all'altro. È abbonata al piacere di potere vincere un terno. Questo
è ottimismo artificiale. Non apre le buste perché
le importa più questa probabilità di vincere continua la
quale le dà un ottimismo continuo--è perché aprendo
le buste prova dei dolori successivi nel costatare che non vince. Questa
donna d'istinto superiore che vive benchè intelligente nella
sua villa isolata a Spazzavento cos contenta e calma senza malinconia con
una piena salute dei nervi. È abbonata anche ai piaceri cittadini
cioè alla vita migliore che non fa mediante il telefono che le
dà la sicurezza di comunicare con tutto il mondo. In solitudine
quasi assoluta, dunque--
ma
con un po' di cittadinismo e di grande vita concentrato nell'apparecchio
telefonico comunicante con Firenze Milano ecc. Importanza enorme che
l'apparecchio telefonico ha nella sua sala da pranzo intima di villa
solitaria. Essa mi dichiarò che nei suoi dolori più
tremendi componeva dei stornelli osceni. Cosa strana data che non dice
mai oscenità né predilige racconti salaci. È
il controveleno del dolore. Il migliore controveleno poichè
l'oscenità allegra e buffa spacca e brucia energicamente il dolore
e la disgrazia sempre pieni di austerità di rinuncia fisica e
di castità.
16) Prendere sempre in tutto l'iniziativa In America vi sono
delle scuole d'iniziativa. Si premia ogni giorno e più volte al
giorno l'in con piccole somme di denaro lo scolaro per una lezione
saputa. Non vi sono punizioni ma si premia tutto con denaro. Le ore di
libertà e di vacanze sono impiegate dai scolari nel guadagnare
come meglio possono del denaro in tutti i modi onesti e con tutte le
fatiche. Si sveglia così nel dodicenne, per esempio, la voglia e
l'arte di guadagnare da sé e secondo il proprio istinto intuito
giudizio. Modo mirabile per sviluppare lo spirito d'iniziativa affaristica
commerciale nel ragazzo.
17°) Tenere conto delle forze della Fortuna e delle forze della SFortuna cioè di tutte le forze favorevoli e sfavorevoli che non sono ancora bene conosciute ma che esistono. Napoleone considerava i suoi generali come si dimostravano intelligenti in tempo di pace abili in tempo di guerra e più o meno sfortunati o fortunati. La loro fortuna o sfortuna era il punto di vista maggiore per giudicarli.
18°) Arte di fiutare decifrare e utilizzare le forze.
19°) Imparare tutto nella vita Non adcoltare mai i libri
vivendola non guardandola.
[23. 10 novembre 1921]
Corteo fascista dopo il Congresso
Ore 3 1/2. Cielo plumbeo. Vento gelato. Marcia solenne di 40.000 fascisti
da Piazza del Popolo all'Altare della Patria. Monumento a Vittorio
Emanuele. Centinaia di gagliardetti rossi neri. Predomina il nero nei
gagliardetti e nelle camicie di seta dei fascisti. Portano i gagliardetti
in avanti come bompressi. Il Vento fa ribollire le ondate rosse nere
di gagliardetti pigiati. Ribollimento dinamico di Balla. In testa dopo
la prima banda. Mussolini in un grosso e largo cappotto ruggine, il
bastone portato a bilanciare. Marca il passo. Grosso rozzo proletario
col testone cesareo gonfio il cuore di assaporata vendetta contro i suoi
ex compagni socialisti. Girando davanti al monumento, alza la mano
braccio teso tende il braccio in saluto al milite ignoto. La banda:
tiraram tirarim
tiraram ram
tiraram tirarim
tiraram ram
1. Luce Marinetti, "Reminiscences of My Father," 1 (Sept. 1994): 45-54.
2. Interview with Luce Marinetti, March 1994.
3. A brief description of the diaries is given by Alberto Bertoni, "Nota sui criteri di edizione," in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Taccuini, ed. Alberto Bertoni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987), lix. References to Bertoni's editorial discussion are made with the abbreviation "NSC," while references to the diaries themselves are given as T. Bertoni's discussion, it should be noted, is based on the study of microfilms alone, rather than the documents themselves; some of the diaries are in fact composite documents that have been formed from the residual parts of what were originally two and sometimes more notebooks, which is to say, separate and autonomous documents stemming from quite different periods. We hope to present elsewhere a fuller discussion of the diaries, their composition, and their present constitution.
4. In reality Bertoni was remarkably inconsistent in following his own editorial criteria. For example, he publishes a second version of Marinetti's "Manifesto Politico" (430-31), but does not include the first one (passage 3 here); also, he publishes half of Marinetti's dream description that will be the basis for the novel Gli Indomabili (The untamed; 1922) (503-4), but omits the second half of the same dream.
5. Passage 23, it should be emphasized, was included by Bertoni in his edition of the notebooks, (T, 510-11). This is the only passage given here that has been previously published, and its inclusion is based on its intrinsic interest.
6. The classic discussion of Marinetti's "polemology" is that of Luciano De Maria, in his "Introduzione" to Teoriae invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria (Milan: Mondadoru; 1983), hereafter abbreviated TIF; for the experimental writings see Noëmi Blumenkrantz-Onimus, La poésie futuriste italienne: essai d'analyse esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984). See F. T. Marinetti, La Bataille de Tripoli vécue et chantée par F. T. Marinetti (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1911), also in Italian by F. T. Marinetti, La battaglia di Tripoli (26 Ottobre 1911) vissuta e cantata da F. T. Marinetti (Padova: Tipografia "Elzeviriana," 1912); and idem, Zang Tumb Tuuum. Adrianopoli Ottobre 1912. Parole in liberrtà (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1914), reprinted in TIF, 643-780, as Zang Tumb Tumb.
7. F. T. Marinetti, Guerra, sola igiene del mondo (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1915), reprinted in TIF, 235-344; idem, Democrazia futurista: dinamismo politico (Milan: Facchi, 1918), reprinted in TIF, 345-470; and idem, Al di là del comunismo (Milan: Editions of La Testa di Ferro, 1920), reprinted in TIF, 471-576.
8. F. T. Marinetti, "The Futurist Synthetic Theater," in Let's Murder the Moonshine, ed. R. W. Flint (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1991), 134. The original reads: "dinamico salto nel vuoto della creazione totale fuori da tutti i campi esplorati." F. T. Marinetti, "Il teatro futurista sintetico (11 gennaio 1915-18 febbraio 1915)," in TIF, 118.
9. F. T. Marinetti, "The New Religion-Morality of Speed," in Let's Murder the Moonshine, 102. The original reads: "La morale futurista difenderà l'uomo dalla decomposizione determinata dalla lentezza, dal ricordo, dall'analisi, dal riposo e dall'abitudine," "ascensione spiralica dell'Io verso il Nulla-Dio." F. T. Marinetti, La nuova religione-morale della velocità (11 Maggio 1916), first published in the first issue of the journal L'Italia Futurista, also printed as a leaflet by the Direction of the Futurist Movement in Milan; reprinted in TIF, 130-38, here 130, 137.
10. F. T. Marinetti, Come si seducono le donne (Florence: Vallecchi, 1917); idem, Come si seducono le donne e si tradiscono gli uomini (Milan: Sonzogno, 1920); F. T. Marinetti and Signora Enif Robert, Un ventre di donna. Romanzo chirurgico (Milan: Facchi, 1919).
11. F. T. Marinetti, L'isola dei Baci. Romanzo erotico-sociale (with Bruno Corra) (Milan: Studio Editoriale Lombardo, 1918); idem, Gli amori futuristi. Programmi di vita con varianti a scelta (Cremona: Ghelfi, 1922); see also idem, Elettricità sessuale (Milan: Facchi, 1920) (contains a rewritten version of the second and third acts of idem, Poupées éléctriques [Paris: E. Sansot and C., 1909]).
12. F. T. Marinetti, 8 anime in una bomba (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1919), reprinted in TIF, 795-920.
13. F. T. Marinetti, L'alcova d'acciaio. Romanzo vissuto (Milan: Vitagliano, 1921).
14. F. T. Marinetti, Gli Indomabili (Piacenza: Futurist Editions of Poesia and Società Editoriale Porta, 1922), reprinted in TIF, 921-1014. Concerning Marinetti's constant involvement with French Symbolism, it is useful to know that during this period he also published a translation of Mallarmé, Versi e Prose di Stefano Mallarmé (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1916). See also F. T. Marinetti, Il Tattilismo. Manifesto futurista (Milan: Direction of the Futurist Movement, 1921); reprinted in TIF, 159-69.
15. See "NSC," lix-lxii. Essentially, the Italian text is given exactly as it appears in Marinetti's diaries, except that periods have been inserted before capitals when it was clear that a new sentence was beginning, and semicolons have been inserted before dialogue to make the text more readable; accents have been added where they are needed, whereas improper or variant spelling is retained in the transcription; Marinetti's underlining--be it with one or more lines--has been rendered with italics. Dates have been standardized. The few notational conventions adopted in the transcription are indicated in the first note of the Italian section.
16. As a point of clarification: the transcription of the diaries was done by Paola Gambarota, the editing of the Italian by Laura Wittman, and the translation into English by Lawrence Rainey.
17. For comprehensive surveys of Futurist theater see Michael Kirby and Victoria Nes Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), with bibliography 322-27; Mario Verdone, Teatro del tempo futurista, 2nd ed. (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1988); and Giovanni Lista, La Scène Futuriste (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1989), with an excellent bibliography, 417-21.
18. The "Manifesto del partito futurista italiano" first appears in L'Italia futurista 3, no. 39 (11 February 1918), reprinted in TIF, 153-58. Points 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the program outlined here appear in the "Manifesto" respectively as points 7, 5, 4, and 3. The program should also be compared with Democrazia futurista (dinamismo politico), 1st edtn. 1919, reprinted in TIF, 343-468, in which points 1 through 5 of the program published here correspond respectively with Chapters 7 and 8, 10, 5, 22, and 23. A later version of it is published in T, 430-31.
19. The original reads: "Grande stagno. Con islotti quasi tondi. Regno della luna. Senso acuto della solitudine e di tristezza.... Molte tabelle su pali con scritto sopra Chi beve l'acqua del lago muore. Questo accresce il terrore lunare del lago;... Cosicché il luogo è deserto e pacifico quietissimo Regno della luna e delle anatre selvatiche che gracidano come e con i ranocchi" (T, 132-33).
20. The original reads: "la clarté corrosive de la Lune," "l'air lourd...de lait lunaire," "une sève étrange," of this "Magicienne infâme" that "épouses et liquéfies la dureté du marbre." F. T. Marinetti, La Momie Sanglante (Milan: Editions of the newspaper Verde e Azzurro, 1904), reprinted in idem, Scritti Francesi (Milan: Mondadori, 1983), 133, 134, 141, 143.
21. "The soul must throw the flaming body, like a fireship, against the enemy, the eternal enemy that would have to be invented if he didn't exist!...," Let's Murder the Moonshine, 54; or: "bisogna che l'anima lanci il corpo in fiamme, come un brulotto, contro il nemico, l'eterno nemico che si dovrebbe inventare se non esistesse!..." F. T. Marinetti, "Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna!" in TIF, 16; originally published in French as Tuons le clair de lune! (Milan: Editions of Poesia, 1909).
22. The original reads:
--Abbandonati, anima, --cantava la luna--sciogliti, dimentica, acquètati. Ho dei rosoli che dissolvono ogni collera, ogni ferocia; ho dei balsami che addormentano i rancori. Tutte le volte che ho voluto fermare la guerra m'è bastato colmare le trancee col latte benefico della mia luce e subito le sentinelle in vedetta hanno reclinato il capo invaso dal sonno e dal pessimismo tenerissimo...
F. T. Marinetti, L'alcova d'Acciaio, 89.
23. The original reads: "Esco la notte e sono insidiato da continue scariche di mitragliatrice alle spalle e davanti. Le palle tintinnano nel martellare il tetto e contro le pareti di legno del baracchino" (T, 199-200).
24. F. T. Marinetti, Mafarka le futuriste (Paris: E. Sansot and C., 1909), reprinted as idem, Mafarka le futuriste (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984), 95ff.
25. The original reads: "Il sole di lava comunica per invisibili tubature col mio cuore, vasi comunicanti." F. T. Marinetti, L'Alcova d'acciaio, 102.
26. See de Renzo de Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario 1893-1920 (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1964), 295; see also his Appendix 12 for their circular calling the demonstrations; see Brunello Vigezzi, "Le 'Radiose Giornate' del maggio 1915 nei rapporti dei prefetti," in Nuova rivista storica 43 (Sept.-Dec. 1959): 313-44, esp. 333-34 for documents regarding Mussolini's arrest and realease. Max Gallo writes that on 11 April Mussolini "was in Rome, speaking in Piazza di Trevi at a demonstration organized by the interventionist Fascio.  He was kept in a cell until the end of the day," in Mussolini's Italy: Twenty Years of the Fascist Era, trans. Charles L. Marmann (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 42.
27. The original reads: "Penso ai Amori Futuristi. Programmi di vita con ramificazioni. Cioè con varianti finali. 2 o 3 o 4 finali possibili diversi l'uno da l'altro e a scelta" (T, 207).
28. Ettore Petrolini (1896-1936) was a theater actor and author of plays and character studies, parodies and iconoclastic sketches. In 1919 Marinetti wrote in L'Italia Futurista: "Pure Futurist humour triumphs in Petrolini's completely original art.  On Leopoldo Fregoli (1867-1936) see Mario Verdone, "Leopoldo Fregoli," Palatino (April and August 1964).
29. F. T. Marinetti to Benedetta Cappa, 15 June [1918], Series 2, Box 2, Folder 2, Marinetti Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
30. Giuseppe Ungaretti, "Dolina notturna," in L'Allegria, in Tutte le Poesie (Milan: Mondadori, 1969), 63; the poem was first published in 1918 by the "Libreria della Diana" in Naples in Antologia della Diana.
31. The original reads: "una depressione del terreno carsico. Sembra un cratere di volcano spento. Talvolta un vero circo scavato dalle acque. Un piccolo laghetto asciugato" (T, 114). The Carso was the mountainous area around Trieste and Gorizia where both Ungaretti and Marinetti fought in 1916 and 1917.
32. F. T. Marinetti, Les Dieux s'en vont, D'Annunzio reste (Paris: E. Sansot and C., 1908) is an expanded version of idem, D'Annunzio intime (Milan: Editions of the newspaper Verde e Azzurro, 1903).
33. The original reads: "La battaglia chimica e gli aloni azzurri," "aloni di vita vissuta," "tutte le forze effettive dei congiunti, amici, parenti, i, madri, amanti e bambini che unite alle forze dei dolori e piaceri passati corazzano i combattenti" F. T. Marinetti, L'alcova d'acciaio, 41.
34. F. T. Marinetti, La conquête des étoiles (Paris: Editions de la Plume, 102), reprinted in idem, Scritti Francesi. See Chapter XI of Mafarka le futuriste, "Les voiliers crucifiés." The original reads, "Lago della Poesia e del Sentimento." Gli Indomabili, in TIF, 971.
35. The original reads: "Il Futurismo è l'ottimismo artificiale opposto a tutti i pessimismo cronici, è il dinamismo continuo, il divenire perpetuo e la volontà instancabile." F. T. Marinetti, "Lettera aperta al futurista Mac Delmarle," in TIF, 94.
36. Enif Robert (Enif Angelini: 1886-1974) was an actress who worked with her friend Eleonora Duse, who appears in the novel; using her husband's surname, she contributed to L'Italia Futurista, taking part in a discussion on the role of women and engaging in controversy with her companions in the group; her articles were published in the second edition of Marinetti's book, Come si seducono le donne, 1918; excerpts of Un ventre di donna appeared in Roma futurista in 1920. Later, in L'Impero, she published a letter arguing against Mario Carli's proposal for "compulsory procreation." See Futurism and Futurisms, ed. Pontus Hulten (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986). According to the unpublished diaries, she was Marinetti's lover in early 1918.
37. The original reads: "coraggio + verità." F. T. Marinetti, Il ventre di una donna. Romanzo chirurgico, xv. The cure consists essentially in depriving oneself of what one desires the most so as to drive desire itself to its utmost intensity--the intensity of artificial optimism and control of the "Forces."
38.
The symbols used in the transcription are as follows:
{xxx} = cancelled illegible words
tortus = cancelled words
{ } = entire passages that are cancelled
< >= missing or ripped out pages at beginning or end of passage
[?] = illegible word elided
[...] = passage elided
[ ] = editor's comments
Debate about the nature and significance of the historical avant-garde has reached an almost feverish pitch in the last decade, its intensity clearly a sign that more is at stake than academic questions of historical accuracy or comprehensiveness. Like an antique mirror from which the mercury has seeped and faded, the avant-garde has become the ambiguous glass in which we seem to scrutinize a perplexing image of ourselves, an image that is haunting precisely because it is simultaneously so alike and unlike, because it bears so many of the features by which we recognize ourselves and the contemporary cultural milieu, even as it also evokes a world that is already feathered at the edges, has already receded irretrievably into the past, is already remote. While it would be impossible to catalogue all the salient features that have been held to define the avant-garde or its significance for today, two questions have gradually acquired especial importance in the course of recent critical discussion: one, the extent to which, to use Peter Bürger's formulation, the avant-garde "can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society," or as Bürger further clarifies, an assault on "art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men"; 1 and the other, the ways in which that attack overlaps with the avant-garde's use of motifs, materials, and artifacts from mass or popular culture, a usage that has been dismissed by Marxist critics as "a colonization of other, formerly independent" cultural practices, 2 or defended by others for its "subvert[ing]...the hierarchical distinctions between high art and mass culture," or for its proposing a "critique, not only of prevailing market conditions, but also of the futility of the Symbolist [or high-art] response to these conditions." 3
These views may sound either glib or unduly dogmatic in their bold assertiveness: and while partly that results from disembedding quotations from their context, partly it reflects the growing polarization, the increasingly schematic formulations that have characterized recent discussion about the historical avant-garde. Yet such well-defined dichotomies prove strangely inadequate when tested against the complex social realities informing the interaction among avant-garde, elite bourgeois, and popular cultures in the formative moments of modernism and the avant-garde, an interaction that might be traced in many cultural exchanges of the period, but perhaps nowhere better than in the dialogue of actions that took place between Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Ezra Pound during the period 1912 to 1914. Marinetti, after all, is typically viewed as one of the founding fathers of the historical avant-garde, his creation of Futurism in 1909 considered one of its paradigmatic moments. 4 Pound too is widely treated as a representative of the avant-garde, sometimes in contrast to Eliot with his more symbolist or modernist style, sometimes by virtue of his role in the formation of first Imagism, then Vorticism, the two movements in the Anglo-American literary tradition which that nearly resemble the Continental avant-gardes. 5
For the most part, however, critics have paired Marinetti with Pound only in order to dismiss the importance of the connection, and in doing so they have largely been following a script that originated with Pound himself. Writing anonymously in 1917, T. S. Eliot had already set a precedent followed by subsequent critics when he characterized Pound's relationship to Futurism as one of implacable but informed opposition:
Pound has perhaps done more than anyone to keep Futurism out of England. His antagonism to this movement was the first which was due not merely to unintelligent dislike for anything that was new, and was due to his perception that Futurism was incompatible with any principles of form. In his own words, Futurism is "accelerated impressionism." 6
Eliot, in these remarks, was not rehearsing a history that he had witnessed first-hand, given that he had arrived in England more than two months after Marinetti's final visit in June of 1914, and it is more than likely that these comments were dictated or suggested to him by Pound. 7 Yet Eliot's assessment--or more accurately, Pound's own--has been repeated at face value again and again. "Pound was never a Futurist," writes Noel Stock, the appointed biographer of Pound, and he remained "indifferent or opposed to most of their principles." 8 Pound, states James Wilhelm, "was strongly opposed...to the gimmick-ridden futurists with their odes to automobiles and desire to sweep away all existing art." 9 Both scholars, it is true, concede that Futurism may have stimulated Pound's thinking, but only insofar as it coincided with a general climate of "artistic rebellion" (Wilhelm) that was "[already] 'in the air,'" (Stock), or only insofar as Futurism may have led Pound to think: "...something saner might succeed" (Wilhelm). Such remarks bespeak a puzzling wish to dismiss the possibility that Marinetti may have played a role in Pound's development, a wish so fervent that it has transformed itself into fact. 10 Consider the standard edition of Pound's Selected Letters, first published in 1950, a volume that includes two letters in which Pound explicitly refers to Marinetti by name, both from 1915; in their published versions, however, the first is presented without the sentence that mentions Marinetti, while the second is given with the name "Marinetti" disred into "Mennetti." 11
If it is true, as the logic of post-structuralism asserts, that every erasure will leave its trace in such a way that the very thing one is trying to exclude is disclosed as the hidden center of a contaminated order, then it will come as no surprise to suggest that Marinetti, far from merely prompting Pound to issue or encourage hostile remarks about Futurism, may have stood behind two of the most significant turning points in Pound's career. In the course of its activities in London during the period 1912 to 1914, Futurism gradually mounted a sustained interrogation of the concept of aesthetic autonomy, blurring the boundaries of a category formerly deemed to be self-evident, precipitating a species of legitimation crisis in the concept of art itself. Yet this crisis was not purely or solely conceptual in nature, but derived its special power from the ways in which Marinetti's activities elided and confused the distinctions separating different spheres of cultural production--most important, those associated with art and those with the production of entertainment as a commodity. The effect of Futurism on Pound and the London avant-garde was to make the social space of cultural production into an urgent question, to problematize the settings in which the work--the business, if you will--of modernism and the avant-garde might get done. It was no longer the polite salon or the genteel review, it seemed for a moment, but the concert hall, the mass-circulation newspaper, or perhaps the music-hall that might serve as the new agora of literary and cultural debate. But only for a moment. For the efforts to address the new challenges raised by Marinetti also proved to be failures: paradoxically, in other words, the twin turning points in the career of Pound and the London avant-garde were significant not because they led to the resolution of an intractable problem, but because they revealed themselves as dead ends--and dead ends not just for Pound's poetic or intellectual development, but for the avant-garde as a viable cultural institution. It was when this was finally understood that the avant-garde turned elsewhere: turned, that is to say, to a third alternative in which the opposition between elite and popular culture, or between art and commodity, could be resolved in a brief but uneasy synthesis--resolved, one might almost say, by the creation of the avant-garde itself; or resolved in such a way that we, who live on the other side of that dramatic moment, have inherited a conceptual and institutional impasse that will probably remain unresolved for quite some time to come.
Though Marinetti's activities in London prior to World War I have been poorly chronicled, they can be reconstructed in considerable detail. 12 What emerges is a portrait of some complexity, one that shows an ongoing dialogue between Marinetti's evolution and a rapidly changing intellectual and social milieu. Marinetti visited and lectured in London at four distinct moments. The first was in 1910, when he delivered several lectures to the Lyceum Club for Women, then located at 128 Piccadilly. Pound, however, was away from London when these took place, and the little attention that they received makes it unlikely that he heard about them upon his return. 13 The second and more important of Marinetti's visits to England occurred in the spring of 1912, when he appeared in conjunction with the first exhibition of Futurist paintings at the Sackville Gallery, located at 28 Sackville Street and owned by Max Rothschild. 14 Even before the show opened on 1 March, it was attracting media attention prompted by reports about the controversy it had provoked during its run in Paris. Most of the coverage came from mass circulation newspapers, dailies and weeklies--The Daily Mirror (7 February), The Sketch (14 February), and The Illustrated London News (17 February). 15 On the day before the opening of the exhibition, Sir Philip Burne-Jones offered his view of Futurism in an interview that appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, and his comments anticipated the terms of subsequent debate. Burne-Jones termed the exhibition "something hideous and incompetent" and dubbed the Futurists "a band of maniacs." 16 But when challenged to defend his assertions a few days later by Max Rothschild, Burne-Jones retracted his specific comments about individual works and formal practices, only to reassert a more fundamental critique. He should not have commented on the exhibition at all, he said now: it wasn't "really worthwhile discussing the matter seriously" because "we are not dealing with Art in any form." The Futurist paintings, he summarized, were "outside the pale of Art altogether." 17 This was the question that Futurism would press to its ultimate consequence: where was the pale, the boundaryline, of Art?
The stage for a confrontation had been set, and when the show opened the next day it set off an avalanche of newspaper reviews, commentary, and publicity. In part the exhibition attracted so much and such intense discussion because it coincided with a deepening political crisis. On the day that it opened, more than one million miners led by self-declared syndicalists declared a strike that seemed to threaten vital natural resources in an unprecedented way. Newspapers called the day "Black Friday," suggesting a religious cataclysm, and printed cartoons such as one that portrays a massive Satanic re with hairy arms, cloven hooves, and the word STRIKE written across his emaciated chest, who strides across a coalyard and infuses the spirit of chaos among a crowd of tiny humans fleeing in fright. The title above reads "BLACK FRIDAY, 1912," while below is a second title, "THE MASQUE OF ANARCHY," a reference to the unions' anarchist-syndicalist leaders. 18 Simultaneously, militant suffragists suddenly intensified their window-breaking campaign, an activity that left contemporaries profoundly shocked. 19 By a kind of metonymy facilitated by the modern newspaper's juxtaposition of disparate events, Futurism was becoming the cipher of a contemporary crisis, and it was in this tense environment that Marinetti himself arrived, ready to give his lecture of 19 March at Bechstein Hall. 20 Ironically, it would mark a turning point in the career not of Marinetti, but of Ezra Pound.
By a curious coincidence, Ezra Pound was also giving a lecture on 19 March 1912, the second in a series of three. The talk that he planned for that day was one that encapsulated the central motifs of his career to that point. From the moment when he had arrived in London in late 1908, Pound had welded his claims to literary authority with the poetry and culture of Provence. The first poem he had published in England had been a sestina, a verse form from Provence, that depicted the Provençal poet Bertrans de Born, while his first books of poetry (Personae, Exultations, and Canzoni) had offered readers a steady diet of sestinas, albas, planhs, ballatas, madrigales, and tenzoni. His first work of critical prose had treated the same subject, the poetry of Provence. Pound had established his earliest literary identity by offering readers a species of erudite exoticism, recondite material updated with pungent obiter dicta, a learned mode of writing that could appeal only to an upper-middle-class audience with significant cultural capital (to use Bourdieu's term) and ambitious cultural aspirations. As one approving reviewer of Canzoni put it, Pound had become "The Modern Troubadour." 21 It was a telling oxymoron: Pound had become a living archaism. For just as the sestina and the canzone were literary genres linked with a distinctly courtly lifestyle, so the troubadour presupposed an aulic mode of cultural production--something poles apart from the late industrial society in which Pound actually lived.
Yet if Pound could be accurately described as a form of living archaism, perhaps it was because he was living archaically. Though Pound had generally received warm reviews of his early verse, he had also soon learned that his writings could scarcely earn a sufficient income. Indeed, he would not have been able to survive had it not been for the stroke of good fortune that befell him in March 1910, when he was introduced to Margaret Cravens, a thirty-year-old American expatriate bohemian--a member of the aristocracy of sensibility, in other words--studying music in Paris and a friend of the pianist Walter Morse Rummel. 22 Two days after they met, Cravens offered to become his patron. The evidence suggests that he received about $1,000, or £200 per annum, a sum that was neither mean nor quite princely. On the eve of World War I in England, the average wage for the adult male industrial worker was about £75 per annum, whereas the average annual income of the salaried class was £340. The gap between these res represented the divide between the working class and the whole of the rest of society, a great and accepted gulf that one historian has termed "the major social fact of the day." 23 Patronage meant that Pound's tent was pitched just on the other side of that gulf, yet never far from the abyss that yawned behind him. On 12 March 1912--one week before Marinetti's lecture, and his own--Pound reported to his prospective father-in-law that his income from his writings had risen to £38 for four months, a re that would yield £114 per annum; in addition, he had recently secured a contract with a publishing firm that guaranteed him another £100 per annum. Together with his £200 from Cravens, he noted proudly, his income amounted to "about £400 per year, with reasonable chance of increase." To be sure, "this would not go very far in England," but at least he was approaching the promised land of the salaried class. 24
It is in this context that we can best understand Pound's plans to lecture in March 1912, for these were plainly conceived in order to supplement his income. The strategy was clear enough: by presenting a series of lectures with limited admission and relatively high prices per ticket, one could maximize the returns from the small audience for poetry, capitalizing on its appeal as a marker of social distinction. The series would comprise three lectures, each at 10s. 6d., or the whole series at £1 1s. With the hall or salon furnished by a well-to-do friend, there were no expenses to cover, and if the house was full, even with the audience limited to fifty people, Pound would earn between £50 and £60. The site for the series was the "private gallery" of Lord and Lady Glenconner, located at 34 Queen Anne's Gate, a sedate residential street in one of the choicest locations in London, parallel to the southwestern edge of Saint James' Park. Then, as now, the street was a museum of eighteenth-century architecture: its houses, all built around 1704, were handsome three-story buildings with brick fronts and interiors that retained many of their original furnishings--oak staircases, carved wood panelling with pediments over doorways, marble fireplaces, and so on. The nearby residents were no less choice, with Lady Assheton-Smith the owner and occupant of no. 30, and Dowager Lady Allendale residing next door at no. 32. 25
Admission to Pound's lectures was almost as difficult to obtain as a house on Queen Anne's Gate, and care was taken to distinguish it from other offerings of the contemporary economy. The program announcing the lectures, for example, was privately distributed. Tickets were not commodities that could be purchased, but favors that might be courteously requested. "TICKETS may be obtained on application to Lady Low," stated the program. Lady Ann Penelope Low, the daughter of General Robert Percy Douglas, 4th baronet, had been widowed in 1905 and now resided at 23 De Vere Gardens amid a row of houses nestled just off the southern corner of Kensington Gardens, where she kept an informal salon and sponsored "evenings at home." A close friend of Olivia Shakespear, the mother of Pound's fiancée, Lady Low frequented a circle of upper-middle-class intellectuals such as G. W. Prothero, editor of The Quarterly Review. 26 Here was the realm of elite bourgeois culture in which Pound's career had been fashioned prior to 1912: a world withdrawn from public life and insulated from the grim imperatives of a commodity economy, a sphere in which literary culture had been largely privatized, serving as a medium of exchange for an exiguous aristocracy of sensibility, a court of intellect. Access to this world was strictly controlled: the audience, as the program noted, was "limited to FIFTY" ( 1).
Pound's three lectures were scheduled for the 14, 19, and 21 of March, and immediately after the first one he wrote his father to report his success: "Have just got my first lecture off my chest and am ready to rest. Have cleaned up $90 so far." 27 Yet there were some obvious disadvantages to these proceedings, which required that Pound maintain good relations with a network of people with influence and power, people who could oblige others to attend his lectures, and it left him little room to provoke an audience on whose good will he was patently dependent. Further, his access to these circles was mediated largely by Olivia Shakespear, creating private tensions and constraints that must have been all but unbearable. That there were other avenues to an audience would become apparent in the unexpected events that attended Pound's second lecture, the one scheduled for Tuesday, 19 March 1912.
The topic of Pound's first lecture of 14 March had been Guido Cavalcanti. His second was to treat "Provence, A.D. 1190: Arnaut Daniel." Pound was on familiar ground here, discussing the master of "trobar clus" or "closed verse," the most hermetic vein of troubadour poetry. Characterizing such poems two months later in an essay based on this very lecture, Pound would write: "They are good art as the high mass is good art," works that must be "approached as ritual" because they sought "to make their revelations to those who are already expert." 28 Pound, very plainly, was describing not just the work of Arnaut Daniel, but his own poetry as well. His lecture on Daniel, his poems and his audience, was a wholly self-referential discourse that bespoke its own situation. Appropriately--and yet how ironic, when compared with Marinetti's lecture that same day--the program for Pound's lecture stated that he would discuss Daniel's "possible relation to the Art of to-day." (Like Philip Burne-Jones, Pound still conceived of art with a capital A.) The time was set for 3:30 p.m.
On the morning of the lecture he received a letter from his fiancée, who told him that she would be attending a lecture that evening--not his, however. She was going "to hear Marinetti lecture...about les Futuristes" at Bechstein Hall. 29 This was Pound's first experience of ephemeral seduction, seeing first-hand the powerful allure of art conceived as public practice, as a spectacle capable of attracting an audience much larger than fifty, as performance capable of arousing widespread curiosity, debate, desire. The next day must have been unforgettable for an avid reader of newspapers such as Pound. Not a one took note of "Provence, A.D. 1190: Arnaut Daniel." But Marinetti's performance was fully reported in the morning edition of The Daily Chronicle, with a headline reading "'Futurist' Leader in London," accompanied by the subtitle, "Makes an Attack on the English Nation." The next day a second article on Marinetti appeared in The Morning Leader, while yet a third was published on the second page of The Times. 30 Odder still, Marinetti had not flattered his audience, but berated it, castigating the English as "a nation of sycophants and snobs, enslaved by old worm-eaten traditions, social conventions, and romanticism." And though The Times reported that "some of his audience begged for mercy," The Daily Chronicle noted that "the long-haired gentlemen in the stalls and the ladies with Rossetti eyes and lips rewarded him with their laughter and applause." Still another observer, writing a year later, recalled an audience that "wildly applauded his outspoken derision of all their cherished national characteristics." 31
Marinetti's lecture achieved instant notoriety. After only six weeks in England, he reported in mid-April, the Futurists had elicited 350 articles in newspapers and reviews and had earned more than 11,000 francs in sales ($2,200 or £440). 32 More important, Marinetti had achieved his success not by addressing only an educated elite, but by speaking in a public forum to a wider audience. Whereas tickets to each of Pound's lectures had uniformly cost 10s. 6d., only the most expensive tickets to Marinetti's lecture had cost that much, and the lowest-priced tickets had sold for 1s.; and whereas Pound's audience had been deliberately "limited to FIFTY," Marinetti's may have reached five hundred. (Seating capacity at Bechstein Hall was five hundred and fifty.) 33 Still more important, Marinetti's real audience had become not just the people who attended his performance in Bechstein Hall, but the millions who read about it in The Daily Chronicle, The Morning Leader and The Times.
Nothing could have made plainer the value of a concerted polemical onslaught, the formation of a collective identity buttressed by theatricality and publicity. Sometime in March 1912--it may have been before Marinetti's lecture, though it was certainly after the outbreak of publicity surrounding the Futurist exhibition--Pound sent off the manuscript for his next book of poetry, Ripostes. At the end of the volume he included a brief statement, since famous as the first public reference to Imagism: "As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping." 34 The use of French, Les Imagistes, to designate the new "school" is an obvious echo of the linguistic practice that had led Dorothy Shakespear to describe her plans "to hear Marinetti lecture in French, about les Futuristes," just as Dorothy's practice had been almost a consequence of Marinetti's own. As Marinetti did not speak English, he delivered all his lectures in French while in England; and as he also wrote the original versions for the early Futurist manifestos in French, at least in part because French was still the lingua franca of European intellectual exchange, it was natural to speak about him in French as well. It was also the French version of new manifestos that Marinetti routinely mailed to British critics and journalists, and while mass circulation dailies translated quotations into English, the intellectual and cultural weeklies usually cited the French directly. When Pound, therefore, first announces the creation of Imagism ("As for the future, Les Imagistes...have that in their keeping"), he uses a conjunction of terms ("future" and the name of a movement in French) that plainly signals their provenance. 35
Pound's subsequent steps toward art as public practice came in the wake of three events, all of them precipitating a collapse of the "courtly" structure of cultural production that had characterized Pound's milieu until now. In June 1912 Margaret Cravens committed suicide, leaving Pound without the financial support that had sustained him for the last two years and reinforced his aulic self-conception. In late October, the publishing firm that had guaranteed him £100 per year collapsed. Pound was back to where he had started, and it was not a matter he could easily forget: £500 per annum, his prospective mother-in-law advised him in September, was the minimum it would take for him to marry her daughter. 36 In late September, too, Pound learned that Edward Marsh was assembling an anthology designed to present the recent work of younger poets as a collective project, the Georgians. 37 By December it had already become clear that the volume was going to be a remarkable success. Impelled by these events, Pound began to launch Imagism in a more systematic and serious way.
On 18 August and sometime in October he sent off poems by himself and H. D. to Poetry magazine, characterizing them as "Imagiste." 38 In December he wrote an essay that surveyed contemporary poetry in London--the essay was published in January 1913--and contained his second public reference to Imagism, a description that ran for two brief paragraphs. Imagism was "the youngest school here that has the nerve to call itself a school." 39 The aggressive tone was at odds with the tentative definitions that followed, a contradiction already apparent in the diction. For "school" was a term that Marinetti had used in his earliest writings on Futurism in 1909, but subsequently rejected for its associations with the taxonomies of academic art history, instead adopting the term "movement." Indeed, Pound's presentation of "Imagism" implicitly underscored its differences from Futurism. Imagism rejected Futurism's ethos of collective identity: a school was something more informal, more casual, more individualistic, the fortuitous outcome of "two or three young men agree[ing], more or less, to call certain things good." Imagism also shunned the kind of programmatic ambitions associated with Futurism: "a school does not mean in the least that one writes poetry to a theory." (Saying this, Pound was echoing contemporary reviewers who had complained that Futurist paintings were "rather a theoretic extension than a spontaneous development.") 40 Instead Pound stressed the purely technical nature of Imagism: "Their watchword was Precision" and they sought "to produce a good single line" or just "a good short" poem. They opposed only "interminable effusions." Yet who, after all, would want to defend interminable effusions? Imagism, in short, was a movement to end movements: informal, antitheoretical, absorbed in matters of writerly technique and averse to more global programs that linked poetry to contemporary social transformations or posed questions about the status and functions of art. Though Imagism is commonly treated as the first avant-garde movement in Anglo-American literature, it was really the first anti-avant-garde movement. And Pound's subsequent efforts to define Imagism only accentuated these features. In an essay published two months later in March 1913, written by Pound though printed under the signature of F. S. Flint, Pound made the opposition of Imagism and Futurism explicit:
The imagistes admitted that they were contemporaries of the Post Impressionists and the Futurists; but they had nothing in common with these schools. They had not published a manifesto. They were not a revolutionary school; their only endeavor was to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time,--in Sappho, Catullus, Villon.
Accompanying this essay was another, this one signed by Pound, "A Few Don'ts By an Imagiste," a title implicitly in opposition to the genre of the manifesto. 41 It was a timid response to the challenges raised by the Futurist presence in London, and in a moment of candor in 1927, Pound himself recalled the creation of Imagism in the most mundane terms: "The name was invented to launch H. D. and Aldington before either had enough stuff for a volume." 42 The launching and marketing of a new product--was this all that was at stake in the creation of Imagism?
Formulating the question this way fails to acknowledge the complications and unexpected consequences that were entailed in this novel use of publicity and advertising in connection with culture, creating new pressures that became increasingly apparent in the course of Marinetti's last two visits to England in late 1913 and early 1914. For Pound these visits were important because Marinetti was increasingly shifting the front of his activity from the visual arts to literature: in May 1912 he published the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature," in August the "Response to Objections"; in June and November 1913 he issued the "Destruction of Syntax--Imagination without strings [or: Wireless Imagination]--Words-in-Freedom;" in October, "The Variety Theater." 43 English readers were kept abreast. In September 1913 the journal Poetry and Drama, edited by Harold Monro, devoted an entire issue to examining Futurism. (Its previous issue, notably, had devoted only a paragraph to Imagism.) The issue included a translation of "L'immaginazione senza fili ("Imagination without strings" or "wireless imagination")," as well as almost thirty pages of poems by Aldo Palazzeschi, Paolo Buzzi, and Marinetti himself. And in a long editorial, Monro praised Marinetti warmly, hailing him for auguring a dissolution of the distinction between poetry and popular culture, art and life. Rhapsodizing about the sheer size of futurism's audience--in Italy it had "gained the support of no less than 22,000 adherents" ("V," 263)--Monro became positively breathless at the thought that I poeti futuristi had sold 35,000 copies ("V," 264). This fact in itself, Monro said, constituted "Marinetti's most interesting attitude" ("V," 264). Here, in other words, was poetry that was no longer written "for...close and studious scrutiny by the eye" ("V," 264), or poetry "no longer... withheld from the people" by "educationalists," "intellectuals," or the commercial press ("V," 265), but poetry intended "for the ear," "for immediate and wide circulation" ("V," 264), poetry "regaining some of its popular appeal" ("V," 265). Single-handedly, Marinetti was restoring poetry to its status in an earlier era, an age when "the minstrel and the ballad-monger then represented our modern Northcliffe" ("V," 265). But Monro's reference to Northcliffe inadvertently signalled some of the tensions latent in the collapse of life and art that he wished to celebrate: for now it seemed that there was no longer a meaningful distinction between poetry and the most ephemeral of commodities, the daily newspaper. Those tensions would be fully exposed in the course of Marinetti's last two visits to London.
Monro's remarks prefaced Marinetti's arrival in London by two months. Once again, for six days in November 1913, Marinetti gave daily lectures and readings that attracted substantial audiences and media attention. Now, however, Marinetti began to press his attack against elite bourgeois culture to new limits, assaulting the very principles that had once grounded his own thinking--principles that still grounded Pound's own. Already in the "Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" of 1909 Marinetti had urged that contemporary art be responsive to continuous change and innovation, emphasizing temporality in a way that tended to blur the distinction between art and fashion; yet he had hesitated to draw the logical conclusion that art itself was not an eternal absolute. 44 To the contrary, as late as 1911 he could still charge that his critics feared him precisely because of his defense of art as an absolute: "Perhaps they saw, shining from our eyes, the glorious passion that we nurture for Art. [The capital A is Marinetti's own.] To art, in fact, which merits and which demands the sacrifice of the best, we give a love that is absolute...." 45 But as early as the "Technical Manifesto" of mid-May 1912 he had begun to sound a new note: "Courageously let us set about making the 'ugly' in literature, and let us kill solemnity everywhere. Go away! don't listen to me with the air of great priests! Every day it is necessary to spit on the Altar of Art!" 46 And now, in the new lectures that he gave in late 1913, Marinetti pursued his conclusions to their ultimate consequences. He damned the sacred conception of art: "Art is not a religion," he was quoted as saying on 17 November at the Poets' Club, "not something to be worshipped with joined hands." Instead it "should express all the intensity of life--its beauty...its sordidness," and "the very complex of our life to-day" 47 (Pound himself may have attended this lecture, as it is certain many of his friends did). 48 Three days later, The Daily Mail would publish Marinetti's manifesto, "The Variety Theatre" or "Le Music-Hall," with its intransigent vindication of a despised and popular cultural form. "The music hall," wrote Marinetti, " is naturally anti-academic, primitive, and ingenuous, and therefore the more significant for the unexpectedness of its experiments and the simplicity of its means.... It destroys the solemn the sacred, the serious and the sublime of Art with a capital A." 49
When Marinetti returned to England six months later in May and June of 1914, he was given a chance to put his theories into effect. In June Marinetti was booked to appear at the Coliseum for an entire week, from Monday 15 June to Saturday 21 June, twice daily. By now Marinetti had acquired an almost extraordinary stature in the life of the commercial press. Mass circulation weeklies such as The Sketch and The Graphic assiduously reported his doings and sayings. His mocking self-portrait, an assemblage of discarded pieces of wood attached to a wire-brush, the bristles of which represented his hair, was featured on the front cover of the weekly Sketch. 50 His views on "Futurist" clothes made headlines, and his every lecture was greeted with warm good humor or respectful earnestness. 51 Major newspapers were even competing for advance news stories about the "Futurist Music," and three days before the premier The Pall Mall Gazette featured a front-page story that was labelled a "'P.M.G.' Special" about the rehearsals. 52 It was a major event indeed when Marinetti had agreed to introduce Luigi Russolo and his notorious noisetuners, or intonarumori ( 2). Marinetti was crossing the boundary into a realm of cultural practice where "traditional art" had seldom been seen.
For the Coliseum was not just a music hall in the traditional sense. Its construction and organization had epitomized a set of new developments transforming the world of Edwardian entertainment. Its site on St. Martin's Lane had been selected by Oswald Stoll, the most successful of Edwardian theatrical entrepreneurs, precisely because it stood directly across from the exit of Charing Cross station, all but addressing the crowds of respectable, prosperous people who poured into the metropolis on a day's shopping excursion ( 3). Such people might be glad of an afternoon or evening's entertainment, Stoll had reasoned. They were "middle-class people for whom a visit to a serious play might seem too ambitious and a visit to a music-hall far too racy." 53 This was the audience whom Stoll sought to please, presenting them a sanitized version of the music hall, a "Palace of Variety" that offered, in the words of its program, "the social advantages of the refined and elegant surroundings of a Club." 54 Stoll's theater was part of a wider trend that was changing the music hall from a form of entertainment rooted in the culture of working and lower-middle classes and instead assimilating it to the tastes of a middle class increasingly defined by consumerism. His Coliseum, which opened in 1904, was the biggest and most lavish music hall in London. Its seating capacity was nearly 4,000, its stage and proscenium the largest ever built, and its architecture impossible to ignore: the centerpiece was a massive tower that soared into the air, topped by eight cupids who held a revolving globe with the name "COLISEUM" in electric lights. Here was something to "to catch the attention of those prosperous shoppers." 55 Here was culture as consumption, art as entertainment, and here was the place where Marinetti would complete his last performance in England ( 4).
The show, paradoxically, was not successful. And contemporary observers understood the reasons immediately. Reviewing the premiere performance, The Times wrote:
Signor Marinetti rather mistook his audience yesterday afternoon, when he tried to deliver an academic exposition of Futurist principles at the Coliseum, and he had, in consequence, to put up with a rude reception from a gallery which seemed fully qualified to give him a lesson in his own "Art of Noises." 56
Marinetti indeed "mistook his audience," ultimately in two different yet related ways. One was historical. Marinetti had badly misunderstood the nature of the music-hall itself. For Marinetti's sense of the music-hall was derived largely from his experience in Italy, where it was still a vital if troubled genre of urban popular culture, a hybrid form addressing a public still in the course of transition from a largely agrarian to a wholly urban lifestyle. It was a form that specifically spoke to the hybridized experience of people who had recently migrated to the metropolis, mingling motifs of the village carnival to treat the dislocations of urban experience. But in the more advanced industrial culture of England, where the wrenching process of urbanization had been more fully assimilated, the music hall was already a corpse that was experiencing a brief but spurious afterlife through its incorporation into the "Palace of Variety," the new institution of an advancing consumer economy. The music hall would soon be swept away by the outbreak of World War I and the arrival of Hollywood cinema. In England, in other words, the music hall was no longer a hybrid creation of popular culture, but a prototype of mass commodity culture.
Marinetti's second mistake was theoretical. In the simplest terms, he failed to see that quotation and bricolage are strictly one-way streets. By this I mean that Marinetti's effort to appropriate, legitimate, and transform a still illegitimate genre such as the music hall had the effect not of delegitimating art, as he supposed, but of reaffirming its legitimacy, insofar as it fostered belief not in the value of this stake (e.g. the music hall) or that stake (e.g. classical theater), but in the value of the game in which all the stakes are assigned value at all. 57 More concretely, from a position within the already legitimate domain of art or high culture it was possible for Marinetti to appropriate and legitimate practices of mass culture; but from within the illegitimate domain of mass culture, the Coliseum itself, there was no theoretical basis of critical distantiation by which to assimilate alien or heterogeneous cultural forms. What The Times reviewer termed an "academic exposition of Futurist principles" was precisely the kind of "serious" and self-reflective discourse that the Coliseum sought to exclude. And so it did. After fifteen minutes of Marinetti's first lecture the curtain was unceremoniously lowered--there was a danger, the stage manager later claimed, that "people would start throwing things" (HSB, 186). And for subsequent performances Stoll obliged Marinetti to include a gramophone playing records by Elgar, the most philistine of all composers, allegedly "to bring a little melody into the act." 58 Though Marinetti finished his run of one week, the Coliseum swiftly moved to compensate for the fiasco, bringing in George Robey as its next headliner, a performer almost as popular as Marie Lloyd. Marinetti's effort to assimilate the concept of art to that of the commodity had failed.
If Imagism was an intellectual failure as an attempt to address the pressures brought to bear by the forms of cultural practice that Marinetti was introducing in England, then it must have been doubly disappointing for Pound to find that his effort to assimilate those same forms should meet with a different lack of success. For if we take it that Blast did indeed incorporate the Futurist attack on high art, that it presented itself as a kind of graphic counterpart of music hall performance, then its lack of critical and public acceptance is revealing. For contrary to what later critics have suggested, contemporary critics were neither angered nor provoked by Blast. They were simply bored, and bored not because Blast was an incomprehensible novelty, but because it was all too familiar. They said so, too, in contemporary reviews:
Almost all the pictures reproduced are (like the typesetting of the first pages), Futurist in origin, and nothing else. And as for the productions of the literary Vortices, these are not even so fresh as that.... All it really is is a feeble attempt at being clever. Blast is a flat affair. We haven't a movement here, not even a mistaken one.
And in perhaps the most cutting words of all, the same reviewer remarked:
Mr. Pound used to be quite interesting when he was a remote passéist and wrote about the Provençal troubadours; but as a revolutionary I would rather have Signor Marinetti, who is at any rate a genuine hustler, whereas Mr. Pound assuming violence and ruthlessness is as unimpressive in his movements as a man who is trying to use someone else's coat as a pair of trousers. 59
Blast was indeed a dull affair, and the poems that Pound published in it are among the dreariest he ever produced. His attempt to address and provoke an audience through a programmatic polemical onslaught had proved a conspicuous failure. And not just in aesthetic, but also in economic terms. When Wyndham Lewis later recalled the brief moment when he was the lion of London society as a result of Blast he remembered how little it served him: "As a result of these sociable activities, I did not sell a single picture, it is superfluous to say." 60
Initially, then, Marinetti's practical and theoretical activities in London during the period 1912-14 had two related effects on Pound and what has subsequently come to be termed the Anglo-American avant-garde. One was to provoke a reconration of the relations among the institutions in which the discourse of art and poetry had been produced until now, forcing intellectuals and artists to come to terms with the role of new institutions of mass culture and assess their bearings on the place of art in a cultural marketplace being radically transformed. The other, in so doing, was to precipitate a permanent collapse of the entire set of distinctions between art and commodity, to effect a perceptible and irreversible levelling of both within the single and amorphous category of the commodity. Further, by late 1914 it was clear that the attempts to address or resolve these dilemmas had proved to be failures, whether it was the rearguard restoration effort of Imagism or the imitative gesture of Blast. But if one could neither go back to reconstruct the aristocracy of the salon nor go forward to embrace the egalitarianism of the commodity, what solution was there? The answer, paradoxically, was to do a little of both at once--to reconstruct an aristocracy, but to reconstruct it within the world of the commodity. To accept, in other words, the status of art as a commodity, even as it was simultaneously transformed into a special kind of commodity, a rarity capable of sustaining investment value. Or to reformulate this, the answer to the levelling effect precipitated by a consumer economy was to defer consumption into the future, to transform it into investment; which is to say, to encourage or even solicit the ephemeral seduction of the consumer economy, acknowledging the status of art as commodity, but to postpone and sublimate its consumption by turning it into an object of investment whose value will be realized only in the future. Art, we might say, becomes "news that stays news."
In concrete terms, this meant that what had once been an aristocracy of patronsaloniers would now be replaced by an elite of patron-investors. For the Anglo-American avant-garde, the future lay in the new patronage provided by a small group of people such as John Quinn, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Scofield Thayer, and James Sibley Watson, Jr. The actualization of this new space within the commodity economy was achieved primarily through the new and unprecedented use of two institutions that had already existed for some time, but which now became central to an emerging apparatus of cultural production: the little review and the limited or deluxe edition, venues situated in a profoundly ambiguous social space, simultaneously sequestered and semi-withdrawn from the larger institution of publishing even while firmly embedded within the market economy. It was in the little reviews--among them The Little Review, the Egoist and the Dial--that the principal masterpieces of the Anglo-American avant-garde would first be published. Likewise, their second appearance was almost uniformly in limited editions of 200 copies (such as Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) or 254 copies (Eliot's Ara Vos Prec), or 1,000 copies (Ulysses)--editions at the farthest possible remove from the 35,000 copies of I poeti futuristi. And in this new social space, the kind of publicization that had once been aimed at a mass audience along the lines pursued by Marinetti and imitated by Blast were no longer of use. Asked by Margaret Anderson in 1917 how best to announce his collaboration on The Little Review, Pound now replied: "IF it is any use for adv[ertising]. purposes, you may state that a single copy of my first book has just fetched £8 (forty dollars)." 61 Similarly, seven years later when William Bird was drafting the prospectus for the first edition of A Draft of XVI. Cantos, Pound would urge the same argument: "Yr. best ad is the quiet statement that at auction recently a copy of Mr. P's [first book] 'A Lume Spento' published in 1908 at $1.00 (one dollar) was sold for $52.50." 62 These remarks, far from advancing assertions of intrinsic aesthetic value based on the presupposition of Art, offer straightforward claims about the performance record of investments within a commodity economy: by 1917 A Lume Spento had been increasing in value at a rate of more than 50 percent a year, by 1924 at 28 percent a year. The same, it is implied, should now prove true of The Little Review or A Draft of XVI. Cantos. The reason to buy these is not necessarily to read them, but to be able to sell them--perhaps at a substantial profit. Readers, in short, are giving way to uneasy mixture of patron-investors, collectors, and speculators on the rare book market, all of these situated within a complex and highly unstable institutional space.
What the patron-investors provided with their generous subsidies and endowments was an institutional sphere that was momentarily immune to the pressures of a market economy, partially removed from the constraints of an expansive and expanding mass culture. In this dense new space of collectors and quasi-investors, large audiences were not a help, but a hindrance. Consider only the case of the Modern Gallery, which was first opened in 1916 at 500 Fifth Avenue by Marius de Zayas, a minor artist and journalist previously associated with Alfred Stieglitz and the "291" Gallery. 63 The gallery's principal clients were Eugene and Agnes Meyer, Arthur B. Davies, Walter Arensberg, and John Quinn. Few but fit. In 1920 alone Quinn purchased nearly $24,000 worth of works from de Zayas, and even after returning two paintings in early 1921, the sum of his 1920 purchases totaled almost $13,000. 64 Translated into contemporary res, this might fall somewhere between $340,000 and $390,000. Success, even survival, could depend on just such a nucleus of patron-investors, as de Zayas was told in 1919 by his French colleague, the Parisian dealer Charles Vignier, who was shaken when he learned that de Zayas was staging exhibitions that were drawing large crowds, with his gallery filled almost daily:
I feel very uneasy to learn that your Gallery is full every day. You are losing uselessly a precious strength by these vain chatterings. I would rather hear that you have seen three clients in one week, of whom one has bought something. 65
Vignier's remarks were perceptive. Ironically, de Zayas was ultimately forced to close his gallery not because he had failed to attract a large audience, but because he had succeeded in doing so. That was the dilemma of the avant-garde.
In responding to it by creating a distinction within the world of commodity culture, whereby there is one set of cultural commodities whose value is exhausted in immediate consumption and another whose worth is deferred or sublated into the future as investment, modernism gained for itself--for an evanescent moment--a breathing space within the present, a space from which it could formulate its powerful critique of commodity capitalism, even as--and at the same time as--it mortgaged that critique in the future, mirroring the very system that it critiqued. But the consequences of this precarious and unstable compromise could not be forever deferred. For it was an inevitable outcome of this situation that the avant-garde's distaste for the dictates of the marketplace should ultimately be revealed as disingenuous precisely because, and insofar as, the works of the avant-garde began to command ever more significant prices within the larger open market. After that it was only a matter of time before we should see the emergence of forms of art that were already "precommodified," art that ironically and even nostalgically acknowledges its own exchange function, art that finds its richest moments--in several senses--in the works of Andy Warhol. These are the tristes tropiques of late capitalism, known in their more naive form as "post-modernism."
Lawrence Rainey, Associate Professor of English at Yale University, is the author of Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture , and co-editor of .
1. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 49; originally published as Theorie des Avantgarde, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974).
2. David Cottington, "What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso's Collages of 1912." Art Journal 47 (Winter 1988): 350-59; here 358. See also his "Cubism, Aestheticism, Modernism," in Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exhibition catalogue, 2 vols., ed. William Rubin (1989; New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 2:58-72.
3. Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 128, 129. For a wide-ranging collection of recent approaches to this issue, see Modernity and Mass Culture, ed. James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger (London: Routledge, 1992). For an influential discussion in criticism of the visual arts see Thomas Crow, "Modernism and Mass Culture," in Benjamin Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut, and David Solkin (eds.), Modernism and Modernity (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), 215-64. Crow argues that the social function of the avant-garde was to effect "a necessary brokerage between high and low [cultures]. In its selective appropriation from fringe mass culture, the avant-garde searches out areas of social practice which retain some vivid life in an increasingly administered and rationalized society" .
4. See for example Luciano De Maria, La nascita dell'avanguardia: saggi sul futurismo italiano (Venice: Marsilio editori, 1986), whose title already announces his equation of the genesis of Futurism and the birth of the avant-garde. De Maria also mentions "l'avanguardia storica europea, di cui, a mio parere, il futurismo segna la nascita effettiva" ; he urges that "Marinetti inventò, letteralmente, il prototipo dell'avanguardia storica" ; and he notes "Marinetti e compagni già gettavano le basi della prima autentica, codificata avanguardia europea" . An equally crucial role is assigned to Marinetti and Futurism by Marjorie Perloff in The Futurist Moment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), hereafter abbreviated FM. And while Peter Bürger never mentions Futurism in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, he does place it alongside Dada and Surrealism as "eine der historischen Avantgardebewegungen" in his "Einleitung" to Surrealismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982), 6.
5. Both theses are forcefully argued by Marjorie Perloff in The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981; reprint, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1983), who views Pound as a crucial re in what she terms "the other tradition," a turn away from a symbolist aesthetic to one of collage and juxtaposition.
6. "Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry," in T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 175. The essay was originally published anonymously as an independent volume by Alfred Knopf in 1917; see Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969), 24, A2.
7. Eliot's arrival in London is announced in Pound to Harriet Monroe, 22 September 1914, cited in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 258; cf. Eliot to Conrad Aiken, 30 September 1914, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 1896-1914, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988), 58-9.
8. Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (1970; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 144. All subsequent quotations from Stock are from this page.
9. James Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris: 1908-25 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 93-94. All subsequent quotations from Wilhelm are from these pages.
10. Apart from Perloff's discussion in The Futurist Moment, an indispensable aid to the study of the relations between Pound and Marinetti are two bibliographies listing 240 primary sources that describe Marinetti's activities in England during the period 1910-1915: Patrizia Ardizzone, "Il futurismo in Inghilterra: bibliografia (1910-1915)," Quaderno 9 (1979; special issue on Futurismo/Vorticismo): 91-115, hereafter abbreviated "Bib."; and Valerio Gioè, "Il futurismo in Inghilterra: bibliografia (1910-15)--supplemento," Quaderno 16 : 76-83, hereafter abbreviated "Bib. Supp." Both bibliographies are poorly organized, mingling strictly bibliographical with historical entries, and together they contain hundreds of errors in the recording of titles, authors, journal names, and page references; moreover, both include publications that have little or nothing to do with Futurism, but concern Vorticism. Even so, they remain indispensable.
For secondary studies on Pound and Marinetti, see Niccolò Zapponi, "Odi e amori futuristi di Ezra Pound," Studi americani 18 : 299-311; Niccolò Zapponi, "Dialoghi e scontri con la cultura italiana," chapter 2 in his L'Italia di Ezra Pound (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1976), 77-140; Ulrich Weisstein, "Futurism in Germany and England: Two Flashes in the Pan," in Revue des Langues Vivantes 44 : 467-97; Niccolò Zapponi, "Ezra Pound and Futurism," in Italian Images of Ezra Pound, ed, and trans. Angela Jung and Guido Palandri (Taipei, Taiwan: Mei Ya Publications, 1979), 128-38. See also the perceptive studies of Giovanni Cianci, "Futurismo e avanguardia inglese: il primo Pound tra imagismo e vorticismo," Quaderno 9 (1979; special issue on Futurismo/Vorticismo): 9-66; idem, "D. H. Lawrence e il Futurismo/Vorticismo," Il Verri, 6th ser., no. 17 : 80-99; idem, "Pound e il futurismo," Rivista di Studi Anglo-americani 1 : 123-31; idem, "Futurism and the English Avant-Garde: Pound Between Imagism and Vorticism," Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 6, no. 1 : 3-39, an undated and slightly revised version of the essay that appeared in Quaderno 9 ; and idem, "Catalizzazione futurista: la poetica del vorticismo," in Modernismo/Modernismi, ed. Giovanni Cianci (Milan: Casa Editrice G. Principato, 1991), 156-74.
For subsequent studies, see Laurette Veza, "Marinetti et le Vorticisme," in Présence de F. T. Marinetti: Actes du Colloque International tenu à l'UNESCO , ed. Jean-Claude Marcadé (Lausanne: Éditions l'Âge d'Homme, 1982), 277-86; Giovanni Cianci, "Pound and Futurism," in Blase 3, ed. Bradford Morrow (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), 63-67; and William C. Wees, "Futurismo, vorticismo e 'mondo moderno,'" in Futurismo, cultura e politica, ed. Renzo De Felice (Turin: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1988), 439-52.
11. D. D. Paige, Selected Letters of Ezra Pound (1950; reprint, New York: New Directions, 1971), hereafter abbreviated SL. See Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe [January 1915], 49. Paige transcribes: "I wish [Vachel] Lindsay all possible luck but we're not really pulling the same way, though we both pull against entrenched senility." He omits the sentence that follows: "In reality, he is of the race of Marinetti." See also the letter that follows, Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe [March 1915], 55, again discussing Vachel Lindsay. Paige transcribes: "I don't say he copies Mennetti; but he is with him, and his work is futurist." The correct reading for both letters is given, albeit in translation, in the Italian edition of Pound's letters: Lettere 1907-1958, ed. Aldo Tagliaferri (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980), 51-54.
12. A synthetic but approximate chronology--dates are given by the month only, rather than by the exact day--is given by Perloff, FM, 172-3, drawing on Cianci, "Futurism and the English Avant-Garde," and on "Bib."
13. There was one brief report about Futurism in 1910, an article entitled "Futurist Venice" by Douglas Goldring, which appeared in The Tramp in August 1910, 487-88. This contained excerpts from "Contro Venezia Passatista" and "Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo" ("Bib.," B.1; "Bib. Supp.," D.1). Goldring was the editorial assistant for The English Review, a journal edited by Ford Madox Ford during the period 1908-1910, and the first important review to publish work by Ezra Pound, in March 1909. He was also personally acquainted with Pound, and, though they were not especially close, they saw one another often in 1909 and early 1910. It is thus possible that Pound was aware of Goldring's report in The Tramp, since the two men knew one another. Significantly, Pound's earliest mention of Marinetti consists in a reference to his manifesto "Contro Venezia Passatista," a reference that appears in the last paragraph of "Patria Mia. III," The New Age 11 (19 September 1912): 491-92, reprinted in Ezra Pound's Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), 1:79, hereafter abbreviated EPPP 1. The fact is significant because that is also the manifesto cited by Goldring in his essay in The Tramp. But by September 1912, when Pound wrote his essay, he could easily have obtained information about this manifesto from other sources.
14. On the development and construction of Sackville Street in 1731 see F. H. W. Sheppard, ed., Survey of London, vol. 23, The Parish of St. James Westminster, Part Two, North of Piccadilly (London: Athlone Press, University of London, 1963), 342-52. A detailed description of 28 Sackville Street is given on 360, and a 1958 photograph of it in plate 128.
15. See Anonymous, "Artists of the Future: Weird Paintings Exhibited in Paris" (photographs of five paintings, with derogatory caption), The Daily Mirror, 7 February 1912, 11, ("Bib.," D.2); Anonymous, "Futurisit Paintings" (illustrations with captions), The Sketch, 14 February 1912, 166-67 ("Bib.," D.3); and G. Konody, "Futurism the Latest Art Sensation," The Illustrated London News, 17 February 1912, 225 ("Bib.," D.4). Though published after 1 March 1912, see also Anonymous, "The New Crazy 'Exploding' Pictures by 'Art Anarchists'" (three photos accompanying article), The Illustrated London News, 20 March 1912, reproduced in full in Futurismo e Futurismi, ed. Pontus Hulten (Milan: Bompiani, 1986) 580; or in the American edition, Futurism and Futurisms (New York: Abbeville, 1986), 572. The article notes that "all Paris is crowding into their salon to see these strange paintings. It is the very newest expression of art, and Paris likes it."
16. Sir Philip Burne-Jones quoted in a letter to the editor from Max Rothschild, dated 1 March 1912 and subtitled "Sir Philip Burne-Jones and the Futurists," in "Letters to the Editor," The Pall Mall Gazette, 4 March 1912.
17. Burne-Jones is challenged to defend his assertions by Max Rothschild in the letter cited in note 16. He replies in a letter to the editor of his own, dated 4 March 1912 and subtitled "Sir Philip Burne-Jones and the Futurists," in "Letters to the Editor," The Pall Mall Gazette, 5 March 1912.
18. See, for example, the headlines from The Pall Mall Gazette for 1 March 1912, 1, which read: BLACK FRIDAY. | COAL WAR BEGUN | DESPERATE SITUATION |...RETURN TO CHAOS. See the cartoon in the same newspaper.
19. See, for example, the headlines from The Pall Mall Gazette for 4 March 1912, 1, which read: "SUFFRAGISTS BREAK MORE WINDOWS | ATTACK ON DRAPERY SHOPS TO-DAY | HARRODS' STORES DAMAGED | POLICEMAN PULLED OFF HIS HORSE." Or 5 March 1912, 1: "SUFFRAGETTISM AND ITS RESULT. | WARMEST FRIENDS DISGUSTED | ...COUNTRY ROUSED BY ROWDYISM."
20. See, for example, The Pall Mall Gazette for 1 March 1912, which prints a photograph of Severini's The Pan-Pan Dance at the Monico on page 2, presented without comment, but surrounded by headlines such as the following. "THE FIRST OUTRAGE. Miners Smash Train Windows." Or: "INDUSTRIAL CHAOS. Over a Million Men Out To-Day." For a different but useful view of public response to the 1912 exhibition, see Rossella Caruso, "La mostra dei futuristi a Londra nel 1912: recensioni e commenti," Ricerche di Storia dell'arte 45 : 57-64.
21. The review is reprinted in Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909-1914, ed. Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1984), 70; hereafter abbreviated EP/DS.
22. On Pound's relations with Margaret Cravens see the "Introduction" by Omar Pound and Robert Spoo, eds., in Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, 1910-1912 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), hereafter abbreviated EP/MC.
23. Arthur Marwick, The Deluge (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), 23, citing Arthur Lyon Bowley, The Division of the Product of Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1919), 18; and again Marwick, 20.
24. Pound to Henry Hope Shakespear, [12 March 1912] in EP/DS, 87. As a point of comparison, Dorothy Shakespear notes in March 1912 that Selwyn Image, the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, was earning £400 per annum (EP/DS, 94).
25. Information on Pound's three lectures of 1912 is from EP/DS, 89, which reproduces a lecture program. On Queen Anne's Gate, see the Montagu H. Cox and Philip Norman, eds., The Survey of London, vol. 10, The Parish of St. Margaret, Westminster, Part 1 (London: The London County Council, 1926), 78-81 and 101-03; on Queen Anne's Gate nos. 30 and 32, see 128-31, along with the accompanying plates.
26. A biographical sketch of Lady Low is given in EP/DS, 349, and there are frequent references to her in the letters from Dorothy Shakespear to Pound during the period 1911-13. On 13 July 1911 Dorothy notes "the great and fast friendship between O. [Dorothy's mother, Olivia] and Lady Low" (EP/DS, 35); on [2] September she urges Ezra to visit Lady Low in Dorset, saying "She's a blessed woman with a brain. I am duly grateful for having met her" (EP/DS, 47). (Pound apparently goes [EP/DS, 52].) On 26 September Dorothy terms her "our best [mutual friend] at present" (EP/DS, 66), and on 1 October Lady Low sends the Shakespears a cutting from The Daily Mail that favorably reviews Pound's Canzoni (EP/DS, 69-70).
27. Ezra Pound to Homer Pound, unpublished letter, 14 March 1912; YCAL 43 (Pound Papers), Beinecke Library, Yale University.
28. Ezra Pound, "Psychology and Troubadours," Quest 4 (October 1912), 37-53; reprinted in EPPP 1, 83-99, here, 86.
29. Dorothy Shakespear to Pound, [19 March 1912], in EP/DS, 89-90.
30. Anonymous, "'Futurist' Leader in London," The Daily Chronicle, 20 March 1912, 1 ("Bib.," C.3.a); Anonymous, "Futurism in London," The Morning Leader, 21 March 1912, page not in source ("Bib.," C.3.a); and Anonymous, "Futurism in Literature and Art," The Times, 21 March 1912, 2 ("Bib." C.3.c). See also Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (Berkeley: University of California, 1976), 28.
31. "A nation of sycophants" and "the long-haired gentlemen" are from The Daily Chronicle, 20 March 1912, 1 "Some of his audience," is from the article in The Times, 21 March 1912, 2, col. 6; and "wildly applauded his outspoken derision" is from a passage recollecting the lecture by Harold Monro, in his "Varia," in Poetry and Drama 1 (September 1913), 263; hereafter abbreviated "V."
32. Letter from F. T. Marinetti to F. B. Pratella, 12 April 1912, in Archivi del Futurismo, 2 vols., ed. Maria Drudi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori (Rome: De Luca, 1959-1962), 1:237-38. Richard Cork, in his Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age concludes that, "It would be difficult to exaggerate the impetus which Lewis's yearning for revolt must now have been given by Futurism's first concerted onslaught on London" .
33. Tickets for Marinetti's lecture were advertised in The Times, 19 March 1912, 1, and in The Pall Mall Gazette, 19 March 1912, 4. Both advertisements listed tickets in four price categories (10s. 6d., 5s., 2s. 6d., and 1s.), and tickets could be purchased at the box office of Bechstein Hall or at the Sackville Gallery. Information on seating capacity is from Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, The London Encylopaedia (Bethesda, MD: Adler and Adler Publishers, 1986), s.v. "Wigmore Hall" (the name was changed after World War I). However, one cannot assume that Marinetti attracted a full house. Recalling the Bechstein Hall lecture in September 1913, Harold Monro described "the little Marinetti" speaking in what he termed "a hugh empty hall," and at another point he noted that Marinetti spoke "to a handful of English" (V"). His account is at odds with the larger audience presupposed by The Times and The Daily Chronicle, but I may be in error in not giving sufficient weight to his testimony about the actual, as opposed to the potential, audience.
34. Ezra Pound, "Prefatory Note" to "The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme" (first published at the end of Ripostes in October 1912), in his Personae (rev. ed., New York: New Directions, 1990), 266.
The chronological limits for the preparation of Ripostes are as follows. In an undated letter from March of 1912, Pound informs his father: "The 'mss.' of 'Ripostes' had gone to publishers...." The letter was evidently written sometime after 1 March 1912, since elsewhere Pound refers to the coal strike that began on that date. Likewise, it was written not long before 19 March, since Pound also notes that he must "get my 'Arnaut' ready for delivery" (Ezra Pound to Homer Pound, unpublished letter, March 1912; Beinecke, YCAL 43 [Pound Papers]). Most likely it was around 14 March, therefore, that Pound sent off the manuscript of Ripostes. However, it should not be assumed that the original manuscript necessarily contained either the five poems by Hulme that Pound labelled "The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme," or the "Prefatory Note" that preceded them, with its mention of "Les Imagistes." Since the poems and the note were printed at the very end of the volume, they may have been added after he sent off the manuscripts in mid-March. But how much later? Pound remained in London, apart from one-day excursions, from mid-March to the end of April. Probably on 1 May he left London for Paris, for Dorothy writes to him on 3 May, "I wish I were in Paris" (EP/DS, 95). At first sight, this is the latest date when Pound could still have added the text of Hulme's poems, if not the prefatory note, for while in Paris he would have had difficulty securing a text of Hulme's works. Even so, he had still not received proofs. After his arrival in Paris around 1 or 2 May, Pound stayed with the pianist Walter Morse Rummel until 26 or 27 May (see EP/MC, 110); he then left for a walking tour in southern France, suddenly returning to Paris on 11 June after learning of Margaret Cravens' suicide (EP/MC, 122). The proofs for Ripostes, meanwhile, reached Dorothy Shakespear in England on 12 June (EP/DS, 111), and she immediately forwarded them to Pound in Paris. On 16 June, while still in Paris and attending to affairs occasioned by Cravens' death, he wrote her that he had "just corrected" them (EP/DS, 113). This date, then, would seem to have been the last when Pound might still have added the poems by Hulme, or, if they already formed part of the volume, his "prefatory note" to them. However, some evidence suggests that Pound received and corrected a second set of proofs for Ripostes some two months later, in mid-August 1912, after he had returned to London. In a letter dated [18] August 1912 to Harriet Monroe (SL, 9), Pound writes: "the proofs of Ripostes are on my desk." If this letter is dated correctly by Paige, it can only refer to a second set of proofs, and in that case Pound could easily have added his prefatory note concerning "les Imagistes" as late as 18 August 1912. I suspect that this is indeed what happened, a suspicion partly corroborated by the chronology of Pound's other references to Imagism. For in all of Pound's extant correspondence, there is not a single reference to Imagism prior to this one in the letter of [18[ August to Monroe. (The passage in question is quoted below.) It is also corroborated by an otherwise curious reference in the "Prefatory Note," in which Pound contrasts the "School of Images," which had supposedly led to the formation of Imagism, with more recent movements, noting that "its principles were not so interesting as those of the 'inherent dynamists'...yet they were probably sounder than those of a certain French school which attempted to dispense with verbs altogether...." These are plainly satirical descriptions corresponding to no movement that actually existed, yet taken together the references to "dynamism" and the suppression of verbs seem to allude to the recent developments of Futurism, and in particular to Marinetti's prescription urging the elimination of all verbs except those in the infinitive, advocated in the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature" that was published in May 1912 (F. T. Marinetti, "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista," originally published in 1912 by the Direction of the Futurist Movement in Milan, as a leaflet dated 11 May; reprinted in F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria [Milan: Mondadori, 1968], 46-54, hereafter abbreviated as TIF). If so, it further corroborates a later date for the "Prefatory Note," which would then have been added after the publication of the "Technical Manifesto." That, in turn, preceded the death of Cravens by only a few weeks. In short, everything seems to suggest that Pound did not invent imagism until mid-June or even mid-August of 1912, only after the controversy surrounding the Futurists and after the death of Margaret Cravens, in essence making his creation of Imagism a response to both these events.
35. For examples of discussions quoting Marinetti or other Futurists in English in mass-circulation publications, see C. Lewis Hind, "Futurist Painters: Manifestos and Works of an Italian School," The Daily Chronicle, 4 March 1912, 6; or Anonymous, "Art That Alarms: Paintings that Nearly Caused Paris Riot Shown in London," The Daily Mirror, 4 March 1912, 5. These articles, it is true, were quoting from a group of manifestos that were included in the catalogue to the exhibition of 1912, all translated into English. But consider the case of the manifesto "Futurist Sculpture," written by Boccioni and published in April 1912 ("Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista" [1912], published as a leaflet by the Direction of the Futurist Movement in Milan, dated 11 April). In a French translation, copies of it were sent to English newspapers and reviewers in early autumn 1912, and as before, mass-circulation newspapers always quoted from it in English translation; see Anonymous, "Paris Day by Day: Futurist Sculpture," The Daily Telegraph, 30 September 1912, 6, col. 1; Philip Gibbs, "Futurist Sculpture: The Plastic Arts to be Revolutionised," The Daily Chronicle, 6 October 1912, 6. In contrast to these, all quotations are in French in Anonymous, "La Sculpture Futuriste," The Tripod, November 1912, 20-30; or Anonymous, "Two Futurist Manifestos," The Academy (30 November 1912), 693.
36. Olivia Shakespear to Ezra Pound, 13 September 1912, in EP/DS, 153-54.
37. See Christopher Hassall, Edward Marsh: Patron of the Arts. A Biography (London: Longmans, 1959), 189-93. Hassall shows that Marsh came up with the idea for the Georgian anthology on 19 September 1912; that he presented the next day to Harold Monro, editor of the Poetry Review, who approved, and that on 25 September he wrote several poets, including Pound, to solicit contributions. Pound's reply is partially transcribed on p. 193.
38. Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe, [18] August 1912, SL, 10: "I send you all that I have on my desk--an over-elaborate post-Browning 'Imagiste' affair..."; and Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe, [October 1913], SL, 11: "I've had luck again, and am sending you some modern stuff by an American, I say modern, for it is the laconic speech of the Imagistes, even if the subject is classic." These appear to be Pound's earliest references to Imagism in his extant correspondence, but as the dates in Paige's edition are notoriously unreliable, one cannot be wholly confident in saying this.
39. Ezra Pound, "Editorial Comment. Status Rerum," dated 10 December 1912, Poetry 1 (January 1913), 123-7. The essay is reprinted in EPPP 1, 111-13; all quotations here are from 112.
40. Anonymous, "Fine Art Gossip," The Athenaeum (9 March 1912), 289-90, here 290.
41. F. S. Flint (though actually drafted by Pound and merely rewritten by Flint), "Imagisme," in Poetry 1 (March 1913), 198-200, reprinted in EPPP 1, 119; and Ezra Pound, "A Few Don'ts By An Imagiste," in Poetry 1 (March 1913), 200-206, reprinted in EPPP 1, 120-22. I owe the impetus to my reconsideration of Imagism to an unpublished essay by Robert von Hallberg, "Notes on Imagism and Politics."
42. Pound to Glenn Hughes, unpublished letter, 26 September 1927, Glenn Hughes Collection, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.
43. F. T. Marinetti, "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista;" idem, "Riposte alle obiezioni," originally published in 1912 by the Direction of the Futurist Movement in Milan, as a leaflet entitled "Supplemento al Manifesto Tecnico della Letteratura Futurista," dated 11 August; reprinted in TIF, 55-62; idem, "Distruzione della sintassi--Immaginazione senza fili--Parole-in-libertà" , originally published in 1913 by the Direction of the Futurist movement in Milan, dated 11 May; reprinted in TIF, 65-80; idem, "Il Teatro di Varietà" , originally published in Lacerba 1 (1 October 1913); reprinted in TIF, 80-90.
44. This emphasis stems from Marinetti's assumption that art must respond to its milieu and his belief that modernity is defined by rapid change. The presupposition owes much to Baudelaire's observation, "Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and immutable," in "The Painter of Modern Life," Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 403. Marinetti's "Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo" was originally published in French in Le ro, 20 February 1909, and is reprinted in TIF, 7-14.
45. The original reads: "Forse videro splendere nei nostri occhi la gloriosa passione che nutriamo per l'Arte. All'arte infatti, che merita ed esige il sacrificio dei migliori, noi diamo un amore assoluto...." F. T. Marinetti, "La Divina Commedia è un verminaio di glossatori," TIF, 267; my translation.
46. The original reads: "Facciamo coraggiosamente il 'brutto' in letteratura, e uccidiamo dovunque la solennità. Via! non prendete di quest'arie di grandi sacerdoti, nell'ascoltarmi! Bisogna sputare ogni giorno sull'Altare dell'Arte!" F. T. Marinetti, "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista," TIF, 53-54; my translation.
47. The Times, 18 Nov. 1913, 5.
48. On 6 November 1913 Pound left London to stay with William Butler Yeats at Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch (see Dorothy Shakespear to Ezra Pound, [5 Nobember 1913], EP/DS, 273). But on 14 November he announced, "I am coming up on Monday," or 17 November (see Pound to Dorothy Shakespear, 14 November 1913, EP/DS, 273). Marinetti's lecture would surely have interested him: it was held at the Poets' Club and its subject was "Futurism in Poetry." Harold Monro attended this event, recalling it in his essay on "The Origin of Futurism: Futurism and Ourselves," Poetry and Drama 1 (December 1913), 389-91, here 389. Richard Aldington also attended some of Marinetti's lectures, most likely including this one; see Richard Aldington, "M. Marinetti's Lectures," The New Freewoman, 1 December 1913, 226.
49. The original reads: "Il Teatro di Varietà è naturalmente antiaccademico, primitivo e ingenuo, quindi più significativo per l'imprevisto delle sue ricerche e la semplicità dei suoi mezzi...distrugge il Solenne, il Sacro, il Serio, il Sublime dell'Arte coll'A maiuscolo." F. T. Marinetti, "Il teatro di Varietà," TIF, 86; my translation.
50. The Sketch, 13 May 1914, cover page.
51. See "FUTURIST CLOTHES. Man's Suit in Single Piece. ONE BUTTON," The Pall Mall Gazette, 28 May 1914, 2. See also The Sketch (cited above), which reports that Marinetti "has been lecturing to very interested audiences."
52. Anonymous, "Futurist Music: 'Noisy Tuners' At A Rehearsal; Cracklers and Roarers," The Pall Mall Gazette, 12 June 1914.
53. Felix Barker, The House that Stoll Built: The Story of the Coliseum Theatre (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1957), 11, hereafter abbreviated HSB.
54. Quoted in Victor Glasstone, Victorian and Edwardian Theatres (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1975), 116.
55. Victor Glasstone, The London Coliseum (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healy, 1980), 17.
56. The Times, 16 June 1914, 5. "ART AND PRACTICE OF NOISE. Hostile Reception of Signor Marinetti."
57. I adapt this observation from Pierre Bourdieu, Distinctions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 569, n. 81.
58. Christopher R. W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 83. I have synthesized Nevinson's account of Marinetti's first performance with Barker's (HSB, 183-6), though they differ in several respects.
59. Solomon Eagle, "Current Literature: Books in General," The New Statesman 3 (4 July 1914), 406. Cf. Anonymous, "The Futurists," The New Statesman 3 (11 July 1914), 426: "One can forgive a new movement for anything except being tedious: Blast is as tedious as an imitation of George Robey by a curate without a sense of humour...to make up of the pages of Blast a winding-sheet in which to wrap up Futurism for burial is to do an indignity to a genuine and living artistic movement. But, after all, what is Vorticism but Futurism in an English disguise--Futurism, we might call it, bottled in England, and bottled badly? ...the two groups differ from each other not in their aims, but in their degrees of competence."
60. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937; reprint, New York: Riverrun Press, 1982), 47.
61. Pound to Margaret Anderson, 10 May 1917, in Pound/Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson, ed. Thomas L. Scott and Melvin J. Friedman, 46.
62. Pound to William Bird, 7 May 1924; Bird Manuscripts, Lilly Library, University of Indiana.
63. "Our object in opening a new gallery is to do business not only to t against dishonest commercialism but in order to support ourselves and make others able to support themselves." Marius de Zayas to Alfred Stieglitz, 27 August 1915; Alfred Stieglitz Archive, Beinecke Library, Yale University. See also Douglas Hyland, Marius de Zayas: Conjurer of Souls (Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1981), 46, hereafter abbreviated MZ, who urges that de Zayas sought to make a gallery "which would be a commercial venture in a way that Stieglitz's had never been." Hyland presents an excellent account of the two galleries run by de Zayas (46-52).
64. De Zayas's principal clients are given in MZ, 48. Quinn's purchases in 1920 are detailed by B. L. Reid, The Man From New York: John Quinn and His Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 471-2.
65. Quoted by Hyland (MZ, 50).
In the period when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti brought to life his ambitious project of artistic reawakening, mass society was still in an early stage of development, far from having acquired the characteristics that would subsequently become more and more clearly defined with the ever more rapid development of new technologies. Yet it was precisely this new world, just emerging at the dawn of the twentieth century, with its profound economic and anthropological transformations, that became the reference point for futurism, a movement that responded to the radical nature of this epochal shift with a project almost equally global in its ambitions, that committed itself to an aesthetic renovation also entailing moral and intellectual claims, and that sought to involve not just an intellectual elite, but all the classes and sectors of modern society. Harking back in certain ways to the criteria of collective art previously suggested by Wagner and Lautréamont, Marinetti chose to pursue a program of cultural democratization, setting himself the goal of bringing art into the realm of daily life.
The advent of mass society, as Benjamin noted long ago, entails the "decay of the auratic," 1 a process in which art loses its halo of associations with ritual and magic as the values of tradition disappear. His viewpoint might almost have been designed to illustrate a well-known prose-poem by Baudelaire, "Perte d'auréole" (lost halo), a witty sketch in which Baudelaire explores the new marginality assigned to the artist by the world of modernity. The protagonist, a poet, recounts his earlier attempt to cross a boulevard jammed with morning traffic. Trying to leap over the mud while also avoiding the horses and carriages that fly in every direction, he had made a sudden movement that caused his halo to fall into the mud. Stricken with panic and fearful of being injured, he then decided to leave it on the ground. Yet he feels no regret, he tells his interlocutor, for now he is free to stroll through the city incognito, "like all common mortals." Now, the poet informs his hearer, he is "an exact resemblance of yourself, as you can see!" 2
Responding many years later to the same sense of the loss of the artist's role in modernity, Marinetti attempted to relocate or rediscover the sense of aura within the forms of modernity itself. Perhaps it is no accident that he placed his own artistic rebirth in a muddy ditch as well in the famous allegorical narrative that prefaces "The Founding and First Manifesto of Futurism," in which an automobile accident is represented as a second birth and myth of initiation to modern life:
Oh! Maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse....When I came up torn, filthy, and stinking from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart! 3
The passage plainly indicates the necessity of descending into the inferno of modern life, of accepting the challenges posed by an existence dominated by speed, standardization, noise, and mass communications; but that project, in turn, implicitly requires that it be translated concretely into a program of recuperating, for the domain of art, the universe of new signs that is offered by the metropolis, signs that can be used for constructing a new epic, an industrial epos shaped by the mythic language of the machine.
That implicit program of recuperation is signalled not by the allegorical narrative, but by the medium of its transmission and the relationship of the narrative to the event that it heralds. Adopting a polemical stance towards the communicative means of more traditional culture, closed in upon itself and incapable of seeing beyond the institutional limits imposed by academies, universities, readers' circles, and salons, Marinetti understands the new world of mass communications and, decades before Marshall McLuhan, intuitively perceives that "the medium is the message." "The Founding and First Manifesto," published on the first page Le ro (Paris) on 20 February 1909, embodies this very understanding: it is launched from an international venue in a language that addresses the widest possible audience. Moreover, it announces a pseudo-event, the birth of Futurism; it is by means of the press that this event is immediately realized. (In point of fact, Marinetti possessed only a handful of followers at the time, all of them poets, and it was not until much later that he would be joined by painters, musicians, and architects, to form a genuinely global movement.) From the beginning, in other words, Marinetti possessed an uncommon capacity for using the media and forging public relations, gifts that he utilized in a self-conscious effort to promote Futurism in much the way that one would promote an industrial product that is to be introduced into the market and publicized.
At least part of Marinetti's sensibility to advertising was a result of his living in Milan, a city then in a stage of rapid economic growth. What struck him in particular were two phenomena that were absolutely new and that plainly accompanied the development of modern society: on the one hand, industrialization, which, advancing in stages of sudden expansion, dissolves the pyramidal structure of an older social order in favor of massification, and on the other hand, the birth of popular political parties and unionization. Both industry and politics possess their own linguistic registers enabling them to enter dialogue with a wide public, penetrating almost every level of society. Aiming at creating an avant-garde that would address a mass society, Marinetti introduced into the world of art precisely the kinds of communicative systems that typified the political avant-garde (verbal violence, techniques of agitation, meetings, etc.) and industrial advertising (hypervaluation in the representation of its own products, a massive use of posters, the launching of leaflets, etc.).
One of the most interesting aspects of this program consisted in the strategy adopted for the sale and diffusion of works of art and books. Marinetti created a complex of entrepreneurial functions and activities aimed at moving goods created by artist-producers to public consumers, and so became the unquestioned manager of a vast program of cultural marketing, responsible for coordinating and directing the entire enterprise. His initiatives extended from publishing to organizing theatrical tournées, from arranging propaganda expeditions in various countries abroad, typically accompanied by lectures and readings, to preparing exhibitions both abroad and in Italy. An impresario of poets and painters, Marinetti would deploy his own economic resources in financing these operations. His house (first in Milan, then in Rome after 1925 or so) was always the official seat, the corporate headquarters of the movement, a mixture of house and museum in which Oriental furniture (inherited from his father, Enrico, formerly a lawyer and businessman in Alexandria, Egypt) was placed alongside the paintings, books, and sculptures of the Futurists. Over the entrance door was a plaque with the simple inscription, "Futurism."
It is a commonplace to say that "publicity is the soul of commerce," but before Marinetti nobody had thought that advertising might be also the soul, or motor, of art. Fifty years after the foundation of Futurism, the poet Aldo Palazzeschi could still recall the sense of shock that this produced among contemporaries.
Marinetti had understood from the beginning the power of advertising, a power that would eventually accomplish feats and address people from the highest to the lowest, omitting no one within the social structure...for more orthodox thinkers, to use it for matters of intellectual and cultural life was considered an ignominy so base that no dictionary was thought to possess a term that could sufficiently describe its wickedness. 4
Among contemporary cultural circles, Marinetti was reproved for operating in a style all'americana (in an American style) that was deemed inappropriate to the world of art. Giuseppe Prezzolini, who was interested in rhetoric and the arts of persuasion, 5 remarked that Marinetti had the "advertising personality of a good travelling salesman":
For him everything is of equal value, provided only that it happen to come from his own firm. Extremely adept at launching new products, he never wonders whether the goods that he is selling are fine or coarse: for him, all of it is merchandise of the highest quality. 6
In the early years of Futurism, prior to the outbreak of the Great War, Marinetti would cover the walls and hoardings of all the major cities of Italy with massive white posters that contained a single word in glaring red: "Futurism." 7
One of the most specific and widely debated instruments within Marinetti's complex of entrepreneurial functions was the so-called serata futurista ("Futurist evening" or "Futurist soirée"). This became a privileged form of communication during the "heroic" years of Futurism prior to the Great War, an era when the theater was still an important means of socialization that spanned the spectrum of Italian culture, permitting people of different socio-economic strata to meet in a single place without distinctions of class or income. From the ground floor to the gallery and the boxes, the theater became a container embracing everyone, a site in which the creativity of the Futurists would spread like lava running from the mouth of a volcano: spectators and artists became the chemical components of an incandescent fusion in which the event was no longer the spectacle in itself, but the ensemble of emotions, tensions, actions, and reactions being created.
Marinetti's management of the serata revealed the same intense concern with entrepreneurial values. In general he rented the theater himself, and typically admission was priced very low or made free in order to encourage an audience as large as possible. Every performance was preceded by an advertising barrage that included advertisements in the daily newspapers, posters on walls, and the distribution of leaflets or handbills. The audience was largely composed of intellectuals, professionals, and aristocrats, with a smaller representation of young people and workers. The performance itself consisted of participants presenting their paintings, reciting poetry or other "words-in-freedom" compositions, or declaiming manifestos. Marinetti and his companions insistently provoked the audience, which in turn responded by launching missiles of every imaginable kind: the serata was transformed into a miniature war that required a visceral involvement on the part of the spectator. To quiet the brawls the police were typically called in, unintentionally lending themselves to a role that had already been scripted for them in advance. From beginning to end the entire event was carefully choreographed by Marinetti, including the predictable aftermath: daily newspapers promptly reported the event with shocked headlines, lengthy articles that detailed the brawls in all their fury, and editorial commentary that deplored the Futurist provocations, all of these inadvertently furnishing the Futurists with advance publicity for the next serata to follow.
Even the tone that Marinetti used in his speeches and addresses to the gallery was tinged with the language of advertising. On the one hand he carefully sought to shock by deliberately taunting and provoking the audience, while on the other hand he glorified the successes of his group with a lyrical rhetoric of excessive emphasis. Not untypical is a speech from one of the Futurist evenings that took place in Florence in 1913 at the Teatro Verdi, in which Marinetti assaulted the audience thus:
We are a handful of tamers here in this cage of wild animals that are roaring and yet also frightened. You will leave here tamed, bearing within yourselves an involuntary admiration for us that you will be unable to repress....Seven thousand mediocrities against eight artists whose formidable genius you cannot deny. 8
Marinetti's activities as a publisher were strictly connected with his propagandistic efforts. 9 In this regard his views owed much to wider changes that were taking place within the world of publishing in Italy, the outcome of a growing perception among contemporary intellectuals that cultural activity was something to be developed as part of a continuous process through a cycle of production and consumption, via specific channels and institutions. Reviews were now increasingly flanked by complementary cultural enterprises, such as publishing houses and retail outlets. Italian intellectuals who were most responsive to current events, in line with the industrial development that marked the era dominated by the governments of Giolitti, increasingly understood that culture was a product, and that as such, it was to be regulated by the laws of the market. Ideas, in order to become subjects of discussion, had to be widely diffused. Sharing this viewpoint, Marinetti had founded the journal Poesia in Milan in 1905, an eclectic monthly that hosted Symbolists, Parnassians, decadents, neo-romantics, modernists, the crepuscolari, and even authors writing in dialect. Yet its foundamental project was always that of self-promotion and publicity for Marinetti himself. The first number of the journal was announced with a "circular letter" prepared for the press, which adopted a synthetic and dramatic style of immediacy that indicated its origins in the language of advertising, a style that would become a constant in Futurism itself. By this time Marinetti was already standing accused of being an intellectual too attentive to the clamor of publicity, a weakness he was thought to share with Gabriele D'Annunzio, another great writer who understood the value of image and self-publicity in the modern society of the spectacle.
Promotional systems created in support of the journal were numerous: the habit of concocting "puffs" for the press, with reviews that were prepared in advance; sending numerous copies of certain issues as complimentary gifts to influential reviewers and authors; an insistent program of editorial self-publicization; a constant search for support for the journal from other intellectuals, including requests for collaboration, which were also handsomely paid. More important, authors were rewarded with res that ranged from one hundred liras (received by the poet Giovanni Pascoli) to three hundred liras (offered to d'Annunzio). Marinetti himself, it might be noted, much preferred Pascoli as an author; his payments reflected not his value judgments, but the fluctuations of the market. 10 Another feature designed to contribute to the journal's propaganda and self-publicity aims was the series of "inquests" that it sponsored: on "the beauty of Italian women," on "free verse," and on and on. Still another were the contests for poetry and prose that were open to the young and unknown. Poesia, moreover, was also supported by a book series that published works by the authors who had won its contests, or works that reported the results of inquests that had proven especially controversial, such as the one on free verse (Enquête internationale sur le vers libre [International inquest on free verse; 1909]). 11 And finally, in an Italian culture that was still largely provincial in nature, the international character of Poesia gave it a special glitter, even as it simultaneously served a crucial function as a bridge between Italy and the rest of Europe. One need only glance at a number of issues to see how many authors of genuinely international caliber were offered to the Italian public: William Butler Yeats, Alfred Jarry, Jean Cocteau, Paul Claudel, Miguel de Unamuno, the Russian symbolist poet Valery Bryusov, or the Greek national poet Costas Palamàs. To be sure, cosmopolitanism was also a characteristic innate in Marinetti's personality. An Italian who was born in Egypt, he had been educated in French and felt far more comfortable writing in it than in Italian until perhaps as late as 1915, and his earliest literary efforts were directed at taking of the role of a "Franco-Italian" poet. All these circumstances meant that Marinetti tended to regard culture as an essentially comparative and international activity, with the result that versions in multiple languages also became a recurrent feature of Marinetti's publishing activities. 12
The journal Poesia continued to appear until 1909, serving as a springboard for the launching of Futurism. Yet while it reprinted "The Founding and First Manifesto," its publication was suspended shortly thereafter. It had proven an invaluable testing ground for the techniques of cultural communication that the movement would subsequently adopt, but it remained inextricably tied to the hinterland of Symbolism by its origins, its collaborators, and its history, and after the break announced by Futurism, Marinetti strove to keep his distance from Symbolism in all its forms. Notwithstanding the suppression of the journal, its book publishing imprint ("Editions of Poesia") continued to be kept in existence, and in 1910 it was renamed only slightly as "Futurist Editions of Poesia," retaining a reminder of the earlier review that had hovered so precariously between the past and the future. From now on it would be the book that became the principal means for diffusing the movement's poetics and propaganda, one of the most vital functions of the complex Futurist organism. The "Futurist Editions of Poesia" were soon flanked by other series and imprints that were typically connected to particular groups of Futurists in specific cities and their reviews: Marinetti's movement became extraordinarily extensive and multifarious, not limited to a single cenacle. Increasingly it was structured like a political party, guided by a charismatic leader and possessing an official policy that was shaped by Marinetti's closest collaborators, generally the best and most prominent painters and poets. Yet it could also count upon an extensive network of Futurist groups that were scattered in every region of Italy, as well as on a number of sympathizers abroad.
The existence of such groups inevitably generated autonomous initiatives that could then be supported or absorbed by Marinetti, such as Lacerba, the review founded by Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici in Florence in 1913. They soon allied themselves with Marinetti, who undertook much of the journal's distribution on his own account for as long as the collaboration lasted. How many readers followed the journal is difficult to establish, as is also the case with the earlier review, Poesia. Yet it is safe to say that press runs were quite high in comparison with those of contemporaneous literary journals. Exact res do not exist for Poesia, though the number of retail outlets that carried it (which the journal listed in every issue) and the letters from readers (which were published in a regular rubric) suggest a rather ample diffusion. Marinetti himself remarked upon the press runs of Poesia's last two numbers, which were issued in quantities much larger because dedicated to Futurism: thirty thousand copies of the penultimate number, forty thousand for the final one. Yet these are res that need to be compared with actual inventories or press orders, sinch Marinetti was not averse to inflating his reports for advertising purposes.
For Lacerba, on the other hand, there are more reliable res available for comparison. The review had a considerable impact and its engaging polemical battles left an indelible impression in the memory of intellectuals of the time. Even Gramsci was intrigued by it, as he was by Marinetti and the Futurists in general, and in 1922 he wrote a letter to Trotsky in which he stated that Lacerba had a press run of "twenty thousand copies" and "four out of five copies had circulated among workers." 13 The re differs little from one recalled by Marinetti in a letter written to Mario Carli in 1919, when Carli was director of the newspaper Roma Futurista: "I am convinced that when censorship disappears, it would be possible to surpass the largest press runs of Lacerba, which were 18,000 copies." 14 But both these accounts differ significantly from res offered by more contemporary documents. Aldo Palazzeschi, in a letter written on 16 May 1913 to Attilio Vallecchi, the printer of Lacerba, speaks of only "ten thousand copies," while Giovanni Papini, writing a bit earlier to Palazzeschi, described the journal's success in the following terms: "Lacerba is selling like hot cakes. A great deal of discussion--and conversions everywhere. The number has been well received and very few of the 8,000 copies are left." 15 And only a few days earlier Papini had written Marinetti to say that he was sending him copies of Lacerba to distribute at his own expense:
Today the printing of L[acerba] was finished and you should immediately receive 3000 copies. At the beginning you will find an article of mine which I have chosen to title Against Futurism. Don't be alarmed. I have done so deliberately in order to attract attention and arouse people's curiosity. It is a defense of the Fut[urists]...Don't be upset if I repeat in several places that I am not a Futurist. For tactical reasons that is a necessity. 16
This letter reveals a considerable awareness of the mechanisms of propaganda, as Papini describes an essay whose title appears to be an assault against Marinetti's movement, but which actually announces Lacerba's shift toward a position in its favor. Papini cunningly exploits widespread hostility against Futurism in order to thwart his readers' expectations and so prove all the more shocking.
Marinetti, it should be noted, could sustain his role as an impresario of poets and painters not only because of his formidable managerial capacities, but also because of his substantial wealth. In 1907, upon the death of his father, he had inherited a conspicuous sum of money. Exactly how much is not known, though Marinetti himself, in his memoirs dictated many years later, recorded that a French newspaper with a large circulation reported at the time that his inheritance amounted to eighty million liras. 17 Marinetti, in any event, employed his patrimony to finance Futurism with uncommon generosity and with a perceptive sense of how to create a more enduring kind of goods: today the works that his movement produced and the books that his publishing house issued constitute an object of great value both in the world of culture and in the domain of the market. Marinetti himself defined the motivations that prompted him to become an impresario of unknown talents in the following terms.
I had the good fortune to inherit a substantial sum from my father, but I chose not to use it in a manner either base or banal. I have, instead, availed myself of the opportunities offered by independence to realize a vast and audacious plan for intellectual and artistic renewal in Italy: to protect, encourage, and materially to help the young, innovative, and rebellious minds that are daily suffocated by the indifference, the avarice, or the myopia of publishers. 18
Marinetti spoke these words in his defense during the trial on charges of pornography that were lodged against him in 1910 for the presence of several erotic scenes in the novel Mafarka il futurista (Mafarka the Futurist; 1910). 19 As was typical for Marinetti, his case was pleaded by a trio of illustrious lawyers (Innocenzo Cappa, Cesare Sarfatti, Salvatore Barzilai) and supported by an expert witness who was then of considerable renown, the author Luigi Capuana, all of which enabled him to turn the trial into yet another publicity success that was partly achieved through his careful organization of a press campaign involving intellectuals from Italy and abroad, a success that also helped to speed the book's translation into Russian and Spanish. And yet it remains a fact that Marinetti's cultural entrepreneurship was based upon a disinterested love of art which was combined with his wish to address the need for an alternative space that could sustain the talents he wished to launch into the marketplace of art and literature: the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, Ardengo Soffici, Fortunato Depero, Enrico Prampolini, as well as the writers Aldo Palazzeschi, Corrado Govoni, Paolo Buzzi, Luciano Folgore, Francesco Cangiullo, and many others. Paolo Buzzi, the first poet whose work was published by Marinetti in book form, later recalled:
Because of my poverty and the necessity that I faced of having to find a job, which required studies that were not intellectual in nature, my literary tendencies would have been dead heaven only knows how long ago if I had not met with that electric lighthouse that you know of. And later, having come into contact with publishers, some of them quite large ones, I immediately perceived the evil mediocrity and the fierce mentality of the petty shopkeeper that animate them: with the result that returning to the old and crazy publishing house [of Marinetti] always gave me a shiver of enthusiasm and, more important, a bit of courage, of faith in the future. 20
The "Futurist Editions of Poesia" were perhaps the most important embodiment of Marinetti's desire to create an alternative cultural space, becoming an experimental laboratory in the true sense of the term, where the canons of a new writing, the "words-in-freedom," were successively elaborated and consecrated for the first time with Marinetti's celebrated Zang Tumb Tuuum . 21 Marinetti himself was perfectly clear about his aims and the role of the publishing house within a larger artistic reawakening: "We reserve the 'Futurist Editions of Poesia' for those works that are absolutely Futurist in their violence and intellectual extremism and that cannot be published by others because of their typographical difficulties." 22
Marinetti, then, was a publisher whose activities were largely unaffected by the need to make money. Instead they resembled those of so-called engaged or committed editors such as Giuseppe Prezzolini and Piero Gobetti, though with some crucial differences: the impulse of extreme avant-gardism, on the one hand, and the communicative systems that were adopted to embody that impulse, on the other. Whereas Prezzolini and Gobetti were deeply concerned with questions of pedagogy and the formation of a civic elite, Marinetti placed more emphasis on the circulation of ideas per se and, therefore, on propaganda. More concretely, Marinetti tended to give away a remarkably high percentage of the copies from any given press run of a book, almost wholly neglecting their distribution in retail outlets such as bookstores. Journalists, politicians, artists, intellectuals, industrialists, potential sympathizers and active rivals--all found themselves flooded with gratis copies of books, newspapers, journals, magazines, and leaflets streaming forth from the Marinetti factories. The poet Aldo Palazzeschi later recalled with wry humor his own naiveté and surprise when first confronted with Marinetti's plans to compose hundreds of dedicatory inscriptions--not for Marinetti's book, but for Palazzeschi's own--to people with whom Palazzeschi had no relations at all:
No sooner had the book been printed in a thousand copies than the question arose of what to do about the number of copies customarily sent gratis to members of the press and perhaps a few friends.  I began leafing through it with a growing sense of fear and dismay. It contained some seven hundred names, together with their addresses and a model of the sort of dedication that each was to receive. The few remaining copies of my book, I was informed, could be sent to a few booksellers in the larger cities, though without any hurry and as if it were a fact of no importance in comparison with the announcement that the book was already sold out, which had also been prepared in advance. The list comprehended a most wild and unsuspected variety of persons: men from the worlds of politics and culture, prominent industrialists and professionals, men and women of society, among whom were people who were truly famous and in some cases notorious for their implacable opposition to Futurism, persons who would surely throw the book away with a curse, or would even burn it. But it was exactly those who didn't want it, according to Marinetti's theory, who had to receive it....I was resolutely opposed to a project of this kind and after much discussion we at last agreed that I would make a wide selection in my own way from the six or seven hundred addresses, reducing it to almost half. I also announced firmly that I was not prepared to write hundreds of dedications to persons whom I didn't know.... "Don't worry," replied Marinetti, "I'll dictate the inscriptions myself, and you can copy them down." 23