Chapter L: P. Cher Monsieur: You ask “What sympathy can the majority of readers

feel for the foreign editor, Ezra Pound, with his contemptuous invective against the ‘vulgus’?” Are the majority of the readers “vulgus”? We had hoped the few choice spirits were gathered. Perhaps they have only migrated to this side of the ocean.

There was also a lady or mother who wrote to me (personally) from New Jersey, asking me to stop the magazine as Lewis’s writings were “bad for her milk”. (I am afraid there is no way of softening her phrase for our readers). Madame, what you need is lactol and not literature; you should apply to a druggist.

And there is the person who says all my stuff is “in a way propaganda. If not”, what am I “trying to do”, etc. Cher Monsieur: My propaganda is the propaganda of all realist and almost all fine un-realist literature, if I seek to “do” anything it is only to stimulate a certain awareness. It would not distress me if the reader should suddenly look upon his surroundings and upon his own consciousness and try to see both for himself, in his own terms, not in my terms, nor in the terms of President Wilson, or W. D. Howells, or Scribner’s, or any other patent cut-size machine, or home-mould or town-mould, or year-mould. Voilà toute ma petite propagande. It is so little propaganda that I am quite content if it has no such effects, and if two or three pleasant people are enabled to get through a dull evening more easily with the aid of my sketches; or those of the writers whom I have brought to this magazine. There are some people who are not entertained by Success, the Saturday Evening Post, The Seven Arts, The Dial and all that contingent. “Matter”, as Lewis has written, “which does not contain enough intelligence to permeate it, grows, as you know, rotten and gangrenous.” It is not everyone who enjoys the aroma of a dormant and elderly corporis litterarum, nor the stertorous wheeze of its breathing.

If I were propaganding I should exhort you to get a decent international copyright law—though as my own income will presumably never equal that of a plumber, or stir the cupidity of the most class-hating, millionaire-cursing socialist, I have very little interest in this matter.

I should exhort you to enliven your universities. I should, whatever your nationality, exhort you to understand that art is exceeding slow in the making, that a good poet can scarcely write more than twenty good pages a year, and that even less that this, if it be good, should earn him his livelihood. (This problem with good augury I shall of course attempt to solve with this magazine.) I should, if you are American, exhort you, for your own good, to try not to drive all your best artists out of the country. (Not that I object to living in London, North Italy, Paris, or that my name need be dragged into the matter). I would ask you to try to understand WHY American literature from 1870 to 1910 is summed up in the sentence: “Henry James stayed in Paris reading Flaubert and Turgenev. Mr. William Dean Howells returned to America and read the writings of Henry James.” And WHY Whistler stayed in Europe, although Chase went back to the Philadelphia Fine Arts Academy. These are simple questions which the serious reader will not try to shirk answering.

However these matters do not belong to the body of the magazine, which will at best, as the clubman complains, be devoted to “invention” if there is enough invention to fill it; and at worst to active cerebration.

Votre bien dévoué,
Ezra Pound

P. S. An american author writes to me “You mix your damn foolery with sense, so you continue readable”. Chère Editeuse, what does this person want? Does he wish it unmixed and therefore unreadable? Should he follow the sign “Seek safety first!”? Read The Spectator! Does he wish “sound opinion”, cautious statement, the New Republic’s guarded hazard that six and seven probably will make thirteen, but that, etc...?

This Approaches Literature!

Abel Sanders:

The enclosed document may be of interest to you, as showing the true nature of the forces against which we are arrayed.

SECRET

(Translation of a German document dated February 20, 1916, taken from a German prisoner captured near Ypres, Comines Canal, March 2, 1916).

Committee for the increase of population

Notice No. 138756.

Sir:

On account of all able-bodied men having been called to the colours, it remains the duty of all those left behind for the sake of the Fatherland to interest themselves in the happiness of the married women and maidens by doubling or even trebling the number of births.

Your name has been given us as a capable man, and you are herewith requested to take on this office of honour and do your duty in a proper German way. It must here be pointed out that your wife or fiancée will not be able to claim a divorce, it is in fact hoped the women will bear this discomfort heroically for the sake of the War.

You will be given the district of ...... Should you not feel capable of carrying on the task allotted to you, you will be given three days in which to name someone in your place. On the other hand if you are prepared to take on a second district as well, you will become a “Deckofficer”[8] and receive a pension.

An exhibition of photographs of women and maidens in the district allotted to you, is to be found at the office of ...... You are requested to bring this letter with you.

Your good work should commence immediately on this notification. A full report of results is to be submitted by you after nine months.

Worthy of Byron

Frank Harris, New York:

Hearty congratulations! I’ve read innumerable things of Ezra Pound in the last ten years and found nothing. He has tantalized me with the feeling that there must be some originality to explain if not to justify at least his preposterous name. And now in The Little Review his satiric poem, “L’Homme Moyen Sensuel”, really enchants me: there are rhymes in it worthy of Byron.

That “infant tick who’s now the editor of The Atlantic” is as good as the couplet on H. Van Dyke. When he praises (Henry James, for instance); he’s not so convincing. Still I enjoyed the whole thing immensely and thank you for the treat.

Dry Bones

H. R., Trinidad, Colorado:

I enclose a subscription to The Little Review. Not because it is worth it. You know it is not. But because of my appreciation of the magazine when it first heralded the dawn of a new era. I knew the body and soul of it then and thought it the most significant, youthful and vigorous magazine in America. When your last number reached me I exclaimed “How the mighty have fallen!” It attempts to speak, but the voice is too feeble. Through its pages I find only bones, dry bones, sans life, sans youth, sans energy.

But as long as you are at the helm of the new adventure I have faith in The Little Review. I know it will emerge triumphantly.

Alienation

Otis A. Poole, Shidzuoka, Japan:

Sometimes I think you needlessly alienate the support of numbers of subscribers, possessed of rudimentary ambitions toward a better appreciation of Art in its various forms, by too roughly snubbing and scoffing at them, because they do not immediately swallow all the new “stuff” created in defiance of convention and precedent, without a grimace of dislike or a rational lack of faith in its worthwhileness as expressive of the present era’s conception of truth and beauty in all that pertains to life as it is or might be; but “the Gods give my donkey wings”, if herewith isn’t an extension of my subscription to The Little Review in spite of it.

Art and the War

J. K. C., Boston:

The idea of The Little Review appealed to me immensely and I subscribed because I wanted to be friends. Altogether I like it: especially your article on Isadora Duncan, Ezra Pound’s stuff, and the Chinese poems. Also the book reviews, which, to use a phrase of Leon Daudet, are not “mere vague publicity” like most of them these days.

But I was very much surprised by the lack of appreciation and understanding shown by your comments on Le Feu by Henri Barbusse, but decided that you had probably never read that great book. What distresses me, however, is in the August number. Some one from Kansas writes congratulating you for not printing anything about “this blasted war”. That you do not I have no quarrel with. It is a relief. But when in a superior way you say that you do not consider the war “an interesting or legitimate subject for Art” I cannot agree. The existence of Art and all its traditions depends on the outcome of the war, which is fundamentally a war of the ideal of these traditions against the ideal of power. Read Le Genie Latin, by Gugliumo Ferrero if you have not already done so. Think of the beautiful noble things inspired by the war in France: for example, among many, the articles of Barres in L’Echo de Paris and the poems of Paul Claudel. After your statement, to compare these writings with some that you have printed is quite laughable. And then Art needs something noble in it, and anything where noble self-sacrifice occurs daily is a fit subject for it.

[I don’t understand what you mean by my lack of appreciation of Le Feu. The object of M. Barbusse was to show that the immense horror of war is not to be used for any object except for the destruction of that horror. As for the noble elements of daily self-sacrifice, etc., etc., he says: “It would be a crime to show the nobler aspects of war, even if there were any.”

As for Art needing something noble in it: Art doesn’t need anything; Art _is_ the nobility. And of course I thought we needn’t argue any longer about the vice of self-sacrifice.

But you have clearly misunderstood what was meant by the war not being a legitimate subject for Art. We will argue it fully in the next issue. Also I have a long letter from Stephane Boecklin about the artist’s relation to the war, which will be printed in the November number.—M. C. A.]

----------

[8] “Deck” possibly meaning “coverlet”.

ART AND CRITICISM IN AMERICA

(from the New York Press)

Tribune: “Edith Wharton’s Summer (Appleton) is a masterpiece of accurate, graceful and fascinating composition ... a climax of graphic power is reached which has seldom been approximated in contemporary fiction. But then—the pity of it all! the pity of it all! Was it worth while to use such gifts, to employ such rare and exquisite an artistry, in the exploitation of so sordid and so seamy a side of life?... If now and then, and here and there, man must be so fallen and so lost, let us rather ‘Walk backward with averted gaze and hide the shame.’”

Times: “Mr. Lewis’s (The innocents, by Sinclair Lewis. Harper) native endowment is essentially Dickensian, because his mental affinity is stronger for what is sweet and clean and bright, upward looking and forward pressing, in human nature, than it is for the rotten, the dour and the hopeless. He sees and duly uses these poisoned and poisonous elements of human life, but in his estimate of the forces that inspire, etc., etc.”

(To get the full value of the reviews of Mr. Lewis’s work one must read his countless stories and novels. But it would be well, perhaps, to mention that he is a rising young manufacturer of literary all-day suckers, who turns out a novel in about the time it took Flaubert to write a paragraph of Madame Bovary)—I. S.

Roosevelt’s “The Foes of Our Own Household”

This is an invaluable book. It is a compilation of all the outworn thought of the last two generations.—jh.

WE WANT!

We want _monthly_ eight pages more for French, eight pages _more_ for painting and sculpture (when extant), sixteen pages _more_ if we are to print both the Hueffer prose series and the new novel promised by James Joyce, at the same time. We see no reason why we should not publish music (not criticism of music) if any happens to be written. Even our most rabid detesters can not expect us to double our format unless we can, at about the same time, double our list of subscribers. It is, placid reader, up to you.

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“Hello Huck!”

Recall that golden day when you first read “Huck Finn”? How your
mother said, “For goodness’ sake, stop laughing aloud over that
book. You sound so silly.” But you couldn’t stop laughing.

Today when you read “Huckleberry Finn” you will not laugh so
much. You will chuckle often, but you will also want to weep. The
deep humanity of it—the pathos, that you never saw, as a boy,
will appeal to you now. You were too busy laughing to notice the
limpid purity of the master’s style.

MARK TWAIN

When Mark Twain first wrote “Huckleberry Finn” this land was
swept with a gale of laughter. When he wrote “The Innocents
Abroad” even Europe laughed at it itself.

But one day there appeared a new book from his pen, so spiritual,
so true, so lofty that those who did not know him well were
amazed. “Joan of Arc” was the work of a poet—a historian—a seer.
Mark Twain was all of these. His was not the light laughter of a
moment’s fun, but the whimsical humor that made the tragedy of
life more bearable.

A Real American

Mark Twain was a steamboat pilot. He was a searcher for gold in
the far West. He was a printer. He worked bitterly hard. All this
without a glimmer of the great destiny that lay before him. Then,
with the opening of the great wide West, his genius bloomed.

His fame spread through the nation. It flew to the ends of the
earth, until his work was translated into strange tongues. From
then on, the path of fame lay straight to the high places. At the
height of his fame he lost all his money. He was heavily in debt,
but though 60 years old, he started afresh and paid every cent.
It was the last heroic touch that drew him close to the hearts of
his countrymen.

The world has asked is there an American literature? Mark Twain
is the answer. He is the heart, the spirit of America. From his
poor and struggling boyhood to his glorious, splendid old age, he
remained as simple, as democratic as the plainest of our
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He was, of all Americans, the most American. Free in soul, and
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