In a notable example, a small group of American poets in 1917 decide to adopt pseudonyms and promote themselves as “the Spectric” school. Their poems appear in a few magazine, most notably in a special issue of Alfred Kreymborg’s Others magazine. Including bizarrely titled poems clearly aping avant-garde experimentations, such as “Of Mrs. Z” and “Spectrum of Mrs. X,” this special collection touts the appearance of an exciting new school of poetry.115 Receiving acclaim from some critics interested in the avant-garde for their poetic experiments, however, the Spectrists Emanuel Morgan, Anne Knish, and Elijah Hay turn out to be Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Marjorie Seiffert who admit that “Spectricism” is indeed a hoax as some critics suspect. The poems they publish under the Spectrist’s banner generate more attention from readers than the poets’ more traditional but “authentic” verse. Posing as radical avant-garde poets allows these more cautious poets to discover aspects of their identities as poets that they would not and could not have explored otherwise. Jane Heap, assistant editor for The Little 235 Review, which had published some poems of “Morgan’s” in 1917, somewhat archly points out after the hoax becomes known, “If a man changes his name and writes better stuff, why does that make the public so ridiculous? Why not stick to the name and pray for more power to it?”116 Rather than be embarrassed by the revelation that the Spectrist movements is a hoax, Heap takes this question of authenticity and parody to its limit, suggesting that if hoaxing produces better poetry, it should be continued. Her question implies that these tricksters should put their masks back on because the Spectrist poetry is better quality, undermining their mockery of the avant-garde. The hoax reveals that, even among writers and artists, the avant-garde can appear faddish, abstruse nonsense to be mocked, and, at the same time, that the façade of collective disdain for readers produces exciting new work. These Spectrists draw attention to the fact that audiences love to hate the avant-garde for its trendiness, but these poets realize that the line between hoaxes and authentic experiment is tenuous at best. This paradox raises a crucial question about the role of play in the avant-garde. Why do the poems of Morgan, Knish, and Hay seem so much more interesting and dynamic than the poems of Bynner, Ficke, and Seiffert? As Suzanne Churchill points out, the conservative creators of Spectrism find that their alter-egos allow a measure of play they had not anticipated when they begin their prank: “What Bynner and Ficke did not anticipate was that the hoax would uncover something ‘other’ within themselves.”117 For Churchill, this sense of “play” is tied to the sexual energy and free verse poetics that adopting an alter-ego allows these poets to practice. Seiffert (Hay) admits that writing as a man seems more natural in some respects: “I write more often as a man than as a woman, for I can examine and assay their emotions better than my own—. . . I have found my own emotions are not feminine, or at least not traditional, so editors would not think them genuine!”118 Through the process of playing different gendered and national 236 identities, Churchill argues, the “Spectrists” actually develop into their characters and benefit from the possibility of playing a radical role, and I would argue they benefit from joining a movement. Because of their conservatism, each poet writes alone as an individual, but belonging to a movement, even if a parodic one, proves exciting and energizing in unexpected ways because movements provide comradeship and collaboration. Churchill hints at such a possibility, “Bynner, Ficke, and Seiffert have become part of the foolishness. Having discovered the fun of fooling around with themselves, with each other, and with Others.”119 The “fun of fooling around” suggests that the Spectrist hoax is more than straightforward mockery, revealing that allegiance to a movement can be liberating, exciting, and supportive, and that play and fooling around are integral aspects of avant-garde movements. Avant-garde groups provide safe and supportive environments for artists, poets, and writers who want to try new forms. Especially during the early years of the twentieth century, many experimenters of Anglo-American culture join an “ism” or two in the search for new practices of expression. The best of these artists and writers eventually earn individual successes, but this cultural recognition relies on a willingness to endure the scorn, hostility, and mockery of the public sphere until then. Joining a movement mitigates some of that reaction by providing a space in and a like-minded cohort with which to work and collaborate. Because these movements actively court controversy, they position themselves as counter-public spheres. Rather than spontaneously appearing and disappearing, however, these counter-public spheres follow a series of stages in the process of group formation. My analysis of these phases reveals that the networks of modernism, even in seemingly isolated movements, are vast and entangled. These networks facilitate the creation and dissemination of the experimental works of modernism. Among the avant-garde, the structural dynamics of these groups make rebellion possible. 237 Notes 1 Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, Trans. Peter Read (Berkeley: U of California P, 2004), 46; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska (New York: New Directions, 1970), 94; Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (U of California P, 1967), 32. 2 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 92. 3 Fabio Durão and Dominic Williams, “Introduction,” Modernist Group Dynamics: The Politics and Poetics of Friendship (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), vii. 4 Ironically, even the most transgressive artworks among the avant-garde in the early- twentieth century have become reified commodities housed in museums. Perhaps the most visible example of this is the popular narrative about discovering a Picasso and becoming a millionaire. Contemporary avant-garde figures such as Banksy use street art to comment on this cultural institutionalization of avant-garde art. 5 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), 17. 6 Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Foreword: Theory of Modernism Versus Theory of the Avant-Garde,” Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984). xv. 7 Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestoes, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 7. 8 Paul Peppis, “Schools, movements, manifestoes,” The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry Eds. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 29. 9 During the 2014 annual meeting of the Modernist Studies Association, Colin MacCabe described modernism as a reaction to World War I during the question and answer following his keynote address to which Stephen Kern responded by pointing to the work of Gertrude Stein and Picasso in Paris before the war. 10 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), 1. 11 Qtd, in Milton Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group 1910-1914 (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 30. 12 Bürger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 22. 13 Bürger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 48. This reversal of the roles of ideology and critique of ideology has been discussed in a concise and engaging way by Slavoj Žizek in his analysis of John Carpenter’s They Live! in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. 14 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 19. 15 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968), 20. 16 Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 20. 238 17 Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 136; Ezra Pound, “Patria Mia,” Selected Prose 1909-1965 Ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 127. 18 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 67. 19 F.T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” Marinetti Selected Writings ed. R.W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972), 43. 20 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” Habermas and the Public Sphere Ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT P, 1992), 124. 21 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia UP, 1993). 22 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 41. 23 Marjorie Perloff, “The avant-garde phase of American modernism,” The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism Ed. Walter Kalaidjian (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 195-217, 195-6. 24 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 35. 25 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 58. 26 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art Trans. M.T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover P, 1977), 6. 27 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998), 28. 28 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 36. 29 Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee, 1. 30 F.T. Marinetti, “Against Past-loving Venice,” Marinetti Selected Writings Ed. R.W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972), 57. 31 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York: Liveright, 1967), 5. 32 William McDougall, The Group Mind (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), 10. 33 Poggioli charts four types of movements: 1) activist movements formed for the joy of agitating for its own ends, 2) antagonistic movements formed against someone or something, 3) nihilistic movements formed for pointless action, and 4) agonistic movements formed out of self-immolation in sacrifice. For Poggioli, these four types of movements can be divided into rationally motivated (activist and antagonist) and the second two are irrational (nihilist and agonistic). Theory of the Avant-Garde, 25-6. 34 Bruce Tuckman, “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups,” Psychological Bulletin 63.6 (1965): 384-99. In 1977, Tuckman added a fifth stage, adjourning. I choose to focus on the earlier four-stage model, discussing adjourning in the context of the intergroup activities. 239 35 Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, 1. 36 Punch Vol. 155 (July 1918): 1-428, 33. Archive.org. Accessed 5 May, 2015. 37 Paul Peppis, “’Sorrunded by a multitude of other Blasts’: Vorticism and the Great War,” Literature, Politics and the English Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 97-132. 38 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998). 39 Some of this is due, no doubt, to the different gender roles adopted by these central nodes. Many of the modernist women in these networks either host salons or edit magazines, whereas the leaders of avant-garde movements during this period tend to be predominately and aggressively male. This reflects the general social dynamics of the period, in which women were expected to remain subservient to male desires and social position. And yet, the editors and hostesses facilitate modernism in a more lasting way because they do not try to exercise complete control over their venue. 40 Donelson Forsyth, An Introduction to Group Dynamics (Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 1983), 207. 41 Cohen, Movements, Manifestoes, Melee, 63. 42 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 32. 43 Cohen, Movements, Manifestoes, Melee, 63. 44 F.S. Flint to Ezra Pound, The Imagist Revolution 1908-1918, 3 July 1915, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas. 45 Freud, Group Psychology, 27. 46 Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1999), 2; J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962). 47 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986), 81. 48 Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 86. 49 Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifest of Futurism,” 39. 50 Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifest of Futurism,” 40-1. 51 Marvin Shaw, Group Dynamics: The Psychology of Small Group Behavior (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), 81. 52 Tuckman, “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups,” 386. 53 Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 85. 240 54 Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifest of Futurism,” 41. 55 Wyndham Lewis, Blast (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow P, 2002), 31. 56 Lewis, Blast, 11, 21. 57 Lewis, Blast, 15. 58 Rainey details Pound’s early lectures sponsored by Lady Ann Penelope Low in Institutions of Modernism, 26-8. 59 Lewis, Blast, 22. It is hard not to hear the influence of Futurist aesthetics in the emphasized praise of ships. 60 Peppis, Literature, Politics and the English Avant-Garde, 91. He is also the source for my noting that the manifesto resembles a ship. 61 Milton Cohen, “’To Stand on the Rock of the Word “We,”’” Modernist Group Dynamics Eds. Fabio Durão and Dominic Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 3. 62 Douglas Goldring, South Lodge (London: Constable and Co., 1943), 67. 63 Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, 46. 64 Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, 38, 42. 65 Pierre Daix, Cubism and Cubists (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 1982), 52. 66 Daix, Cubism and Cubists, 76. 67 Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, 41. 68 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 94. 69 Tuckman, “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups,” 66. 70 Marinetti, “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 41. 71 “Intragroup Conflict Cycle.” In Forsyth, Donelson. Introduction to Group Dynamics, Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 1983. 80. 72 Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age Vol. 1 Origins and Developments (Berkeley: U of California P, 1976), 138. 73 Cork, Vorticism, 132. Cork describes how Lewis is described in the art reviews as both a Futurist and a Cubist at different moments, and he claims that Lewis uses these labels to help his career: “Lewis was prepared to shelter under the label of the Italian movement: Futurism was becoming fashionable, and he had been slighted for so long that any popularity which gave him the chance to work was welcome” (132). 241 74 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 35. 75 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 36. 76 San Francisco Call (June 14, 1913): editorial page. http:// http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. Retrieved 24 February 2015. 77 Ezra Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, Ed. D.D. Paige (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), 38. 78 Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake (New York: The Viking P, 1941), 139. 79 J.B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-1917 (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1975), 41. 80 Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 44. 81 Harriet Shaw Weaver, The Egoist 2:5 (July 1915). Ironically, Pound tries to secure the editorship for The Egoist for Lowell before this, but she loses out to Weaver. 82 Qtd. in Virginia M. Kouidis, Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980), 7. 83 F.T. Marinetti, “Let’s Murder the Moonshine,” Marinetti Selected Writings, 46. 84 Mina Loy, “Lion’s Jaws,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger Conover (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), 49. 85 Mina Loy, “The Feminist Manifesto,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 153. 86 Lewis, Blast, 151. 87 Loy, “The Feminist Manifesto,” 155. 88 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art Trans. M.T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover P, 1977), 8. 89 Marinetti, “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 41. 90 Guillaume Apollinaire, “Art News: The Futurists,” Apollinaire on Art, Ed. Leroy Breunig, Trans. Susan Suleiman (New York: Viking P, 1972), 201. 91 Qtd. in R.W. Flint, “Introduction,” Marinetti Selected Writings 23. 92 Marinetti, “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 42. The terms “violence and precision” refer to a letter Marinetti sent to Belgian painter Henry Maassen describing the manifesto form. Qrd. in Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 81. 93 Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985), 4. 242 94 Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 38. 95 Marinetti, “Great Traditional and Futurist Milan,” Marinetti Selected Writings, 285. 96 Marinetti, “Futurist Speech to the English,” Marinetti Selected Writings, 59. 97 Anthony Parton qtd. in Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee, 135. 98 Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 113. 99 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 33. 100 Marinetti, “Great Traditional and Futurist Milan,” Selected Writings, 280. 101 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 33. 102 Qtd. in Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee, 44. 103 Apollinaire, “The Salon des Indépendants,” Apollinaire on Art, 149-50. 104 Apollinaire, “Cubism,” Apollinaire on Art, 257. 105 Qtd. in Cohen, Movement, Manifest, Melee, 16. 106 “The Armory Show,” Art Institute of Chicago, accessed 3 March 2015, http://extras.artic.edu/armoryshow/finale#ref 107 Qtd. in Sarah Burns, “Cubist Comedy and Futurist Follies: The Visual Culture of the Armory Show,” The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution, Eds. Marilyn Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt (New York: New York Historical Library, 2013), 347, 352. 108 “The Rude Descending a Staircase.” In Francis M. Naumann, “An Explosion in a Shingle Factory,” The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution, Eds. Marilyn Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt (New York: New York Historical Library, 2013), 206. Duchamp, Marcel. Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. http://www.philamuseum.org. Retrieved 15 June 2015. 109 Mabel Dodge, Movers and Shakers (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1985), 36. 110 Early in his career Antonio Gramsci points out that Italian Futurism did more to further a Marxist cause than the working-class groups in operation during the same period. Selections from Cultural Writings ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell- Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985). 111 “Map of the Armory Show.” In Watson, Steven. Strange Bedfellows. New York: Abbeville P, 1991. 112 Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows (New York: Abbeville P, 1991), 169. 113 Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Futurism Today,” Russian Futurism Ed. Ellendea Proffer and Carl Proffer (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980),193. 243 114 Apollinaire, “Cubism,” Apollinaire on Art, 256. 115 Others: A Magazine of the New Verse 3:5 (Jan. 1917). 116 Jane Heap, “The Hoax of the ‘Spectrics,’” The Little Review 5:2 (June 1918), 53-4. Heap includes quotations from a letter written by Pound dismissing Spectrism in an effort to avoid the critique that follows a hoax in which editors mistake fake poetry for good experiments. Interestingly, Pound’s letter works to distance Spectrism from Imagism based on two conflicting criteria: that Spectrism is both unoriginal and also not structured enough i.e. that Imagism was experimental but not too experimental: "After all Imagisme had three definite propositions about writing, and also a few 'don'ts'. And it differed from the neo-celtic-twilightists, etc., who preceded it. Morgan is only another Imagist imitator with a different preface from Amy's" (53). 117 Suzanne Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Hampshire UK: Ashgate, 2006), 88. 118 Qtd. in Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry, 99. 119 Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry, 98. 244 CHAPTER V WORLD WAR I AND SCRAMBLED MODERNIST CIRCUITS “Life was one big bloodless brawl, prior to the Great Bloodletting.” --Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering1 A 1917 letter from Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson symbolizes World War I’s disruptions of modernist network circuits. “Mails leaving New York, or rather collected between Feb. 14 and Feb. 18,” he complains, “were on that boat that was sunk.”2 One year into the war, the German military conducts unrestricted submarine campaigns against ships making transatlantic voyages—and the mail or manuscripts they may be carrying—and Pound warns Anderson that a sinking may have interrupted their correspondence. As foreign editor, Pound is circulating The Little Review in England and sending manuscripts of European modernists to the magazine. However, Anderson and Pound’s communication conduit is interrupted by the spread of hostilities. Although only a brief comment in their larger correspondence, and an unimportant moment in the history of the war, this reference to lost mail denotes larger historical phenomena that cut network circuits operating in the cooperative production of early modernism. The outbreak of the European stage of the war in August 1914, and the entry of the United States in April 1917, “scrambles” many transnational network circuits that had formed between the turn of the century and the war and that enabled the development of pre-war modernism. Floyd Dell sums up the dramatic fluctuations in social connections after the war breaks out: “The war had scattered and divided us; friend was set against old friend; and even if that had not been unhappily true, the war would inevitably have brought to an end that glorious intellectual playtime.”3 Political radicals and avant- gardists find their lives irrevocably altered, and the youthful energy and dynamism that characterizes the collaborative atmosphere of early modernism is destroyed. 245 Enthusiasm about the possibilities of modernity gives way to the horrors of technological combat in the trenches. This scrambling of modernist networks does not happen overnight. Much like public enthusiasm for the war, the dissolution of networks occurs as the war slogs on. The beginning of the war is met with enthusiasm, best captured in the poetry of Rupert Brooke, whose early death is used as propaganda to drum up recruits but whose untimely end comes to signify the utter waste of the war. In his sonnet sequence, The Soldier, Brooke characterizes English youth “as swimmers into cleanness leaping,” prepared to go off to war and “Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move.” Brooke’s soldier happily volunteers for the front and thinks only of death as bestowing “rarer gifts than gold”: the honor of serving in a grand military drama.4 As Robert Wohl points out, however, English soldiers begin to realize the true dimensions of the war in winter of 1916 after the battle of the Somme: “This new image was born in the trenches of the Western Front among some of the more sensitive officers and men, who had begun to feel a sense of identification with the enemy and a skepticism about the aims for which the war was being fought.”5 As the war progresses, many lose faith in the war and the State, exhibiting a pessimism that would pervade post-war cultural production. Writers in the trenches increasingly turn to an aesthetic that better captures the grotesque absurdity of modern combat. Poets Wilfred Owen, Siegried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg fill their poems with increasingly violent imagery, designed to capture the realities of trench life and the senselessness of combat. In “Dead Man’s Dump,” for example, Rosenberg describes a horrible new form of social contact enacted by technological warfare: “The wheels lurched over sprawled dead / But pained them not, though their bones crunched, / Their shut mouths made no moan.” Here, the sentimental rhetoric of fraternity that had infused Brooke’s poems transforms into grotesque. Rather than comrades in arms, soldiers at the front drive 246 over dead bodies, crushing them beneath the wheels, and “our brothers dear” are reimagined as “brains splattered on / A stretcher-bearer’s face.”6 The war empties ideals such as honor and patriotism of meaning. Owen captures this loss of faith in “Dulce et Decorum Est”: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.”7 As the war progresses, and casualties mount in wave after wave of charges across No Man’s Land, artists, writers increasingly become more traumatized by the horrors they witness. Many artists and writers who are important nodes in my networks leave for the front and return wounded: Richard Aldington, avant-garde painter David Bomberg, Georges Braque (wounded), Blaise Cendrars (arm amputated), Ernest Hemingway (wounded), Ford Madox Hueffer (shell-shocked), Cubist Fernand Léger (gassed), Russian Cubo-Futurist Mikhail Larionov (concussion), Wyndham Lewis, and Futurist Luigi Russolo (head wound, trepanned). These cultural figures return home but are forever changed by the traumatic experiences of combat. In a conversation with Hemingway after the war, Gertrude Stein famously sums up this group of returning veterans as “a lost generation.”8 For a generation to be symbolically “lost,” in terms of a network, means being cut off from the circuits of connection that link the nodes to a larger structure. Other early modernists who go to the front are not so fortunate, leaving a gaping hole in their networks: Guillame Apollinaire, Futurist Umberto Boccioni, Rupert Brooke, Cubist Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, modernist theorist T.E. Hulme, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, German Expressionist painter Franz Marc, Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia, and Futurist Ugo Tommei are all either killed at the front or die from injuries sustained in combat shortly after returning home.9 In his “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” Pound rages against this pointless waste of life and art: “There died a myriad / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a 247 botched civilization.”10 For many who witness and survive the destruction of World War I, this sentiment captures the pointlessness and hopelessness that the war brings and informs the aesthetic of high modernism. Among those who return from the frontlines, many suffer “shell shock” and physical traumas, experiencing a sense of disillusionment toward the civilization that had allowed such a war to happen. An apocalyptic feeling infuses many works of high modernism, as writers and poets explore this pervading sense of loss. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land imagines civilization as a series of fragments and ruins, which he tries to reconstruct, concluding his poem with an image of the lone poet trying to bring together the remains of culture: “These fragments I have shored against my ruin.”11 Hemingway’s post-war novels depict shell-shocked men who suffer from both physical and mental wounds and who try to cope with alcohol and distraction. Despite their willingness to fight, black soldiers returning from serving at the front find they must still endure racist social strictures, including an increase in lynching, even of men in uniform. Claude McKay captures the rage and frustration of such travesties of justice in his short story “The Soldier’s Return,” in which a white southern sheriff imprisons veteran Frederick Taylor on false charges of raping a white woman. The sheriff tells Taylor after barely preventing a lynching, “Pauline was frightened by seeing you wearing soldier’s uniform. You know that in our town we don’t like it when niggers wear soldier’s uniforms.”12 Mark Whalan contends, “the dominant narrative African Americans constructed about their service in the war was one of betrayal.”13 Many prominent black intellectuals had supported the war in the hopes that it would demonstrate American solidarity between races, only to discover both that post-war American society is still racist and that the French are much more tolerant. These discoveries prompt feelings of anger and further disenfranchisement with white American society and culture, prompting the 248 constellation of cultural producers known as the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s.14 The war scrambles each of the cultural networks I analyze in this project, interrupting their functionality or, in many cases, completely dissolving them. Milton Cohen describes these disruptions: “This juggernaut rolled through all artists’ lives, whether or not they donned a uniform, abruptly cancelled or radically redirected their artistic projects, closed down scores of little arts magazines and newspapers, squelched plans for new exhibitions and collective projects, broke up thriving groups . . . and destroyed the international spirit that distinguished so much of prewar modernism.”15 In large part, this disruption of cultural production occurs because many important nodes in these networks sign up for combat and are either wounded or killed. Of those who stay behind, pressures from the war either suspend or disband the networks formed before the war. Of course, some of the networks I analyze continue through the war, and some even thrive during the post-war period, but most of these networks flare up and dissipate as the war continues. The political radicalism that infuses so much of these early modernist networks disappears as social pressures to support the war effort, and the transference of hostility to the Germans, halts radical activity in the U.S. and England. George Dangerfield describes the “strange death” of radicalism as a process of absorption and redirection of political dissent into the war effort.16 The social networks of the modernist salons are disrupted by the war. Stein and Toklas suspend their art salon in order to contribute to the war effort. Dodge stops holding her free speech salon in Greenwich Village as the war progresses, and the radicals who had made her evenings so exciting largely stop their activities once the war gets underway. Using the Espionage Act, a 1917 war measure that permits the government to deport troublemakers, the U.S. arrests Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and subsequently sends them to Russia. Dodge leaves New York 249 after the war and begins a small modernist writers colony in Taos, New Mexico. Violet Hunt’s Kensington salon stops meeting after her lover Hueffer heads for the front, and the circle of Vorticists who had formed the core members of her salon disband. Hunt explains the collapse of Vorticism, describing it as a “flicker of a genre that flourished just before the appearance in the world of the Maelstrom of woe that sucked us all down in its vortex.”17 Hunt insinuates that Vorticism existed as a brief moment of innocence before the real vortex dissolved such childish illusions. Unlike Lewis and Pound’s cultural vortex, the war’s vortex appears as an apocalyptic sign of the end of a way of life. Although vibrant salons continue to form after the war— Stein’s, Natalie Barney’s, Ottoline Morrell’s, and A’leila Walker’s in Harlem—early modernist salons provide especially experimental forms of social interaction characterized by juxtapositions and dialogic confrontations and set the mold for sociability and collaboration in the coterie sphere. These early salons play a crucial role in the dialogic negotiation and development of modernism. The periodical networks I study are less disrupted by the war than the social networks, but many editors cannot continue to fund their modernist little magazines in light of international war tariffs and paper shortages. Anderson’s The Little Review continues to publish regularly from 1914-1929, in one of the longer magazine runs, despite suffering from government suppression and international postal restrictions. Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver’s The Egoist manages to continue publishing throughout the war but collapses shortly after peace is declared. Other magazines also cease publishing after the war begins. Lewis manages to produce a second “War Number” of Blast, but the magazine stops publishing because Lewis, Bomberg, Hueffer, and Gaudier-Brzeska leave for the front.18 In 1917, the Espionage Act shuts down Max Eastman’s New York socialist magazine The Masses, a forum for pacifists, critics of the war, and radical activists. Others continues to publish radically experimental avant-garde poetry through 1919 but finally ceases publication in July of 250 that year, and proto-Dadaist magazine The Soil flares up in 1916 only to burn out in 1917. Although many little magazines before the war espouse radical political ideas alongside avant-garde literature and art, magazines that crop up after the war eschew such orientation in most cases. Little magazines that either survive or appear in the post-war period such as Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, T.S. Eliot’s Criterion, Matthew Josephson’s Broom, and Eugene Jolas’s transition, typically shift focus almost entirely to aesthetics.19 Mike Gold’s Liberator, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Crisis, Charles Johnson’s Opportunity, and Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph’s The Messenger are notable exceptions in that they publish political modernism as well as literary.20 However, eclectic avant-garde magazines featuring vast networks of contributors from politically and aesthetically diverse modernist orientations largely disappear after the war. Unlike salons or avant-garde movements, little magazines thrive both before and after the war, but their networks become much more rigidly divided along aesthetic and political lines.21 Of the three networks I study in this project, the avant-garde movements suffer the most disruption due to the war. Avant-garde movements lose key members to the fighting, and many of the early vanguard gain in reputation after the war, shedding their early investment in a movement. The public’s attention for avant- garde antics disappears entirely once the fighting begins, robbing the avant-garde of their crucial publicity. The violence of glorifying war as “the world’s only hygiene” or titling a manifesto Blast may have been invigorating before the war. After the trenches, however, such humor and violence seem pale in comparison to the Great War.22 Lewis makes this point, “I have said enough to show that the months immediately preceding the declaration of war were full of sound and fury, and that all the artists and men of letters had gone into action before the bank-clerks were clapped into khaki and despatched [sic] to the land of Flanders poppies to do their bit.”23 For Lewis, this statement suggests that vanguardists were more masculine and 251 dynamic than the “bankers,” the bourgeois public, but his reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth hints that the avant-garde activity was also insignificant compared with World War I. In retrospect, the violence that characterizes the avant-garde is especially poignant, almost as if Futurism and its imitators brought about the very war they praised. Marjorie Perloff argues that the obsession with technology that characterizes Futurism contains within it the seeds of this larger conflict: “the darker implications of this new technology, imperfectly understood by the artists of the avant-garde themselves, are expressed, however subliminally, in their poetry and painting.”24 Their praise of combat, violence, and technology reaches its apogee among the battlefields and trenches of the first modern war, but rather than serving as “hygiene,” the war kills many among the avant-garde and demolishes the “isms” of the period. Among the avant-garde movements, Futurism stops during the war as its artists join the fighting, Vorticism dissolves completely, and many Cubists leave for the front including Braque and Léger. Of course, some networks keep operating throughout the war, while others are born subsequent to it, but many unique cultural formations dissolve and important figures die as a result of the European cataclysm that shakes the globe from 1914 to 1918. The early modernism of Stein, Hunt, and Dodge; Anderson and Marsden; Marinetti, Pound, Lewis, Apollinaire, and Picasso, changes after World War I. The period known as high modernism emerges from the ruins with a more pessimistic and despondent view of modernity’s possibilities and promises. The technologies that made vast networks of modernism possible before the war also make the war itself one of the most brutal conflicts in modern history. My project visualizes the brief period of early modernism, between the turn of the century and the war, as composed of an international spirit of cooperation and collaboration. Modernists travel between metropolitan cultural centers, sharing ideas and theories. Hostesses provide spaces in salons for these travelling modernists to discuss their 252 ideas and plans within a coterie sphere outside the public eye. Little magazines publish a variety of radical topics, including essays on political struggles, new forms of poetry and literature, and social commentary, and editors package these ideas for consumption in the public sphere. Many of the artists and writers who frequent these salons and write for these little magazines also form or join avant-garde movements in which members maneuver as a militant counter-public cadre against the constraints of the public sphere. When analyzed up close, the dynamics of these networks are difficult to discern, but when flattened out into network visualizations, the webs of interconnection and cooperation become visible. In such an approach, the networks of modernism become a visible totality, a macro-scale text representing the workings of cultural production that make modernism such a dynamic and vibrant period of literary history. Notes 1 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967), 35. 2 Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson, Pound/The Little Review Eds. Thomas Scott and Melvin Friedman (New York: Faber and Faber, 1988), 18. 3 Floyd Dell, Love in Greenwich Village (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1926), 27. 4 Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier,” World War I British Poets Ed. Candace Ward (Mineola: Dover, 1997), 1-2. 5 Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979), 94. 6 Isaac Rosenberg, “Dead Man’s Dump,” World War I British Poets Ed. Candace Ward (Mineola: Dover, 1997), 15-16. 7 Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” World War I British Poets Ed. Candace Ward (Mineola: Dover, 1997), 22. 8 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner’s, 1996). 9 This list of casualties provided by Milton Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group 1910-1914 (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 299-301. 10 Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Early Writings: Poems and Prose (New York: Penguin, 2005), 130. 253 11 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 51. 12 Claude McKay, “The Soldier’s Return,” World War I: An Anthology of Short Stories Eds. Scott Emmert and Steven Trout (Kent: Kent State UP, 2014), 194, 190-4. 13 Mark Whalan, The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2008), xii. 14 The Harlem Renaissance represents the most dynamic network of modernism to appear in the post-war period, as artists, poets, and writers congregate in Harlem and develop a unique African-American asethetic. 15 Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee, 6-7. 16 George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York: H. Smith and R. Haas, 1935). This description of Dangerfield’s main thesis is discussed in relation to modernism in Vincent Sherry, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 6, 1-11. 17 Violet Hunt, I Have This to Say: The Story of My Flurried Years (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), 212. 18 Weaver’s correspondence with Marsden after the war reveals that Lewis had considered the Egoist Press as a possible outlet for producing a third issue in 1919, but Lewis never completed it. 19 I include Anderson here because, despite her pre-war investments in Emma Goldman and anarchism, she loses interest in radical politics during the war, and her magazine increasingly focuses on literature rather than anarchism and radical philosophy. 20 I find it compelling that African-American periodicals during the height of the Harlem Renaissance exhibit many of the same features as early magazines such as Dora Marsden’s The Freewoman, A.R. Orage’s New Age, and Anderson’s The Little Review before 1918: a fusion of political modernism with aesthetic modernism. 21 Chistopher Butler marks a different division that characterizes post-war cultural production: “the nature of Modernism changes after the First World War, when a traditionalist, allusive conservatism is countered in its turn by the irrationalist pretensions of Surrealism.” Early Modernism (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1994), xvii. 22 F.T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” Marinetti Selected Writings ed. R.W. Flint. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972), 42. 23 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 35. 24 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986), 13. 254 REFERENCES CITED Rev. A.D.R. to Anderson. “The Reader Critic,” The Little Review 1.8 (Nov. 1914). Aldington, Richard. Life for Life’s Sake. New York: The Viking P, 1941. 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