My favourite book of
2015 was Kevin Jackson's Constellation Of Genius, which was
published in 2012 but being me I only caught up to it this summer. It's
subtitled 1922: Modernism And All That Jazz and it is
basically a diary of a year which Jackson says was the start of a new
age. Or rather, Ezra Pound said it, calling it year one 'post
scriptum Ulixi' or after the writing of Ulysses. Of course, Pound's
new
epoch soon was subsumed in his enthusiasm for Mussolini, but
that's a different constellation. In his introduction Jackson
acknowledges that what we think of as modernism actually arises over
a period of time that begins nearly two decades earlier, but his view
is predominantly literary, and predominantly Anglo-centric, and 1922
therefore makes sense, bracketed as it were by James Joyce's Ulysses and
T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. 1922 was also the year William Carlos Williams published Spring And All, revolutionary in its own way, but it passes without notice here.
But the book is not
designed as an argument; it is an unfolding of a year presented as an
outflowing of ideas, and as such becomes a joy to follow. It created
a dilemma for me as a reader: did I keep it handy to simply dip into
bit by bit, entranced by its surprises and welcoming its invitations
to make connections and consider our perceptions of art, or should I
just surrender to the momentum of the calendar, and read along in a
flurry of excitement? How many books do you read these days that
create excitement? The same sort that reading Ulysses
for the first time did, or Hemingway's In Our Time, which
remains to me his finest work (along with some of the other early
stories).
Not that these were
being read widely in 1922. Having grown up studying
them, seen them as if displayed behind perspex, we forget the nature
of the world they started to overturn. That is why I said
Anglo-centric, even though Joyce is Irish and Eliot and Pound
are American. Here's a home-grown English modernist, Virginia Woolf, as
quoted by Jackson, about Ulysses:
“and Tom
[Eliot} great Tom, thinks it on a par with War And Peace! An
illiterate, underbred book, it seems to me: the book of a self-taught
working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how
egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating. When
one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you
are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood”
This
puts the problems of literary modernism into a nutshell. Growing up
in the Sixties, in America, my perception of Eliot was coloured by
his bastard offspring, the 'New Critics', and the coded
interpretations of modern reference that entailed, their clinging on to the elitism of a sort of upper-middle class experimentation. I mentioned William Carlos Williams' 1922 book going unmentioned here; Williams himself noted, when he read The Waste Land it 'set me back twenty years'.
In my upbringing, the world of Elliott and Woolf was
being overturned by the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets (though
Charles Olson's personal mythology needed as many footnotes as
Eliot's) and a new freedom of language and, yes, raw expression. Eliot
seemed a Yank who had gone 'over there' and not come back, as Frost
or Hemingway or Cummings had; moreover he had adapted the protective
colouration of the old world, a reversal of classic American 'going native'. Yet to those whose colouration he adopted, the raw savages were 'self-taught working men'. But it was amazing to me, when I moved to
Britain in the late Seventies, to discover how important Eliot was
still to the older generation of artists, how liberating his work,
which I considered constricted, actually had been, and still was to them, and I revisited it through a new perspective as a result.
In light of this, Ezra Pound, whose influence wound up being far greater in America, and who is in many ways the central figure in Jackson's book,
gets short shift.
He was the mover and shaker in the literary world of
London and Paris, but more important, and what doesn't receive notice
here, is the way Pound absolutely transformed
The Waste Land. His editing
on it was immense and made it something it would not have been
otherwise, a challenge to both language and formal constraint. The line from Eliot through the Imagists to the poets I
mentioned earlier, proceeds directly through Pound, and I would argue only because of
him.
But
as I said, this is not a book of argument, it is one of connection.
And as I followed its progress through the year, I thought of the
photos of the great artistic experimenters of that era, the
bohemians, the surrealists, the modernists, and how they are always
posed formally, in their suits and collars, or at least neckties; how
this was a world whose boundaries they were knocking down while still
remaining at least on the surface tied to them. I wish Jackson might
have included more about actual jazz, though I'm not convinced 1922
is a crucial year. I reviewed once, for the Spectator, Philip
Larkin's writings on jazz; it occurred to me that his adulation of
the early twenties and Louis Armstrong, and his ultimate disdain for
almost everything that followed, was a form of fetishism for the
liberating sense that music brought him in his youth, a freedom from the strictures of his upbringing.
And
that was what I kept coming back to, how revealing this book is about
the world that was being changed or at least challenged by modernism.
Again, I call on Woolf, commenting on the death of Kitty Maxse,
thought of as the model for Mrs. Dalloway, who fell down a flight of
stairs. 'Still it seems a pity Kitty did kill herself: but of course
she was an awful snob'. Ms. Pot does not seem very modernist at all. I may have connected with Constellation Of
Genius because it took me back, as much to the England which I
encountered in 1977 as it did to 1922, an England that was in many ways far closer to the world 50 years earlier than it is to a world only 40 years later. The book sits by my bedside still, and I still dip
into it. The best of both worlds. Again, how many books rate such a position?
Constellation Of
Genius by Kevin Jackson
Windmill Books,
£9.99, ISBN 9780099559023
I've followed Max
Allan Collins' completion of unfinished novels left behind by Mickey
Spillane, and Max and I have even discussed/debated our
interpretations of Mike Hammer and his character on my blog after a
couple of my reviews. Which is why my first thought about Murder
Never Knocks, the latest of
Max's collaborations with Mickey, was that it was to my mind the best
of the novels set after the classic Fifties Hammer milieu. It may not
be the best novel, but Mike, Velda, Pat and even Hy Gardner are all
drawn as characters who have moved on from some of their tropes, and
they have all moved into the mid-Sixties gracefully.
It's New York after the close down of many of the great newspapers,
after the twist craze has come and gone, and the newsstands now sell
Marvel comics with the Fantastic Four, so you can date it pretty
well.
