Chapter M: H., La Grange, Illinois

Some of your stories and criticisms I am glad to have read. I remember the interesting (and instructive) criticism on our four pianists and a _wonderful_ short story by Sherwood Anderson,—those two things and a Harold Bauer eulogy are about the only two things I can recall favorably. A story written to protest against the hanging of one of our worst criminals (as in the very first _Little Review_ I received—I remember because it disgusted me), another story ridiculing our part in the war (as in the last number), and other queer Emma Goldman sort of stories (in between these first and last copies) are way beyond me.

Why should one be a Democrat or a Christian or a Militarist or a Mrs. Potter-Palmer or a push-face policeman to believe in our cause for entering the war. I wish every paper and magazine might help inspire the right sort of war enthusiasm. Many, a few years ago, believed in peace at any price; but many minds have changed, including my own. If the real business of life is to live, we’ll fight for the privilege so long as we can’t rely on any other means of gaining that right. And we want at least a few more generations to live as well as our own. If there are various ideas of what “living” means I’m glad there are those who can never understand Emma Goldman’s theories.

German women can’t realize what “living” means if they feel obliged to get off the sidewalk to let pass a German officer. Do these men who are afraid to fight for their country know what living means—men who drink and smoke? Would they believe they stand less chance of recovery from sickness, less chance of resisting sickness, less chance of _living_ very long, than the men who never touch alcohol or tobacco? (But this is not the point either, and men are reforming).

Anyway I would rather give a dollar and a half to the Red Cross than subscribe for _The Little Review_. And also I’m not intellectual enough to enjoy it.

[There is really nothing to be said to the above two letters: explanation up against what must be a matter of evolution. It would be necessary to give out sample copies for a year or so to prospective subscribers to insure satisfaction before we take their money. Since there are Hearst publications to give the public what it wants in literature and art, the cinematograph to give it what it wants in drama, why should that public bother at all with _The Little Review_? Especially when we state fairly that we are a magazine of the Arts, making no compromise with the public taste?—_jh._]

Interest Begins at Home

F. E. R., Chicago:

I have just read your June issue. Won’t you ask Ezra Pound if he should mind making an effort to be interesting?

[I ask you to make an effort to discover why he is so interesting.]

“The World’s Immense Wound”

Why does Ezra Pound regard America with contempt? America is beneath it.

I have just read Muriel Ciolkowska’s review in _The Egoist_ of _Le Feu_ by Henri Barbusse. In that book M. Barbusse has a character say: “One figure has risen above the war and will shine for the beauty and importance of his courage: Liebknecht.”

How this book ever passed the censor is beyond me. To quote further:

The future! The future! The future’s duty will be to efface the
present, to efface it even more than you think, to efface it as
something abominable and shameful. And yet this present was
necessary! Shame to military glory, shame to armies, shame to the
soldier’s trade which transforms men in turn from stupid victims
to ignoble executioners.

A _Feldwebel_ seated, leaning on the ripped-up planks of what
was, there where we stand, a sentry-box. A little hole under one
eye; a bayonet thrust has nailed him by his face to the boards.
In front of him, also seated, with his elbows on his knees, his
fists in his neck, a man shows a skull opened like a boiled
egg.... Near them, appalling sentinel, half a man is standing: a
man cut, sliced in two from skull to loins, leaning upright
against the bank of earth. The other half is missing of this
species of human peg, whose eye hangs out, whose bluish entrails
twist in spirals round his leg.

“The whole book, from beginning to end,” says Mme. Ciolkowska, “is a fearless revelation, be the theme drowning in swamps, the storming-parties, the dressing-stations, starvation and thirst which drives men to drink their own urine:”

Of the greatness and wealth of a country they make a devouring
disease, a kind of cancer absorbing living forces, taking the
whole place and crushing life and which, being contagious, ends
either in the crisis of war or in the exhaustion and asphyxia of
armed peace. Of how many crimes have they not made virtues by
calling them national—with one word! They even deform truth. For
eternal truth is substituted the national truth of each. So many
peoples, so many truths, which twist and turn the truth. All
those who keep up these children’s disputes, so odiously
ridiculous, scold each other, with: “It wasn’t I who began, it
was you.” “No it wasn’t I, it was you.” “Begin if you dare.”
“Begin, you.” Puerilities which keep the world’s immense wound
sore because those really interested do not take part in the
discussion and the desire to make an end of it does not exist;
all those who cannot or will not make peace on earth; all those
who clutch, for some reason or other, to the old state of things,
finding or inventing reasons for it, those are your enemies!

In a word, the enemy is the past. The perpetrators of war are the
traditionalists, steeped in the past ... for whom an abuse has
the power of law because it has been allowed to take root, who
aspire to be guided by the dead and who insist on submitting the
passionate, throbbing future and progress to the rule of ghosts
and nursery fables.

“Verily the criminals are those who echo, ‘because it was, it
must be.’”

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman have just been given a sentence of two years in prison, fines of ten-thousand dollars each, and deportation, for believing these same things!—_M. C. A._

Argument

Louis Putkelis, Cambridge, Mass.:

I am thinking seriously on the subject of Art and I would like to have a clear exposition of your views and the reasons why they do not agree with mine.

Having the relation of art to life and to society, as a question, seriously to heart, I would prefer a serious reply to a serious article rather than a flippant reply to chance remarks. I had hoped that discussions would arise among the Reader Critic that would interest a larger circle of readers and that would sift the question thoroughly.

It seems to me that the last few numbers of _The Little Review_ have been below your earlier standard—almost below zero. What sympathy can the majority of readers feel for the foreign editor, Ezra Pound, with his contemptuous invective against the “vulgus”? The last letter of Wyndham Lewis, to be sure, has more food for thought, though it seems that the author’s acquaintance with Russian literature is rather limited. I could say more about that but I await the psychological moment.

[To be very serious I had no idea that this department was ever flippant. I thought we had said so much about art values that we couldn’t go on boring our audience forever with the same discussions. And discussing Art isn’t very profitable anyway. We’re trying to show what it is. When you asked questions which seemed to me quite obvious, or at least seemed to show quite obviously that you didn’t understand what we had said in clearing up those values, I knew no better way to point up our disagreement than by using what is known as “epithet” instead of going off into long serious discussions of matters that had already been “got across.”

A contempt for the “vulgus” is the inevitable reaction of any man or woman who observes the antics of the “flies in the marketplace.” There’s nothing supercilious about it. It’s a fact that humanity is the most stupid and degraded thing on the planet—whether through its own fault or not is beside the point when you’re weighing values. You’re not blaming humanity when you say that; it isn’t interesting to blame: the interesting thing is to put the truth of it into a form that will endure.—_M. C. A._]

Note

Banish
Anne Knish,
Set the dog on
Emanuel Morgan.

_X._

Quotation