The Little Review, April 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 2)

(VOL. 3, NO. 2) ***

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR

APRIL, 1916

Four Poems: Carl Sandburg Gone Graves Choices Child of the Romans Portrait of Carl Sandburg by Elizabeth Buehrmann Dreiser Sherwood Anderson To John Cowper Powys Arthur Davison Ficke A Letter from London Ezra Pound A Sorrowful Demon Alexander S. Kaun The Poet Speaks Margaret C. Anderson Poems: Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne The Cry The Excuse The Cross What Then—? R. G. German Poetry William Saphier An Isaiah Without a Christ Charles Zwaska Announcements Flamingo Dreams Lupo de Braila New York Letter Allan Ross Macdougall The Theatre Book Discussion The Reader Critic Vers Libre Prize Contest

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MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher Fine Arts Building CHICAGO

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Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago

THE LITTLE REVIEW

VOL. III

APRIL, 1916

NO. 2

Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson

Four Poems

CARL SANDBURG

Gone

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town. Far off Everybody loved her. So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold On a dream she wants. Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went. Nobody knows why she packed her trunk: a few old things And is gone.... Gone with her little chin Thrust ahead of her And her soft hair blowing careless From under a wide hat, Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate lover.

Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick? Were there five men or fifty with aching hearts? Everybody loved Chick Lorimer. Nobody knows where she’s gone.

Graves

I dreamed one man stood against a thousand, One man damned as a wrongheaded fool. One year and another he walked the streets, And a thousand shrugs and hoots Met him in the shoulders and mouths he passed.

He died alone And only the undertaker came to his funeral.

Flowers grow over his grave anod in the wind, And over the graves of the thousand, too, The flowers grow anod in the wind.

Flowers and the wind, Flowers anod over the graves of the dead, Petals of red, leaves of yellow, streaks of white, Masses of purple sagging ... I love you and your great way of forgetting.

Choices

They offer you many things, I a few. Moonlight on the play of fountains at night With water sparkling a drowsy monotone, Bare-shouldered, smiling women and talk And a cross-play of loves and adulteries And a fear of death and a remembering of regrets: All this they offer you. I come with: salt and bread a terrible job of work and tireless war; Come and have now: hunger danger and hate.

[Illustration: Carl Sandburg _From a silhouette photograph by Elizabeth Buehrmann_]

Child of the Romans

The dago shovelman sits by the railroad track Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna. A train whirls by and men and women at tables Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils, Eat steaks running with brown gravy, Strawberries and cream, eclairs and coffee. The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna, Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day’s work, Keeping the road-bed so the roses and jonquils Shake hardly at all in the cut glass vases Standing slender on the tables in the dining cars.

Dreiser

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

_Heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head._ _Fine, or superfine._

Theodore Dreiser is old—he is very, very old. I do not know how many years he has lived, perhaps thirty, perhaps fifty, but he is very old. Something gray and bleak and hurtful that has been in the world almost forever is personified in him.

When Dreiser is gone we shall write books, many of them. In the books we write there will be all of the qualities Dreiser lacks. We shall have a sense of humor, and everyone knows Dreiser has no sense of humor. More than that we shall have grace, lightness of touch, dreams of beauty bursting through the husks of life.

Oh, we who follow him shall have many things that Dreiser does not have. That is a part of the wonder and the beauty of Dreiser, the things that others will have because of Dreiser.

When he was editor of _The Delineator_, Dreiser went one day, with a woman friend, to visit an orphans’ asylum. The woman told me the story of that afternoon in the big, gray building with Dreiser, heavy and lumpy and old, sitting on a platform and watching the children—the terrible children—all in their little uniforms, trooping in.

“The tears ran down his cheeks and he shook his head,” the woman said. That is a good picture of Dreiser. He is old and he does not know what to do with life, so he just tells about it as he sees it, simply and honestly. The tears run down his cheeks and he shakes his head.

Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick his books to pieces, to laugh at him. Thump, thump, thump, here he comes, Dreiser, heavy and old.

The feet of Dreiser are making a path for us, the brutal heavy feet. They are tramping through the wilderness, making a path. Presently the path will be a street, with great arches overhead and delicately carved spires piercing the sky. Along the street will run children, shouting “Look at me”—forgetting the heavy feet of Dreiser.

The men who follow Dreiser will have much to do. Their road is long. But because of Dreiser, we, in America, will never have to face the road through the wilderness, the road that Dreiser faced.

_Heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head._ _Fine, or superfine._

To John Cowper Powys, on His “Confessions”

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

I.

Old salamander basking in the fire, Winking your lean tongue at a coal or two, Lolling amid the maelstroms of desire, And envying the lot of none or few— Old serpent alien to the human race, Immune to poison, apples, and the rest, Examining like a microbe each new face And pawing, passionless, each novel breast— Admirer of God and of the Devil, Hater of Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, Skeptic of good, more skeptic yet of evil— Knowing the sick soul sounder than the well— We mortals send you greeting from afar— How very like a human being you are!

II.

Impenetrably isolate you stand, Tickling the world with a long-jointed straw. Lazy as Behemoth, your thoughts demand No cosmic plan to satisfy your maw; But as the little shining gnats buzz by You eat the brightest and spit out the rest, Then streak your front with ochre carefully And dance, a Malay with a tattooed breast. There are no sins, no virtues left for you, No strength, no weakness, no apostasy. You know the world, now old, was never new, And that its wisdom is a shameless lie. So in the dusk you sit you down to plan Some fresh confusion for the heart of man.

III.

Lover of Chaos and the Sacred Seven! Scorner of Midas and St. Francis, too! Wearied of earth, yet dubious of Heaven, Fain of old follies and of pastures new— Why should the great, whose spirits haunt the void Between Orion and the Northern Wain, Make you their mouthpiece? Why have they employed So brassed a trumpet for so high a strain? Perhaps, like you, they count it little worth To pipe save for the piping; so they take You weak, infirm, uncertain as the earth, And down your tubes the thrill of music wake. Well, God preserve you!—and the Devil damn!— And nettles strew the bosom of Abraham!

A Letter from London

EZRA POUND

I should be very glad if someone in America could be made to realize the sinister bearing of the import duty on books. I have tried in vain to get some of my other correspondents to understand the effect of this iniquity ... but apparently without success. It means insularity, stupidity, backing the printer against literature, commerce and obstruction against intelligence. I have spent myself on the topic so many times that I am not minded to write an elaborate denunciation until I know I am writing to someone capable of understanding and willing to take up the battle. Incidentally the life of a critical review depends a good deal on controversy and on having some issue worth fighting. Henry IV. did away with the black mediaevalism of an octroi on books, and the position of Paris is not without its debt to that intelligent act. No country that needs artificial aid in its competition with external intelligence is fit for any creature above the status of pig.

The tariff should be abolished not only for itself but because dishonest booksellers shelter themselves behind it and treble the price of foreign books, and because it keeps up the price of printing.

If there is one thing that we are all agreed upon: It is that the canned goods of Curtis and Company and Harper and Company and all the business firms should be set apart from the art of letters, and the artist helped against the tradesman.

As a matter of fact a removal of the tariff wouldn’t much hurt even publishers, as the foreign books we really want in America are the sort which the greed of American business publishers forbids their publishing ... but that is no matter.

It affects every young writer in America, and every reader whether he wish merely to train his perceptions or whether he train them with a purpose, of, say, learning what has been done, what need not be repeated, what is worthy of repetition. There is now the hideous difficulty of getting a foreign book, and the prohibitive price of both foreign and domestic publications. I don’t know that I need to go on with it.

Again and yet again it is preposterous that our generation of writers shouldn’t have the facility in getting at contemporary work, which one would have in Paris or Moscow. It’s bad enough for the American to struggle against the dead-hand of the past generation composed of clerks and parasites and against our appalling _decentralization_, i. e., lack of metropoles and centers, having full publishing facilities and communication with the outer world—(which last is being slowly repaired)—also our scarcity of people who know.

When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity, since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.—_Bernard Shaw_, 1916.

A Sorrowful Demon[1]

ALEXANDER S. KAUN

How he hates us, ordinary mortals! No, he seldom hates; he reserves his hatred for God, for life, for the universe. For us, weak bubbles driven on the surface by uncontrollable forces, he has only contempt. Yet, though hating and despising, he is infinitely dear to us: the thick melancholy vein that bulges across his wildcat forehead makes him almost human; the taut string of his remote harp vibrates at times with such yearning and pain that we feel nearly at home with that alien-on-earth, Mikhail Lermontov. We are glad with a petty gladness whenever we discover in him this weakness, his humaneness; we chuckle at the comfortable feeling of being able to observe him on the level plane, freed from the necessity of throwing our heads far back in order to perceive him on the lonely peak. He is our brother, we boast; and we inflict on him the severest punishment for a genius—forgiveness.

But his contemporaries could not forgive him. A general sigh of relief echoed the official announcement of his death “in a fearful storm accompanied by thunder and lightning on the Beshta mountain in the Caucasus”. “Bon voyage”, exclaimed Nicholas I, rubbing his hands in glee over the departure of one of his most undesirable subjects, the uncompromising mutineer. The church refused to bury the arrogant denier. Society applauded Major Martinov whose bullet snapped the life of the unapproachable aristocrat, the mocker of customs and conventions, the maimer of feminine hearts, the careless, fearless duellist who played with life, his own or that of others, as with a valueless toy. The people—there was not such a thing in Russia of 1841.

Society organism cannot digest a foreign element. We are too local in our terrestrial standards to tolerate an individual who is made not of the same stuff that we are made of. Lermontov was a child of a different planet who fell upon our earth by some crude mistake, doomed to chafe twenty-six years among humans. As a child he protested against the fatal misplacement; he discharged his venom in demolishing flower-beds, in torturing animals with tears in his eyes, in brandishing his tiny fists against his grandmother, when he observed her mistreating the serfs. When he grew up—and he grew up early: at ten he loved a girl; at fifteen he conceived his greatest poems, _Mtzyri_ and _Demon_—his protest had calmed down. He no longer wept or raged—he hated God and despised mankind. His contemporaries tell us that no one could stand his heavy penetrating look. Men hated and feared him; women hated and loved him, as they always do extraordinary things. Lermontov took revenge for his accidental association with mankind; he left behind him a long row of broken hearts and wounded ambitions. His rebellious spirit sought rest in chaos, in torturing others and himself, in creating around him an atmosphere of tragedy, in reckless fighting with the wild Caucasian mountaineers.

And he, the mutinous, seeks storm, As if in storm he may find peace.

Pechorin, the hero of his autobiographical sketches collected in _A Hero of Our Time_, is the first Nietzschean in literature. His terse, unpretentious maxims and paradoxes have been re-echoed by Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Przybyszewski, and other writers of the superman-literature. As always is the case with deliberate or unconscious commentators, they liquefy the original. One carelessly dropped sentence of Lermontov is elaborated in tons of Dostoevsky’s gallous psychology, in mountains of Nietzsche’s brain-splittering philosophy, in cognac-oceans of the vivisectionist-Przybyszewski. Pechorin does not talk much; he is too aristocratic for extravagance in words. Pechorin does not compromise; he is not made of that stuff. He neither repents nor seeks atonement; in his hatred for reality he does not erect a consoling phantom in the image of a Superman; he would dismiss with a contemptible shrug Falk’s matrimonial and sexual tribulations. Pechorin is eternally alone. Those who approach him are scorched with his unhuman flame. Alone, in the steppe, after a mad ride which kills his horse, Pechorin hugs the soil and weeps “like a child”. Like a child pressing to its mother’s bosom, plaintively demanding the Why and the Wherefore of existence among strangers. Shall we chuckle at the suddenly-discovered weakness of our enemy? Or shall we modestly turn away our eyes from the stolen sight of a god in his nudity?

I once called Lermontov a sorrowful demon. Not a Lucifer, not a Mephistopheles, but a Russian demon, as the sculptor Antokolsky conceived him. Lermontov-Demon-Pechorin, a quaint superman, neither god nor devil, a pluralistic being, a combination of cruelty and compassion, of contempt and sympathy, of cynicism and sentimentalism, of the loftiest and the basest, of the unhuman and of the human-all-too-human. Dostoevsky?

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[1] A Hero of Our Time, by M. Y. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.

The Poet Speaks

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

There are people in the world who like poetry if they know the poet. There are a good many people in Chicago just now who understand and enjoy Amy Lowell’s poetry because she read it to them at the Little Theatre.

I know a poet who could make nothing of Vachel Lindsay’s things until Lindsay chanted them to him one day. And I know another who said to me, when I remarked that I didn’t like Alfred Kreymborg’s verse, “Oh, but you would if you knew him.” I am puzzled, because I know this man to be an intelligent being. And somehow I have always been under the naive impression that poetry was a matter of art.

But there are worse things. There is one type of person we always eject promptly from the office of THE LITTLE REVIEW. He is the person who says that Amy Lowell’s poetry has no feeling in it. Now please listen: I want to quote you something. It is called _Vernal Equinox_, it was written by Miss Lowell, and it appeared in the September issue of _Poetry_; but I want to see it put down in these pages so that we may actually know it has been in THE LITTLE REVIEW:

The scent of hyacinths, like a pale mist, lies between me and my book; And the South Wind, washing through the room, Makes the candles quiver; My nerves sting at a spatter of rain on the shutter, And I am uneasy at the bursting of green shoots Outside, in the night.

Why are you not here to overpower me with your tense and urgent love?

A poet whose new book will soon be talked of said to me, when I showed this to him, “Yes, it’s very clever, but it has no feeling.” He left the office gladly in three minutes.

Still there are worse things. _The Chicago Tribune_ sent a reporter to the Little Theatre to hear Miss Lowell read and to record his impression of her work and personality for those who still peruse the newspapers. You may have seen the reporter’s article....

And still worse?... Lots of people have been splitting hairs over Amy Lowell’s work, but no human being has been heard to remark: “A beautiful thing is happening in America. Amy Lowell is writing poetry for us.”

Poems[2]

ELIZABETH GIBSON CHEYNE