Lawrence Rainey

On the morning of 16 June, in city after city throughout the world, small groups of people will gather to engage in curious rituals. In New York, some fifty people will each pay $25 to breakfast on mutton kidneys and slightly burnt toast. Optional courses will include ‘nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs’ and ‘fried hen-cod’s roe’. The kidneys will be judged by how keenly they give the palate ‘a fine tang of faintly scented urine’ or leave one feeling ‘a bit peckish’. In Sydney, two hundred people will gather in the Cathedral to hear a requiem mass for Paddy Dignam, someone who never lived, then exit by torchlight to re-stage his burial, which never took place. In Dublin, as has been the custom for some years, perhaps a hundred will go to the cemetery where Dignam wasn’t buried, there to re-stage the same funeral, which never took place. A man in a brown mackintosh will lurk in the background. And in Toronto, two hundred or so will stroll along the shore of Lake Ontario, but refer to it as Sandy-mount, then walk to a series of other sites within the city, each renamed after a locality in Dublin – all in order to reconstruct the perambulations, which were never made, of a man called Leopold Bloom, who never lived, on a day that never existed.’

Newspapers and magazines of the day published countless photographs chronicling the March on Rome. The images are all in black and white, often coarse and grainy. Groups of men, many of them smiling for the benefit of the camera in front of the barricades that have been erected to block the streets, or the railway cars that have brought them to Rome, or open automobiles brimming with rifles and boxes of cartridges. A number are dressed in black shirts; some are wearing helmets, others fezzes, or fedoras, or rustic caps. Onlookers abound, sometimes craning to look at the men, sometimes waving exuberantly and sometimes glancing furtively at the camera. These are the photographic records of the insurrection that brought Benito Mussolini to power 75 years ago, on 28 October 1922. What transpired, however, may be something more elusive than a simple or straightforward event, something far more difficult to capture or describe: a subtle compound of likenesses and illusions.

For the first time since Mary Butts died more than sixty years ago, all her major work is available in Britain, together with a first, full-length biography by Nathalie Blondel. Their appearance promises an occasion to assay the limits of the canon, for Butts’s second novel, Armed with Madness, first published in 1928, is, I would say, a masterpiece of Modernist prose. Her papers have been purchased by the Beinecke Library at Yale, assuring them a place alongside those of Pound, Marinetti and Stein; a short story has recently been published in the New Yorker and a late essay on Bloomsbury appeared in the April number of Modernism/Modernity.

Ezra Pound’s support for Italian Fascism has long been a contentious subject in modern literature. For some, it is merely a vivid instance of the uncritical acclaim that surrounded Mussolini well into the mid-Thirties. Others see it as evidence of a private pathology, a grotesque outgrowth of the virile posing that Pound sometimes indulged in. Still others have urged that it ‘arose from the great contempt he felt for the masses’, an avant-garde disdain that turned into a massive political delusion. Finally there are those who believe that Pound’s admiration originated in an essentially humane response to ‘the Great Depression and the economic chaos of the Thirties’: that his adherence to Fascism was the result of goodwill marred by naivety, of noble impulses that went astray.

The grainy photograph shows the doorway of a house, the double door itself scarcely visible, obscured by a row of three huge paintings, all four to five feet in height, which have been carefully posed on the doorstep. Each boasts an almost illegible array of shaded polygons. On top of the central painting a fourth is stacked, and flanking that, two more, both oval in shape, suspended either side of the doorway. As the eye labours across this improbable heap of images, it gradually discerns a series of masterpieces in the history of modern art, all of them by Picasso. In the row on the doorstep are the Aficionado, Man with a Guitar and The Model; flanking the doorway are the two ovals both known as Guitar; suspended between them and perched on the others sits The Poet, a debonair figure who wryly surveys the assemblage. Is the snapshot intended simply as an inventory of the work that Picasso achieved at a modest villa in the town of Sorgues in the summer of 1912, or is it a mad altarpiece of some sort, ‘an unholy polyptych’, as T.J. Clark calls it, with its wings unfolded as if ‘for Easter or Pentecost’, the ensemble crowned by The Poet, ‘raised high in place of the pantocrator’? And what should we make of this mixture of farce and metaphysics, a mixture raffishly recapitulated in the painting of The Poet, where the sombre browns are flamboyantly punctuated by black impastos, thickly ridged, shiny, almost gelatinous, which signal brilliantined hair and waxed mustachios? Clark is willing to concede its unmistakable ‘jauntiness’; but that is not enough to redeem it from what he calls ‘an impacted, melancholic severity’. Nor, he adds, was it ever intended to do so. But ‘melancholic’ about what? About modernity, it seems at first glance. For plainly, in Clark’s masterful engagement with the canonical moments of Modernism in the visual arts, modernity is always and everywhere an unremitting, irredeemable horror. Yet that is too glib – better to follow his discussion of Cubism a bit further, to tease out the darker, more compelling sources of that urgent, wistful grimness.’‘