One was too young to judge, sitting in Roger's studio in Fitzroy Street, being painted by him, enjoying what one had never enjoyed before, contact with a superb and generous mind. Mind and understanding that allowed for one's own, that did more than tolerate, that encouraged one's crude immaturities--not with patience, not with tolerance even, but with grave, sometimes even excited interest. Youth and maturity neck to neck, it was all adventure, discovery, an unenvious race.
That was this writer's introduction to Bloomsbury, indeed the only time that one was in any deep and immediate contact with them, and then only through him. Yet, even then, even in those early years, there went with it an equally divided judgement. Unequally but deeply divided between gratitude, affection and intellectual delight. These and the secret rapture of a country-bred child before the rich comic possibilities that seemed on one's own up-bringing inherent somehow in the whole situation.
Yet now, looking back on those years, one is reminded--one was even dazed at the time--was it a sequence, what was once called a Signature, an example out of Mr. Dunne?5
Years before, when the Titanic went down, Thomas Hardy published a poem ["The Convergence of the Twain"]. One of those poems which, as Lytton Strachey says, without a single poetic grace, have the secret of touching the marrow in one's bones. I only remember one line, but in it he describes the assembling, the growth of a great ship; and how at the same time, in the fog and chill darkness of Polar Seas, nature "grew the ice-berg too." So that the mind was haunted by the vast, the universal implication of this.
To find its sudden application.
When Roger Fry at Cambridge had been getting his double-first, when St. John Hutchinson was being called to the Bar, when Aldous Huxley was preparing for Eton, there was--as H. G. Wells said of Cato of Utica--running about some garden a horrid little boy, a sturdy man-child, bearing a name not unknown in Victorian history.6 A boy who was to fling himself into the War, as an Artillery Officer--become something of a soldier, take hold of battle with both hands and endure it nearly unto death.
A thing no Bloomsbury ever did. A thing I could not but accept. Then, after a time at the Slade, on the strength of his obviously immense gifts, he was to be found for a while at that strange workshop, at once one of Bloomsbury's completest failures, yet which the world has never quite managed to forget.
And if ever a group warmed a serpent, help hand-rear a doom, grew a ship while nature grew the ice, it was when young Wyndham Lewis went to work at the Omega.7
Then he left it, just at or just before the time when I was with Roger Fry almost every day. That happy interregnum--Roger by day and Ballet by night--then it was that the berg moved into action, and there appeared the first counter-attack, criticism, caricature, challenge, first steps of the anti-masque to their masque, goat's-foot beat of a very different measure of antic hay.
The Caliph's Design, he called it, and loyalty apart, it was clear that a new and formidable voice was speaking. On behalf of all the arts, in being or to be. On behalf of every other artist in England outside the Bloomsbury ring? No, not that. Hardly at all. A lone voice speaking, a more violent gift, experimental, unfinished, "futurist" was the current label; exceedingly male in quality, by no means free from the neuroticism of virility, and above all contemptuous of the intricacies, the private jokes, the derivative, feminine elements, the snobberies, the pedantries of culture.
Now, at this moment, in the common mind, there is a complex reaction to the profound culture that was Old Bloomsbury's distinguishing asset. The old sheer respect for scholarship, for pure learning, for the educated man, at least in cities, is gone. The popular press is producing the shoddiest imitation of it, by which the semi- and very recently literate are taken in. Yet, like love or fine breeding or the arts, it is one of the values that cannot be faked, the slightest attempt shows itself up instantly. You have either entered into the work, the books, the music, the building of such and such masters. Or you have not. At the same time, real knowledge, real familiarity lends itself to a kind of family shorthand exasperating to those outside.
With Bloomsbury it was absolutely genuine, natural, happy, and, within their idiom, profound, fused with their entire nature, their approach to life. Yet, even within, there were factors in their knowledge that weakened them; and in their inherited, inherent liberalism, pledging them, so to speak, in advance to Advanced Thought; that, for another thing, forbade their panache, or pride in high position or an honourable name. Physical elegance they despised. Who, on what seemed arbitrary, à rebours principles, their private virtuosity, a family chic, called people beautiful, who, to the eye of youth were merely queer. Who could always justify this by some recondite example, some trouvaille out of the past.
It was in this knowledge of theirs, I think, that they felt safe and their mastery each of his own special knowledge. It was their sure ground--the wonderful, disciplined knowledge, the power to go lightly back into the past and bring back treasure, arguments, examples, parallels, precedents, illuminations, from every art and action, thought or work or personality that has ever been.
Yet there it was, at that very moment, moving out of its original darkness, its isolation and its proper mystery, the berg arrived upon their seas, grown and ready for action. A powerful intelligence, confident also of ability to beat them at their own game; outside them, yet in possession of some of their secrets--a sea mountain, a sea monster they had thought once to have in tow.
As Lytton Strachey said of Voltaire's Akakia, The Caliph's Design was written by a demon with a grudge. A strong demon, and as tough a customer as ever lived--the hard-bitten soldier, back from that Occurrence they had tried to ignore; and it is the measure of their superbità that they nearly did so. For these were no garden-city cranks.
To return though to The Caliph's Design. Its key passage, from the point of propaganda, was a malicious, searching, savage, scandalously witty attack on Roger Fry, to which even his tolerance was unequal. "Only pretending to be a bee"--that was the measure of Roger Fry, the measure of them all. Pretending to be the honey-makers, the rock-comb builders, the fertilisers, the "holy, light and wingéd." Only in a papier-maché garden of waxed flowers.
"Faisandé"--"high"--and again Lewis had scored. They were setting off the young Kunstforchers of England up the garden path, and the wrong garden at that, making them liable to become art-fanciers, turning their taste only too devoutly towards wax fruit and flowers made out of feathers, things made of one substance pretending to be things made out of another; leading young craftsmen to turn out their (often pleasing) variations of those themes; young painters to an orgy of still-lives--very natures mortes--and strictly non-representational portraits. A good game while it lasted, but they made too much of it. Until it was an essay by Aldous Huxley which sounded the call to order, with the simple reminder that between a nineteenth-century ivory and a bowl of wax fruit, between a Hepplewhite chair and a shell and gilt inlay round a panel painted with a view of Windsor Castle, there is a difference not relative, but absolute.
It was a game they were playing. And Art is not a game. A game with values, and the values of art are ultimate values. That was the substance of the attack in The Caliph's Design--which one read, loyalty apart, with a delight one could hardly explain in its savage vitality, its creating sentences, half stumbling, half revealing, its tiger spring.
"The snap of a fine gut string." So that was how it went, was it? That was what art was like. As one read, a cord of one's own allegiances snapped. Personal affection could not change, but the people who were going to make art come alive again in England were not necessarily going to paint or write like Wyndham Lewis, but go his dangerous road. A much longer road, a stony, lion-haunted road. A hardy, dangerous, beautiful road. Inside the Bloomsbury garden there would be flowers grown, interesting plants, Mayan rarities, pastiche, for all I knew, on the Fan tribes, or carpet-bedding brought up to date again. Only not those flowers which, after all, are the gardener's first care, not the rose or the iris, the larkspur or the lily, the poppy or the hyacinth, the great hieratic flowers. Or, if you found them there, could you be sure they were not copies; how sure were you that you might not even be stung there--by a synthetic bee?
The work that draws its life from the centre, from the source, from Plato's country, that does not depend, ultimately, any more on religion, on tolerance, or elegance of outlook or on "vain learning"--the work that uses these things, but is not in bondage to them--of that work and its origins the tough who had written The Caliph's Design had blasphemed a warning and a reminder.
You could see him with a bayonet on his chimney-piece, not with a wax pear. You could see him tight, but not on aesthetic emotions; you could see him with a harem--and heaven help it! not with a lady-like boy. You could not see him on his knees to man or woman, painting or devil. You could to God.
He believed in the supernatural. They did not.
So much for slowly-elicited first thoughts.
Youth, under one formula or another, cannot do without moralities, and, as such, moralities were forbidden in Bloomsbury. Where it seemed to be assumed, either that one was perfect in them, or that they did not exist. An assumption that all civilised beings, just because they were civilised, had solved the questions of ethics, had no difficulty in doing instantly what they should do.
What ethics were there implicit in The Caliph's Design? None to be written home about, but, such as they were, they were not negative. Very far also from the apotheosis of tolerance, leading, as it sometimes seemed to do, to a kind of rather self-conscious naughtiness, and a belief in humanity which appeared to go so far and not far enough, that one had observed in Old Bloomsbury.
Yet at the time much of this passed over one's head, who was away on adventures of a very different kind in another land, saving what could be saved of one's youth from the war. Yet always just sufficiently in touch with that brilliant group to mark their progress in time. Who were to be admired, decried, imitated, attacked, snubbed, snobbed--until the people getting born when I was young have grown up and entered Bloomsbury; and the term has widened, and the term has narrowed, and as individuals they have justified their fame.
So, again, it seems that the moment has come to ask: "What has it all meant?" "What has it stood for?" "What are its casualties?" "Its final successes?" "Is it over?" "Why?"
Roger Fry is dead. So is Lytton Strachey. T. S. Eliot apart, perhaps their chief claim to incontestable fame. The Sitwells (if you count them) seem settled down as littérateurs. Unless you count Duncan Grant, they have not yet produced a first class painter.8
Surely, in those first years, they might fairly claim that, the ancients apart, nearly all the living art in England grew in their garden enclosed. (What has been the succession from Blast?) "So much for the worse for English art," said the Designer. To which the reply, perhaps too easily made, is "sour grapes." There was Aldous Huxley with his extremely individual work, whose substance is accidia in excelsis. Eliot added to his handful of poems, whose trouble was that they had to carry within their compass the whole weight of a new aesthetic, the burden of another major poet's life work. Only, with that, he had his review to spread the light, and there was all the New Statesman to play with.9
Again, there were the Sitwells (can you count the Sitwells?), who were never really Bloomsbury, but Chelsea-Mayfair. There was Virginia Woolf and her husband. There was Maynard Keynes and Oliver Strachey at the Foreign Office to carry on the tradition that attached them to public life, there was St. John Hutchinson and Montague Shearman at the Bar.10
There was Lowes Dickinson, and in the earliest days, Jane Harrison in scholarship, and to hold down the chair of music for them at Cambridge, Edward Dent. In science, Julian Huxley and James Strachey and his wife.11
A pretty wide corporation--with its eyes ever open for new talent; yet, as Lytton Strachey said of Congreve, their feet so down in good English earth that more than once the called did not remain the chosen, and Mr. Middleton Murry came--and went.12
There was Waley, with his Chinese translations, doing what no one had ever done before; and here, there and everywhere there was Clive Bell, with his gay, excited theorisings for compère and producer and publicity-man. There was E. M. Forster, their J. M. Barrie, whose one masterpiece was a bestseller. There was Desmond MacCarthy for critic and imcomparable wit; and David Garnett to make them little toys in letters, bibelots as charming as anything out of the cases at the Chinese Exhibition.13
There was more young entry, highly intelligent young men and women. Two of the Davidson brothers, the painter and the critic of painting. There was Ray Strachey, who out of her family papers produced that most fascinating book, Group Movements in the Past.14 All these and many others, and the type that is now called "Bloomsbury" beginning to impress itself upon the public mind.
Now it is impossible to underestimate or to be ungrateful for all this. The first time for a very long time (Disraeli was an exception) that a group has made a bid for power and cultural leadership whose appeal was based on reason and on intellect; whose eclecticism, in practice, left out of count all those sides to men's nature that lie deeper than the purely rational mind. I do not mean that they left psychology out--no one, for example, played more happily with psychoanalysis than they did.
Yet, here it is that we come to the ready, the obvious criticism. Their attempt was legitimate, but in handling it they made an error, an ingenuous one for men and women of their intelligence, showing them as blind to their own blind spot as the most bird-witted of their philistine opponents. Whose confidence they have shaken, but not shaken enough. Because it is not enough to despise the Philistine, or from the most real authority thrust him aside, annihilate him, strip him, make game of him. Dance circles round him, a witty dance, a ballet of their own composition. "My men like satyrs. . ." It was excellently done. Only it was not enough. Their enemy was not the real enemy. Their enemy was not an enemy at all, but the man they could not make friends with. (The Philistine is easy game.) But there remained all around them that "real" world, the larger world of men of good will; the world that does not want satyrs dancing at it all the time.
Roger Fry, Eliot? No, Eliot, for reasons which will be seen later, stands apart; and Roger, one of the oldest of them, had in him some quality which seemed, to me at least, as if it were something remaining; something, as it were, left over from "a cleaner and lordlier world."
For all the rest, there was a quality exceedingly hard to describe, that for all their learning, their science, their wit, their considerable art of living, carried with it an all-pervading insufficiency. A kind of hole in the centre, into which the mind fell instantly, the moment the question was asked, and very soon it began to be asked, "What is the real meaning of all this?" "These people touch on life at every side. What, if they had their way, would be the result, the pattern, the intelligible whole?" Or simply: "What are they letting us in for?" Questions that were not answered. That never have been answered. That were not often even intelligently put.
Remember all this time, now coming closer with every year, the realignment that is going on in human society. A regrouping whose kind what follows should attempt to make clear. Remember now that as Old Bloomsbury went on from triumph to triumph, easy triumph to easy triumph--too easy?--the same anti-masque attended their masque, and the Caliph's Designer rarely let his pen rest.

He did. That all this was leading us up a blind alley; that in the end all this would not do. He saw enemies everywhere (especially among his friends). But he saw the Enemy also. The Enemy of souls, busy over the world to its damnation. He did not put it like that, but that is what he meant.
As he showed, justly and unjustly, but with little points of appalling discernment, among the instruments of the Enemy, the high, gay, confident persons of Old Bloomsbury. Because what they had done would not do. Because they had led the world a dance, a ballet, which was only a family charade. Because they were a mutual admiration society. Because, au fond they were not serious at all. Frivolous, the wrong order of frivolity. (Not his kind, bien entendu.) A man against a group who could never share the same jokes.
He was crabbed, rude, unkind, ill-bred, unjust. He allowed for nothing that they could do, for Strachey's crystal style, for Roger Fry's magnanimity. He seems to have taken particular care that not more than one man in ten should understand what he has to say. He was uncharitable, bitter, unperceptive. He left most readers in a very dim state as to in what he himself put his trust.
Yet, through it all from The Caliph's Design to The Childermass, from his drawings and his manifestos, he gives an overwhelming impression (much as he would blaspheme the imputation) of an intelligence at once most powerful, searching, original, discontented, wounded, thwarted, maimed, unconquerable.
This brings one to the publication of The Apes of God. It does indeed. A book whose value it will not be easy to judge until the time comes when it has ceased to be perhaps the most comprehensive libel à clef that has ever been written.
Appalling ballet--anti-masque become masque with a vengeance! Actually, as an attack, its theme is wider considerably than Old Bloomsbury or New. Almost the whole of what might be called fashionable--in the best sense--culture. Bloomsbury--Chelsea--Whitechapel--Mayfair--Montparnasse. Its agonists--protagonists sounds too mild--are not Bloomsbury at all. (Unless you count the Sitwells.)  Yet one opening chapter passes in the penetralia of Old Bloomsbury; and a great part of the action at a single party, where many of them appear. And (if you count the Sitwells or not) no one has ever wasted time pretending that three of the chief victims of that episode are not identical with them.
"This is the most Peter Pannish family ever born." A comparatively merciful remark. For the rest, he gives to that long summer night's entertainment, the quality, modernised and put into prose, of something like a canto in Dante's Hell. The sense of movement in a circle, and what a ronde--a violent, purposeless, demon-scourged fleeting of lost souls playing at salvation. And all terrified of nothing. But this is not a review of The Apes of God.
Clearer and clearer the double alignment of European society begins to show, where all forces are shaking down into two fronts with the Waste Land between them. Put in its final, simplest terms: the world is dividing itself and will be divided into believers in a supernatural order, of which the natural is a development, a reflection, an aspect, and on whose relation to which its health depends. Or the believers in a natural order only, plastic to man, for him to determine, probably on some variant of the Marxian dialectic, first and foremost in relation to his physical needs. After which all other things will be added to him. If he still wants them. And if you protest that this is to remove all "higher" values from life and from the world, the answer is a very curious one, and Mr. Julian Huxley is the man to make it.
Now, one does not know how far Wyndham Lewis subscribes to this. One cannot imagine him bowing the knee to some Transcendance which is not the mirror of his suppressed wishes. Still less to the vegetarian phallos round which Mr. Shaw's petrified lambs skip.
On the other hand one cannot see him working out a restatement of the philosophia perennis with Christopher Dawson, Berdyaev or Jacques Maritain.15 Here, as a Bloomsbury critic, his questions asked, his function ends. A great dog, he has hunted them. He has not brought them to bay, or to the huntsman's knife.
The significant moment, I think, unheralded, unrecognised, its details to me quite unknown, came when T. S. Eliot parted metaphysical company with the man who had first sponsored him in our society. One day, it must be twelve years ago and more, I was walking in Paris with Ezra Pound, and listening to his lamentation on the fact that Eliot was taking Dante seriously. Aesthetically, as a poet, yes; but also his beliefs. Still young enough to feel that he was right--of course Ezra Pound must be right--but still wondering how it was possible to come to any sort of terms with Dante and leave his religion out.
For at that moment Ulysses was appearing. Ulysses, a challenge, the challenge of challenges, to the whole supernatural, sacramental conception of the world, our societies, our lives. Not only of sex, but of all the key points in human life and the values we attach to them; the most stupendous, Calvinist-puritan-materialist manifesto ever issued: to one's own private mind, the most stupendous aberration of genius.
But then everyone was reading it, and here was an obvious suspicion in the heart of Ezra Pound that his friend, Mr. T. S. Eliot's reactions were not, or would soon not be, aesthetically pure. And as one walked, one's mind became more and more doubtful. For one knew what Ezra Pound could never know, the nature of English sacramentalism. So that was what Eliot was choosing, was it? His dip in the lucky bag that is "forever England"? And what would Roger say?
Roger would not be pleased, any more than Ezra, Ezra who in no sense ever belonged to Bloomsbury at all. Roger would say that you could make poetry out of anything, just as you could make a picture of his old trousers, hanging on the wall from a nail, their cylinders cut by the disk of an Omega plate, a composition replete with significant form. So you could, if you were a Van Gogh, but that was just the point that had sent the Caliph's Designer off so wickedly.
It was from this conversation, as one now sees, that one's mind began slowly to clear, as though one had caught a glimpse of the world-picture shaping. The world, the intelligent world, whose beliefs and opinions filter down now to the mass of the people, to form the ambience of the social mind, must either abandon their scepticism or stick to it. Half-beliefs, suspended beliefs, agnosticisms, modernism, indifferences are becoming sensibly more impossible. For it is another war for which we are preparing, the Armageddon, perhaps the real Armageddon, of our societies, our civilisation, that three thousand years' adventure we date (for convenience) from the siege of Troy.
Has it all been one essential fake, a brilliant self-deception, with one form or another of the Marxian dialectic; that grim reorientation, transvaluation of all values, first practised in a country of mysticism run to seed; for its last word?
Or, from another angle, can we incorporate in our Three Thousand Year Plan our recently acquired scientific power, for what it is worth and for what it is not worth, what it can give us and what it cannot give? It tells us how things behave, but nothing at all about what things matter, servant as much as God to the unjust and to the just. The questions we all began to ask, night and day, on the publication of "The Waste Land."
What would Roger say? Actually, in those early days, at least, Roger had not made up his mind--the question yet hardly formulated, with the U.S.S.R. in its bloody infancy.
Yet to return to the heart of the business.
However much he may deny this religion or that, it is not easy, perhaps it is hardly possible, for the artist or for the man of any genius to deny altogether the supernatural. For, as Ellis-Roberts says, "of all men he needs it most."16 Besides, there was in Roger Fry's blood, and I have heard him admit it, that protested against that denial, and he admitted the protest. You are not for nothing the son of centuries of Quaker contemplation.
On the other hand, take the whole range of their work, of all Old Bloomsbury whose names are now so celebrated, try the tone of it. Scepticism too sceptical even to come down on the materialist side of the fence. "Dainty jests," as Charles Williams said in one of his rare flashes of bitterness, "at the Trinity and the death-agony of Philip of Spain."17 From E. M. Forster, their substitute for the values of J. M. Barrie, and his occasional flirtations with purely pagan ghost-to-daimon hauntings. Forster their limit in one direction; on the other the sentimentalist rationalisings of Julian Huxley against his brother's remorseless accidia, the will not to believe. Lytton Strachey's gay version of what he believes Voltaire wanted us to think.
No, the joke is and the point--that for people of their pretensions, they show as strange a set of intellectual limitations as any of the people they have held up to scorn. A work that needed doing, it was sometimes exquisitely done, but once out of their skillful hands, where has it got us?
To the debunking campaign; which began as art, began as history; became a game, became a vulgar game. Very quickly this has happened. Already the original players and spectators are tired of it, tired and a little ashamed. A decadence moreover, inherent and discernible, from the very first. Aldous Huxley's analysis of Pascal will add nothing to his fame.18 Other Christians have been sick men and out of love with the world--without being Pascals. As to St. Francis, it would take some doing to find a man, by temperament as much as by training, as unable as he to appreciate the Umbrian saint.

Yet "in Bloomsbury" such variety of experience could hardly be called the spice of life. A very fine epicureanism, all the advantages of the cloister with none of its disadvantages, at least in the old exclusive days, was the note of existence there. An eclecticism which, at least when I knew it, had almost perfected itself; and which of all systems imposes the most obvious restraints. For if you are to taste everything, you have rarely time to sit down to a long meal.
In effect their discipline of life was strict, every aspect of existence, war, sport, physical adventure, mystery, passion, even the delights of strictly fashionable life, all liable to interfere, and all implicitly banned.
By inclination--certainly. Yet, except perhaps for the last, in theory liberty was allowed. Only, such a return [to what] they, bless their hearts, believed to be the late eighteenth century, very soon, as the Caliph's Designer lost no opportunity to point out, presented them to the public eye as people as much under a glass case as any of their own fruit.
"Only pretending to be a bee." The fun of it. Or is it finally fun, when the genuine bee, or perhaps the wasp, sits down on you? As one has tried to say before, one does not suppose that any simple person who has ever been in contact, has not at moments longed to hurl them into life--into the sweat and heartbreak of things, see them at Deauville or the Derby or the Devil. (Or, equally, give them a taste in action of the revolution they play with on paper, that some of them were, at least, so elaborately prepared to welcome here.)
However they persuade themselves, [they would be] the very first people to be "liquidated" is I think the word, if the Commissars from Glasgow got going, and the bloody wheel one has watched turning down all history, here in England begins to burn and spin.
Infinitely too intelligent not to know this, amply courageous to die with elegance and wit. Yet to conclude, surely the demand that the common intelligence of our time would make on them is to ask: "You who know so much, can say it so well, is there nothing more you can do for us?"
Ever more clear, sharp, and deep with an abyss between, shows the double alignment of western society. It has become a cliché to say that our civilisation is on its trial. Who knows enough, who writes well enough to give life to that commonplace? Who has sufficient belief? And in what?
Threatened, challenged, in deadly danger--as it has not been since the classic Empire fell before the Barbarians. Who will warm the knowledge of this to life and illuminate it by their intellect? Who might have the courage to scrap all they have hitherto held, for the intelligence's sake?
 Have they not wit enough to prevent so disagreeable a conclusion, for themselves, as well as for us all?
One is doubtful. Because to become what they have become they have lost--what, to win again, T. S. Eliot had to endure, all that went to the making of "Ash Wednesday." "Ash Wednesday" after "The Waste Land." The thing that always gets lost when men set themselves to live as they have lived as Olympians playing, yet uncertain of the validity or the origin of their power. The quality we call among other things Simplicity of mind, by which alone values are preserved, by which alone the intelligence, out of the mixed heap of virtù we call the good life, knows how to pick out the stone of great price.
Civilisation is their business. They have made it so. From them its Enemy, the Enemy, theirs and the world's, and the Enemy of Wyndham Lewis, the old Enemy of Intellectual Love, one of whose creatures they are, might get its quietus. Or it might not.
One wishes to hear their answer.
One wishes they knew it.
Mary Butts (1890-1937) was a distinguished writer of modernist fiction. Camilla Bagg is her daughter. Nathalie Blondel is the Mary Butts Research Fellow Lecturer at the University of The West of England, Bristol. She has recently published Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life (McPherson & Co., 1998) and is currently editing Mary Butts's journals.
1. The opera-ballet Prince Igor, by Alexander Borodin and Sergei Diaghilev, was first performed in London in June 1914, and revived in November 1918 after the end of the Great War. The Coliseum, constructed in 1904, was then the largest and most luxurious music hall in the world; throughout the 1920s it also provided a venue for more serious performances.
2. Strachey's Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto and Windus) was published in June, 1918.
3. Clive Bell, the husband of Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa, published the classic formulation of Bloomsbury aesthetics, Art (London: Chatto and Windus) in 1913. It was reprinted numerous times throughout the 1920s.
4. Aldous Huxley published Leda (London: Chatto and Windus) in 1920 and Antic Hay (London: Chatto and Windus) in 1923. The quotation is from Christopher Marlowe and serves as the epigraph to Antic Hay.
5. J. W. (John Williams) Dunne was the author of An Experiment with Time (London: A & C. Black, 1927), one of many popularizing accounts that explored the philsophical implications of Einsteinian physics.
6. St. John Hutchinson (1884-1942) was a barrister, supporter of the arts, and prominent critic. His wife Mary had a long affair with Clive Bell and both were notable res in the Bloomsbury circles.
7. Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) studied at the Slade Art College in London, then lived for several years in Paris before returning to London in 1910. After working briefly in 1913 in the Omega craft workshop which Roger Fry had founded, Lewis rebelled against his influence and aesthetics. He edited two issues of the journal Blast in 1914 and 1915, and published The Caliph's Design in 1919 (London: Egoist Press), his most sustained critique of Bloomsbury aesthetics. In the 1920s he withdrew from painting and wrote numerous works of critical prose and several novels, including The Childermass (New York: Covici-Friede Publishers, 1928) and The Apes of God (London: Arthur Press, 1930), a roman à clef which contains many characters based on members of the Bloomsbury group.
8. Duncan Grant (1892-1978) was a minor painter closely associated with Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell.
9. T. S. Eliot founded The Criterion in 1922 and continued to publish it until 1939. It typically had some 600 subscribers.
10. Oliver Strachey (1894-1957) was a cryptographer and a brother of Lytton Strachey. Montague Shearman (1885-1932) was a barrister, civil servant, and art collector.
11. Galsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862-1932) taught at King's College, Cambridge, and strongly influenced the Bloomsbury group. He was a historian and philsophical writer. Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) also taught at Cambridge, at Newnham College; a classical scholar and the first woman to teach at Cambridge, her two books on ancient Greek religion, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Relgion and Themis had a great influence on E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, as well as Mary Butts. Edward Dent (1876-1957) was a musicolgist and translator of Mozart's operas. Julian Huxley (1887-1975) was the elder brother of the novelist and a biologist whose essays were much esteemed. James Strachey, another brother of Lytton Strachey, was a psychoanalyst and the chief translator of Freud's works into English; his wife, Alix Strachey (1892-1973) was also a pyschoanalyst and translator.
12. John Middleton Murry (1889-1957) was the husband of Katherine Mansfield and edited The Athenaeum. The rivalry between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf meant that his affiliation with Bloomsbury was very brief.
13. Arthur David Waley (1889-1966) was an orientalist and translator of Chinese poetry. Desmond McCarthy (1877-1952) edited the journal Life and Letters. David Garnett (1892-1981), a minor member of the Bloomsbury group, who ran a bookshop and published deluxe editions during the 1920s.
14. Angus Davidson (1898-1980) was a writer and biographer; his brother Douglas was a painter. Ray (Rachel) Strachey (1887-1940), another sister of Lytton Strachey, published Group Movements in the Past and Experiments in Guidance in 1927 (London: Faber and Faber); it consisted of extracts from the papers of her grandmother, Hannah Whitall Smith, which concerned, as the title page put it, "curious religious sects."
15. Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was an historian who wrote on the evolution of religion in Western culture; Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948) a prolific writer on religious and existential themes; Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), the well known Catholic philosopher.
16. R. Ellis Roberts (1870-1953) was a writer and editor who took an interest in Mary Butts's work and corresponded with her during the 1930s.
17. Charles Williams (1886-1943) was a novelist and editor in whose work Mary Butts took an active interest during the 1930s.
18. Aldous Huxley published an essay on Blaise Placal, "One and Many," in Do What You Will (London: Chatto and Windus,1929).
.
It is difficult today to project oneself from the tenebrous era of the univers concentrationnaire, with its accompanying esthétique of epigones, to that period of felicity and effervescence in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when writers of the Anglo-American literary colony in Paris competed with their French contemporaries in imagining new mental landscapes, in an atmosphere of complete intellectual liberty. We seem now to have been living in a golden age of the logos. Many of us had taken refuge from the bleakness of the Volstead regime in the more friendly climate of Montparnasse and Montmartre, and we were hell-bent on discovering new continents of the mind as well. Daring experimentation with words, colors and sounds was the chief preoccupation of an intercontinental avant-garde that extended across continents and did not pause until that day in 1929 when Wall Street "laid its historic egg." Most of the British and Americans went home then, but a few die-hards remained until the Nazis' attempt to conquer the Occident.
In the late fall of 1926, I began preparations to launch the review the following spring. I needed an editorial assistant, and had the names of several newspapermen then living in Paris under consideration. Elliot Paul seemed my best choice and I decided to invite him to join me. He gave enthusiastic acquiescence to the plan, which included a small salary that permitted him to quit newspaper work entirely and devote himself exclusively to the task. He came to our apartment in the rue Valentin-Huy every day, and we began to discuss details with growing excitement. After a few weeks, having outgrown our dining-room table, Paul and I hired a room in a modest hotel on the Place des Invalides, where we hung out the transition shingle. Our "offices," as Paul used to call our cluttered-up ex-bedroom (complete with all French plumbing-fixtures), were eventually to become the mecca of numerous manuscript-laden "exiled" writers from every state in the Union.
For some months the problem of a name troubled us, and numerous suggestions were weighed and rejected. For a time "Bridge" and "Continents" seemed to be the favorites. Then Edwin Muir's collection of essays appeared in London, and the title struck our fancy. We finally settled upon this same title, because it seemed best to symbolize the epoch. I insisted, however, that it be printed with a lower case "t." As an old newspaperman, I knew that the critics would give it a howling reception, and anyway it was the fashion among many continental "little magazines" of the day.
Sherwood Anderson came to Paris that winter, and we were happy to see him again. I met him at the Gare du Nord, and a news story I wrote about him brought many requests for interviews from the French press. But Sherwood did not really like Paris.
He knew no French and felt ill at ease in consequence, for he was essentially the Middle Western type, and it irked him that he should not be able to talk to the workers of Paris in their native argot. I can still see him standing at a little bar where he had invited some workers for a drink, smiling and trying with gestures to approach their minds. He was a frequent visitor in our house, and he also saw a good deal of his old friend Gertrude Stein, concerning whose peculiarities he entertained us. "Use your head, Sherwood," she would say to him, whenever he lazily played with some Middle Western "notion" of his. One day he arranged to bring Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas to our home. At his insistence, Maria sang some of the American songs he had liked to hear in New Orleans. Miss Stein seemed pleased, although I doubt if her interest in music was more than platonic. With Virgil Thomson, who was also present, the conversation turned to the Gregorian chant, Antheil, Milhaud and Honegger. It was not a wholly successful evening. It constituted, however, an accurate review of our future relationship with Miss Stein, which was also to be never wholly successful.
Editing the review seemed to entail such an alarming amount of social activity, that we decided to look for a place outside the capital, preferably well in the country. When we heard of an old house for rent in the Haute Marne, near Chaumont, we decided to make a tour of inspection and invited the Andersons to join us. After a three-hour train-ride we arrived in an ancient, almost abandoned village called Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, and put up at the only hotel in the place, the "Cheval Blanc." The "estate," which consisted of a roomy house and garden, surrounded by meadows and forests, had great charm. While we visited it in detail, Sherwood gossiped, or tried to gossip, with the villagers, especially the village belles, and seemed to derive much pleasure from the experience, despite linguistic difficulties. He was curious about their love affairs, their social relations, the harvest, anything they could tell of their lives, and he kept me busy translating back and forth. He was amused by the revelations of village customs which were told him without false modesty, and he enjoyed to the last drop the excellent near-Champagne wine of the region offered by M. Poulnot, the hotel proprietor. We liked Colombey-les-deux-Eglises and decided to rent it--for Fr. 4,000 a year. The move was planned for early spring.
I urged Sherwood to give us a manuscript for the review, but he firmly refused; perhaps he was a bit jealous of the Paris writers. Or was he afraid? I never knew. Paul and I were now in communication with writers in England, France, Germany and the United States. We went through countless manuscripts in French, English and German, and began to translate pieces not only from these languages, but, with the aid of experts, from Spanish, Russian and Yugoslav as well. We went to the Shakespeare Bookshop in the rue de l'Odéon and asked Sylvia Beach to speak in our favor to James Joyce. This she very kindly did and within a few days, overjoyed, we held in our hands a bulky manuscript bearing the title "Work in Progress."
One Sunday afternoon, at the end of 1926, Joyce invited Miss Beach, Mlle. Monnier, Paul, Maria and myself to his home in the Square Robiac, to listen to him read from the opening pages of his manuscript, which was subsequently to appear in the first issue of transition. He read in a well-modulated, musical voice, and often a smile went over his face when he reached a particularly witty passage. We were staggered by the revolutionary aspect of this fragment. After he had finished, he asked each one of us separately: "What do you think of it?" There was little to be said; it was obvious that we were faced with a unique literary work, one before which all critical canons would have to be abandoned. For Joyce had apparently found a solution to his language problem that was essentially his own, a solution that was also exclusively applicable to the English language, to which he gave a polysynthetic quality. We knew that while the technique of the "interior monologue" or "stream of consciousness," used in Ulysses, had found a number of supporters (and imitators), the new work, which was based rather on the canon of the "stream of unconsciousness," would in all probability find few sympathizers. We nevertheless had complete faith in the ultimate value of the work, and were proud to contribute in a modest way to its unfolding.
Paul was in constant contact with Gertrude Stein, who let him see a batch of her manuscripts that had been gathering dust in her rue de Fleurus home. I never shared Paul's enthusiasm for the repetitiveness of Gertrude Stein's writings, but I did not oppose publishing them, because she, too, was experimenting with language.
I myself was in touch with the Surrealists and Paul Eluard gave me not only his own poems for translation, but poems by other Surrealist friends as well. One of these, Marcel Noll, an old Strasbourg friend who had just been appointed director of the new "Galerie Surréaliste," let me have reproductions of Tanguy, Miro, Arp, Picasso, Ernst and others. The writers and artists of the Surrealist group were at that time under orders from Breton not to collaborate with any French review other than their own, La Révolution Surréaliste, and it was something of a triumph, therefore, when in 1927 transition published the Surrealists--many years before they became the fashion in New York and London. In fact, a proposed anthology to be composed of translations of Surrealist prose and poetry, with illustrations by the painters and sculptor identified with the movement, was turned down by a number of New York publishers when they were approached by Maria in 1928. "Nobody would be interested," was the invariable reply.
Archibald MacLeish, Raymond Larsson, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, Matthew Josephson, Ludwig Lewissohn were among the many American writers who gave us manuscripts without hesitation. Their work, however, differed from the French orientation, for it contained a kind of American expressionism, a humanistic quality that was lacking in the cerebral torridity of the French writing of that epoch. There were indeed no Surrealist tendencies evident in American writing during those years. It was all the more interesting, as time went on and Breton's doctrines became known, to see the results of this excursion away from literary isolationism on the part of a whole generation of U.S. writers. Among the German expressionist works which had by then more or less dropped into oblivion, I chose "Busekow," by Carl Sternheim, and a short story by Gottfried Benn. I dictated the translation of Sternheim's psychological study of a Berlin policeman to Paul, who took it down on the typewriter, while we both laughed hilariously.
It so happened that a few months before our review appeared, Ezra Pound started his new review, Exile. He wrote us from Rapallo, where he was then living, that if he had known that Paul and I were planning a review, he would never have burdened himself with the ungrateful task. His review, I believe, lasted only three numbers.
Finally, all the translations were made, the original texts were carefully checked, and the whole manuscript was in the printers' hands. In a state of nervous excitement we awaited the result of our effort, for we were planning to bring out the first number in February 1927. But just here something happened that seemed of almost saturnine origin and which, in any case, proved to be prophetic of the stormy career that lay ahead of our revolutionary magazine.
One grey, wind-blustery day, Paul and I went to the Gare des Invalides to entrain for the town of Mayenne, where we were to supervise the make-up of the first issue directly in the print-shop. We stopped by our "offices"--our room in the little Hotel de la Gare des Invalides--to pick up whatever mail might be there. We found a letter from an American poet angrily withdrawing his contribution because, in our advance announcement, we had inadvertently printed his name in what he felt to be an inferior and therefore unflattering position. Since his poem was to be printed in the first number, this manifestation of wounded amour propre upset us considerably. Before taking the train, I hurried to a nearby telegraph office and wired the irate poet our regret and the pious hope that he would reconsider his decision. Arrived in Mayenne, we found a wire from him, liquidating the difficulty. Finally we were ready to go ahead.
Mayenne is a quiet old town in Normandy, about ten hours away from Paris. Immediately upon arrival we installed ourselves in the office of the print-shop, where we began to read final proof. The excellent cider of the region soon found two eager amateurs, and the three days we spent in the town remain among my happiest memories. Finally, everything seemed to be in order, and we gave the bon à tirer--the signal for the printer to go ahead. I returned to Paris, and took the next train to Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, where we had moved a week earlier. While waiting for the first number to appear, I welcomed the pastoral quiet of our new home. It soon became evident, however, that this quiet would be only relative.
First there was Gertrude Stein. A few hours after we had received our advance copy of the review, a special-delivery letter arrived. Maria and I were already in a rather disappointed state, for we felt we might have done better; we even criticized the number rather harshly, and were discussing the elimination of certain defects we had noticed. But Miss Stein had another complaint: one of the pages of her contribution entitled, ironically enough, "An Elucidation," which was to have explained her technique in her own style, had been printed in the wrong place, thus creating a certain confusion; oh quite a disarray! Her letter was virulent enough and demanded a rectification. I got hold of Paul by telephone and we agreed that we would try to print a correction; but this proved technically difficult and we finally decided to order a special reprint of her entire contribution, to be inserted in the number as a supplement. This involved considerable expense. However, Gertrude Stein was propitiated. The supplement had quite a success later on, and critics in England and America seized upon the whole incident as an excellent theme for spoofing both author and editors.
The second number appeared, and the third. We were quite astonished to realize that the review was being discussed, criticized, vilified, admired. From England, Ireland, the United States, South Africa, India, Australia came reactions of every shade of opinion. We were frequently amused by the violence of the echoes, for we had expected a very small group of readers, and were suddenly confronted with the necessity of ourselves taking our mad effort more seriously than we had at first anticipated. The bookshop demand was growing rapidly.
To me, transition was not only a workshop, but a kind of higher journalism, a simultaneous attempt to report to the English-speaking world the main intellectual movements of the continent, and to introduce to European readers the work of English-language writers. And since I felt that realism, imagism, the photographic, had become the chief enemies of the modern creator, I posited as my main objective the dictum of a "transformation of reality." In my manifesto, "Suggestions for a New Magic," published in Number 3, 1927, I stated: "We need new words, new abstractions, new hieroglyphics, new symbols, new myths . . ." This was my guide-post throughout the transition decade. I wanted to encourage the creation of a modern romanticism, a pan-romantic movement in literature and the arts.
For this reason I welcomed individual Surrealist contributions, from the beginning until the last issue in 1928; and, in fact, transition was the first review to present Surrealist poems, texts, dreams, etc. in English; the first non-French review to reproduce photos of Surrealist and abstract objects and paintings. Not that I was ever a member of the Surrealist clan, but I sympathized with André Breton's early efforts, with his discovery of the "Surrealist text" in the Champs Magnétiques (written collectively by him and Philippe Soupault), with his discovery of automatic writing as a possible basis of a new type of literary creation. To be sure, he deviated from his first idea often enough, and I made it plain by the end of 1927 that I was violently opposed to the political aberrations of Surrealism--that I was chiefly interested in its neo-idealistic tendencies. Surrealism as a post-romantic manifestation has today become a world movement. But when I knew it first, it was confined to limited circles, even in Paris. It was transition that made it known to the Anglo-American world.
I myself had been under the neo-romanticist influence of Surrealism since 1924, and had trained myself in the notation of my dreams. I kept a notebook on my night-table and after a while was able to note down, even in the dark, the images that I had experienced, each time I awoke. I filled many of these books with sketches written in various languages. I saw that in nocturnal life there was a new life, that there were juxtapositions of which the waking life was apparently unaware. The most heterogeneous images were tumbled together and became friendly and coherent. Many of these dream and day-dream sketches were included later in my book, I Have Seen Monsters and Angels.
At that time the Breton-Soupault experiment was the sensation of Paris. Many young poets used it and finally developed into a poncif--a stereotyped system. Aragon, then a member of the Surrealist group, explained it in his "A Wave of Dreams," published in the magazine Commerce, in the following manner:
What strikes the writer is that he seems to possess a power he did not know he had, an incomparable ease, a liberation of the spirit, a production of images without precedent, and his writings assume a supernatural quality. He recognizes in everything that thus emerges from him--without feeling in any way responsible for it--all the incomparable qualities of the few books, the few words that still move him.
Some years later Aragon renounced all this and joined the Communist party. A strange evolution for an idealist, even for a nominalist mystic!
Being at that time more or less swept up into the Surrealist avalanche, I witnessed a number of public manifestations organized by Breton. Among others I was present at the "Vieux Colombier" theater when the Surrealists forgathered to boo a matinée poétique featuring a recital of de Musset and other poets of his type. It should be added that de Musset was their bête noire, as he had been that of Rimbaud. In the midst of a grandiloquent reading of the pseudo-romantic poet's works by an effeminate-looking gentleman, Breton rose and shouted: "C'est une saloperie!. . ." At this point there began a wild scramble to the stage. Benjamin Peret shouted imprecations, while Eluard climbed on a chair and began to harangue the fevered crowd of society ladies and gentlemen whose mild enjoyment of "poetry" was being so rudely interrupted. The management called for police protection, and in the midst of the greatest excitement, Breton, Eluard, Peret and others were conducted to a nearby police station. There they were booked on the egregious charge of bagarre entre intellectuels. A few telephone calls to certain of their friends in the Ministry of the Interior brought about their liberation several hours later.
As our task grew heavier, we began to look for an editorial assistant, and I decided to engage Robert Sage, a young American writer also working with the Chicago Tribune, for the position. Paul, Sage and I used to meet in one or the other of the left-bank cafés we had chosen as annex, and it was during one of these discussions that we tried out Breton's technique of automatic writing as it had been explained by Soupault. We soon began to try our hand at composing collective poems in prose, stemming directly from the unconscious, and felt exhilarated by the boldness of the images, and the liberation of the imagination that resulted. There was no doubt that here was a method worthy of the age of psychoanalysis; a method which would still need the curbing hand of critical reason, but which opened up new and unsuspected veins of wealth to the poet.
The importunities of would-be contributors in Paris, added to the need to economize, soon drove us completely to Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, and by the early summer of 1927 practically all the editorial work was being done from there, leaving only the "office" in Paris.
The Colombey house was a large, rambling affair, covered with ivy, and isolated from the country road by a high wall. Lilac-trees were in bloom along the wall when we arrived, and we could look from there into a far land of rye and clover waving in the wind. A beautiful, wild park surrounded the house, and below it was a hillock covered with furze and fern. Beyond the fields lay a tangled, mysterious forest called la Forêt de la lune, in which big game was abundant. At night the inn-keeper's wife watched stout-heartedly for wild boars, of which she usually managed to shoot one specimen during the season. The peasants, who called this country la Champagne Pouilleuse (to distinguish it from the real Champagne country, contiguous to it), still lived in a machineless age. They cultivated their fields and vineyards with the same stubborn love of the loam which their ancestors had shown, and their meager existence was made more difficult through the fact that most of the younger men and girls had left the village to seek less monotonous work in the cities. They made a wine from local vineyards which I always thought was as good as any of the better known white wines. Their rather hard, Eastern patois reminded me of that spoken in nearby Lorraine.
Tranquil weeks at the "Boisserie," our hermitage! Paul would come down from the nerve-mad city to meditate and prepare new issues of transition with me. He liked to stay with us in this pastoral quiet, but never for very long, for he was restless and led a somewhat complex personal life that often made it necessary for him to return to Paris on very short notice. Other friends came for weekends: Philippe and Marie-Louise Soupault, Stuart and Moune Gilbert, Robert and Maeve Sage, Whit Burnett and Martha Foley, Carl and Lydia Einstein, Harry and Caresse Crosby, and others, joined us in our rustic retreat, in order to forget for a while the dynamo-whirl of the Capital. We were told that Clémenceau used to visit there as the guest of a friend, before 1914; and a curious quirk of fate was the fact that after our final departure, in late 1929, the place was sold to a French colonel named Charles de Gaulle.
This old house, which was conceived originally as a hunting-lodge by the wealthy nineteenth-century merchant who built it, had had a somewhat lurid existence: in 1917-18 it housed American troops who left their names and drawings on the attic wall; from 1927 till 1929 it housed ourselves, our growing family, and transition; in 1940 it was confiscated by the Vichy government as being the home of France's first resistant, and during the second war it was occupied by German troops. Today, it has become the little Versailles of the Gaullist movement, the goal of all new recruits to the R.P.F. (Rassemblement du Peuple Français), the center from which their leader launches most of his political statements.
For the most part we were not interested in social problems, in economics, or in any particular political complex. We thought of our t as good, clean aesthetic fun, nothing else. We baited the Babbit with monstrous paradoxes, we prodded him with topsy-turvy asseverations. We saw ourselves as modern barbarians who did not hesitate to shout their nervous prejudices into the faces of well-to-do, streamlined, shallow minds. We were rebels against everything that did not participate in flights of wild, burning imagination. We were the romantics of the twentieth century, launched on voyages of discovery.
James Joyce was our bellwether. In his "Work in Progress" he was building a colossal elegy to the night-mind, a creation in which the ancestral night was wedded to the individual, modern night in grandiose transformations. We lived in this night-world of his in which he was transmuting not only the myth of Finn Macool, but all myths. At his side we felt no fear in our own pilgrimage through the Nox, in the walk from dusk to dawn.
Around us were French poets who were also in love with the night, for Breton was leading his little band toward what he called "magical Surrealist art," and a revival of interest in the dream and everything connected with the nocturnal processes of the unconscious was the result. He even went so far as to dig up certain early "black" romantic writers, such as Raabe, Borel, and von Arnim, whom he proposed as models to his disciples. Although all the Surrealists were conscious of this nocturnal universe, this was particularly true of Antonin Artaud, Paul Eluard, and Robert Desnos.
I myself tried independently to revive interest in the "white" romantic poet Novalis, and translated for transition his Hymns to the Night, with a short preface of my own. I also published a pamphlet entitled The Language of Night, in which I sought to analyze Novalis's vision of night and his expression of that vision. My translation of poems by Hölderlin, written while the poet was living in a state of mental alienation, was a further attempt to place transition at the service of "white" as opposed to "black" romanticism.
Meanwhile I continued to study the writings, not only of Freud, but of all his group, and in the review Imago, as well as in the Psychoanalytische Rundschau, I found many possible applications to the creative processes. Stekel's studies in psychic criminology interested me particularly, and I asked myself if the curiosity concerning Sade evinced by some of the younger Frenchmen, as well as their predilection for crime novels and crimes tout court, did not indicate that the taste for cruelty went well beyond the limits of the criminal unconscious. The "diabolical principle" which had undoubtedly inspired Lautréamont's work, for instance, was certainly part of our own mental heritage. It could be found in many of Baudelaire's lines, and Edgar Allan Poe's necrophilia offered another example, as did certain works of Barbey d'Aurévilly, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and others. Les Contes cruels had their prolongation in most of the early Surrealist writings, as well as in those which this group recommended for study. The French words supplice, viol, délire, ivresse, volupté, assumed a significance for us that the English equivalents did not possess. We were living in a world of sorcellerie.
This preoccupation with the night-mind elicited a violent onslaught against transition from the British writer, Wyndham Lewis, father of the vorticist movement. Lewis published two books--Time and Western Man and The Diabolical Principle--in which he grew nearly hysterical about transition's efforts. He denounced the review as a Surrealist challenge to modern letters, forgetting that it published, as well, expressionist, dadaist and futurist writers. He attacked particularly James Joyce, who replied in his "Work in Progress" with an Aesopian allegory, "The Ondt and the Gracehoper." Meanwhile, Paul, Sage and I also engaged in a somewhat ironic and acrid debate with "The Enemy," as Lewis called himself. We pointed out that transition was not a Surrealist organ, but had published some of these writers because they were allies in the pan-romantic battle. I had written an essay in transition, "Enter the Imagination," in which I analyzed the Maldoror by Lautréamont from my own personal and somewhat theological standpoint. I pointed out that the "diabolical principle" inherent in Lautréamont's monologues had its genesis in religious perversion. The Promethean revolt, I wrote, was evident in this poem. I asserted that there was a spiritual element in his frenzy of agnostic and bestial imagery. I could have added that he had such distinguished precursors as Milton and Dante. Lewis pounced on the term "diabolical principle," which he used as the title of his new book, making it the point of departure for a virulent denunciation of the entire transition direction.
Mayenne, where the first three issues were printed, was in Normandy, and we were now living in the heart of the East, at the other end of France. It became necessary, therefore, to look for a new printer. In our antique Ford, we decided to scour the villages and towns of Haute Marne in search of one. We first tried Langres, the attractive medieval town beyond Chaumont. We next tried Chaumont itself. But the print-shops in both towns were unsatisfactory. We finally discovered an excellent printer in the industrial town of St. Dizier, at the other end of the Département. The print-shop of M. André Brulliard became our headquarters until the review was temporarily suspended, in 1930.
Many European writers, especially those of the advance-guard, were published in transition. We had our own team of translators, for I regarded this as an essential feature of the mediatory action of my early conception. During the first year, transition published Franz Kafka, in a translation, made by myself, of his short story "The Sentence." Unless I am mistaken, this was his introduction to Anglo-American readers. As the years went on, his grotesque and anguished narratives continued to appear in the review, the last of them being "Metamorphosis," which we published in 1938. transition can probably justly claim, therefore, to have fathered the interest in Kafka's work which has since swept the Anglo-American world.
In addition to numerous writers of continental Europe, chosen from the expressionist, dada and Surrealist camps, transition gave many young and older writers of the English-speaking world an opportunity to present not only their finished work, but also their experimental efforts. Sylvia Beach was our Paris representative, and Frances Steloff's "Gotham Book Mart" acted as our American agency. During the first year I was extremely busy, for I had not yet finished my French anthology of American poets. I also undertook for Joyce the rather arduous task of reading proof on the German version of Ulysses.
For several days each month, St. Dizier became our temporary headquarters. Paul and I installed ourselves in a little room put at our disposal by the printer, which we did not leave until the bon à tirer was given. The Bruillard print-shop had been in the same family for many generations, and a leisurely, paternalistic system prevailed there. All the printers were French, which of course complicated matters considerably, and our special foreman--a wizened little man named Monsieur Noël whom Paul dubbed "Father Christmas"--was always worrying about the numerous changes we often had to make at the last minute.
As a rule things went smoothly enough until the final proofs of James Joyce's "Work in Progress" came from Paris. A first proof, in overlarge type, had already been set up, on which additions were made in Paris by Joyce. He then sent this back to "St. Dizzier" (as he called it), in a condition that more resembled an esoteric scroll than typesetter's copy. At this stage of the work, Joyce's friends were usually enlisted for the task of deciphering the many notebooks in which, for years, he had been jotting down his bold inventions. Stuart Gilbert, Giorgio Joyce, the latter's wife Helen, Elliot Paul, Padraic Colum, Thomas McGreevy, Samuel Beckett, Paul Léon, Maria and myself all shared in this task. The proofs went back and forth, each time with new inventions, until the pages had often doubled in number. For Joyce would improvise whenever something particularly interesting occurred to him during the reading, and occasionally even allow a coquille--a typographical error--to stand, if it seemed to satisfy his encyclopedic mind, or appeal to his sense of the grotesque hazard. Often, however, his last-minute additions really taxed the patience of the excitable Monsieur Noël. "Joyce, alors!" he would shout, while the editors kept discreetly silent. Joyce chuckled when I told him that his name was being used as an objurgation.
Once, I remember, I had just finished reading the last page of final proof and had given orders to go ahead with the printing. Although somewhat exhausted, I felt happy at the thought that another number was ready to appear. I dropped in at the nearby "Café du Commerce" to join Paul, who was already ensconced before a shimmering glass of what he had baptized an "ironworker's cocktail." (This invention of Paul's consisted, if I remember rightly, of generous portions of cognac, rum, armagnac, champagne, and a dash of Alsatian kirsch, and was guaranteed to create at last a temporary dionysian ecstasy.) As we settled back comfortably, the telephone rang. An excited voice announced that a heavy special-delivery letter from Paris had just arrived for us at the print-shop. Joyce wanted to make further additions, one of them probably the longest he had yet invented: an onomatopoeia of over fifty letters expressing collective coughing in a church during a sermon. It was included.
In Paris, Joyce, who was then living in the Square Robiac, also on the Left Bank, would sometimes climb the four flights of stairs to our office, to talk with "his editors" about "Work in Progress." He was very anxious to have people like the work, and seemed astonished that the first reactions were for the most part negative in tone. He would look carefully over the list of our subscribers in France, England, ireland and the United States, and sometimes suggest names for circularizing. One visit I particularly remember was the occasion of Marshal Foch's funeral. Joyce stood for a long time at the window, field-glasses in hand, profoundly engrossed by the spectacle of the procession of dignitaries leaving the Invalides. A mythological version of the funeral of another "great man," H.C.E., was incorporated into "Work in Progress" shortly afterwards.
At Joyce's suggestion, Paul wrote an interpretative article about "Work in Progress" for transition, and I followed with another. We then decided to ask other sympathizers with the new work to contribute further essays, and thus published a number of articles on the subject by writers of several nationalities, among whom were Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage, and William Carlos Williams. Some time later, Sylvia Beach brought out those essays in book form, under the title Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress--a title which, needless to say, was suggested by Joyce himself. In addition to the transition essays, this volume contained an unsigned article which was included in order that, symbolically, the "disciples" or "apostles" might be twelve.
During the summer of 1927, Joyce had let me read his entire manuscript. It was not more than 120 pages long, and had been written, he said, over a period of five weeks during a stay on the Riviera in 1922. Yet it was already complete in itself, organically compressed, containing the outline of the entire saga. Even the title had been chosen, he indicated, but only he and Mrs. Joyce knew it. It was still a primitive version, to which he had begun to add numberless paragraphs, phrases and individual words. In a moment of confidence he told me something about the genesis of the idea. His friend and admirer, Miss Harriet Weaver who, some years before, like a Maecenas of other days, had made it possible for the struggling writer to be freed of financial worry, had asked him one day with what book he was planning to follow Ulysses. He replied now that Ulysses was out, he considered himself as a man without a job: "I am like a tailor who wants to try his hand at making a new-style suit," he continued. "Will you order one?" Some weeks later Miss Weaver handed him a pamphlet written by a village priest, that contained a description of a giant's grave discovered in a parish lot.  she asked. It was the giant's narrative that ultimately became the story of Finn Macool, or Finnegans Wake.
The first issues of transition containing installments of what was then known as "Work in Progress" (Joyce told me that his provisional title was the invention of Ford Madox Ford, who had previously published a fragment in his transatlantic review) created a fanfare of sensational outbursts in many continents. For the most part, the confused critics in France, England and the United States simply snorted their violent disapproval. Miss Weaver herself was quoted as having expressed the fear that Joyce was wasting his genius, an incident which disturbed Joyce profoundly, for, after all, it was for her that the "tailor" was working. His French friend, Valéry Larbaud, said he regarded the work as a "divertissement philologique," and of no great importance in Joyce's creative evolution. H.G. Wells wrote that he still had a number of books to write and could not spare the time needed to decipher Joyce's experiment. Ezra Pound, after expressing the opinion that "Work in Progress" reminded him of a description of some venereal disease, advised him to put the manuscript into the family album together with his poems. This Joyce resented, and since Pound had only recently eulogized the poems of an American poet named Dunning, Joyce bought a copy of the book in question, to see what it was like. "If that's Pound's idea of poetry," he said to me, "I'm quite safe." As time went on, the reactions to "Work in Progress" became more and more vehement, and on the whole, journalistically stereotyped. Joyce continued working at his vision.
To those who knew him intimately during the late twenties, James Joyce was a man of great warmth and charm, although at first approach his personality could seem almost forbidding. As a point of fact, it always took him some time to accept easy comradeship in social intercourse. At first he appeared to be on his guard, an attitude that was particularly noticeable during the explosion of fame that followed the publication of Ulysses. Later, as his own personal tragedy deepened, a dour and almost inhuman passion seemed to impinge in all his outside relationships, and he was able to live in his cavern of despair with what appeared to be pitiless indifference to events that did not touch him directly or, through friends, indirectly. Once he had given his friendship, however, nothing could swerve him from his loyalty, and he was capable of extreme delicacy towards those he felt were his friends. He was never an ebullient man, and his moments of silence and introspection frequently weighed even on his immediate surroundings. Usually, however, there would finally come a festive pause, when he would begin to sing, or even dance, and on these occasions he frequently showed flashes of gaiety and wit that approached a kind of delirium.
I never knew Joyce to be an easy conversationalist. He had a tendency to rather monosyllabic utterances. Nor did he relish being questioned on any subject. Nevertheless, when he was in the mood, his conversation, couched in the mellifluous Dublin speech, was a ripple of illuminating ideas and words, and once he had left his anarchic, misanthropic isolation he could enjoy the companionship of his friends with a conviviality that brought out his essential nature. Above all, he eschewed esotericism. He was interested in human relations, human behavior, human thought and customs. His range of interests was a wide one: poetry prodigiously remembered and faultlessly recited; music and musicians, especially singing, of which his technical knowledge was astonishing; the theater, where his preferences went to Ibsen, Hauptmann, Scribe; the various liturgies; education; anthropology; philology; certain sciences, particularly physics, geometry and mathematics. He was little interested in pure politics or economics, although he followed events faithfully and his occasional barbed comments revealed complete awareness of all that was happening.
Back in Paris, I found Joyce still working on his magnum opus, but under great psychic difficulties. His daughter, a lovely, gifted girl in her early twenties, had begun to show alarming signs of mental derangement. There had always existed a great affection between the father and daughter, and her increasingly serious malady soon became a nightmare from which he could never free himself. Lucia, whose principal interest was the ballet, but who also had a sensitive talent for medieval illuminated lettering, had become engaged to a young friend of the family, and Joyce had arranged an informal celebration of the event. A few days later, however, after announcing that she would have to break the engagement, she began to talk irrationally and showed signs of aberration. At Joyce's request, Padraic and Mary Colum invited her to visit them, but they soon noticed that her case was much more serious that had at first been believed.
The sudden death of his father [in 1931], which had occurred only a few months previously, had also been a profound shock to Joyce. He had never made any secret of his deep affection for his father, and the autobiographical elements of his work reveal this in symbolical and mythological allusions. Ulysses was man in search of his father, and Finnegans Wake takes up this theme again in a different manner. In those days he dreamed much about him, and one evening he said to me: "I wonder where he is." Sometimes he would tell tales of his father's waggish wit. I remember one that concerned the old gentleman's reaction to the sketch made of him by Brancusi, and which consisted merely of a geometrical spiral study of the ear. "Well, Jim hasn't changed much," commented his father drily, when the portrait was shown him in Dublin.
I was preparing a new number of transition and had decided to pay homage to Joyce on his turning the half-century mark. Among other features, I had ordered a sketch to be made of him by the Spanish artist, César Abin. The result was an impressive study of a distinguished homme de lettres, with pen in hand and his own volumes reverentially piled beside him. But Joyce would have none of it, and insisted in giving the cartoonist precise instructions for the design and execution of the job.  For more than two weeks he kept making new suggestions, until he was at last satisfied. He asked to be drawn with a battered old derby hung with spider's webs and bearing a ticket on which should be inscribed the fatal number "13." He asked that a star be put on the tip of his nose, in memory of an English criticaster's description of him as "a blue-nosed comedian"; that his feet be suspended perilously over a globe labeled Ireland, on which only Dublin was visible; that he have patches on the knees of his trousers, that out of his pockets there should emerge the manuscript of a song entitled "Let me like a soldier fall." For his "luck," his "fate," had already started down the somber path it never left again. It was as though already at that time he had a premonition of the immense trials that lay before him.
Joyce's family life had always been a happy one, and his humor was a natural manifestation of this. Yet even then it was rather what André Breton has called somewhere "un humour noir." It had an Elizabethan tang and robustness. During the economic crisis, when even mirth-loving Paris began to assume a dreary face, Joyce celebrated, on the same day, his fiftieth birthday and the tenth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses. The two events were hardly noticed by the literary world, which was discovering social realism and considered Joyce outmoded. To mark this occasion we gave a small dinner at our home in Paris, attended by Thomas McGreevy, Samuel Beckett, Lucy and Paul Léon, Padraic and Mary Colum, Helen and Giorgio Joyce, and a few others. The birthday cake was decorated with an ingenious candy replica of a copy of Ulysses, in its blue jacket. Called out to cut the cake, Joyce looked at it a moment and said: "Accipite et manducate ex hoc omnes: Hoc est enim corpus meum." At table the talk turned to the subject of popular sayings. Someone expressed a suspicion of all of them and gave voice to his dislike for the adage "in vino veritas," which experience had shown him to be untrue and bromidic. Joyce agreed warmly, adding: "It should really be in riso veritas, for nothing reveals us as our laughter." He was always astonished that so few people commented on the comic element in his writings.
It was shortly after this event that he suggested we organize a bal de la purée (which is French for general insolvency), since the depression was beginning to be felt more and more. The party was held at our house, and we invited a number of friends, among whom was the operatic tenor, John Sullivan. For several years, Joyce had been urging all his friends to go to the opera and listen to what he considered the world's greatest tenor voice. Sullivan sang that night, and his powerful voice rang through the house, to the delight of all present. The gayest of the guests was Joyce himself, who finally inveigled all the ladies present into giving him first prize for his costume: that of an old Irish stage character, famous once as "Handy Andy."
The doctor advised Joyce to send Lucia to the mountains, and at his request we took her with us on a trip we had planned to Feldkirch, a little medieval town in Austria, near the Swiss border. Her parents remained in nearby Zurich, because it was the doctor's theory that Joyce's own tension might be partly responsible for her condition. And in fact, the mountain air and the isolation and quiet seemed for a while to do her good. She began to smile and took long walks, always accompanied by a nurse, however.
I was busy working, and looked forward to a fertile summer. One day there came a telephone call from Joyce, asking me to come to Zurich. I took the next train, and found him in great distress. He said that he had received a disturbing letter from his daughter and he wanted to know my impression. I told him I felt she was living a quiet life, but that her condition had not fundamentally changed. It was decided that Mrs. Joyce would accompany me to the Austrian town, and that he would follow later, which was done.
Now began a tragic period. Lucia's condition was worsening day by day, and both her parents were deeply grieved at the turn her health was taking. They were staying at a hotel in the center of town, while we had taken a little house nearby. Joyce seemed utterly bewildered by the blow which fate had struck him.
He had not been writing for some time, due partly to intense worry over his daughter's condition, but also to the general mood of inertia caused by the depression. So we took walks together along the swirling mountain river Ill, nearby, or we climbed the wooded hills. He had a love for mountains and rivers, because, he said, "they are the phenomena that will remain when all the peoples and their governments will have vanished." Yet he was not at all a nature romantic, but rather a man of the megalopolis.
Towards dusk, after a siesta, he would go walking again. Eight o'clock was the hour he had set himself many decades before as the time for his first glass of wine of the day. That summer he evolved a sort of ritual which, to me, had an almost grotesque fascination. At half past seven, he would suddenly race for the railroad station, where the famous Orient Express was due to stop for ten minutes each day. He would walk quietly up and down the platform. "Over there, on those tracks," he said one evening, "the fate of Ulysses was decided in 1915." He referred to the fact that in this very Austrian border-town he had almost been prevented by some jinx from crossing into Switzerland during the First World War. When the train finally came in, he would hurry to the nearest car in order to examine the French, German and Yugoslav inscriptions, and he felt for the embossed metal letters with the sensitive fingers of defective vision. Then he would ask me questions about the persons getting on or off the train, or he would listen to their conversations. In those moments his fine ear for dialectical nuances in German often astonished me. As the train continued on its way into the usually foggy night, he stood on the platform waving his hat, as if he had just bid godspeed to a dear friend. With eight o'clock approaching, he almost skipped back to the hotel, for his first draught of Tischwein--or, as Mrs. Joyce, who thought the drink of rather inferior quality, used to say, "dishwine."
We thus spent a month of idling and worry. Joyce talked about his Austrian days before the First World War, and Mrs. Joyce especially liked to reminisce about Trieste. She laughingly said she had loved Emperor Francis Joseph like a father, and Joyce expressed his conviction that the Austro-Hungarian federation had been one of the most efficacious political regimes of modern times. Lucia and her parents always spoke Italian among themselves, which gave our little party a multilingual ambience.
One day I told Joyce that I was preparing a new issue of transition, after having let almost a year go by without publishing anything. This acted as a fillip to him, and he began to write again, for he said he wanted to appear in the new issue. He attacked his work with almost savage energy. "How difficult it is to put pen to paper again," he said one evening. "Those first sentences have cost me much pain." But gradually he got the task in hand. This fragment was to be known later as "The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies." During the remaining months he wrote steadily on this fragment, in spite of his anxiety about the health of his daughter, and his own increasing nervousness. We worked in the afternoon at his hotel, and one day as I arrived there he handed me a closely-written foolscap sheet beginning with the words: "Every evening at lighting up o'clock sharp and until further notice. . . " which I typed for him. After a few pages had thus been transcribed, we began to look through the notebooks, and the additions, set down years ago for a still unwritten text, became more and more numerous. The manuscript grew to some thirty pages and was not yet finished.
Joyce never changed a word. There was in fact always a certain inevitability, an almost volcanic affirmativeness about his primal choice of words. He only added ceaselessly, like a worker in mosaic, enriching the original pattern with ever new inventions. His black notebooks had esoteric titles and signs which he used to indicate the various characters of his story. He had a special love for Earwicker, the hero of the book, and to my astonishment I noticed one day that the ancient arms of the town of Feldkirch had precisely the same sign as Earwicker. He smiled, when I called his attention to it; but he never seemed to be over-astonished at fantastic coincidences in his life.
"There really is no coincidence in this book," he said during one of our walks. "I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner . . . Every novelist knows the recipe . . . It is not very difficult to follow a simple, chronological scheme . . . But I am, after all, trying to tell the story of the Chapelizod family in a new way . . . Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of this book. . . Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death . . . There is nothing paradoxical about this . . . Only I am trying to tell my story on many planes . . . Did you ever read Laurence Sterne?"
We read together Goethe's account of his experiments with color, but he finally said he could use nothing from it. He was interested in a comic version of Leibniz's essay on theodicy, and he asked me to obtain from the local Jesuits, in charge of the famous Catholic preparatory school, "Stella Mautina," a certain Augustinian text. We discussed Vico's theory of the origin of language and the Viconian conception of the cyclical evolution of civilizations, born from each other like the phoenix from the ashes, haunted him. He began to speculate on the new physics, and the theory of an expanding universe. Sometimes while walking with him I was obsessed with the notion that he was not really in an Austrian town but in his native Dublin.
The children's game called "Devils and Angels" which is one of the themes of "Mime" riveted his attention for a long while. He read a number of gnostic books, and was interested in the Manichean idea of light and darkness. The news of the discovery in Egypt of an ancient Manichean text interested him. Besides the purely theological construction of the Irish game--which he remembered vividly having played in the streets of Dublin--he was bent on incorporating into the text children's games from many languages. In a kind of abstracted way, he sometimes watched our two little girls as they played in the garden of our house, and he did not fail to use one of their games and their Joycified names in his fragment.
The "Mime" was completed in Zurich, after our return there. In the late afternoon Joyce and I often took a motorboat for a ride on the lake. Or else we would go walking up hill to the zoo, where one evening he quoted to me the magnificent nocturne of Phoenix Park with the verbal magic of animal sounds dying off in the gathering night. He had just finished it, and he seemed to be pleased with the result. Joyce had a love for Zurich, its rivers and mountains, its lake, its well-ordered life. In the forenoon he liked to walk along the busy Bahnhofstraße, which runs from the railroad station to the lake. In those moments he was always very quiet and introspective and I remember that sometimes we would walk for an hour without either one of us saying a word.
He usually lunched at a vegetarian restaurant where vegetables were served camouflaged as meat dishes, which always amused him. He knew all the Swiss-German dishes and some of them he recommended heartily. But in the evening nothing could keep him from the "Kronenhalle," which he preferred to the more colorful "Zum Pfauen" that had been his Stammlokal during the First World War, and where he used to meet his friends. The "Kronenhalle" was near the lake, and its cuisine and cellar were excellent. He was very fond of the Swiss Fondant wine from the Valais, and rarely drank any other. He did not like to drink red wine, which he found "unpalatable." He used to say that white wine had an electric quality which all wine should have. In that we were thoroughly in agreement; all my life I have preferred white to red wine. His preferences were: Swiss Fondant, Alsatian Riesling or Traminer, Niersteiner or some acrid Moselle wine, French Chablis or Champagne nature.
Among Joyce's Swiss friends were, beside the Giedions, Professor Bernhard Fehr from Zurich University, Dr. Borach, one of his World War I English pupils. and Edmund Brauchbar, who had apparently served as model for the re of Bloom in Ulysses. With these friends Joyce never entirely lost a certain reserve which was so characteristic of him. I remember that during another of my visits with him in Zurich, the Neue Züricher Zeitung was publishing excerpts from Dr. Borach's diary, notations Borach had made of his conversations with his teacher during the World War, with verbatim quotations. Joyce was somewhat upset about this, since he did not like to be quoted for publication. He never gave an interview, and it used to be a source for amusement in Paris literary circles that even Frédéric Lefèvre, the demon interviewer of the Nouvelles Littéraires, was never able to batter down Joyce's resistance on this point. Joyce forgave Borach, however, for he had great loyalty to old friendships.
One day a British critic wrote that Joyce was trying to revive Swift's little language to Stella. "Not at all," was Joyce's comment, "I am using a Big Language." And he added: "I have discovered that I can do anything I want with language." His linguistic memory was extraordinary and he seemed to be constantly on the look-out, listening rather than talking. "Really, it is not I who am writing this crazy book," he said in a whimsical way. "It is you and you and you and that girl over there and that man in the corner." One day I found him in a Zurich tea-shop laughing quietly to himself. "Have you won the gros lot?" I asked. He explained that he had asked the waitress for a glass of lemon squash. The somewhat obtuse Swiss girl looked puzzled. Then she had an inspiration: "Oh, you mean Lebensquatsch?" she stammered. (Her German neologism might be translated by 'life's piffle'.) Joyce remembered all the scraps of conversations, the lopped-off syllables, pronounced in moments of inertia or fatigue, jeux de mots, alcoholically deformed words, slips of the tongue--all the verbal grotesques and fantasies which he heard said around him in unconscious moments.
Often he would give his friends strange, out-of-the-way books on science, philology, philosophy, theology, or psychology to read and ask them to extract such words--or ideas--from them as he could use in his work. Or else he would ask one of us to read the books aloud to him. I remember reading Mauthner's German volume on language to him, and he was much interested in certain of the conclusions which seemed to harmonize with his own. On these occasions he lay on a sofa, his thin legs tangled almost inextricably in the air, listening intently, making constant notes, jesting. He would thus extract numerous words which found their place somewhere in the vast pattern of his story.
Joyce had great dislike for ready-made phrases and particularly for much of the modern medical vocabulary. Whenever anyone in his presence used words from the psychological dictionary, he would become almost impatient, and with a certain insistence he usually succeeded in obtaining the same thing in other words. This was in line with his intellectual indifference to the psychoanalytical school of thinking. While in Zurich I read to him an article on Ulysses by Dr. Jung, but he felt it was unimportant. "The Rev. Dr. Jung," as he called the distinguished psychologist, seemed to him less a re to be reckoned with than Dr. Freud, whom he did not readily accept either, but whose pioneering genius he nevertheless admired.
Man's history, with its dreams, legends, myths, was the aim of the Joycean vision. Thus his language left the rules of logic to one side, although he always followed the conscious recorder. The usual meaning of words was destroyed by this revolutionary procedure. He was interested in a vast verbal metamorphosis, for his own construction of the history of mankind, with its repetitive cyclical return to eternal events, was being created in the panorama of the unconscious life. All linguistic borders had to be crossed in this progress towards a new universe. His new language must express night and sleep. Compared with this colossal attempt, the experiment of the Surrealists, who were also interested in digging into the nocturnal life, remains, to my mind, abortive. In this connection, Joyce was never interested in automatic writing. He was the rediscoverer of the great myths, and it was in a state of intense consciousness that he welded them "in the smithy of his soul."
During walks in Paris, we often talked about dreams. Sometimes I related to him my own dreams which, during the pre-war years, began to take on a strangely macabre and apocalyptic silhouette. He was always eager to discuss them, because they interested him as images of the nocturnal universe, though he was reluctant to attribute any transcendental or mystic function to them. He himself, he said, dreamed relatively little, but when he did his dreams were usually related to ideas, personal or mythical, with which he was occupied in his waking hours. He was very much attracted by Dunne's theory of serialism, and I read to him the author's brilliant An Experiment with Time which Joyce regarded highly. He told me one of his own dreams, in connection with which subsequent events seemed to confirm Dunne's serialistic conceptions. Joyce said he was walking through a big city and met three men who called themselves Minos, Eaque and Rhadamante. They suddenly stopped their conversation with him and became threatening. He had to run to escape from their screams of obloquy. Three weeks later I noticed a feature story in Paris-Soir to the effect that the police were looking for a crank who was sending explosives through the mail. This fanatic signed himself: Minos, Eaque, Rhadamante, the judges of Hell. One of Joyce's less complicated dreams, however, caused considerable chuckling each time he thought of it. This was a dream the climax of which was a vision of the titanic re of Molly Bloom, seated on the side of a high hill. "As for you, James Joyce, I've had enough of you," she shouted. His reply he never remembered.
His excellent knowledge of French, German, Greek and Italian stood him in good stead, and he was constantly adding to his stock of linguistic information by studying Hebrew, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Finnish and other tongues. At the basis of his vocabulary was also an immense command of Anglo-Irish words that only seem like neologisms to us today, because they have for the most part become obsolete. His revival of these words will one day interest philologists.
Language to him was a social as well as a subjective process. He was interested in the experiments of the French Jesuit, Jousse, and the English philologist, Sir Paget, and Finnegans Wake is full of applications of their gesture theory. He spoke however with a certain derision of such auxiliary languages as Esperanto and Ido, which seemed to him to be without possibilities of any kind.
During those Zurich days I lived in the Pfauenstraße, and Joyce often walked up the hill to bring new additions to the "Mime," as he called it now. Despite his intense anxieties, he remained absorbed in his book.
His daughter was now under observation in a hospital near Zurich and he went frequently to visit her. He hoped against hope that it would be possible to heal his child. He even went so far as to consult Dr. Jung, although he had little confidence in the result.
During this period he became increasingly absorbed by the problem of imaginative creation. He read Coleridge again, and discussed with me the romantic poet's distinction between imagination and fancy. His approach was quite humble and he even asked himself if he really possessed imagination. He read Wuthering Heights. "That woman had imagination," he said. "Kipling had it too, and certainly Yeats." In fact his admiration for the Irish poet was boundless. A recent commentator, asserting that Joyce lacked reverence for the logos in poetry, inferred that he had little regard for Yeats. I can testify that this was not true. Joyce often recited Yeats's poems to us from memory. "No Surrealist poet can ever equal this for imagination," he said. Once when Yeats spoke over the radio, he telephoned us hastily to come and listen with him. I read "The Vision" out loud to him, and he was deeply absorbed by the colossal conception, only regretting that "Yeats did not pull all this into purely creative work." He was thrilled to discover that the hero of Finnegans Wake was described, both physically and psychically, as one of the human types Yeats presents in the "Vision." When Yeats died he sent a wreath to his grave at Antibes, and his emotion, on learning of his death, was very genuine. He always denied, almost vehemently, that he had said to Yeats in Dublin that he was too old to be influenced by him.
A favorite diversion during this time was at the afternoon movie. He preferred English and French films to American, and was a keen judge of their aesthetic merit. He seemed to have very little sympathy with the problems of either North or South America, and judged the two continents entirely on the basis of their alleged dearth of aesthetic vision. He disliked all manifestations of American humor in the film, his particular bêtes noires being Charlie Chaplin and a comedian named Schnozzle.
We always depended on his remarkable judgment whenever we wanted to see a play in Paris, nor were we ever disappointed. The many plays we saw together and which he usually chose from a plethora of other, better "ballyhooed" ones, were nearly always striking and entertaining. I remember my great aesthetic pleasure when he and I went to see the Habima players in a play done in the Hebrew language, "Rachel." He had a fine flair for little, out-of-the-way theaters, or for dusty, old plays, especially at the Odéon Theater, where we saw plays by Scribe, whom he liked. Naturally, too, he never missed an Ibsen revival.
There was always an atmosphere of fête when Joyce went to the theater. Afterwards--since he was in the habit of dining late--we usually forgathered at Fouquet's, in the Champs-Elysées, or Chez Francis, and he quaffed his first glass of Champagne nature with a gesture that was most diverting to watch. He usually ate little, but the carafe was never allowed to remain empty on the table until Mrs. Joyce interposed the final veto. He and I developed a trick we used in order to outwit the watchful eye of the spouses, and which I still use when that last drink seems desirable, and for this reason I shall not reveal it now.
Joyce's love of opera, especially Italian opera, and occasionally Wagner, has been noted by all who have ever written about him. Among opera singers he preferred the voice of his great friend John Sullivan, whom he considered to be the greatest tenor since Caruso. He also admired Lawrence Tibbett, the American baritone, and one or two Russian bassos whose voices he described as "coal-mines." He had a hearty dislike for the music of Stravinsky and of most of his contemporaries, in fact. He liked to listen to piano music, especially Chopin.
I remember reading to him a German translation from a speech by Radek in which the Russian attacked Ulysses at the Congress of Kharkov as being the work of a bourgeois writer who lacked social consciousness. "They may say what they want," said Joyce, "but the fact is that all the characters in my books belong to the lower middle classes, and even the working class; and they are all quite poor." I know he was a convinced antifascist. He never returned to Italy under Mussolini, and only passed through Nazi German on his way to Hamburg, when he wanted to realize his life-long dream of seeing Copenhagen.
There are many human, all too human anecdotes about Joyce during those last years before the war that will bear recalling.
One sultry evening in July, Sylvia Beach organized a reading by Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Spender at the Shakespeare Bookshop, in the rue de l'Odéon. Joyce, who liked Hemingway, decided to attend and asked me to accompany him. A good many American, English and French writers were already present when we arrived, rather late, in the midst of Hemingway's reading. Hemingway was seated at a small table with beside him a large mug of beer, from which he took an occasional sip. He was reading a fragment from the manuscript of his latest book, on Spain. He interrupted his reading for a moment while we were being seated, then took up again where he had left off.
As the reading progressed, Joyce began to yawn. In fact, he did it so frankly that everyone noticed it. However, Hemingway soon came to a pause and Stephen Spender read one of his poems of the Spanish revolution. Once more Hemingway took the floor. After a few sentences, Joyce pulled my sleeve: "Let's go . . . " I tried to persuade him to stay a little longer, but he would have none of it. To my great embarrassment he rose, and after stumbling over our neighbors' feet we left.
Joyce was undoubtedly allergic to any suggestion of politics.
Joyce had a keen sense of liturgy and was interested in the doctrine and rituals of all religions and confessions, both Roman and Orthodox Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism--all were grist to his writer's mill.
His relation to the Roman Catholic Church of his Dublin youth, although combative, was also one of analytical curiosity. He went to Notre Dame to hear the Lenten sermons of the famous Jesuit priest, the Rev. Père de la Boullaye de Pinard, and came back with numerous witty commentaries on the orator's name. He also followed the liturgy of the high feast days with almost ecclesiastical precision.
He resented intensely the personal attacks by certain Catholic circles in the United States who assailed him on the ground that his work represented an apparently heretic attitude. He often pointed out to me the enormous role of the concept of evil in Catholic theology. The pascal acolyte does not hesitate to eulogize "the sin of Adam" in a famous liturgical passage, and St. Augustine himself declared: "Felix culpa! O fortunatissimum Adamae peccatum." The obscene distortions of gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals show the luxuriant imagination of the conformist architects. The satanic chimeras of the painting of such believers as Matthias Grünewald and Hieronymus Bosch lead us into the abyss of the grotesque. Joyce, who knew his Fathers of the Church, assumed the right which the Catholic Church has always given to the artist: to present the carnal side of man's consciousness with all the mystery of his verbal art.
"And what of the Book of Kells?" he asked. Once he gave me a volume of reproductions from that rare book of illuminated manuscripts. One picture in it showed a particularly hideous depiction of the Christ-child. "Doesn't he look as if he had just robbed the hen-house?" Joyce asked.
In the winter of 1938 someone sent him an issue of the Osservatore Romano, world-organ of the Vatican, dated October 22, 1937. It contained a reference to Joyce which delighted him, and he often quoted it as we sat at Fouquet's one evening. In an essay on modern Irish literature the pious Vatican essayist had written about Joyce:
And finally James Joyce, of European fame, iconoclast and rebel, who after having sought to renovate the old naturalism, attempted in Ulysses to translate plastically the inner reality, and, in Work in Progress, in an oneiric and linguistic experiment, is seeking to open up new paths for the expression of human sentiments.
"We roaming Catholics," he used to say to me, whenever he wanted to introduce a reference to Jesuit theology.
Once an internationally known literary climber telephoned Joyce to ask for some biographical data to be used on the occasion of an evening which a group of Paris poets, "Les Amis de 1914," were planning in his honor. Joyce agreed to receive the lady in question, since she was to make the introductory speech at the meeting and he felt it was only courteous to have a brief talk with her beforehand. She arrived, elegantly dressed, and accompanied by a large dog, which did not make matters easier, since Joyce had a real aversion to dogs. Remembering vaguely that there was a certain city in which Joyce was particularly interested, the lady started out boldly: "When were you last in Edinburgh, Mr. Joyce?"
"I never saw Edinburgh in my life," was Joyce's reply, after which he fell back into his usual silence. A little confused, but undaunted, the lady then asked permission to photograph him for an article she was writing for the morning newspaper Le Jour. The photographer was waiting downstairs, she said, and he could do the job in a trice. In order to give point to her story, she indicated that she would like to have her picture taken in conversation with Joyce. She had not reckoned, however, with the inventiveness or our friend Joyce. Excusing himself for a moment, he telephoned to Paul Léon and myself and urged us to come immediately so that he should not be photographed alone with her.
Fortunately, we were both at home and very shortly afterwards, we arrived at his apartment, almost simultaneously. Joyce introduced us to the lady, but she was not very cordial and evidently resented the miscarriage of her carefully-laid plans. The photograph was made, however, with Léon on Joyce's side and I on hers. The picture appeared the following morning in the Jour, spread over four columns, but lo and behold--both Léon and I had our heads chopped off by some artist in the newspaper studio. The lady, whose first name was Daisy, had won. Léon and I were highly amused, but Joyce was not pleased.
The following evening he recited a parody he had composed to the tune of "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. . . " I forget the middle lines but I remember it ended: "And won't we look sweet / Upon the seat / Of a photograph faked for two. . . "
The night of the event, the lady read from the French translation of Ulysses. Joyce, who was seated on the platform, managed somehow to turn his back on her during the reading. I have often wondered if the experience gave much real satisfaction to her lion-hunter's heart.
As the political clouds gathered on the European horizon, Joyce grew saddened and lived in increasing isolation. We continued to meet regularly either at his or our house, or else for dinner at Fouquet's. The years brought great change in him, however: his hair became quite grey, and his old self-assurance seemed shaken. I felt he was more deeply human than formerly, more gentle, too. He even showed a certain curiosity about America, although he still adhered to his dogma that the great creative myths of humanity stemmed from Europe. I told him that I intended to bring out one more number of transition before relinquishing it, and he approved. "I'll have something for you," he said.
The terrible malady that had befallen his daughter was an ever-present heartbreak and even his iron will was unable to discover the remedy that might cure her. Paul Léon, his old and trusted friend, was still helping him, but most of the friends of former, happier days had left France and there was a deepening silence about him. Malevolent critics wrote sneeringly of the "clique around Joyce," which he ironically transformed into the "joyous click." There was little that was joyous about it, however, and we were hardly a "click." I myself was passionately interested in "Work in Progress" and I was proud of the fact that Joyce had confidence in me for the publication of his last great work. Yet I almost dreaded the moment when he said in his casual, yet awfully deliberate manner: "I'll have something for you. When will you publish again?" For I knew it meant working with him night and day, it meant being at his beck and call for several months, until the number finally appeared.
Joyce did not explain. He wanted you to guess, to show aptitude at approximations, to have sudden intuitions. The "click" around him carried on arduously, and in fact we were like so many schoolboys working under the ever so slightly despotic whip of our Jesuitical magister. For that he was, indeed. It was not ad majorem Dei gloriam, but ad majorem Jacobi gloriam, and his cerebral intensity was over us like a rattan cane. His occasional impatience with the obtuseness of certain of the "students" was such that I almost anticipated chastisement for the offender. Yet we all felt affection for him, a kind of brotherly sense of protection which increased with his isolation.
I should like to say here a few words for those friendly followers of Joyce's work who did not fall by the wayside, as the years went on and the proletarian littérateurs with left-wing megalomania plodded through their inchoate program. I have in mind the men who wrote for the new Joyce at a time when few were interested in his neologistic innovations, when the majority of American and British writers felt they would have nothing to do with such novelties. They, after all, were only interested in the norm. They were interested in traditional values, in dramatic chronology, in fiction and poetry as handed down by their predecessors. They could not understand that a man who had written Ulysses and the Portrait might have continued in that vein, yet had decided heroically to forego sure success in order to engage in a long calvary of creation. Nor did the professional critics distinguish themselves by great foresight in the years between 1927 and 1938. With a few exceptions, they waited for a signal from above. They waited for the moment when the literary stage was set and ready, before taking the bold step.
The men who set this stage were Joyce's friends, and some of them were my friends. We all felt that we were badly equipped for the task of interpreting a work which was not yet complete, and which we had seen only in disparate sections. We certainly had no conception of the whole as yet, only anticipatory presentiments of what it was to be. Elliot Paul was the first to take the step of explaining what we then considered to be the "plot" of "Work in Progress," and his essay on that subject in transition was a milestone. There was also Stuart Gilbert who was ceaselessly at work deciphering the hermetic book. There were others, too, brilliant analysts all: Harry Levin, William Troy, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Padraic Colum, Samuel Beckett.
Then there was Frank Budgen, the British writer and painter, who had been Joyce's friend in Zurich during World War I, and had written an engaging book on that period, The Making of Ulysses. An essay by him, which was published in transition, dealt with Joyce's use of Nordic mythology in "Work in Progress." When Budgen visited Paris we used to meet at Joyce's flat and then go on café-squatting "Chez Francis." He talked wittily about the Zurich days--and, incidentally, was one of the few Anglo-Saxons I ever met who could speak faultless Zurich dialect.
Once in Zurich, when Joyce and I were walking in comparative silence through the Bahnhofstraße, I heard Joyce mumble Budgen's name. I remember that he and Budgen had been accustomed to meet at the "Pfauen" restaurant for nightly dinners and copious quaffs of "Waliser" wine during World War I when Budgen was employed at the British Consulate in Zurich. However, I said nothing more and we continued on our way. Suddenly Joyce turned down a side street called the Uraniastraße. It was dusk and there was a gossamer haze over the town.  "Who?" "Budgen." I looked up and saw a number of nude sculptured res gazing down at us. Joyce explained that Budgen had posed for the Swiss sculptor, Suter, who had been commissioned by the city for the work. "Where is he?" I asked. "Labor," said Joyce laconically. Indeed, there stood the nude re of Budgen on top of the world in all his paradisiacal glory. "Labor," mused Joyce, "the laziest man I ever knew. . . "
Another friend of Joyce was Samuel Beckett, the Irish poet who came to Paris to teach as exchange professor at the "Ecole Normale." Joyce took a great liking to Beckett and through him we became friends. He was Anglo-Irish and in gesture and spirit resembled Joyce sometimes to such an extent that we were astonished. He was young man of genuine talent, very original and creatively alive. Both as a poet and as a prose writer his personality imposed itself in all of us, and I enjoyed his brilliant albeit dour mind. He had an extraordinary verbal facility and inventiveness, and in that respect was like his great countryman, un beau ténébreux, a celtic visionary who was in love with France. Unlike Joyce, however, he wanted to simplify the English language rather than enrich it. For this reason he began to write in French exclusively shortly before World War II in order to retain simplicity by writing deliberately [in] a language he did not know as well as his native tongue. His French writings strike one as dépouillés and yet richly suggestive of his island background.
Six months before "Work in Progress" was scheduled to appear in book form, there was an amusing incident in connection with the title, which till then was known only to the author and Mrs. Joyce. Joyce had often challenged his friends to guess it, and he had even made a permanent offer to pay 1,000 francs in cash to the person who succeeded. We all tried, Stuart Gilbert, Herbert Gorman, Samuel Beckett, Paul Léon, myself, but we failed miserably. One summer night while dining on the terrasse of Fouquet's, Joyce repeated his offer. The Riesling was especially good that night, and we were in fine spirits. Mrs. Joyce began to sing softly an Irish song about Mr. Flannagan and Mrs. Shannigan. Joyce looked up startled, urged her to stop. This she did, but when he saw no harm had been done, he very distinctly, as a singer does it, made the lip motions which seemed to indicate F and W. Maria's guess was "Fairy's Wake." Joyce looked astonished and said: "Brava! But something is missing."
At home we mulled over it for a few days. One morning I knew it was "Finnegans Wake," although it was only an intuition. That evening I suddenly threw the words in the air. Joyce blanched. Slowly he set down his wine-glass: "Ah, Jolas," he said, "you've taken something from me." When we parted that night he gave me the accolade, danced a few of his intricate steps, and asked: "How would you like to have the money?" I replied: "In sous." The following morning, during my absence from home, Joyce arrived with a bag filled with ten-franc pieces. He gave them to my daughters with instructions to serve them to me at lunch with the hors d'oeuvres. So it was "Finnegans Wake." We were sternly enjoined by Joyce not to reveal the title until he himself made the official announcement at a birthday dinner given by his son and daughter-in-law on the following February 2.
In the last few years of his life, Joyce circumscribed more and more his social activities. He was invited out very little--people had probably grown discouraged--and he rarely accepted the invitations he received. Thus he came to depend more and more on a few friends. Among others, I used to take frequent walks with him in the Bois de Boulogne, or go to a movie with him. On these occasions he was often silent, and seemed absorbed in his own world of meditations.
He was just the opposite, in fact, of the gregarious Gertrude Stein, whom he had never met in all the many years that they lived simultaneously in Paris. Shortly before the war, however, the American sculptor Jo Davidson, who was a good friend of both writers, decided to break the ice and invite them together to his studio. They were introduced, and shook hands. But that was all. Nor did Joyce ever meet Picasso, although I once saw them in the same restaurant. We were having a drink "Chez Francis" after a concert. Picasso was seated at a nearby table, in conversation with André Breton, Jacques Prévert and other Surrealist writers and artists. Informed of their presence, Joyce did not look up, although I noticed that the Picasso group seemed curious about him.
Joyce's devotion to his sick daughter knew no bounds. She was by now interned in a maison de santé near Paris, and he used to spend hours trying to amuse her, talking to her about the past, singing for her, or listening to her verbal fantasies with absolute patience. But sometimes his own nerves seemed to crack under the strain, and once I saw him weep bitterly.
"Why should this thing have happened to us?" he said. "We were so happy." Then, wanly: "And I am supposed to be writing a funny book. . . "
Although often despairing, he continued to read proof on Finnegans Wake. In addition to Mrs. Joyce, who literally never left him, Giorgio and Helen Joyce, Lucie and Paul Léon, Sam Beckett, Moune and Stuart Gilbert, Maria and I were his most constant companions. Usually one or the other of us went out with him each evening, and when he started brooding we tried to cheer him up.
One evening I received a telephone call from an unknown man who, it developed, was the proprietor of a little bistro in the rue de Grenelle.
"Monsieur Jouasse," he said, "wants you to come down as soon as you can. The address is. . . "
I found Joyce standing in front of a bar, with a glass of pernod before him.
"Bon soir," I said, and ordered a pernod.
"Oh, there you are," he said, and fell into silence.
After a while he asked in a low whisper:
"Do you know the poet Mangan?"
And he began to recite "Dark Rosaleen" in his musical Dublin speech. One verse in particular struck me:
I could scale the blue air,
I could plough the high hills,
O, I could kneel all night in prayer,
To heal your many ills!
And one beamy smile from you
Would float like light between
My toils and me, my own, my true,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!

The months passed in great anxiety and Joyce became desirous of seeing his complex book appear before, as he said, "the storm broke." All his notes were carefully gone over by Léon and together they adhered to a rigid working schedule. Even through its fragmentary publication in transition, we knew that the work constituted a challenge to contemporary speculation, as no other work had done for decades. To be sure, its partial appearance might have militated against immediate acceptance. On the other hand, public appetite had been whetted through the exegetical efforts of transition writers, and through the comments of connoisseurs, particularly in the United States.
We knew that it had been Joyce's ambition to write a book dealing with the night-mind of man. We had already followed most of the purgatorial, multiple characters blundering through their larval and anthropological transmigrations. We had glimpsed the titanic city-mountain synthesis of the wanderer Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, and watched his countless human and pre-human metamorphoses. We had followed the pan-symbolic pattern in the creation of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the river-woman, the magna mater. Shem and Shaun, the antithetical brothers, sometimes called Jerry and Kevin; the daughter Isabelle, the washer-woman, the household slut, the topers and gossips of Chapelizod: all these contemporary and primitively barbaric evocations were familiar to transition readers. There were other characters too, most of them minor, but yet intricately interwoven in the narrative, with whom we were now acquainted. We knew the contour of the incessant conflict that takes place on the nocturnal stage; we saw the continuous mutation of locality, objects, events, languages, characters. Examining with new eyes Joyce's revolutionary idea of the paragraph, we tried to keep in mind that the dramatic dynamism of the book was based on Bruno's theory of knowledge through antinomies, as also on the Vico philosophy of cyclic recurrence. History, for Joyce, was a nightmare, and he undoubtedly considered the present epoch to be the last phase of the Vico cycle: man's fall, followed by chaos and resurrection. Like Goethe's, his was an Olympian eye. He looked on at the political scene with amusement and detachment.
As the war approached, Joyce manifested apparently little political awareness. I talked with him before and after Munich, but he remained non-committal. This was, in fact, a bewildering feature of my relation to him. For I was being gradually drawn into the anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian struggle, while Joyce, on the contrary, seemed almost to resent any reference to it. One day he said to me: "What can an individual do in times like these? I think he can only help personally those who are threatened." He was assiduous in his efforts to help Jewish friends escape from the Nazi clutches, and it is a fact that the Austrian novelist, Hermann Broch, and a number of other Central European friends were able to escape as a result of his intercessions on their behalf.
Paris was a rapidly changing city. There was constantly increasing social disturbance, and the resultant political fever all but paralyzed the functions of the state. The clash between the Croix de Feu, Action Française and other right-wing fascist groups on the one hand, and the left-wingers, led by the Communists, on the other, foreshadowed a cataclysm. One had the sensation that the time had come for the bursting of the dikes, for all-engulfing floods, for apocalyptic dementia. Hitler's persecution of racial minorities brought thousands of refugees to Paris and all the languages of Central Europe could now be heard on the boulevards. French friends often said: "Pourvu que ça finisse! If only this false peace would end! We would rather t than wait helplessly."
Joyce gave me the last fragment of "Work in Progress" for inclusion in the new number of transition I was then preparing. This was the fragment relating the radio yarn of Butt and Taff, or how Buckley killed the Russian General. As usual, there were to be many changes before the final bon à tirer could be given. Joyce seemed to be living in the mythical inn of Chapelizod where the twelve uproariously drunken customers were engaged in recreating the world and ting its battles--the brother--battles of Shem and Shaun, become Butt and Taff, and the protean transformations of sin-haunted HCE.
The first bound copy of Finnegans Wake reached Paris just in time for Joyce's birthday, on February 2nd, 1939. It naturally constituted an added attraction to the anniversary dinner which took place at his son's home, and to which French, Irish, British and American friends were invited. Joyce let each guest examine the precious volume, which T.S. Eliot, on behalf of the London publishing house, had just forwarded.
The Viconian cycle was coming to its inevitable climax. Two years later James Joyce died in Zurich.
Rainer Rumold, Associate Professor of German Literature and Critical Thought at Northwestern University, has written books on Helmut Heissenbuettel, Gottfried Benn, and German expressionism.He is coeditor (with Marjorie Perloff) of the series "Avant-garde and Modernism Studies" (Northwestern University Press).
Andreas Kramer, Lecturer at Goldsmith's College, University of London, has written books on Carl Einstein and on Gertrude Stein and the German avant-garde.
.
The "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature," a brief work written and published by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in May of 1912, has acquired extraordinary status among critics of recent years, increasingly considered one of the pivotal documents in the history of twentieth-century aesthetics. Issued three years after Marinetti first launched the movement of Futurism in 1909, it announces, by any standards, a radical departure from previously accepted norms of literary discourse. While proclaiming eleven rules that are to govern the new mode of Futurist writing, the manifesto enjoins the elimination of adjectives, the abolition of adverbs, and the suppression of all punctuation. It stipulates that verbs be used only in the infinitive form, a practice that would effectively sever logical connections between subject and predicate (e.g., "he to fly"). It insists that the new writing consist primarily of "images or analogies"; that the "analogies or comparisons be composed of terms as divergent as possible"; that all connecting conjunctions such as like, similar to, and so on be abolished; and even that the first term of any comparison be suppressed in favor of a continuous image-flow, a language composed of pure metaphors. Finally, it urges that onomatopoeia acquire an unprecedented prominence, and it advocates a dynamic typography modeled on the most recent graphic practices. The writer, Marinetti summarizes, should "destroy syntax and scatter one's nouns at random as they are born." 1 The result will be "words-in-freedom" (le parole in libertà), a new expressive language that will finally be commensurate with what Marinetti terms the "wireless" or "radio imagination" of advancing modernity, an idiom synchronized to the cutting-edge technologies of the day--the telephones, radios, phonographs, airplanes, cinemas, and mass-circulation newspapers which are inundating the new century.