Gifford - Personal Modernisms

Published by

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS

Ring House 2

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E1

www.uap.ualberta.ca

Copyright 2014 James Gifford

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Gifford, James, 1974, author

Personal modernisms : anarchist networks and the later avant-gardes / James Gifford.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77212-001-1 (pbk.). ISBN 978-1-77212-009-7 (epub). ISBN 978-1-77212-010-3 (Amazon kindle). ISBN 978-1-77212-011-0 (pdf)

1 Modernism (Literature)Great BritainHistory and criticism. 2 English literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. 3 Modernism (Literature)United StatesHistory and criticism. 4 American literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. 5 Modernism (Literature)CanadaHistory and criticism. 6 Canadian literature (English)20th centuryHistory and criticism. 7 Anarchism in literature. 8 Avant-garde (Aesthetics). I Title.

Index available in print and PDF editions.

First edition, rst printing, 2014.

First electronic edition, 2014.

Digital conversion by Transforma Pvt. Ltd.

Copyediting and proofreading by Joanne Muzak.

Indexing by Adrian Mather.

Cover design by Alan Brownoff.

Cover image: Clay Ellis, Sticks/From Monmartre, (detail) 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 124.4 236.5 cm. Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Used by permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written consent. Contact the University of Alberta Press for further details.

The University of Alberta Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from The Canada Council for the Arts. The University of Alberta Press also gratefully acknowledges the nancial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund (AMF) for its publishing activities.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

CONTENTS

The Shape of Literary Criticism

From the Villa Seurat to English Post-Surrealists

Theories of Personalism

Miller, Durrell, Smart, and Duncan

Acknowledgements

Fourteen years ago, Jerry Zaslove gave me a handful of books. This book would not have been possible without those books, and Ive attempted to replicate that moment of giving in my own work. The greatest gift of a teaching career is not knowing where our work leads nor what it will produce through others. The critical conundrum of this book first developed with The Henry MillerHerbert Read Letters: 193558 , which I would not have edited without support from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellowship and the personal support of the Special Collections staff in the McPherson Library, University of Victoria, and the UCLA Library Special Collections. As the idea developed, I relied on previous scholars: Allan Antliff, David Kadlec, David Goodway, and David Weir, even where I quarrel with them. The SSHRC-supported archival work on which this book is based grew out of visits to the Universit Paris X, the Gennadius Library in Athens, the American College of Greece, the University of Tulsa, the University of Louisville, SUNY Buffalo, McMaster University, the University of Toronto, the National Library of Canada, University College London, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The same support allowed me to consult materials that are now held by Columbia University, the British Library, and that remain in private collections. Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) also generously supported research travel and conference presentations, including two weeks in Oxford at the Bodleian Library and two follow-up trips to London and Oxford. The support of the staff in these libraries was invaluable, gracious, and efficient beyond any expectation. The value of these quietist escapes from the exigencies of an administrative and teaching post is inestimable. My chair, dean, and provostDaniel Grassian, Patti Mills, and Cecil Abrahamshave also offered much needed support. I was particularly fortunate to enjoy a term as a visiting professor in the graduate program of the Department of English at Simon Fraser University where I taught a course based on this book after completing its first draft. To the students in that class I owe many thanks and the hope that they will enjoy the result: Ryan Fitzpatrick, Amy DeAth, Nick Beauchesne, Crystal Bjerke, and Mark Westerlund, as well as Steve Collis, Peter Dickinson, and Betty Schellenberg for inviting me. I also co-organized three seminars for the conferences of Modernist Studies Association in Long Beach, Montreal, and Buffalomy co-organizers and the various participants all contributed to the ideas developed here, and I hope this work at least approximates the outstanding scholarship and critical perceptions you shared so graciously.

Early portions of this book were written while in a two-week residence at the Durrell School of Corfu at the invitation of University of Iowas Overseas Writers Workshop. The first draft was written in a furious one-week research trip to Victoria and the McPherson Library funded by FDU, and I also completed revisions while on a faculty retreat at FDUS Wroxton College in Oxfordshire.

Thanks are also due for the various permissions, which are too many to list, and also to authors whose estates have lapsed. For the various agencies and presses, I hope this project returns readers to unjustly neglected authors in your stables. I have also benefitted from the anonymous readers at the University of Alberta Pressenormous thanks when you see this. Special thanks go to Edward Bishop for saving my bacon, Michael ODriscoll for early comments on the ReadMiller letters, Stephen Ross for minding the pug, Margaret Konkol for coffee-fuelled chats, James Clawson for consoling Henry, Charles Sligh for organizing the finest conference Ive ever seen or ever will, Peter Midgley for being the best editor one could hope for, the staff at University of Alberta Press, and Joanne Muzak for inquisitive and exquisite copyediting.

Finally, my family needs not an acknowledgement but an apology for time away or spent mumbling about people whom they dont know but who somehow made me into the person they do knowLindsay, Finlay, Riordan, and also Cheryl and Chanel, as well as everyone who will not see this page.

Introduction

When we think of the 1930s and wartime writing, in particular in Britain but also in the United States, we often turn to the notions of Late Modernism, the ascendancy of the Auden generation, the shrinking of the British High Moderns, as well as the imminent arrival of the Beats, the Angry Young Men, and Kitchen Sink Realism after the war years. There were, by and large, no war poets of note. Modernism shuffled through a steady decline while Social Realism buoyed off the politics of the Auden group and W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwoods migration to America, and the conditions of postmodernity had not yet arrived though they simmered in the pending birth of the Cold War. We might also expect to note the last vestiges of Modernism in Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and Samuel Beckett (the latter of whom we might prefer to view as ushering in the language of the postmodern). We would surely expect to reject the elitism and sometimes even fascism of the High Modernists for the progressive Marxism of the Auden group and the subsequent social(ist) realism that shocked us to our senses after the decadence of Modernism. We would not expect an entire generation to have gone missing. We would not expect such a generation to espouse anti-authoritarian or even anarchist politics. We would certainly not expect it to have had a literature and body of work vitally alive, internationally distributed, and developed through a network of mutual support stretching from Shanghai, Cairo, and Athens to London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco. But we should expect precisely this.