Vol. 13 No. 6 · 21 March 1991
pages 11-12 | 3025 words
Six hands at an open door
David Trotter on Modernism
- Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group: Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot by Dennis Brown
Macmillan, 230 pp, £35.00, November 1990, ISBN 0 333 51646 X
- An Immodest Violet: The Life of Violet Hunt by Joan Hardwick
Deutsch, 205 pp, £14.99, November 1990, ISBN 0 233 98639 1
Dennis Brown concludes his celebration of Anglo-American Modernism with an account of Ezra Pound’s death on 30 October 1972. ‘That year I ended an obituary of Pound in a Canadian student newspaper: Pound is now dead and no poet remains of his stature. But poetry is “NEWS that stays NEWS”. READ him: Read HIM.’ The capitalisation is very much of the period, and it may he that the message is as well. For the poet’s death was shortly followed by a critical work, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1974), which placed him at the head of the ‘Men of 1914', and chronicled in elegiac terms his lifelong struggle to reanimate a moribund literary culture. Brown shifts the emphasis from Pound Era to Group Era, but his approach is otherwise remarkably similar – remarkably, that is, when you consider how much has been written on the subject since 1974, some of it tending to a qualification of Kenner’s thesis. Criticism, after all, is news that doesn’t necessarily stay news.
[*] In Fin-de-Siècle and its Legacy, edited by Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 345 pp,. £35 and £11.95, 13 December 1990, 0 52134 108 6).
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 8 · 25 April 1991
From Dennis Brown
I was grateful for the amount of attention David Trotter gave to my book Intertextual Dynamics (LRB, 21 March) and for his mention of a book (and an essay) I had not read. However, I should like to mention some brief points in reply. My main contention about Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ was that it ‘talks back’ (yes) to Pound’s ‘Exile’s Letter’ – not a connection I have seen made elsewhere. I have admitted my debt to Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era and I rejoice to be associated with Derrida and Foucault, but I do not see why the invoked ‘generation of American scholars’ makes celebration of Modernist achievement a matter of sell-by-date critical history (the Seventies). My book, too, acknowledges Pound’s role as commercial entrepreneur – but there is a difference between snake-oil and The Waste Land.
I agree my reiteration of the birthing metaphor may be over the top – but it gestures less to the ‘natural’ than to the psychoanalytic realm (and was often used by writers themselves, including Yeats in ‘The Second Coming’). ‘Cultural process’ is, indeed, a highly complex phenomenon. Beyond the Great War issue, I was attempting to show how group influence may be a group psychoanalytic affair – where ‘nonsense’ (whether the ‘higher’ or the ‘lower’) may be less than clear-cut. I do not know any study of Crane and Co or the ‘Auden Gang’ which acknowledges psychoanalytic group-theory, nor does there seem any awareness of it in Trotter’s otherwise thought-provoking article.
Nevertheless, his last thrust, ‘a head start down the birth-canal of the literary future’, made me laugh aloud: nice one.
Dennis Brown
Ware, Hertfordshire
Vol. 13 No. 10 · 23 May 1991
From Brian Southam
Dennis Brown (Letters, 25 April) makes a point of claiming to discover a connection between Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ and Pound’s ‘Exile’s Letter’ which he has not ‘seen made elsewhere’. Such a connection is noted in the fifth edition, 1990, of my Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, where I also identify the dialogue that Eliot maintained with Pound through his poetry.
Brian Southam
London NW11
