The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

AUGUST, 1916

A Real Magazine | Margaret C. Anderson
Wakefulness | Amy Lowell
Plymouth Rocks | R. G.
Ulysse Fait Son Lit | Jean de Bosschere
Modernity Exposed: | Caesar Zwaska
Sandburg’s Chicago Poems |
The Case of Masters |
The Poet Sings to the World | Ben Hecht
Splendid Isolation | John Grimes
The Tree | Helen Hoyt
Editorials and Announcements |
Julia to Jim | Sue Golden
A Vers Libre Contest |
The Reader Critic |

Published Monthly

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MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
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Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, San Francisco, Cal.

The Little Review

VOL. III

AUGUST, 1916

NO. 5

Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson

A Real Magazine

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

I am afraid to write anything; I am ashamed.

I have been realizing the ridiculous tragedy of The Little Review. It has been published for over two years without coming near its ideal.

The ultimate reason for life is Art. I don’t know what they mean when they talk about art for life’s sake. You don’t make art so that you may live; you do just the reverse of that. Life takes care of itself, rolls on from the first push, and then falls over the edge. Art uses up all the life it can get—and remains forever. Art for Art’s sake is merely the sensible statement of the most self-evident fact in the world. It has been the easy creed of charlatans; but what does that matter? It has always been the faith of the strongest.

Well—I wanted Art in The Little Review. There has been a little of it, just a very little.... It is tragic. I tell you.

And Revolution? Revolution is Art. You want free people just as you want the Venus that was modelled by the sea.... All my inadequate stammerings about Emma Goldman have been to show her as the artist she is: a great artist, working in her own material as a Michael Angelo worked in his.

Now we shall have Art in this magazine or we shall stop publishing it. I don’t care where it comes from—America or the South Sea Islands. I don’t care whether it is brought by youth or age. I only want the miracle!

Where are the artists? Where is some new Pater, and how will his “She is older than the rocks among which she sits” sound to us? Where is some new Arthur Symons with his version of “Peter Weyland”? Where is a Henry James and a Hardy and a Bjornson and an Andreyev for us? Where is a Jean-Christophe who will let us publish his songs?

Helen Hoyt, you have a poem in this issue called The Tree. It is not Art; it is merely a rather good poem. You could have made it Art. Do it every time, for the love of the gods! “Sue Golden” has one about Jim and Arabella. It has an interesting idea that many people need to understand. Why not make Art of it? I know one of hers which begins “My body is too frail for these great moods”—and the miracle is in it.

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!

Wakefulness

AMY LOWELL

Jolt of market-carts;

Steady drip of horses’ hoofs on hard pavement;

A black sky lacquered over with blueness,

And the lights of Battersea Bridge

Pricking pale in the dawn.

The beautiful hours are passing

And still you sleep!

Tired heart of my joy,

Incurved upon your dreams,

Will the day come before you have opened to me?

Plymouth Rocks

R. G.

Some new Agitation is always fretting the souls of those who feel that it is their task to save the world from itself. Of late it has been Birth Control. They have been going to prison for merely mentioning the words Birth Control in the presence of an ingenue government. And all the time the government has the most perfect system of Birth Control for genius and art—the National Board of Censorship—so perfect as to produce sterility.

A simple mind would wonder why these agitators don’t first fight the censorship, and perhaps all these things would be added unto them!

Last winter a rumor did come out of New York that a few of these and a few artists were trying to form a plan of unorganized but concerted action, each profession or art or group protesting to the state on its own behalf. It turned out to be another of those Spoon River things: when the test came a few stood by the idea, but the others were either too lily-livered to have their names appear or the inevitable Puritan ancestor arose to remind them that after all they were Plymouth Rocks.

And all the while the tale grows finer yet:

Jerome Blum, a painter of reputation, a real painter, returned from China in the spring naively bringing with him, to this land of the free, a little collection of Chinese and Japanese art to keep by him for the delight of his soul. In the collection was a book over one hundred and fifty years old, containing eight original paintings on silk, by one of the greatest of Chinese painters, and a Japanese scroll, twelve feet long, of even finer workmanship.

Mr. Blum was summoned before the Collector of the Port of Chicago. The two works described had been declared obscene by an appraiser: “They would arouse the passions of an ordinary man.” They were to be destroyed, with the possible inclusions of the entire case of old bronzes, tapestries, embroideries, etc., in which they were shipped. Mr. Blum had laid himself open to a fine of thousands of dollars, with something like five years imprisonment, for good measure.

Law versus Art. Mr. Blum offered to paint out all objectionable parts, asked permission to send the things back to China or permission to present them to some museum. “Art or no Art, all paintings of the kind were to be burned” was the decree from the customs officials. And the two “obscene” works of art were burned in the furnace of the Federal building.

No need here to go into what Mr. Blum must have suffered as an artist over the destruction of precious beauty never to be replaced—or as a man over the delicate and unobscene discussions, by the officials, of the objectionable parts, over the injustice of having his property destroyed without trial before a jury of his peers.

All people of any education know that the art of all ancient peoples sprung from a desire to recreate for the hearts of men the mystery of creation and reproduction of life; thence came religion to explain to the minds of men the awe and wonder of creation. The Art of the Orient is almost wholly concerned with these subjects. Here was where Mr. Blum’s became “obscene” art.

If the censors should become informed woe for the Christian churches, each raising an “obscene” phallic symbol, in the cross, shamelessly uncensored to the sky; the bishops would mourn their fish-mouthed phallic hats, and so on endlessly.

Who knows but if left to themselves they may not even reach themselves in their unlimited censorship and be their own destruction?

It is not doubt, but certitude which drives one mad.—Nietzsche.

Ulysse Fait Son Lit

JEAN DE BOSSCHERE

Ulysse glorieux, revenu des batailles

Choisit une terre, dans la ville qui sourit à sa paix

Il est à eux; il s’est donné avec la paix.

Tous le touchent, et

S’il pose la main sur les yeux

Tous crient

“Il songe à trahir, il est orgueilleux

Peut-être croit-il nous faire honneur

Même en ne nous regardant pas.

Nous ferons deux nouvelles statutes pour toi, Ulysse!

Tu seras bien forcé à te tenir parmi nous.”

Or, Ulysse ne songe pas à fuir.

Il sait l’homme dans les cuisines

Dans l’aréopage, dans les batailles

Il les aime avec leurs écailles de poisson

Leurs nageoires sur un corps de truie

Et la tête est celle du canard,

Les pattes celles du coq,

Avec des ailes de moineau;

Il aime leur saveur de mauvais pain d’épices

Mais souvent, le soir, l’odeur de chat,

L’odeur est trop forte

Et il ne peut plus embrasser ses amis

“Que ma statue et ma penseé soient avec eux” dit-il.

Dans sa terre, autour d’un sycomore

Il elève un mur rond de pierre et de bois;

À la hauteur du front, il coupe une porte;

Elle n’est pas plus large que des épaules d’homme

Puis il la ferme avec des planches

Comme les cinq doights de la main cachent une blessure

“Comme un pied appliqué aux vastes fesses des hommes”

Dit-il; mais il rougit

“Comme un couvercle sur le monde

Comme un couvercle sur un pot de fromage piqué de vers.”

Dit-il; mais il rougit.

Et se frappe trois fois la poitrine.

La foule regarde le mur

Il n’y a pas de fenêtres.

“Ulysse n’a pas le droit de se mettre au tombeau.”

Le jeune Franklin s’accroche aux branches du sycomore

Se hisse, et regarde par dessus le mur.

Il retombe sur ses pieds de sycophante;

“Ah! il scie le tronc de l’arbre” crie-t-il.

“Il nous trahit, il nous vend, il nous renie.”

“Ulysse, Ulysse! nous avons déposé des roses blanches

Sous ta statue

Ulysse, Ulysse! nous accrochons des roses rouges à ta porte;

Ulysse, Ulysse montre-toi aux bourgeois de la ville.”

Il a scié le tronc.

Il en sépare des planches adorables,

Et que l’on peut aimer d’amour

Des planches plus aimables que des miches de pain.

Ulysse, sans clous de fer

Construit son lit avec le sycomore.

“Ulysse, Ulysse, le conseil te réclame.

Nous lui contâmes ce que tu fis de l’arbre”

Lui avait-on, avec le terre, donné l’arbre

D’où le jeune Franklin pouvait le voir?

Il n’a pas le droit,

Pas le droit.

Il y a peut-être un souterrain

Certainement il reçoit des messages sans fils.

Oui, il communique avec l’ennemi.

Ulysse avec des couleurs rouges et noires

Trace des signes de joie sur son lit et sur sa porte.

Puis il rit,

Il rit, et son cœur

Au milieu de l’air joyeux de la poitrine

Et comme une rose sensuelle qui l’ouvre.

Elle s’épanouit comme un soupir d’aise sans limite.

Alors, du coté de la mer

Il fore un trou dans la muraille.

“Je vais prendre femme” dit-il,

“Je sais bien comment elle sera, lisse et blanche

Des cheveux ni de blé, ni de châtaigne

Et des yeux sages avec l’ardeur des chats.

Mais je veux la voir dans ce jour d’exultation

À peine s’il me faut ajouter une table, un coffre, un autel.”

Ulysse regarde par le trou ouvert, dans la pierre

Ils sont mille autour du mur rond

Et il entend que les hommes disent

“A-t-il ses armes?

Vous savez combien des la mamelle il fut malin

Habile aux armes

Et méchant”

Il voit que les hommes sont chargés de fagots.

Il y a un bûcher autour de la maison.

Les femmes l’arrosent avec l’huile des lampes

Et y versent celles de leur toilette,

Les cuisiniers l’huile des poissons conservés,

Les charrons la poix des charrettes,

Le batelier apporte une marmite de goudron,

Et un capitaine, vêtu de ses médailles de sioux

Pousse la flamme d’une torche sous le bûcher.

Ils cuisent Ulysse

Car il est bien à eux.

Au loin les statutes sont traîneés vers la mer.

Un chaudronnier les achète à la foule trahie.

Il paie trois guinées pour boire en paix.

Ulysse cuit

Les jeunes filles chantent

Rougies par la lueurs des flammes

Et les mères ravies, sourient.

Modernity Exposed

—And Gone One Better[1]

CAESAR ZWASKA

It has come to be that on the stage, where once we watched for artists, we find only vainly strutting weak-willed human beings. We are not held, and the light within the sacred space grows dimmer. We lose all interest in places where once we have found Art.

And how desperate we have become!

The procession of the Imagists has been the only sacred thing before our eyes—thin and fragrant. Their fragility has the sap of eternity; blustering winds, blowing through the gaps back-stage, tear at them in vain. The Imagists have grown straight and strong. The beauty of their tiny procession strikes into our very hearts the emptiness, the appalling desolation, of our position.

Carl Sandburg has understood the failures and the lies and exposed the cause. He has shown the lie of your government and the farce and folly of monuments to those who kill to keep it alive. He exposes your little deaths and their perfumed sorrow and the bunk of words and antics of your Billy Sunday and fellow citizens. He has heard the “fellows saying here’s good stuff for a novel or it might be worked up into a good play,” when speaking of an Italian widow living in city slums. He has the courage and the knack of giving them the challenge—calling their bluff; and he declares with strong conviction that he’s able to back up his defiance. Who of the scatter-brains living could put her or her daughter-in-law or the working girls or the entire mob, for that matter, into a play? But he has put them, their spirit, into lines, gaunt and vivid as their lives. And I declare he is the only modern that has got it across.

This is the process of the book and of the poet’s progress: The Chicago poems; he has worked his vengeance; from the cinders and ashes, glowing still, rise sparks, brilliant and tiny. (He calls them Handfuls.) The stifling smoulder of the War poems to the warm rich glow of The Road and the End and the flame of the fire with its attendant fogs and then grim shadows. As a confession, or rather a solidifying of the entire force of the poet, he reveals the Other Days, quite as intense as the present mood. This from the last of that section:

Snatch the gag from thy mouth, child,

And be free to keep silence.

Tell no man anything for no man listens,

Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.

Why should a man speak? When there are things to say, such as the Red Son, always have your lips ready to speak:

I am going away and I never come back to you;

Crags and high rough places call me,

Great places of death

Where men go empty-handed

And pass over smiling

To the star-drift on the horizon rim;

My last whisper shall be alone, unknown;

I shall go to the city and fight against it,

And make it give me passwords

Of luck and love, women worth dying for,

And money.

I go where you wist not of

Nor I nor any man nor woman.

I only know I go to storms

Grappling against things wet and naked.

There is no pity of it and no blame

None of us is in the wrong.

After all it is only this:

You for the little hills and I go away.

Poetry has grown stronger in your eyes?

Thus has Carl Sandburg in one book gone the entire range of a life today. The humanitarian poet as well as the artist-poet. He has proven things—and peoples. The nigger: foam of teeth ... breaking crash of laughter; Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti: with that kindling wood piled on her head, coming along Peoria street nine o’clock in the morning; Jan Kubelik: girls of Bohemia ... in the hills with their lovers; Chick Lorimer: a wild girl keeping a hold on a dream she wants; Mischa Elman: a singing fire and a climb of roses; the plowboy: turning the turf in the dusk and haze of an April gloaming; the gypsy: her neck and head the top piece of a Nile obelisk. He has known uplands when the great strong hills are humble; losses: and one day we will hold only the shadows; wars: in the wars to come kings kicked under the dust and millions of men following great causes not yet dreamed out in the heads of men; joy: sent on singing, singing, smashed to the hearts under the ribs with a terrible love; the mist: at the first of things, I will be at the last; and The Great Hunt:

When the rose’s flash to the sunset

Reels to the rack and the twist,

And the rose is a red bygone,

When the face I love is going

And the gate to the end shall clang,

And it’s no use to beckon or say, “So long”—

Maybe I’ll tell you then—

some other time.

The Case of Masters

In one of Whitman’s songs he speaks to those “who would assume a place to teach, or be a poet here in the States”; or, rather, he questions them, something like this:

What is it you bring my America?

Is it uniform with my country?

Is it not something that has been better told or done before?

Have you not imported this, or the spirit of it, in some ship?

Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a prettiness?—is the good old cause in it?

Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians, literats, of enemies’ lands?

Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?

Does it answer universal needs? Will it improve manners?

Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?

Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my strength, gait, face?

Have real employments contributed to it? original makers, not mere amanuenses?

And so on. I think the questions quoted and the rest of the poem are valuable; especially in thinking of Masters’ new book.[2] Because here are put to the lawyer, who is known as a poet, all the questions of our time. They are put to him because his first book gave us to believe that he was the first poet whom we need scrutinize closely since Whitman spoke his simplicities to the present and the next ten futures.

Masters may not cringe before these “terms obdurate.” He will point to The Spoon River Anthology. I will point to his work before the Anthology and again these later things. Masters of course loves Walt Whitman. He knows the poem from which I quoted. But Theodore Watts-Dunton—you remember him? Masters, I am sure, is more anxious and willing to accept, nay, subscribe to, the rules and judgments of this Victorian critic than to the mere words spoken in poesy of Watts-Dunton’s American contemporary, Whitman. I am almost certain of this. Masters speaks highly of Watts-Dunton’s essay on poetry. It appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Please read it and find the Masters creed. He seems ready to bow before it. If Masters wants honors as a decadent he can have them—really he has earned them. The Spoon River Anthology: its manner, joy, abandon, deepest humanity, art (all that makes it the tremendous book it is), seem to be the one great thing that Masters had to give us. The new book does not show the “truly deep poetic spirit” which Francis Hackett claims to have found in it. Such a judgment is given the lie by such poems as: St. Francis and the Lady Clare, Rain in My Heart, Simon Surnamed Peter, The City, Helen of Troy, O Glorious France, Love Is a Madness, The Altar, Soul’s Desire, Ballad of Launcelot and Elaine, In Michigan, The Star.

Our own feeble voice aside, I merely put before you words of two men—one a creator and critic, and the other a creator and human being. And I hope I have visualized for you the pathetically absurd spectacle of a “modern poet” bowing on bended knee before—. Well, why should a poet bow at all?

[1] Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg. New York: Henry Holt.

[2] Songs and Satires, by Edgar Lee Masters. New York: Macmillan.

The Poet Sings to the World

BEN HECHT

I am a stranger, wandering always.

Only the dark trees know me and the dark skies.

Wistfully I look on you and wander on coldly,

For you will not know me...

Only the night that swims in the black branches knows me

And the silence that walks in the dark streets.

But I know you—

You of the little words and the little visions

Who are warm with laughter and the joy of common things.

I wander among you and I wish to laugh

And I yearn to take your hand.

But your eyes look into mine and stare

And there is no love in them such as you lavish elsewhere.

Your eyes look into mine and frown

For you will not know me...

Only the blue distances of the day on the water know me

And the cold wind that warms itself in my heart.

I reach to embrace you,

I dream of touching your heart with my fingers,

But I am a stranger, wandering always;

Wistful and coldly mocking your dull faces

As you slip from my arms like a shadow;

Hating and laughing at your little sacredness...

For you will not know me...

Only the dark trees know me and the white stars

And the friendless night that comes smiling to me for comfort,

And the cold wind that warms itself in my heart.

For you have sent me, doomed me to wander,

And only they know me—the far-away things.

Only they come to me,

Taking my hate and my love into their vastness.

And sometime you will hear the things I have spoken to them—

Unsaid things of myself and of you—

Coming out of their distances;

Tears for your sorrow and wild laughters for your joy.

And then you will know me

Even as they knew me:

Not as an exile singing

But as a part of your soul that wandered away.

“Splendid Isolation”[3]

JOHN GRIMES

He might have removed mountains or carved out empires; instead he turns his nails against provincial society and scratches. Pechorin—egoist, self-seeker, hater, superman in swaddlings—stifled to madness by the air of Russia, bled of energy, his idealism thwarted; fearing to raise his head from the ashes and launch against circumstance, there was nothing in all Holy Russia that could test his soul in supreme activity. He lacked the moral courage that forced the sons of the fathers into revolution. There was left mockery, and the insulting of the soul with puny wickedness, vapid and provincial. So genius was poured into the mould of the commonplace.

Pechorin sought a splendid isolation. He killed humanity in his heart, became a creature of self, and began to hate as sincerely as a revengeful, spoiled child. His hatred becomes sordid vindictiveness; his emotions correspond to tantrums. He feeds upon the ruined hopes and the despair of society, making himself “an author of middle-class tragedies.”

He looms before us on the screen, menacing, grandiose, Byronic. But he is great only from the scaling of values. His contact is incessantly with weaker types who bend or break before him. Grushnitski is a modish idealist; Bela, a captive maid who acknowledges his right to do as he wills; Vera, a hysterical sentimentalist of that spirituelle type to whom the intense physical traits of Pechorin make a ready appeal. She quiets her scruples with the sacred notion that she is sacrificing herself, soul and body to one whose life would otherwise be incomplete. Princess Mary is a typical Byronese victim, a devotee at the shrine of heroism, who for nothing in the world would give herself to a man who has not some mystery or who has not been the victim of some crushing sorrow. Contrast her with the vital, passionate Natalya in Turgene’s Rudin.... Pechorin hunts easy game. He acknowledges that he has never loved women of spirit: “Once only I loved a woman with a firm will that I was unable to vanquish. We parted enemies.” What would these erotic, parasitic Byrons subsist upon nowadays? Woman is no more the mere giver; she asks and receives in return.

Pechorin wins from us not honest hatred but contempt. One searches the book for an honorable impulse upon his part. He is a washed-out Byron; a pale Don Juan. He loves many women for the excitement of mere change. “We live out of curiosity. We expect something new. How absurd, and yet how vexatious!” Women fall at his feet and he asks derisively: “Can it be that wickedness is so attractive?” He knows the ways of his victim by heart, he anticipates her every move, and calls her accomplishment tiresome. Passion has shriveled until it is an inglorious segment of his life. It is a thing of curiosity rather than of sympathy. Love is an annoyance, yet he persists in it: “I feel within me an insatiate hunger that devours everything it meets upon the way. I look upon joy and suffering only in their relation to myself, regarding them as nutriment that sustains my spiritual forces.... To none has my love ever brought happiness because I have never sacrificed anything for the sake of those I loved. I have only tried to satisfy the strange cravings of my heart, greedily draining their feelings, their tenderness, their joy, their suffering—and I have never been able to sate myself.”

It occurs to Pechorin that such aimlessness cannot but be a misinterpretation of the mystic handwriting of life. “It cannot be that I came purposeless into the world. A purpose there must have been, and surely mine was an exalted destiny because I feel within my soul powers immeasurable. But I was unable to discover that destiny. I allowed myself to be carried away by the allurements of passions innane and ignoble. From that crucible I issued hard and cold as iron.”... “My chief pleasure is to make everything around me subject to my will. To be the cause of suffering or joy to another without having a definite right to be—is it not the sweetest food for our pride?”

Lermontov is honest. He makes no attempt to vindicate a type. He must have smiled at his hater, his incipient superman, shattered by fate casting himself on the bare steppe after killing his horse in a mad ride, and clasping his body to the earth. Did he think to merge himself with the great “I am”?

“Alas! there cometh a time when man shall no longer give birth to a star. Alas! there cometh the time of the most contemptible man who can no longer despise himself!”

Thus spake Zarathustra!

Not submission, self-abnegation, Tolstoyanism, but wholesome self-hatred, acknowledging in one’s self but a bridge to beyond-man. Pechorin saw life as an end in itself. He was a creature of the surface, he feared to plunge into the blue depths.

One smiles at his childlike attempt to be self-efficient, isolated, damnable. But one is impatiently sorry that his splendid vitality was turned from healthful pioneering to the puny triumphs of the ballroom, and the conquest of hysterical ladies. Young Russia despises life except as a means. It will hurl revolutions into the world’s face, it will build empires. Life will be a hot flame of action and not a hectic afterglow of spent passion.

[3] A Hero of Our Time, by A. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.

The Tree

HELEN HOYT

On the way to the factory,

In the block as you leave the car,

Growing from cinders

Is a tree.

And it has leaves ....

Green ....

All around are the factory walls

And small sooty houses with bleak steps

And babies crawling among flies ....

In summer I have felt the pavements

Pouring out heat like ovens.

O tree, how can you be so patient!

Editorials and Announcements

A Real Orchestra in San Francisco

It’s a quite amazing phenomenon: here in this town encased in philistinism there is a symphony orchestra, conducted by a radical young man who knows his business, playing a series of modern music programs during the summer!

The first day I went out to inspect San Francisco I was struck dumb before a poster in a music store announcing Sunday afternoon concerts by a People’s Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by N. Sokoloff, with Debussy’s “Faun” and those lovely Caucasian Sketches of Ippolitow-Ivanow on the program, and Tina Lerner as soloist, etc., etc.—all for a price ranging between twenty-five and seventy-five cents.

I went, naturally; not because I expected it to be a very good concert, but because I was starved for music. I knew nothing of Sokoloff, except that he had played the violin in Chicago last winter and I had missed his concert. Perhaps you can imagine the shock and the joy of hearing the “Faun” conducted as I at least have never heard it done before: so that it became really a thing of cool lavender shadows in a forest.... It’s impossible to describe, but it made you weep—it was so beautifully done.

Since then I have heard the story of the unique organization. San Francisco has one orchestra under the leadership of a man who may be called a conservative, I suppose, and backed by numerous wealthy citizens who have the artistic interests of the town at heart without a very definite knowledge of what channels they should follow. But Mrs. J. B. Casserly, a musician, conceived the idea of having better music in San Francisco, and asked Mr. Sokoloff to undertake these concerts. Mr. Sokoloff, who was a violinist rather than a conductor, was fired by the idea, and a skating-rink was hired for the first rehearsal. There was some embarrassment as to who should pay the expenses of the rehearsal, but it was finally decided that if the orchestra men liked the new conductor they would assume the entire cost; if not, it was to be “on” Mrs. Casserly. As I remember, they played the Tchaikovsky Pathetique that afternoon in the sacred halls of the skating-rink, and when it was over the men rose to cheer the conductor. “Well, gentlemen,” said Mrs. Casserly, “who pays?” But there was no hesitation over that trifling matter.

And so the concerts began in a local theatre. It is perfectly simple to realize that San Francisco would not largely appreciate such a blessing, and that Mrs. Casserly and Mr. Sokoloff would be criticised for their “modern” programs; but it is hard to understand the action of the other orchestra people, who locked up their scores so that the “rival” musicians couldn’t use them and were forced to buy new ones. This is the typical history of all struggles in the world to find beauty, so one grows used to it. But the important thing is that the People’s Philharmonic is to go on next year, and their programs (I should have mentioned that they play old music, which is good as well as new music) are exciting to think of. I listened yesterday to their rehearsal of the Tristan Prelude and I know that Mr. Stock in Ravinia Park is not offering his audiences anything so fresh and inspired as Mr. Sokoloff’s reading. May they live long and prosper!

An Anarchist’s Question

On the day of the Preparedness Parade in San Francisco some one threw a bomb and killed eight people, who undoubtedly didn’t deserve to die. Since then the city has gone around on tip-toe, as an anarchist I know expressed it. Five people who undoubtedly don’t deserve it have been thrown into jail and tortured. Puzzle: if the object of preparedness parades is achieved, everybody will be killed off anyway; why is one kind of murder so much worse than another?

Julia to Jim

(After reading Edgar Lee Masters’ “Jim and Arabel’s Sister”)

SUE GOLDEN

You see, it’s this way, Jim ...

You can call me a primrose, if you like,

Or the Lover, for that’s a way you have, or men have,

Of tying things in bundles,

That don’t belong in bundles;

For every woman, or man too, I guess,

Is a separate complex package

With a little bit of everything

Out of all the other bundles.

You find in us exactly what you look for,

As Francis did in Arabella;

It wouldn’t have made the least difference

What you or I told him,

Or what he found out—

But about me, Jim?

You’ve sat here drinking my coffee,

And I’ve made you comfortable and happy,

And you’ve told me all about myself,

And you haven’t even asked me what I thought about myself.

It didn’t occur to you.

Do you think Francis

Has ever gone deeper

Than the curve of Arabel’s cheek,

Or what he thought her, or wanted her to be?

You call me the Lover.

And try to figure out

Why I am not like other women;

But I am, Jim—

Just an ordinary primrose,

For that primrose that changed

Started out like all the others;

And you wonder why I don’t live like the others,

Get married—I was once, have children—my son’s grown—

So I’ve been all three, sweetheart and mother and wife,

And I am still.

Every woman is all three,

But not all at the same time;

That’s why it is such a bore

Being expected to be.

When you have had your coffee, you’ll go down town

And forget me.

And I’ll forget you, and be comfortable and happy,

Not having to remember you.

But if I were married to you,

You’d want me to keep on remembering you

Every minute of the day,

And I’d be so tired of it by the time you came home,

I’d be sorry to see you.

I have nothing against marriage,

Except that it’s a bore

Trying to live somebody else’s life.

You can’t do it.

Married people would be happier

If they didn’t try to.

They ought to live as freely

As we do.

All these sudden split-ups

In the newspapers

Are just this:

The hysteria of woman is a shriek of boredom.

Why, I’d die in a week if I had to keep on

Being the particular kind of primrose

That you think me.

But the hysterical woman,

There’s your flower changing, Jim.

I’m just the common kind, but I know that

I’m never the same, and I don’t want to be.

If I’m the mother today, I may be the lover tomorrow,

And I don’t want anybody sitting around on me

And keeping me from growing. Your primrose probably changed

Just to spite the old scientist who kept prying at it.

Sex? No, it isn’t sex that these people are writing about,

It’s sentimentality.

They have an ideal, and if the first woman doesn’t answer it

They think the second will, or the third.

And they call it sex, or beauty, or urge—

But it isn’t sex, Jim.

I know what sex is.

The reason I like you, Jim,

Is because you haven’t any of these silly notions.

Sex is honest and healthy.

You say they trace morbid ideas to sex,

But I tell you it’s the morbid, silly, beautiful ideas

About Love and about being able to satisfy the ideal

That are at the root of the trouble about sex!

I can’t absorb you, and I don’t want to,

And I don’t want to be absorbed.

I don’t know whether you get what I mean.

I like you, Jim,

Because you leave a person free.

After you go, I shall be busy with my own thoughts

And my own life, just as if a friend had dropped in.

I shall be anything I want to be. I shall change into

Just as many primroses as I want to, and you won’t

Know anything about it.

You ought to get married, Jim,

No, not me.

But if you came here every night,

I’d a thousand times rather be married to you,

For I have never known anybody more tied up

Than these “free-love” people.

Am I happy? Well, I’m free.

We’d all like to be free and happy.

Lots of people could be happy—ought to be happy,

If they knew enough to be free.....

Perhaps happiness is partly the chance of being unhappy—

You and I, Jim, haven’t that.

But what I hate is all this mussing up

Of love and sex and the ideal—it isn’t life.

One ought to start straight on earth,

And take heaven when it comes.

I promise the advent of a tragic age: the highest art in the saying of yea to life, “tragedy,” will be born when mankind has the knowledge of the hardest, but most necessary of wars, behind it, without, however, suffering from that knowledge.—Nietzsche.

A Vers Libre Prize Contest

Through the generosity of a friend, The Little Review is enabled to offer an unusual prize for poetry—possibly the first prize extended to free verse. The giver is “interested in all experiments, and has followed the poetry published in The Little Review with keen appreciation and a growing admiration for the poetic form known as vers libre.”

The conditions are as follows:

Contributions must be received by August 15th.

They must not be longer than twenty-five lines.

They must be sent anonymously with stamps for return.

The name and address of the author must be fixed to the manuscript in a sealed envelope.

It should be borne in mind that free verse is wanted—verse having beauty of rhythm, not merely prose separated into lines.

There will be three judges: William Carlos Williams, Zoë Aikens and Helen Hoyt.

There will be two prizes of $25 each. They are offered not as a first and second prize, but for “the two best short poems in free verse form.”

As there will probably be a large number of poems to read, we suggest that contributors adhere closely to the conditions of the contest.

The Reader Critic

The Nymph

(Edgar Lee, have you missed anything?—Editor.)

I see it all now: I was born with the soul of a nymph,

And they expected me to be law-abiding and moral!

Why, I was a nymph from the day my mother lashed me

For playing kissing games with the boys, out behind the school,

To the day I shot my lover in a South State Street cabaret

For flirting with another girl and they put me in the penitentiary.

Good God! is it a sin to be young?

—Anonymous.

How Stanilaus Szukalski Expresses Life

L. C. B.:

There are trees and valleys and mountains—red, blue, orange and purple—all smothered by a phosphorescent green. The trees stretch up gnarled hands, swollen from too much striving. There is no sky. Dull coal mingles with the earth clods. Diamond mines glitter. The ground is misshapen. Flowers give forth a stale odor. A hideous laugh sounds. It comes from the mouth of a hunch-back who, with prods of burning metal, forces people into the quick-sands. Over the sands sucking, demoniacal waters rush. Here and there an eye or a torso floats on the surface. From the trees and valleys and mountains, luridly colored, come human faces. Blood runs from their opened arteries. Their hands are horribly twisted. In the foreground writhes a shape whose fingers bend back to meet his knuckles. Another rears a massive head, the veins of which stand out further than his purple lips. A woman’s arm is extended, too full of blood. A weird figure hovers over an abyss, swathed with the vapors arising from the gases of the underground. All the people are dying. Everyone breathes hard. A whole mound is composed of a soft substance—disintegrated limbs. The jelly-like mass quivers. This is life.

Did you see his exhibition at the Art Institute? At seventeen one is almost wholly in sympathy with him.

Phantasy

Noncompos Mentis, Napa, California:

Night! A lambient fog * * * * *

Stirs the damp echos of the baleful deep,

Cimmerian in its fell intensity.

Shrouded in mist, pale wraiths flit hitherward

Or yon; lured or impelled * * * * * Peace!

Ah! Who shall say?

Borne on the vagrant breeze she floats;

Kelp in her hands; ’twined in her hair

The weed from outer seas; writhing yet strangely still.

Behold her eyes—shallow, opaque,

Yet glaucous with a nascent light, gleaming

Its message of appeal to answering soul.

* * * * * Ah me! Recall the past;

Blot out its infamies; this fiery tumult quell

With one tempestuous kiss.

My being swoons—my soul is wafted hence,

Drowned in its God-like, saccharine ecstasy.[4]

[4] Here the Muse skidded. Author contemplated another stanza, but warder entered with strait jacket and gag.

Birth Control

Russell Palmer, Seattle:

... With particular reference to the matter of Birth Control, which the writer has studied in an amateurish fashion for some time, I want to ask you if there has ever been framed a model statute providing for the dissemination of such information by the State.

If such a model statute exists I will arrange to have it introduced in the Washington State Legislature when that body convenes next January. If nothing of this sort is available I would earnestly recommend that steps be taken immediately to prepare a measure which will bring about the maximum amount of good and yet at the same time have an opportunity of receiving the support of law-makers elected by a semi-civilized and bigoted people.

It should be borne in mind that the Initiative and Referendum are both in effect in the State of Washington, so that there would be a strong probability that such a proposed law would be passed upon directly by the people, either through the failure of the legislature to meet the issue squarely or its over cautious desire to have its action approved by the voters individually.

I believe that such an act would have a fair chance of passage. We look upon our State as not altogether unprogressive, for in addition to the legislative progress indicated by the Initiative and Referendum we enjoy woman suffrage, glory in non-partisan direct primaries, carry but do not wave a Red Light Abatement Act, tolerate Prohibition and threaten Single Tax. So you see there are hopes.

What Is the State?

(An answer to Alan Adair’s “What Is Anarchy?”)

Alice Groff, Philadelphia:

Is it not time that thinking people should cease to speak of the social order as “the state”? The very meaning of state is static, and if there be a qualifying word that does not apply to the life of the social order static is that word. The social order is a growing, developing, evolving thing.

Man is a social as well as an individual being. He may be called a political being by virtue of his social activities, and the methods he uses to live best his social life; but the individual man is not a political being—he cannot “flock in a corner all by himself” as Dundreary would say—he is political only in the sense of being an element in a social ego, with a social will toward the desired social end of that ego.

Such social ego is continually being formed anew in the social order. The dominating social ego of any stage is not necessarily the highest ideal which the most advanced and thoughtful minds in that stage can conceive. It is the highest ideal of the largest or most powerful number of individuals that are in unanimity upon that ideal and capable of ruling the rest of the social order with it for the time being. Every form of social dominance that has ever prevailed in the history of the world will come under this head and answer to this description. And who shall say that the prevailing and dominating social ego at any one stage is not the best possible for the social order at that stage?

The individual man with a high philosophic gift and a reasoning mind may say to himself, and to others: “Man is capable of a better social order than this, there are higher and finer ideals than those that prevail”—but he can do absolutely nothing of himself to do away with the prevailing social ego, and to substitute a new one with better ideals, as he thinks, except to teach, to agitate, until he can induce a number of individuals to take up his ideal and to join him in a social ego that shall become powerful enough to drive out the dominating ego and substitute for it the new one. This is all that there is to political activity. This is the whole story of social evolution. And no individual or social ego can possibly decide that the new ideal is better than the old until it is “tried out.” It is of course likely to have better elements than the old in so far as it is born of criticism upon the old which then was being “tried out.” But no dominating social ego can ever hope statically to establish itself in the social order while the world endures; consequently the reasoning mind must say to itself: “The highest social ideal that I can conceive and can induce a social ego to stand for is only the next step in social evolution, which must give place to the next and the next.” Hence, such mind can only smile indulgently upon all static ideals—monarchy, democracy, anarchy, socialism alike; realizing that the only social ideals worthy the name are those based upon demonstrated scientific truth—the collected and collated set of social facts that have been found to work in accordance with natural law in past social evolution; realizing that the personal ideal of the individual man, unless based upon such facts, is socially a child’s soapbubble, whatever it may be in the innermost of his own soul as to the evolution of his own individuality.

The Little Review

Literature, Drama, Music, Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Editor

The monthly that has been called “the most unique journal in existence.”

The Little Review is a magazine that believes in Life for Art’s sake, in the Individual rather than in Incomplete People, in an Age of Imagination rather than of Reasonableness; a magazine interested in Past, Present, and Future, but particularly in the New Hellenism; a magazine written for Intelligent People who can Feel, whose philosophy is Applied Anarchism, whose policy is a Will to Splendour of Life, and whose function is—to express itself.

One Year, U.S.A., $1.50; Canada, $1.65; Great Britain, 7/-

The Little Review

OTHERS

A Magazine of the New Verse

Various writers are being invited to edit Others, each for a period of one month.

Williams Carlos Williams will have charge of the July issue, which he announces as A Competitive Number.

Maxwell Bodenheim of the August, which he announces as A Chicago Number.

Helen Hoyt of the September, which she announces as A Woman’s Number.

OTHERS is published monthly at
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THE SEXUAL QUESTION

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Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of The Little Review.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

... Se hisse, et regarde par desses le mur. ...
... Se hisse, et regarde par dessus le mur. ...

... Un chaudronnier les achète à la foule traphie. ...
... Un chaudronnier les achète à la foule trahie. ...