That Ol' Time Modernism
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry THAT OL' TIME MODERNISM BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL TO THOSE OF US who find ourselves on the far side of 50, it seems only yesterday that the Modernists and their disciples were enjoining...
...In 1947 Brooks moved to Yale, where by the 1960s he had become a member of the old guard trying to hold the fort against new ideas...
...Mina Loy's strongest verse sounds as if it had been written yesterday...
...and Giovanni Papim, a philosopher who...
...He did not return, and his fate remains a mystery...
...For a year they drifted nearly penniless, uncertain what to do...
...There he studied with John Crowe Ransom and made friends with an upperclassman, Robert Perm Warren, and a recent graduate, Alan Tate...
...In fact, the 20th-century poets and novelists academics focused on seldom had connections with universities or wrote for those who did...
...Feminists condemn its misogynism...
...The onset of World War II drove her back to New York, where she gradually settled down as an eccentric Bowery figure, "the Duchess...
...It is salutary to be reminded that although neither Brooks nor Loy would have much use for the other's work, each exemplified facets of an esthetic philosophy that influenced how people in the first half of the century saw themselves in relation to culture...
...The biography and poems prove, too, that not all Modernist ideas are dated...
...Loy never really recovered...
...His pregnant wife watched him sail out to test it...
...Mina Loy participated in such radical experiments as Futurism, Surrealism and Dadaism...
...As Monroe K. Spears pointed out, however, each poem is "immersed in its own time " What appeals to the sensibilities of one culture may well leave another cold...
...Burke's portrait of Loy shows us a resilient survivor who, no less than Mehitabel...
...or tomorrow...
...She was at heart romantic, which helps explain why she fell for the mascot of the Surrealists, Arthur Craven -whose real name was Fabian Lloyd, lie had been a boxer in France, was Oscar Wilde's nephew and wrote poetry, but was mainly valued by the group for his magnetism and unconventionality (the same role Neil Cassady played for the Beats...
...Craven bought a used boat...
...But two new biographies, in their own way, disprove that notion...
...then in the words of the old hymn, "it's good enough for me...
...I he plight of Bowery derelicts and homeless people inspired some of her most impassioned poems and artwork For the pictures she used neighborhood garbage—eggshells, banana peels and the like—to fashion collages she gave such titles as "Christ on a Clothesline...
...495 pp., $35.00) tells the very different story of an almost forgotten innovator...
...poststructuralists and de-constructionists of every flavor decry its elitism...
...Winchell catalogs most of the main disputes surrounding Brooks'theories...
...promulgators of Dadaism, Some of their vision appealed to her, though as a practicing Christian Scientist she never adopted its nihilism...
...Winchell admires Brooks to the point of taking up the cudgels on behalf of his positions (in one extreme case, the biographer sides with the critic s partisan battles against reforms in his beloved Episcopal Church), Ultimately, though, Winchell must acknowledge that the New Criticism had its limitations...
...government, she followed him to Mexico and married him...
...This erotic tangle gave Loy raw1 material for verse that dissects, with a satiric scalpel, the conflicts between men and women...
...In the midst of forging twin careers as a painter and a poet, she managed to rear two children by different fathers, Loy came to New York in 1916 to gel a divorce and to sample this "capital of modernity" whose Art Deco skyscrapers had become symbols of a new way of life...
...By the time Brooks joined the faculty of Louisiana State University in 1932, he had developed into a formidable advocate of this approach to literature that made the most of Modernism's erudite allusions and passion for paradox...
...one of the original shapers of Modernist tenets, got her schooling largely in the expatriate communities of Germany, France and Italy, rather than the classroom...
...Here she made friends with William Carlos Williams and met the woman then considered her chief poetic rival—Marianne Moore...
...Harold Bloom, one of Brooks' most gifted proteges, built his reputation redeeming 19th-century Romantic authors from the academic disfavor Modernism had relegated them to...
...When his radical politics got him in trouble with the U.S...
...All three were prominent members of a regional Modernist group that strongly influenced him called the Fugitives, whose view of Southern history was distinguished by a mixture of irony and nostalgia...
...Futurism's founder (and, later, a confidant of Mussolini...
...Nevertheless, many of today's critical illuminati—including Bloom and Stanley Fish—learned their craft from him...
...Brooks (1906-1994), who came from a family of Tennessee ministers, attended his father's alma mater, Vanderbilt University...
...Bom in London to a successful haberdasher of Hungarian Jewish origins and an English mother, she weathered family conflicts brought on in part by anxiety over British anti-Semitism and broke away as soon as she could through her talent for painting and her extraordinary beauty...
...One of the most serious was its claim that the qualities of "good" literature are universal and never change...
...Loy and Craven recognized each other as kindred spirits...
...Simultaneously the publisher has reissued Loy's The Lost Lunar Baedeker (238 pp., $19.00), a collection of poems and prose written between 1914 and 1949...
...The canon this school created favored T. S. Eliot at the expense of writers like Shelley, and elevated Joyce and Faulkner while demoting the 19th-century novel...
...He long outlived the era he explained so eloquently...
...A poet, artist, designer, and pioneer of free verse...
...Winchell, who excels at capturing the tone of an era, recalls for us that before such volumes appeared the average English course force-fed biographical data on authors and received opinions on their output but left students clueless about how to form esthetic judgments of their own...
...Burke's book presents striking photographs of her...
...He helped turn LSU—intended by Governor Huey Long as a showcase for the state—into an intellectual powerhouse...
...They make for stimulating reading, but demonstrate that this century's scholars tend to see their theories as salvific truths, and so attack opponents as fervently as inquisitors hunting heresy...
...Carolyn Burke's Becoming Modern: The Life ofMina ImtFarrar Straus Giroux...
...the alley cat whose exploits were chronicled by newspaper columnist Don Marquis in the teens and 1920s, is "toujours gai...
...Long was subsequently assassinated by Brooks' physician...
...Together with The Lost Lunar Baedeker...
...Loy (her surname was Lowy till she invented this new one) proved to be altogether more original and resourceful...
...She liasbeen sadly neglected, but read her now If this is where Modernism indeed led...
...Although wemay not care to embrace Brooks' particular perspectives...
...Her use of explicit sexual imagery retains its power to shock even in our porno-jaded decade...
...But the critics were wrong...
...The reactionary critical movement within Modernism regarded her as nothing more than one of the early camp followers...
...Mina Loy (1NH2-1966...
...Loy engineered simultaneous affairs with Fillipo Marinetti...
...Winchell skillfully proves that the legacy of his devotion to close textual analysis still enriches our literary climate IF WINCHELL'S engaging retrospective hasa fault, it lies in a tendency to see Modernism as primarily an academic creation...
...Reading these condemnations, a member of the generation born after 1960 might assume that Modernism was relatively monolithic...
...In addition to his influential critical works—such as The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren (1963)— Brooks contributed to revolutionizing the teaching of literature with a series of textbooks promulgating Modernist principles and tastes...
...On Poetry THAT OL' TIME MODERNISM BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL TO THOSE OF US who find ourselves on the far side of 50, it seems only yesterday that the Modernists and their disciples were enjoining practitioners of the arts to "make it new," to "purify the dialect of the tribe," to comb literary texts for revealing instances of irony, metaphor and symbolism...
...Experimenting with new art forms and with sex, she put herself front and center in the most lively Anglo-American colonies of Pans and Florence—mixing with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Mabel Dodge, Carl Van Vechten, Djuna Bames, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound...
...Now, in a cynical Postmodern age, the earlier period's brave experiments are under the gun for being as romantic as the 19th-century credos they scorned and sought to replace...
...To expose Modernism's shortcomings, current arbiters of taste have been firing off postmortems that measure its precepts against new "isms...
...Compassionate, angry, ironic, and beautiful, these works disturb the viewer, yet they also say something fundamental about life in the face of degradation...
...She acted with the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village and fell in with Marcel Duchampand Man Ray...
...Out of the Fugitives' cogitations emerged the American branch of the New Criticism...
...many taken by her first husband—a minor fin de Steele would-be decadent who sounds like a Max Beerbohm parody...
...For a while she lived in Paris with her two daughters, selling fanciful lampshades of her own design in a shop financed by Peggy Guggenheim...
...Thanks to the Southern critics, it began to be said that the center of Modernist thought had shifted "from the left bank of the Seine to the left bank of the Mississippi...
...another European refugee subsisting on Rice Krispies and collecting old junk...
...Students not only learned to think creatively, they were encouraged to strive lo equal their professors' expertise...
...New Criticism discarded obfuscating commentary to bring readers face to face with the text itself, and used outside disciplines like psychoanalysis and linguistics to aid the decoding...
...Her friends said she became "starry"- vague, unambitious, impractical...
...Mark Royden Winchell's Cleunth Brooks and the Rise of Modernism (Virginia, 488 pp., $34.95) focuses on one of the patriarchs of New Criticism, which gave decades of college English majors their critical tools...
...In one of those ironies New Critics loved...
...thanks to his jealousy over sharing his mistress, became its severest critic...
...It is no surprise that the group responded eagerly to The Wasteland and its image of fragments of the past "shored" against ruins...
Vol. 79 • August 1996 • No. 5
