John Rodker Research Articles

The Scourge as Safety-Valve: John Rodker’s Analysis of the Avant-Garde

The Scourge as Safety-Valve: John Rodker’s Analysis of the Avant-Garde

Before a New Architecture: Frederick Etchells and the Emergence of Architectural Modernity in Britain, from W.R. Lethaby to Le Corbusier

This article addresses the ways in which the writings of Le Corbusier interacted with modernist architectural thought in Britain. It focusses on Frederick Etchells, who translated Vers une architecture in 1927, and analyses key influences upon his intellectual development and approach to design, namely Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, W.R. Lethaby, Christopher Hussey, and John Rodker. It suggests that dedicated study of Etchells as a connective figure in this network aids our understanding of modernism's fraught integration into British culture; that architectural ideas are central to vorticism's engagement with the artist's relationship to society; and that Fry and Lewis deserve recognition for establishing a mature conception of architectural modernity in Britain, alongside Le Corbusier.

Reception Study: John Rodker's Psychoanalysis, Masochistic Production, and James Joyce

In 1927, at the same time that he was reading and writing about James Joyce's Work-in-Progress, modernist poet, critic, and publisher John Rodker uttered his own "invented portmanteau word" in his psychoanalysis with Barbara Low. Both Rodker's invented word and the Work-in-Progress puns he wrote about in Parisian magazines circled around themes of passivity, petrification, and punishment. This essay situates Rodker's desire, expressed in analysis with Low, to become a statue in relation to his own experimental writing from the 1910s and 1920s as well as his astute criticism on Joyce's masochistic themes in these same years. Rodker's reception of Joyce must include his mimicry of Joyce's pun language in analysis. This inadvertent copying returns us, on the one hand, to a moment when Rodker's anxieties about his writing were distended by modernism's masculinization of literary production and, on the other, to the realization of Rodker's own vision that Joyce's language of the unconscious would spread outward into the minds and mouths of men and women everywhere.

John Rodker on Theatre: Rethinking the Modernist Stage from London’s Jewish East End

This article explores the Jewish working-class poet John Rodker’s writing for and about the stage as an overlooked, alternative theorisation of modernist theatre and its artistic and institutional function. It retraces the origins of his 1914 theatre manifesto, published in the magazine The Egoist, to his earlier theatre criticism to show that Rodker initially took an interest in the stage, above all, as a tool for the political engagement and artistic education of the masses. I discuss three theatre critiques, published in The Freewoman and Poetry and Drama between 1912–1913, in which Rodker considers three different types of contemporary theatre with a view to their effectiveness in engaging popular audiences in contemporary social and aesthetic debates. While he criticises the commercial West End theatre and regional repertory companies for their failure to promote social and cultural reform, he lauds the local Yiddish theatre in London’s East End as a true community theatre and the home of a revolutionary modern drama. By highlighting the role played by the popular Yiddish theatre in Whitechapel in shaping Rodker’s ideas for an institutionally and artistically reformed modernist stage, this article aims to restore a forgotten piece of working-class history to our critical conception of modernist drama.

Stevens and the Publishers: What the Huntington Correspondence Reveals

Stevens and the Publishers: What the Huntington Correspondence Reveals Edward Ragg THIS ESSAY IS CONCERNED with Wallace Stevens’s epistolary relationships not only with his own publishers but also with those small presses with which he corresponded throughout his career. Undoubtedly, the Wallace Stevens Archive at The Huntington would be amply and richly detailed enough if one were confined to the letters involving his trade book publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, those to do with the Cummington Press, and the sometimes uneasy exchanges among and in relation to Stevens, Knopf, and the Cummington Press. Consider, for example, the fascinating correspondence surrounding the debacle of the Fortune Press edition of Stevens’s Selected Poems, featuring Nicholas Moore, Tambimuttu (of Editions Poetry London), and the shady Mr. Pollinger (agent to Knopf in the UK), not to mention Knopf’s frequent and palpable irritation at Stevens’s dealings with the Cummington Press as the latter published Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Esthétique du Mal, and Three Academic Pieces. However, as Holly Stevens observes in her Letters of Wallace Stevens, during the 1930s and after, what she terms “private” printers “rank high in the list of major correspondents” with whom Stevens clearly had frequent written contact. Referring to “Katharine Frazier and Harry Duncan, at the Cummington Press, and Victor Hammer, of the Anvil Press,” Holly adds, “But there were also letters to James Guthrie, of the Pear Tree Press, Sussex, England; to Elizabeth Yeats, at the well-known Cuala Press; and to others” (L 257). The latter recipients do not feature extensively in the selected Letters—hence Holly’s highlighting them in her commentary—but do represent a further rich seam in the Stevens archive. Thus, although for any scholar consulting the archive Knopf’s resistance to Stevens’s involvement with the Cummington Press along with Stevens’s handling of his relations with Knopf, the Cummington, and other presses make for remarkable reading, my interest here is more in those even smaller presses and those less well-charted correspondents who served to stimulate the poet. These not only inspired Stevens’s passions as a book and art collector but also reveal the extent to which he deliberately cultivated an international network of sources of information and [End Page 198] channels of exchange. Moreover, Stevens’s dealings with publishers and various correspondents—some of whom effectively became his personal buyers of books and other artifacts outside the US—provide an epistolary window into how the poet conceived of himself, his own literary career, and even how he came to think of poetry as literary modernism evolved. Indeed, Stevens’s relationships with publishers over the years can be seen to have informed his documenting of his own poetic career, both in his letters and the publications he produced. Much of the correspondence with other small presses predates the more critically documented letters with Ronald Lane Latimer of the Alcestis Press (in the 1930s) and Stevens’s Cummington years (during the 1940s). Read together, therefore, this overall correspondence helps contextualize what it was that Stevens saw in the opportunities to publish with artisanal, less mainstream publishers, and what inspired him in his bindings of his own books (even asking the Cummington Press to help prepare the binding or folder for his Stevens family portraits). For, as his relatives died or lost touch—not least once Holly had also left home—Stevens clearly took solace in this larger family of books. My point is that, in addition to considering the Alcestis and Cummington presses, there is a treasure trove of correspondence with further small presses, bibliophiles, and others that is essential to appreciating the overall progress of Stevens’s life and career—both as these developed and as the poet conceived and perceived them. In Stevens’s earlier correspondence, his letters with John Rodker of the short-lived Ovid Press represent a revealing instance of the exchanges— both physical and verbal—the young Stevens relished, especially as he painstakingly built his network of contacts enabling this Connecticut-based poet to track some of the writers, artists, and publishers who would shape early modernism. Revealingly, Stevens wrote to Harriet Monroe in March 1920, “Since you were here, I...

T. S. Eliot and Paul Valéry: 1926-1929

The purpose of this paper is to explore, from the perspective of biographical criticism, the relationship between T. S. Eliot, the greatest English modernist poet, and Paul Valery, the greatest French Symbolist poet during the years 1926-1929. This paper is to thoroughly trace the mutual relationship and the influential interaction between Eliot and Valery mainly through the nexus of The Letters of T. S. Eliot 3: 1926-1927 (2012) and The Letters of T. S. Eliot 4: 1928-1929 (2013). Although Eliot’s brief encounter with the French poet and critic at a London reception in 1927 inevitably and repeatedly triggered unpleasant feelings, the editor of The Criterion and a board member of Faber & Gwyer positively and supportively mediated in trying to have Valery’s friend and adjutant William McCausland Stewart’s and the latter’s friend Thomas McGreevy’s English translations of Valery’s French prose and verse published by Faber & Gwyer or the Hogarth Press or Jonathan Cape in place of the Criterion Press. Thanks to Eliot’s insistent endeavors through his correspondence, however, McGreevy’s translation Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci was published by John Rodker in 1929 and Stewart’s translation Eupalinos or The Architect finally not by the Hogarth Press but by the Oxford University Press in 1932. In short, numerous English and/or French letters of Eliot, Valery’s translators, Leonard Woolf the publisher of the Hogarth Press, a mutual friend of W. B. Yeats and Eliot Thomas Sturge Moore the poet-critic, and other men of letters over a period of four years intensively reveal the two masters’ trustworthy and respectful friendship especially with regards to publication of English translations for the worldwide spread of the French poet-critic’s work.

Mawkishness, or Literary Art: John Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 in Modernism

Mawkishness, or Literary Art:John Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 in Modernism1 Elizabeth Pender (bio) John Rodker’s novella Adolphe 1920 has gradually come to the attention of critics of modernist literature since it was republished by Andrew Crozier in 1996. Rodker is known principally as a publisher of major modernists through his Ovid Press—including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis. But he was also a poet and fiction writer, and Adolphe 1920 offers an interesting example of a writer positioning new work within an existing avant-garde frame. Yet the novella has not so far been the subject of any extensive body of criticism exploring ways it could be read against the work of Rodker’s contemporaries and milieu. Adolphe 1920 certainly warrants careful attention: it offers developments on modernist modes of representation that promise to reflect new light on more familiar authors, and in its published form it was the site of exchanges over taste that were similar to those that have been generative of discussion (and more) in the cases of other modernist writers, most notably James Joyce. The following analysis articulates some of the developments offered by Adolphe 1920 and inquires how this new work was received by its contemporaries. A text emerges that is capable of sustaining critical attention and that is important to an understanding of literary modernism. At the time of writing Adolphe 1920 in 1925–26, Rodker was already an established figure in Anglo–American modernist milieus. He had privately published a first volume of verse in 1914 (Poems), had made regular submissions of poetry, short pieces, and criticism to literary magazines including Poetry, The Egoist, The Little Review, Others, and others, and had published a second volume of verse in 1920 (Hymns).2 In 1917 Pound wrote [End Page 467] to Margaret Anderson, “Rodker has convinced me at last, that he ‘has it in him’”;3 in 1919, Rodker took over Pound’s position as London editor of The Little Review.4 In 1919 and 1920 in London, Rodker’s Ovid Press published work by Pound, Eliot, Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Edward Wadsworth, and Roald Kristian, along with Rodker’s Hymns, aiming “to bring before the public work that was considered advanced.”5 In 1920, Rodker printed Wilde’s To M. B. J. without the Ovid Press imprint. Rodker’s publications in 1919-20 show a sharp aesthetic and professional sense for what would later become known as British modernism.6 In 1920 the Ovid Press encountered major financial difficulties and effectively closed, but Rodker continued to work as a printer and publisher,7 and in 1922 he served as co-publisher, with the Egoist Press, of the second impression of Ulysses (Cloud, 42-44).8 He had a significant interest in Joyce: with Pound, he arranged for Ludmila Savitzky to translate Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into French,9 and he wrote on Exiles in The Little Review and later contributed to the volume on Work in Progress that appeared under Joyce’s supervision.10 This involvement suggests a writer with a strong enthusiasm for an emerging modernism and a publisher ready to take on considerable financial risks to make this new writing available. Indeed, Rodker was to be dogged by debt from his publishing ventures for much of his life.11 His selection of material to publish also suggests an eclectic set of interests across artistic forms, taking in poetry, prose, and visual art, and his own early work shows his interest in theater. Crozier details the debts of Rodker’s later writing to his early work with theater, music, and the “Choric School” of dance, arguing that “if we are to read Rodker fully we need to renegotiate the canons of modernist decorum which condition our taste, and recognize that Rodker was able to make of modernism something more than we expect.”12 Rodker’s background also shows the extent of his interest in French literature, especially late-nineteenth-century French poetry. After the Ovid Press had ceased to publish, Rodker’s publication, translation, and writing reflected his wider literary interests beyond anglophone avant-gardes. He opened his Casanova...

Satyriast's Beatitudes: John Rodker's Hymns

“He is both creative and procreative, and his own volume of Hymns, which was one of the last things to come from his press, combines these two libidos to such an extent that it is necessary to keep the book hidden in the piano”—so wrote Wallace Stevens of John Rodker on September 25, 1920 (“Letters” 383). Rodker’s second book of poems, Hymns, had appeared in April. Stevens appreciated Rodker’s work as a poet and as a printer, and in writing to him on October 6, Stevens called Hymns “that admirable book” (“Letters” 383). This might give us pause. What was it about the poetry of a man chiefly remembered, if at all, as the publisher of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, that Stevens liked? Stevens was by no means unequivocal in his praise. “Rodker’s publications last winter were by all odds the most sympathetic of the year,” he enthused to Harriet Monroe on December 2. But then he qualified: “There is, of course, a cliche of the moment as well as a cliche of the past: and I rather think that Rodker merely represents the cliche of the moment” (Letters 221). Rodker’s poetry often provoked this ambivalence. Sometimes it seemed radically modern, refusing to truck with hackneyed tradition. Sometimes that modernity seemed merely superficial, representing only a passing vogue. After Richard Aldington attacked Hymns in the October issue of Poetry, Maxwell Bodenheim leapt to its defense. “Rodker is constantly groping for new methods in poetic style,” he urged, “and because he sometimes attains these roads, he must naturally arouse the anger of those who believe that poetry should stand still” (“In Defense of Rodker” 170). Even Bodenheim allows for a degree of worthy failure. In turn, Monroe appended a brief note to Bodenheim’s letter, confessing that she felt “strain, rather than achievement, in Mr. Rodker’s beautifully printed Hymns.” 1 Stevens’s praise is further complicated by the fact that Hymns appeared in April, in the spring. Perhaps Stevens was referring loosely to “last winter.” Perhaps he meant some of the other works which Rodker’s Ovid Press had been busily producing: Pound’s Fourth Canto in October 1919, Wyndham Lewis’s Fifteen Drawings in January 1920, and Eliot’s

Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity Michael Nath Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity. Andrzej G.asiorek, Alice Reeve-Tucker, and Nathan Waddell, eds. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xiii + 265. $99.95 (cloth). A dozen essays (some of them worked up from conference proceedings) appear in this volume. Its aim, in the words of the editors, is to focus on "contexts, relationships and writings that are not well known in order to extend our understanding of Lewis's work and his engagement with the modernity he analysed and attacked in equal measure" (3). Part one ("Friends and Enemies") discusses Lewis's use of quotation; his relationships with David Bomberg and William Roberts, Rebecca West and Naomi Mitchison, and John Rodker; and the reception of Blast. Part two ("Media and Mass Society") deals with music, cinema, patronage, and Evelyn Waugh. In part three ("Culture and Modernity"), we have essays on anthropology, the 1930s, and shellshock. This is a broad and enterprising collection, and is justified both by the variety of Lewis's creative and critical activity and of his associations. Furthermore, while it is hard on the prejudices [End Page 619] (as in Ian Patterson's essay on Lewis and Rodker), and large errors of judgement (as in Andrzej Gasiorek's on Lewis and commitment in the 1930s), it is free of the pantomime disapproval that regularly accompanies responses to Lewis. These essays will be of benefit to the growing number of undergraduates and postgraduates who are electing to work on Lewis; they also have much that is new to offer both the browsing generalist and the Lewis scholar. I myself learned, for instance, from Alan Munton's essay on quotation, Alexander Ruch's on patronage, Jodie Pearson's on Blast, and Victor Barac's on anthropology. The first provides the best examples of close reading in this volume. The second deals with the question that had occupied Lewis since his rift with middle-brow Bloomsbury in 1912, namely, who pays for modernism? To which it provides the surprising answer, the BBC. It was this institution that, late in Lewis's career, paid him to complete the Human Age trilogy. The rift itself is illuminated in Pearson's account of contemporary responses to vorticism, led by John Squire (81-84). Barac compares Lewis and Eliot as ethnographers, and suggests that Lewis's contribution to anthropology, notably in The Art of Being Ruled (1926), is not only superior in kind to Eliot's cultural criticism, but important in its own right (e.g., in its conception of gender determination and bipedalism). The superiority supposedly consists in the fact that Eliot could not sever the idea of culture from religion, whereas Lewis's critical methods were historical and scientific (199-200). The last claim has a bright sound to it, though it may need to be considered alongside the fact that Lewis's imaginative practice was at home with the supernatural, The Human Age being modernism's most substantial encounter of this kind (the trilogy takes place in an afterlife and the satire, if we can still use that word, is aimed at the Devil's party). But Lewis's critical observations were not alien to the supernatural anyway: "If you say that creative art is a spell, a talisman, an incantation—that it is magic, in short, there, too, I believe you would be correctly describing it. That the artist uses and manipulates a supernatural power seems very likely."1 This statement, from Time and Western Man (1927), exemplifies the difficulty of defining what Lewis was actually up to, when he wasn't being an artist. The introduction to this volume presents him as a "philosopher-critic" (3), so, as well as rational anthropologist, Lewis appears as opponent of Bergson in James Mansell's essay on music and modernism, as sociologist in Nathan Waddell and Alice Reeve-Tucker's essay on Lewis, Waugh, and the "Child-Cult," and as critical theorist in the manner of Adorno and Marcuse in Gasiorek's essay. Waddell and Reeve-Tucker notice "how far Lewis's account of satire intersects with religious idioms" (170), though Gasiorek reckons that Lewis's conception of...

A Spanish View of Modernist Poetry in American Periodicals (1925)

A Spanish View of Modernist Poetry in American Periodicals (1925)

‘a serious venture’: John Rodker (1894–1955) and the Imago Publishing Company (1939–60)

John Rodker (1894–1955) was the founder of the British publishing house – the Imago Publishing Company – which undertook the republication of the complete works of Sigmund Freud in German just before World War II. Rodker, himself a writer as well as a publisher, was initially tempted by a psychoanalytic career; numerous obstacles, however, lay in his path. War, along with the complicated management of the royalties from Freud’s writings, compromised the progress of what seemed to him to be ‘a serious venture’. Besides Rodker, we meet numerous actors of the psychoanalytic movement: Anna Freud, Marie Bonaparte, Ernest Jones, James Strachey, all of whom had worked for the dissemination of Freud’s writings. This paper shows how the English language gradually became the ‘official norm’ for psychoanalysts. According to the editors of the Standard Edition, at that time ‘nothing new [was] being written’ in German or in French. The failure of the Gesammelte Werke project signalled the end of an era in which psychoanalysis was mainly written about in German.

“NO HISTORY TO SPEAK OF”: JEWISHNESS AND MODERNISM IN JOHN RODKER'S MEMOIRS OF OTHER FRONTS (1932)

This study argues that an important part of the relationship between modernist literature and the modern Jewish experience can be understood through an examination of the novel Memoirs of Other Fronts (1932), written by John Rodker, but published anonymously. It shows that Rodker, who had been associated with major figures of Anglo-American modernism throughout the 1920s, was engaged in a complex and often painful negotiation of identity that was not a simple use of modernist techniques nor a straightforward acceptance of modernist imaginings of “the Jew”. Rodker's indirect means of writing about his own Jewishness was the product of a particular social location: not being fully part of mainstream British society, nor of any Jewish community, nor, indeed, part of mainstream modernism itself. Such a location caused him to produce an image of himself as foreign and estranged, but allowed him, through his use of psychoanalysis, to see this condition as true of everyone in the period, creating a powerful and compelling portrait of Britain during and after the Great War as traumatized, sadistic and commodified. However, by making everyone into “Jews”, the way in which the “Jewishness” of actual Jews was defined was left unquestioned.

Ezra Pound's CANTOS DE LUXE

Ezra Pound's Cantos De LuxePreamble Olga Nikolova The following text takes to heart the possibilities opened up by a work like The Cantos. My main argument is the most obvious one—it consists in the design of this paper, in the kind of discipline this paper required in its refusal to say more than it needs to say, its refusal to repeat, rehash, and rephrase (and so appropriate other scholars' work). I have come to a point where it is impossible to go back—either to the idea that literary texts can be transparent and independent of what "container" they come into, or to a practice of criticism and scholarly work which assumes the same transparency for itself. The usual 12 point Times New Roman double-spaced page, which is then inflexibly poured into the template of whatever book or journal, is no longer neutral to my eyes. I see no reason why the objective, distanced, invisible position such page layout implies is often accepted to be the only option, and the resistances which keep it in place (lest we mistake criticism for something else) are yet to be brought to the table, especially as we are no longer dealing mainly with original texts, but with a rich (if not overwhelming) critical heritage on most subjects. I am approaching criticism here in an almost combinatorial manner, as a game, a composition of elements. It is not the game of conforming to an institutionalized format and language, although the very desire that drives this text belongs properly to academic discourse. It is giving shape to the story a work can tell. Giving form rather than assuming one. This is why this text lets mostly quotations do the job. The quotations take their place in an argument, which is by definition an incomplete puzzle: white spaces make part of the picture. [End Page 155] Giacometti: "Cézanne never really finished anything. He went as far as he could, then abandoned the job. That's the terrible thing; the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it." Lord: "Those were prophetic words. But I didn't know it then. I drank my Coca-Cola, said goodbye, and left." Twelve days later, Lord: "It's difficult for me to imagine how things must appear to you." "That's exactly what I'm trying to do," he said, "to show how things appear to me." "But what," I asked, "is the relation between your vision, the way things appear to you, and the technique that you have at your disposal to translate that vision into something which is visible to others?" "That's the whole drama," he said. "I don't have such a technique." (Lord pp. 11, 76–77 ) Saussure noted down in one of his notebooks: "When the actors have left the stage, a few objects remain: a flower on the floor, a [ ]* which lingers in the memory, suggesting more or less what has happened, but which, being only partial, leaves room for—" [*note of Starobinsky: "Space left blank in the text." ] (Starobinski 7) [These pages] offer an image of what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted, and what can appear as rational or not. (Raad i–ii) Cantos De Luxe The facts: the first three editions of Ezra Pound's The Cantos were limited deluxe editions: 1925: A Draft of XVI. Cantos. (Three Mountains Press, Paris.) 1928: A Draft of Cantos 17–27. (John Rodker, London.) 1930: A Draft of XXX Cantos. (Hours Press, Paris.) Then, in 1933, Farrar & Rhinehart in New York and Faber & Faber in London issued the trade A Draft of XXX Cantos. From then on, The Cantos came out in trade editions. In their preparation of a revised edition in the 1970s (the project for a definitive edition of The Cantos was ultimately abandoned, for various reasons; see Eastman), the publishers and editors collated editions from the 1930's Hours Press (marginally included) onwards. The...

Writing on Other Fronts: Translation and John Rodker

Translation occupies a rather odd position in modernist culture. Sometimes it seems to be central to a writer's development or to the achievement of a poetic voice, occurring either as a private act of reading, like Eliot's reading of Laforgue, or more publicly, like Pound's Propertius or his translations of Li Po in Cathay. Sometimes it seems to stand quite outside a writer's usual sphere of interest Eliot's translation of St John Perse's Anabase, for example. It can just as easily be quite irrelevant, and for quite different reasons: whatever Wyndham Lewis may have learned from painters working in Berlin or Paris, his prose owes nothing to writing in other languages, and for all his cosmopolitan awareness, his identity as a writer derives its authenticity from a kind of ironic nationalism. The Waste Land or the Cantos seem

Mary Butts's "Unrest Cure" for The Waste Land

In 1928, Lost Generation writer Mary Butts published Armed with Madness, novel that utilized Arthurian grail-quest mythology to comment on the conditions of modernity. She was, of course, not the first to connect these themes: S. Eliot's celebrated long poem, The Waste Land, had been published in 1922. In journal entry from 1927, Butts half-jokingly complains that Armed with Madness well have been called 'The Wasteland.' Eliot always anticipates my titles. . . . Eliot and I are working on parallel, she says, but what is interesting is that he is working on the San [c] Grail on its negative side (Selections 172). A simultaneous reading of Eliot's The Waste Land and Mary Butts's Armed with Madness is fascinating precisely because these contemporary works have so much in common, and yet manage to present such different visions. Working from an understanding of the grail myth similar to Eliot's own and even utilizing elements of his topography, Armed with Madness is nevertheless nothing like mere reiteration of The Waste Land. Through its suggestion of readily available cures for the condition of barrenness and sterility illustrated in Eliot's poem, Butts's novel subtly critiques both Eliot and The Waste Land. Those who knew both Butts and Eliot might have anticipated the nature of Butts's response to The Waste Land. Even the physical presences of these two authors would have suggested critical differences in vision and tone. In her memoir Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach describes Mary Butts who bounced in and out . . . in the Paris of the twenties, with her red cheeks and red hair, [and] wasn't melancholy (113). The Eliot of the same period showed artistic Bloomsbury a face tinted green with powder to look cadaverous (Gordon 5). Butts seems to have known nearly every artistic personality of Paris and London in the 191 Os and 1920s.(1) Her friends and admirers included Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, H.D., and Marianne Moore (Blondel xv). Nevertheless, her situation as writer, in the late 20s, differed significantly from Eliot's. By this time, Eliot was established . . . the centre of London's literary society (Gordon 1). A member of the underground(2) living mostly in Paris, Butts was much less well known, despite the fact that her individual stories, her first collection of stories (Speed the Plough, 1923), and her first novel (Ashe of Rings, 1925) had all received critical acclaim.(3) While the conservatively clad Eliot prayed on the London subway during his daily commute to the offices of Faber and Faber (Gordon 6), Mary Butts was pub-crawling through Paris by night, squandering her meager income on opium and penniless men. Eliot and Butts knew each other, although they were never close friends. In 1920, Ovid Press, run by Butts's then-husband, John Rodker, had published Eliot's second book of poetry, Ara Vos Prec. In the 1927 journal entry in which she describes the parallel between Armed with Madness and The Waste Land, Butts indicates her sense of her relationship with Eliot. T. S. Eliot . . . the only writer of my quality, dislikes me and my work, I think, she says (qtd. in Blondel 186).(4) She then describes the incident that made after years 'see through' S. Eliot (not to lose an ounce of . . . admiration for his poetry). She recalls time when [Eliot] said: 'that - in some such way - the mandarins who went to M. Bergson's lectures the Sorbonne may have been said to have been using their minds.' An admirer of Eastern philosophy and culture, Butts claims that the provincialism of this racist comment is what at last . . . decided [her] against Eliot (Selections 172).(5) Her decision against him easily could have been influenced by other factors as well, including Eliot's refusal to write an introduction for Ashe of Rings, despite his pronounced esteem for this work (Blondel 416). In his post as editor of The Criterion, Eliot had also rejected number of Butts's stories in 1925 (Blondel 141). …

Foundations of Modern Art by Ozenfant, Translated by John Rodker

Foundations of Modern Art by Ozenfant, Translated by John Rodker

<italic>The History of Witchcraft and Demonology</italic>. By <sc>Montague Summers</sc>. [The History of Civilization, edited by C. K. Ogden.] (London: Kegan Paul; New York: A. A. Knopf. 1926. Pp. xv, 353. 12 s. 6 d.), <italic>The Geography of Witchcraft</italic>. By <sc>Montague Summers</sc>. [The History of Civilization, edited by C. K. Ogden.] (London: Kegan Paul; New York: A. A. Knopf. 1927. Pp.

Journal Article The History of Witchcraft and Demonology. By Montague Summers. [The History of Civilization, edited by C. K. Ogden.] (London: Kegan Paul; New York: A. A. Knopf. 1926. Pp. xv, 353. 12 s. 6 d.), The Geography of Witchcraft. By Montague Summers. [The History of Civilization, edited by C. K. Ogden.] (London: Kegan Paul; New York: A. A. Knopf. 1927. Pp. ix, 623. 12s.6d.), Malleus Maleficarum. Translated with an introduction, bibliography, and notes by Montague Summers. (London: John Rodker. 1928. Pp. xlv, 278. 35 s.) and Demoniality. By Ludovico Maria Sinistrari, Friar Minor. Translated by Montague Summers. (London: Fortune Press. 1928. Pp. xliii, 127. 21 s.) Get access The History of Witchcraft and Demonology. By Summers Montague. [The History of Civilization, edited by C. K. Ogden.] (London: Kegan Paul; New York: A. A. Knopf. 1926. Pp. xv, 353. 12 s. 6 d.) The Geography of Witchcraft. By Summers Montague. [The History of Civilization, edited by C. K. Ogden.] (London: Kegan Paul; New York: A. A. Knopf. 1927. Pp. ix, 623. 12 s. 6 d.) Malleus Maleficarum. Translated with an introduction, bibliography, and notes by Summers Montague. (London: John Rodker. 1928. Pp. xlv, 278. 35 s.) Demoniality. By Sinistrari Ludovico Maria, Friar Minor. Translated by Summers Montague. (London: Fortune Press. 1928. Pp. xliii, 127. 21 s.) George L. Burr George L. Burr Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 34, Issue 2, January 1929, Pages 321–325, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/34.2.321 Published: 01 January 1929