The Pool Group and the Quest for Anthropological Universality: The Humane Images of Modernism 9783110491081, 9783110439212

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Betsy van Schlun The Pool Group and the Quest for Anthropological Universality

Buchreihe der ANGLIA/ ANGLIA Book Series

Edited by Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf Advisory Board Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine, Andrew James Johnston, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen, Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner

Volume 55

Betsy van Schlun

The Pool Group and the Quest for Anthropological Universality The Humane Images of Modernism

For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/36292

ISBN 978-3-11-043921-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-049108-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-048867-8 ISSN 0340-5435 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents List of Illustrations

XI

Acknowledgements

XIV

 Introduction 1 . The Pool Group: Its Formation, Financing, and Avant-garde Lifestyle 4 . A New Humane and Universal Art 12 18 . State of Research on Pool

Part I

Theory The Spirit of the Quest

 The Autonomy and the Necessity of Art 23 . The Autonomy of Art 23 .. Bourdieu’s Theory of the Literary Field 23 26 .. The Literary and Artistic Field of Twentieth-Century Modernism .. The Pool Members’ Positioning within the Literary and Artistic Field of Modernism 36 .. Pool’s Attempt to Unite Avant-garde Aesthetics and ‘Pure’ Art with 47 ‘Popular’ Culture . The Necessity of Art 51 51 .. The Idea of Art as a Human Necessity throughout History .. Eibl’s Poetical Animal and the Biological Need of the Human for Art 55 .. The Importance of Nature and Biology for Pool and Their Art 59

Part II

Technique and Style Towards a Universal Language of Art

 A Language Composed of Images and E/motion 69 . Montage & Metaphor and the Stream of Narrative 69 . Eisenstein and Cinematographic Metaphor 70 71 .. Eisenstein’s Collective Language of Emotion .. Intellectual Film: Eisenstein’s Dialectical Language for the Masses 73

VI

. .. .. .

.. .. .. . .. .. .

Contents

Imagism 77 77 Ezra Pound and the Clear, Objective Image H.D.’s Ascetic Metaphors & Mythopoetic Montages 82 Collage and Photomontage – Pool’s Scrapbook and Art for the Sake of It: Playing with the Language of Human Psychology, Art and Film Technique 90 Macpherson – Dynamic Forces of Life and Nature 92 94 H.D. – Simple Form and Abstraction Bryher – ‘Pure’ Spirit and the Descent of the Gods 96 Continuity: Literary Cycle of Life and Psychological-Realistic 98 Film Dorothy Richardson and the Literary Series 99 Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Film and the ‘Invisible Cut’ 101 113 Light, Vision and Film Art

Part III 

Philosophy The Quest for a Universal Foundation of Human Life

Universal Sympathy and Universal Man: Pool’s Avant-gardist New 121 Humanism . The Creative Power of Dreaming: Trans/Forming Affects into Visual Images, Symbols and Narrative 125 .. Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams: Human Libidinal Wish126 Fulfilment and Pleasure Instincts .. Hanns Sachs’ Community of Daydreams: From Subjective WishFulfilment to the Social Function of Art 130 . Myth Worlds and Anthropological Universalities: The Great Dynamics of Being 136 .. The Myth of Narcissus and Its Transformation into Psychoanalytic Concept and ‘Aesthetic Instinct’ 140 .. Life, Death, and Rebirth: The Universal Myth of Fertility and the Cult of Regeneration 144 .. Nietzsche and the Artistic Drives of Nature: Greek Tragedy as Human Psychology 149 . In Love with Life and Creation: Pool’s Biosophy and the Homo Artes 153

Contents

Part IV

VII

Works of Love Pool’s Humane Art or: Their Artistic Body

 POOL Novels 161 . Poolreflection: The Mirror and the Self-Love of Art 165 166 .. The Mythical Figures of Narcissus and the Faun ... Narcissus, the Artist and the Mirror of Self-Reflection 166 172 ... Narcissus, the Faun and the Fountain of Life ... Mythology and Mysticism – The Faun and the Poetic Vision 177 ... Metamorphoses of the Great Works of Arts 181 187 .. Bildungsroman, Künstlerroman and Love Poetry ... Shakespeare’s Two Loves and the Tradition of Love Poetry 187 ... ‘Grand Love’ and ‘Human Love’ – from Narcissism to 192 Compassion ... Poolreflection – Modernist Künstlerroman in Dialogue with Joyce and Woolf 196 . Gaunt Island: Cinematographic Fiction of Celtic Sensitivity 203 205 .. Opposing “A New Sensitivity” to Modernist Objectivity ... Robin and the Artistic Principle of Love and Compassion 205 ... Geoffrey – the Poetic Principle of Divine Vision and the 210 Sublime ... Elmo, the Mythic Unconscious, and the Psychology of Fear 215 ... “Because of nerves, a face coming suddenly to the window was Grand 218 Guignol” ... The Corruption of Art and the Interaction of Macpherson’s Figures as Agents in the Literary and Artistic Field 223 ... Music and Mood: The Song of Life and the Bang of Survival 228 .. “Universal Regeneration”: K. Macpherson’s Gaunt Island versus T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land 235 . Reconciling the Opposites of Dream and Reality: A Conclusion to Macpherson’s Novels 240 .. Poolreflection and Gaunt Island: Macpherson’s Dialectics of Art and of Human Emotion 240 .. Amore: Macpherson’s Last Novel Rome 12 Noon 244 . The Other Fictional Works by POOL 246 .. Bryher, Civilians (1927) – “If you liked The End of St. Petersburg why not try Civilians?” 247 .. E.L. Black, [John Ellerman] Why Do They Like It? (1927) – An Adolescent Anti-Establishment Novel 250

VIII

..

Contents

Oswald Blakeston, Extra Passenger (1929) – Another of the 253 Cinematographic Novels

 Films by POOL Productions 257 . Film Fragments and Lost Films 258 258 .. Wing Beat – Transforming the Poetics of Imagism into Film ... H.D.’s Unpublished Essay “Wing Beat” or the Bird-Stuffers versus the Beat of Art 261 ... Advertising the Film in Close Up 265 .. Foothills – A Joint Venture 266 269 .. Monkey’s Moon – Happy Animal Nature ... The Art of Biosophy 269 ... The History and Advertisement of the Film 276 .. I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside – A Satire on ‘Intellectual’ Film 278 Criticism . Borderline: Happy Dream and Violent Passions or “Two Loves I Have 280 of Comfort and Despair” .. History and Historical Context of Borderline 280 ... The History and Reception of Borderline 280 ... State of Research 283 285 ... Confusing Sensations in Black and White ... An International Interracial Artistic Collaboration – Pool and Paul Robeson, the Black Apollo of the Harlem Renaissance 289 294 .. The Symbolic Language of Borderline ... Dream Symbols and Key Figures of the Imagination: The Mythic Hero Pete and the Witch 294 ... Why the Use of Intertitles When Speaking in Metaphors and Continuous Association? 303 ... The White Bacchantae and the Mentality of Lynching 310 ... Secrets of the Souls – The Signature of G.W. Pabst 314 ... The Lyre of the Black Apollo and the Wild Dance of Ecstasy – Uniting ‘High’ Art and Popular Entertainment 321 ... Friendship and Universal Sympathy, and the Various Shades of Human Life 331  POOL Architecture: The Villa KenWin 336 . Geographical Location and Its Literary Historical Context 336 . Modern Bauhaus Architecture in the Swiss Mountains 339 . KenWin – The Dialectics of Classic Modern Form and Nature 348 . Later Years through to Today (Outlook) 355

IX

Contents

 Close Up – A Popular Forum for Film and Film Culture 357 359 .. State of Research and the Close Up Anthology . Wedding the Concept of the Avant-garde Little Magazines to Film Journalism and Weimar Berlin Film Culture 361 . Macpherson’s Editorial “As Is” – Vox Populi of Film Art 370 .. “How furchtbar funny that an Englishman should have started Close 370 Up” 379 .. Film and Anthropological Aspects of Universality . Film Journalism and Poetry: The Poetic Contributions of H.D. 384 .. The “Projector” Poems 385 .. “The Cinema and the Classics” – Classic Poetics for the 389 Public . The ‘Purely’ Experimental Literary Contributions of Gertrude 394 Stein . Dorothy Richardson’s Serial Column “Continuous Performance” 402

Part V 

~ The End ~

Conclusion: The Disintegrating Body of Pool and the Spirit of Art

Works Cited

417

Index of names Index of Subjects

449 455

409

List of Illustrations 1. 2.

Pool’s frequent travel routes and the centres and axes of modernism 12 POOL logo (designed by Macpherson) Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner Family Foundation. Used by permission. 13 3. The three pillars of Modernism 18 4. Pool in the literary and artistic field about 1927 (a blueprint model) 29 5. Macpherson in Celtic costume, from the scrapbook Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript 61 Library 6. Nude Bryher Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner 64 Family Foundation. Used by permission. 7. H.D. as ‘Oread’ Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner 64 Family Foundation. Used by permission. 8. Photomontage Macpherson, from the scrapbook Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner 93 Family Foundation. Used by permission. 9. Photomontage H.D., from the scrapbook Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner Family Foundation. Used by permission. 95 10. Photomontage Bryher, from the scrapbook Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner Family Foundation. Used by permission. 96 11. Sunrays breaking through clouds (still Monkey’s Moon) Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner 271 Family Foundation. Used by permission. 12. The sunny mood expressed by the saxophone (still Monkey’s Moon) Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript

XII

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

List of Illustrations

Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner Family Foundation. Used by permission. 272 The monkey’s joy of life (still Monkey’s Moon) Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner Family Foundation. Used by permission. 273 The looming shadow of doom (still Monkey’s Moon) Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner 274 Family Foundation. Used by permission. Giant Pete (screenshot Borderline) 295 Rights reserved by the Cinémathèque Swiss Robeson the Athlete Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 296 Venus from Borderline (screenshot) 311 Rights reserved by the Cinémathèque Swiss Napoleon from Eisenstein’s Ten Days that Shook the World (screenshot) 311 Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow Barmaid with knife (screenshot Borderline) Rights reserved by the Cinémathèque Swiss 313 Knife transformed bloody dagger (screenshot Borderline) 313 Rights reserved by the Cinémathèque Swiss Thorne’s violent thoughts (screenshot Borderline) 316 Rights reserved by the Cinémathèque Swiss Accusing gesture from Borderline (screenshot) Rights reserved by the Cinémathèque Swiss 319 Pete’s ‘light-sculpted’ head (screenshot Borderline) Rights reserved by the Cinémathèque Swiss 326 Michelangelo’s David, detail hand Photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut 328 The dead Astrid, detail hand (screenshot Borderline) Rights reserved by the Cinémathèque Swiss 329 The broken Venus and the dead Astrid’s hand (screenshots Borderline) Rights reserved by the Cinémathèque Swiss 330 Pete with the symbolic rose of love (screenshot Borderline) Rights reserved by the Cinémathèque Swiss 333 Sylvia Beach at Kenwin Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript

List of Illustrations

29.

30.

31.

32.

XIII

Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner Family Foundation. Used by permission. 337 White cube in the Swiss Alps Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner Family Foundation. Used by permission. 340 Bryher at Kenwin Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner 342 Family Foundation. Used by permission. Kenwin, front and garden view Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner 349 Family Foundation. Used by permission. Macpherson’s continuity editing in the journal Material by H.D. and Bryher: Copyright © 2016 by the Schaffner Family 400 Foundation. Used by permission

Acknowledgements First and foremost gratitude belongs to Ralf Schneider, a most kind and considerate boss, who conceded me much time for my book. I would also like to thank Steve Tollivey at the BFI and Charles Silver at the Film Library of the MoMA for their ready help with the Pool film material and film-viewing equipment. For their help in securing permission concerning copyrights I thank Nancy Kuhl at the Beinecke Library (Yale Collection of American Literature), Michel Dind from the Cinémathèque Swiss, Grazia Visintainer from the Institute of Art History in Florence – Max Planck-Institute, and Declan Spring from New Directions Books and the Schaffner Family Foundation. Tobias Döring, Anne-Marie Bonnet and Barbara Schellewald I thank for their support in the early stages of this project and Michael Neumann for his ever friendly ear. Thanks also to Gabriele Rippl, Martin Middeke and Hubert Zapf, editors of the Anglia Book Series, and to the anonymous peer reviewers, to Bernhard Matschulla at the library of Eichstätt University, to Britta Schulze-Böhm for helping with questions about architecture and to Jennifer Horstmeier for improving the quality of some of the pictures. I also thank my colleagues at the University of Bielefeld and last but not least my family and friends.

1 Introduction Pool were¹ a British avant-garde group active at the time of ‘high’ Modernism. The members of Pool published their own books, edited and published their own film magazine, Close Up, and produced their own films. Pool’s oeuvre compasses such diverse genres and media as film, the novel, non-fiction books, journalism, poetry, short prose pieces, language teaching books, books on film technology and film history, film criticism, pieces on educational reform and psychoanalysis and more. What is more, the different genres become entangled; novels are imagist or cinematographic, films are poetic and symbolic as well as realistic and documentary, journalism has literary aesthetic qualities, and the film magazine incorporates poems and experimental modern prose or collages. Their oeuvre furthermore extends from the most private creativity of their photo scrapbook to their publications, films, and architecture, through to the most outreaching public art activity of their film magazine. As the name already declares for their programme, Pool contain many different streams and present plurality, and they themselves have to be understood as a synthesis of the arts. Moreover, a mere inventory of their works already shows that Pool mediated between the two often conflicting tendencies of Modernism and modernity – the avant-garde aesthetic and popular culture.² Although associated with almost all the iconic modernists of their time, Pool are hardly known today. Hence much archival research was necessary to find and compile material at the outset of this project, but recently more and more of it has re-emerged in antiquarian bookstores, some of the film material is now available on DVD, and the Beinecke Library at Yale has uploaded an increasing amount of archive material to its Digital Image Collection.

 I intentionally deviate from the grammatical conventions and will use the more logical plural with Pool to emphasise that this collective was made up of distinct individuals and characterised its heterogeneous composition.  The most frequently cited studies that have become classics in this context are Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde () and Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (), but more recent introductory studies still continue the notion. See, for example, Nicholls’ Modernism: A Literary Guide (), especially the chapter “Modernity and the Men of ”; Jane Goldman’s Modernism,  –  (), and Julian Hanna’s Key Concepts in Modernist Literature (). Studies like Berman (), Rainey () and Armstrong () diverge from a clear-cut separation between Modernism and modernity and acknowledge a relation or interaction of the two antagonistic poles. In particular Armstrong demands that the “still fairly prevalent view of modernism” as a ‘reaction against’ modernity must be displaced in favour of one that acknowledges the relation of the two as other than antagonistic (: ).

2

1 Introduction

Pool pose a research desideratum in studying Modernism, not only because they and their oeuvre have not been investigated in their sum total so far but because they are also completely different from other modernists. The modernists are often split up into an avant-garde that embraced modernity with its (technological) progress and mass culture and those modernists of classical ‘high’ Modernism who advanced radical aesthetic experiments and an aesthetic revolution in opposition to modern popular culture (Huyssen 1986: vii, Rainey 1998: 30; Nicholls 1995: 166; Goldman 2004: 6 – 9; 2009: Hanna x). Pool are different in that they unite these two opposing tendencies, merging avant-garde modernity and popular culture with the experimental form aesthetic of classical Modernism, while also joining technological progress to humanitarian concerns. The conventional auxiliary critical construction therefore does not work with Pool. Thus the Pool phenomenon opens a new perspective onto Modernism and prompts a reconsideration of its canonical texts and figures. Pool is situated at the very intersection of those contradictions which constitute Modernism, and this is where much of the fascination of Pool lies, in their bundling of many of Modernism’s contradictions. Next to the avant-gardes around Ezra Pound, on the one hand, and the Bloomsbury group, on the other, Pool constitute a third avant-garde mainstay of Anglo-American Modernism. In opposition to the more pluralistic concept of Modernism (Bradbury and McFarlane 1976; Berman 1982; Rainey 1998; Armstrong 2005), Ann Ardis in Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880 – 1922 (2002) returns to the idea of ‘the men of 1914’ as an exclusive coterie in her attempt to “retain the specificity of term” (2002: 2) and contrasts it to a ‘feminine other’. While I do not want to introduce such a gender dichotomy into my definition and prefer a pluralistic concept in general, I do like the idea of sharpening my usage of the term. To this end I will use capitalized ‘high’ Modernism for the predominantly Anglo-American literary phenomenon that promoted aesthetic experiment and distinguished itself from popular mass culture, herein following the now classical study of Bradbury and McFarlane. Thus, irrespective of any historical involvement in commerce and marketing³ (which will not be ignored), Modernism will represent a particular

 For the complex relationship of Modernism with capitalist culture and strategies see John Xiros Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ); Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, eds. Ian Willison, Gould Warwick and Chernaik Warren (Basingstoke, London: Macmillan, ); Marketing Modernism: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, eds. Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ); Alissa G. Karl, Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen (New York, London: Routledge, ), and, of course, the already cited work by Rainey.

1 Introduction

3

cultural ‘elitist’ attitude, against which Pool positioned their artistic activities. However, the term also denotes a dedicated commitment to aesthetics and the autonomy of art, with which Pool did identify. In distinction to Modernism, lowercased modernism (usually used synonymously in critical research) shall include all avant-garde arts that are not subsumed in Modernism, either because they work in popular media that were not consecrated by Modernism, for example film, or because they concede to commercial considerations. The latter takes into consideration the more expansive concepts of critical discourses on modernism, especially those that allow for an interrelationship of modernism and modernity (Berman 1982; Rainey 1998; Armstrong 2005). I thereby hope to visually indicate diverging tendencies within the movement. The boundary between the two will nevertheless ultimately become permeable in the process of examining the Pool phenomenon. By my differentiation between Modernism and modernism I furthermore hope to retain a historically documented artistic ethos and attitude of distinction by which the artists of Modernism characterised themselves.⁴ The term ‘Modernism’ therefore shall largely follow an aristocratic conception of Art and aesthetic elitism, while the term ‘modernism’ shall indicate a rather more democratic notion of art. I deliberately say ‘rather’ because such conceptions can never be absolute and several artists of Modernism had democratic concerns. Dorothy Richardson, for example, intended her Pilgrimage for women of the working classes, Hemingway was concerned with common speech, and the free verse of the Imagists also tended to a democratic direction. Such reduction is part of the problem with critical constructs of Modernism, which shall be reconsidered in the course of the present project but cannot be redressed at this point. Finally, one might raise the question of whether the tendencies respecting Pool should be considered postmodern. I have decided to follow Christa and Peter Bürger in this respect, who maintain that the “rather helpless term postmodernism” describes a tendency which the historical avant-garde pursued already during the heyday of classical Modernism (Bürger 1987: 10 – 11). Forgotten for decades, Pool were rediscovered in the nineteen-eighties by scholars of film studies and renewed interest in their films emerged at the beginning of this century, when Wing Beat was shown at the Tate Gallery in 2003 (19 May – 10 August) and Borderline at the Berlinale four years later. The latest study on Pool by François Bovier once again comes from the field of film studies. Now the present study wants to recover Pool and their works for literary and cultural studies. Therefore it will look at their oeuvre at large, their novels, non-fiction

 For a more detailed account of some modernist writers’ ethos of professionalism see Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: UP, ).

4

1 Introduction

books, films and film magazine and will also include their private and unpublished scrapbook as well as the architecture of their Bauhaus residence, because these too constitute important components of their artistic collaboration and are essential contributions in understanding not only Pool’s art but also their artistic philosophy and ethos. In contrast to most studies of Pool to date, it furthermore wants, first, to put the emphasis on the artistic collaboration of the group instead of concentrating on one of its individual members and, second, reconsider the influence and importance of the German film director G.W. Pabst and Weimar Berlin film culture on Pool.⁵ Although Pabst has usually been acknowledged as an influence upon the group, Eisenstein is the canonised authority whose impact upon Pool’s film work is frequently emphasised, a circumstance which has led to the classification of their films as avant-garde aesthetic. In approaching the Pool phenomenon, I will examine the group within the artistic context, or rather contexts, of their time and in relation to the various tendencies within modernism, drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of the literary and artistic field. But Pool do not merely operate in relation to other modernists; their works reveal intensely humane aesthetic concerns and anthropological ideas about humanity’s necessity for art. This aspect needs to be considered within a wider historical and philosophical scope and with regard to Eibl’s notion of a poetic animal.

1.1 The Pool Group: Its Formation, Financing, and Avant-garde Life-style Pool were an avant-garde group that originated in 1927 in Britain and were active under this denomination until 1933. The group consisted of the three core members Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Macpherson (1902– 1971), a Scottish artist and novelist, is virtually unknown today. If he is mentioned at all, it is usually in connection with Bryher and H.D., either as husband or lover.⁶ Bryher (1894– 1982) was an English writer,

 Marina Camboni’s “’Perché, Berlino, ti devo tanto amare?’ Bryher a Berlino,  – ” tends in this direction, but eventually the article focuses more on Bryher’s individual personality than on the group’s art work. (Her article was first published in Città, avanguardie modernità e Modernismo. Atti del Convegnotenutosi a Macerata, il  –  maggio  , a cura di Marina Camboni e Antonella Gargano (Macerata: Eum, ):  –  and has been translated into English.).  Information on Macpherson is very scarce. He does not even feature in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; he is only mentioned in the entry on Bryher.

1.1 The Pool Group: Its Formation, Financing, and Avant-garde Life-style

5

who is little known for her historical novels and usually mentioned as the rich wife of Robert McAlmon or companion of H.D. Queer studies rediscovered her in the 1990s and maybe claiming her for this specific critical niche somewhat forestalled a broader literary reception and an acknowledgement of her impact on Modernism.⁷ In fact, she made major contributions to financing Modernism, but even though she deserves more critical attention there is as yet no biography on her, save her own The Heart to Artemis (1962), and only individual papers have given attention to her role in Modernism.⁸ She is acknowledged in McAlmon’s autobiography Being Geniuses Together, 1920 – 1930 and Adrienne Monnier’s The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier (c. 1976).⁹ The third of the core members is H.D. (1886 – 1961), one of the American expatriates who came to settle in Europe prior to the First World War. She became one of the leading poets of the Imagist movement and the only one of the triumvirate to acquire literary fame and be accepted into the modernist canon. All three were first and foremost writers who at one point discovered film as another modern, experimental medium of artistic expression. Additional members of the group included the writer, film critic and filmmaker Oswell Blakeston (Henry Joseph Hasslacher), the writer and journalist Dorothy Richardson, and the writer and editor Robert Herring. Blakeston not only wrote extensively on film theory but was also a prolific writer of crime and detective novels.¹⁰ Thus a brief introductory glance at Pool already shows that the group reverses critical constructs of a ‘male’ modernist avant-garde which opposed itself aggressively to a ‘female’ popular culture (see especially Huyssen 1986: 44– 62). While H.D., Richardson, and Bryher

 See for example the studies by Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism (); Claude J. Summers, The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Work, from Antiquity to the Present (); and Diana Collecott, “Bryher’s Two Selves as Lesbian Romance” (). Furthermore, Bryher’s two novels Development and Two Selves were reprinted in Living Out: Gay & Lesbian Autobiography series from the University of Wisconsin Press () and her novels are often listed in catalogues of classical lesbian works.  Currently Susan McCabe is working on such a research project, a full-length biographical study of Bryher that will be published under the title: Bryher, Female Husband of Modernism: A Critical Biography (no prospective date of publication given). See McCabe’s faculty homepage, University of Southern California, College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. A first brief publication on the subject-matter is her article “Bryher’s Archive: Modernism and the Melancholy of Money,” English Now: Selected Papers from the th IAUPE Conference in Lund , ed. Marianne Thormählen (Lund: UP, ):  – .  Monnier does inscribe the chapter on Bryher “Our Friend Bryher.” Bryher is also mentioned in Humphrey Carpenter, Geniuses Together: American writers in Paris in the s (London, et. al: Unwin, ).  Some of these crime and detective novels he wrote under the pseudonym “Simon” and in collaboration with Roger Burford.

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1 Introduction

doubtlessly have to be regarded as representatives of avant-garde literary Modernism, Macpherson, Herring, and Blakeston are clearly proponents of popular film culture. Associated with the group were furthermore renowned Berlin psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs, filmmakers Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Sergei Eisenstein, and numerous befriended artists. Pool was formed when the young and fulgent Kenneth Macpherson appeared on the scene. Bryher and H.D. had known each other for years by then, having met in the summer of 1918 (Bryher, Heart 216) and travelled together frequently in the ensuing years. When H.D. was seriously ill with pneumonia during a pregnancy in 1919, Bryher cared for her and very likely saved her life and that of the child, Perdita. It was the beginning of their lifelong friendship. Macpherson and H.D. met in 1926 and soon became lovers. In the fall of 1927 Bryher, who had previously been married to the American writer Robert McAlmon, married Macpherson and the ménage settled down in Switzerland. Their Swiss residency corresponded with their love for nature and Bryher’s particular ardour for mountaineering (ibid. 105 – 107, 317). Yet Switzerland was not some remote rural outback but an artistic avant-garde hub, home to Dada and expressionist dance, experimental communities, and, most importantly for Pool, a place where a great variety of international films were shown regularly. “Switzerland was a perfect place for our headquarters. It was possible to see French, German, American and English films all in the same week” (Bryher, ibid. 290). Films were not only shown as soon as they were released but were moreover shown uncensored. Switzerland, as we learn from one of Macpherson’s editorials, had a cinema culture rather unique at the time: We see films as soon as they are released. […] And we read six months after we have seen them of films just reaching London and New York. They come from Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Russian, America, and somewhat tardily from England, from everywhere, uncensored, think of that! and all the better for it. There [in Switzerland] they have a programme de famille sometimes, and to these only are children admitted. […] No more successful arrangement could possibly be made than this concession or recognition of the fact that people of Switzerland and people in Switzerland live decently from choice, and not because a censor guards their precarious morals. (“As Is” 1:4, 16 – 17)

Switzerland thus stood for a liberal and autonomous life-style, and it was very much this liberal life-style of Swiss internationalism that attracted Pool. However, Switzerland was not only international because of its cinema culture or its three national languages but also because of its infrastructure. The train station of Aigle, from which connections went to such metropolitan centres as London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Rome, and by extension New York, was not far and right around the corner to their villa Kenwin was the station Burier. Prior to mov-

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ing into Kenwin, Pool had stayed at Riant Chateau in Territet, the publishing location given in all their POOL Productions. Riant Chateau was a building in the Art Deco style, equipped with all the comforts of modernity, which housed a cosmopolitan clientele and even today advertises its good transport connections.¹¹ Pool furthermore appreciated the Swiss national and cultural diversity and “the different patterns in countries such as Switzerland” (Bryher, Heart 125). In addition to all this, Switzerland was attractive for the same reason it is still attractive today, for saving taxes, money which Bryher apparently preferred to funnel into modernist projects (Walwyn 2004: 141– 43). The marriage of Bryher and Macpherson was one of convenience that benefited all three: It gave Bryher the opportunity to leave Robert McAlmon and his alcohol excesses without sacrificing the freedom of a married woman, it financially protected the fundless Macpherson, and it screened the love affair of Macpherson and H.D., who although separated was still married to the poet Richard Aldington at the time. The Macphersons’ later adopted H.D.’s daughter Perdita, an arrangement that granted Bryher legal claim to Perdita, ensuring that she could be Bryher’s heir, and acknowledged the mutual parenthood of the three friends. Bryher had successfully set up her own unconventional but nonetheless committed and affectionate family.¹² Along with the formation of their group Pool founded POOL Productions, a publishing house and film production company. The publishing house was modelled after Robert McAlmon’s Contact Press. McAlmon, together with William Carlos Williams, was the editor of the little magazine Contact and one of the most important publishers of American writers in France and a supporter of contemporary experimental works. His Contact Editions had been launched in 1922 with Bryher’s financial support. McAlmon, with Bryher’s money, had supported James Joyce while he was writing Ulysses and agreed to publish the work, which eventually was published by Sylvia Beach. He had also published Gertrude Stein’s Making of Americans, several of Hemingway’s short stories, and Pound’s  The commercial webpage on the Chateau still promises that “at the Riant Chateau, you are centrally located” and gives the distances to various nearby train stations and Geneva International Airport. The webpage furthermore advertises that the Chateau used to be the meeting place for the avant-garde of the cinema, was frequently visited by such notables as Eisenstein, Room, and Pabst, and housed the headquarters of the POOL publishers. (accessed  October ).  For further details on their unorthodox family and ménage à troi see Bryher’s autobiography The Heart to Artemis and Barbara Guest’s biography Herself Defined: H.D. and her World (Tuscon, Arizona: Schaffner Press, , repr. ); also Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (Cambridge: UP, ) and Annette Debo’s recent study on H.D. The American H.D. (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, ).

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1 Introduction

Cantos (i. e. A Draft of XVI Cantos), along with works by William Carlos Williams, Nathanael West, H.D., Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Richardson.¹³ Bryher was the organisational force of POOL, while H.D. and Macpherson were the representative figures. She organised the printing and distribution of the POOL publications, negotiated contracts and prices, and cultivated contacts. It was Bryher who committed her energies to staying in touch with all the Close Up correspondents and wrote back and forth with them concerning articles.¹⁴ Although she also wrote articles for Close Up, she remained rather invisible in comparison to H.D. and Macpherson. Their film magazine was published from 1927– 1933, which corresponds with the timeframe of the group’s registered activity. ₪₪₪ POOL, and Pool too, was financed by the private funds of Bryher, the daughter of Sir John Reeves Ellerman, a prosperous shipping tycoon and one of the wealthiest men, if not the wealthiest man, in England at that time.¹⁵ He was the only Englishman comparable with the great American millionaires such as Rockefeller and he by himself was wealthier than the family of the English Rothschilds collectively (Rubinstein 1984: 252, 255). When he died he left more than 36 million pounds, “by far the largest British fortune left up to that time” (ibid. 255). While Rubinstein states him to be “the purest approach to disembodied business intellect ever seen in Britain” (ibid. 257), Morgan claims that at heart he was an artist, although she admits that “the financial wizard in him overwhelmed in the end every other creative impulse” (ibid. 256). His business endeavours were not limited to the shipping industry but also encompassed trusts in the brewery business and commercial investment, and later his business empire even extended into the British colonies.¹⁶

 McAlmon mentions his decision to publish Ulysses in a letter to Bryher (February , Paris). In the same letter he also talks of Stein’s Making of Americans and Pound’s Cantos (quoted in Kenwin [: – : ff.]). McAlmon is reported to have given Joyce $ a month during that time (Friedberg, : ).  Some of these correspondences remain in the Bryher Papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale.  For a more detailed account of Sir John Ellerman’s wealth see also Louise Morgan, “Ellerman, Sir John Reeves,” The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. L. G. Wickham Legg, vol.  (Oxford: UP, , repr. ):  –  and also William D. Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution (London: The Social Affairs Unit, ², ). For a full account of the Ellerman wealth see James Arnold Taylor, Ellermans, a Wealth of Shipping (London: Wilton House Gentry, ).  It extended to a rice milling concern in Burma. See Rubinstein (: ). In the shipping industry, Ellerman acquired and reorganised such renowned shipping lines as Leyland & Co., the West India & Pacific Steamship Co, Papayanni & Co, the Hall Line, and the smaller Westcott

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In 1904 he began buying into the newspaper trade, becoming “the largest shareholder in the Financial Times” (ibid. 253) as well as a major shareholder in The Daily Mail and The Times and later buying weekly magazines, among them such popular ones as The Sphere, The Tatler, and the The Illustrated London News. This shows his influence upon the financial field in England and his powerful position within the media. In addition, Ellerman secured himself a respected position in the political field when he supported the British Government during the First World War, advising on matters concerning shipping and placing “his ships at the Government’s disposal” (ibid. 253). In return for his generous patriotic services, he was made a Companion of Honour. He also bought into real estate and by the late 1920s, the most active time of Pool, Bryher’s father owned large portions of central London. Due to such powerful financial backing Pool were completely independent with regards to commercial or other considerations concerning all their productions. Consequently, they were entirely free to work and publish according to a modernist avant-garde ethos and, true to this avant-garde spirit, fighting censorship as well as opposing the inartistic commercial products of the film industry were amongst their prime endeavours. Yet, even though they would never sacrifice artistic quality to commercial concerns, Bryher acted on pragmatic economic considerations and Macpherson even printed the strikingly non-modernist statement that “really good art IS commercial” in his film magazine. But I will yet come to speak of this in the theory chapter and when looking at Macpherson in the context of the literary field of Modernism. b Friendship and companionship were a great priority with Pool, not only in the form of their intimate family friendship, and they would frequently visit or be visited by friends. As already mentioned, Pool were associated with a vivid circle of numerous avant-garde modernist writers, artists and intellectuals that consisted of such celebrities as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence, André Gide, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, the Sitwells, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara or the French Surrealist poet René Crevel, to list only some of the best known. The individual Pool members contributed their various friends and thus different artistic influences to their mutual pool of acquaintances. H.D. was close friends with Moore, Williams, and Pound, all of whom she had known for a long time

& Laurance Line. For further information on the various trading sea-routes which Ellerman worked, expanding into the Far East, see the works by Rubinstein and Taylor.

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1 Introduction

before the formation of Pool, and Moore became a close friend of Bryher. H.D. was close to D.H. Lawrence for a while and also loosely associated with Bloomsbury, but more with the district than with the artistic movement, since the Imagists met regularly in the British Museum and because she lived at Mecklenburg Square for a time. Pound’s literary London circle of which she was part was rather antithetical to the Bloomsbury group and even though H.D. met with some of its members, she never became a part of the Bloomsburies (Guest 2003: 238). Both H.D. and Bryher remained only distantly acquainted with Woolf, and loosely with Eliot – although H.D. considered him a friend (ibid. 220). The Bloomsbury Brahmins and their highbrow ways were not exactly their cup of tea. Another, stronger link to Bloomsbury was Pool associate Dorothy Richardson, whom Bryher had befriended in the early 1920s. Richardson was close to members of the Bloomsbury group and the Fabian society, and for a time maintained an intimate friendship with the writer Herbert George Wells. She was especially bound up with the social and political reformist ideas associated with these circles and funnelled this strain into Pool. While H.D., together with Richardson, introduced the London avant-garde into the Pool circle of friends, Bryher brought with her the Parisian avantgarde. She was acquainted with several of the Paris artists and American expatriates via her first husband Robert McAlmon, who was an integral part of avantgarde Montparnasse and regularly went out with Joyce and ‘the bunch’, as they were called (Bryher, Heart 243). While Bryher went to Man Ray’s studio, socialised with Hemingway, or met Joyce and Jean Cocteau, she was on intimate terms only with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. She also formed a particularly close and life-long friendship with Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, who had small bookshops on the Left Bank in Paris and sold and published experimental modernist literature. H.D. met some of the Parisian avant-garde via Bryher and others she knew via Pound. To McAlmon’s Paris circle belonged furthermore Nancy Cunard, a bridge figure between white Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Djuna Barnes, and Mina Loy, but of these three Bryher mentions only Cunard in passing in her autobiography. Bryher had also formerly met with André Gide through her younger brother’s French tutor and later would introduce the Sitwells to the Pool acquaintanceships. This shows that Pool’s circle of acquaintances formed the literary and artistic field of Modernism, which will be further discussed in the ensuing theory chapter. Finally, Macpherson funnelled the film acquaintances into Pool’s common reservoir of friends, introducing Eisenstein and Pabst, and thus the field of modernity that seems so often antagonistic to literary Modernism. To be precise, it was Robert Herring who first urged Bryher, H.D., and Macpherson to go to Berlin, where Macpherson eventually met Pabst at a conference (Bryher, Heart 290, 295),

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and via Pabst they became acquainted with many people working in the German film sector. The German film director became a close friend of the group and was equally adored by H.D., Macpherson, and Bryher. Through their Berlin film connections Bryher then befriended Lotte Reiniger (maker of the silhouette films), the Metzners (Ernö Metzner was Pabst’s film architect), and the German film actress Elizabeth Bergner. It was also Bryher, along of course with Hanns Sachs, who introduced several psychoanalysts to the social environment of the group. Herring in turn was the one who introduced the Robesons and other artists, intellectuals and particularly musicians of the Harlem Renaissance into the Pool circle and very likely sparked Macpherson’s interest in this art movement. The preceding explorations show that Pool reached out to myriad centres and influences of Modernism and modernity and that all these different artistic influences were part and parcel of Pool’s lives. Due to their extensive friendship network they were furthermore connected with all the important hubs of avantgarde artistic activity: to Greenwich Village in New York via Marianne Moore, to Harlem via the Robesons, to Paris via McAlmon and ‘the bunch’, to Berlin via Pabst and their film friends, to Vienna via their psychoanalytical friends, and to London via Richardson and because of their own base there. Because of Bryher’s financial means Pool could and regularly did travel and visit their friends and thus they moved continuously between the various centres of modernist art. Bradbury and McFarlane have pointed out that the concept of Modernism usually concentrates on the London – Paris – New York axis (1976: 13, 36) and forgets about Berlin and a Germanic Modernism that embraced modernity, as well as Moscow and Russian Modernism.¹⁷ Pool obviously constitute the phenomenon that synthesises all the different strains and artistic influences of modernism through their compendious and heterogeneous circle of friends. Their numerous acquaintanceships formed an extensive international artistic social network that connected Pool to an impressive variety of artistic currents and movements of their time. It is only an assorted selection of their numerous and international acquaintances which has been presented here; their social network of modernist avant-garde acquaintances was even more extensive, including avant-garde musicians such as George Antheil.

 Although Bradbury and McFarlane, who by their Germanic Modernism mean Expressionism, date it to the late nineteenth century (: ).

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1 Introduction

Figure 1: Pool’s frequent travel routes and the centres and axes of modernism

1.2 A New Humane and Universal Art The group’s name already indicates its aim: Pool can mean either a group, a collective consisting of different individual members, or a pond, where sometimes different streams of water merge. In addition, it also has a financial meaning, denoting the pooling of financial sources¹⁸ and, of course, information.¹⁹ In either case, a pool is something where various elements meet, constituting a heterogeneous, diverse whole, and thus the term also points to the group’s democratic programme. But the natural or ‘organic’ meaning of their name appears to have been of primary importance to the group since it is also expressed in the group’s pictogram: a black and white woodcut print of a water-pool with a rippling surface – and the double-o of the printed name intersects like two wedding rings or two sets building an intersection. Pool’s 1929 catalogue of publications explains it as a symbol of the group’s ambitions: The expanding ripples from a stone dropped in a pool have become more a symbol for the growth of an idea than a simple matter of hydraulics. […] As the stone will cause the spread of ripples to the water’s edge, so ideas once started will go to their unknown boundary. […] These concentric expansions are exemplified in POOL, which is the source simply – the

 The Oxford English Dictionary lists it under “Extended uses” (“pool”, n³, II. Extended uses, .a) as a business term denoting a common fund, which was in use since .  Pool associate Eric Elliott uses the term in the context of cinema in his Anatomy of Motion Picture Art, remarking that the cinema “deserves an international pooling of information” (: ).

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stone – the idea. […] POOL is seeking to express new trends and new will. Not as we have said before, to grind an axe, but to make a centre for new ideas and modern thought.²⁰

Figure 1: POOL logo

The expansion, the outward movement of the circles moreover signifies an extroverted art that reaches out and mediates, in contrast to any introverted and selfreferential art. Macpherson also plays with the symbolism of their logo in the title of his first novel Poolreflection, but I will come to this later. As the catalogue explanation of the pool symbol already announces, Pool’s idea of avant-garde art was organic instead of mechanistic, cultivating and creative instead of destructive, and non-violent instead of aggressive. It attempted regeneration and a new beginning after the cruelty of the recent war. To quote Bryher: “‘It’s got to be new,’ we chanted because old forms were saturated with war memories

 The Pool catalogue of publications is in the Bryher Papers, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University. GEN MSS , Box , Folder . The passage from the catalogue is also quoted in Alberta Marlow, “The Rediscovery of Pool” Film Intelligence (accessed  February ) and partly in Tirza True Latimer (: ).

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1 Introduction

that both former soldiers and civilians wanted to forget” (Heart 303). The First World War had been the result of nationalism and the belief that one’s own values and national culture were superior to those of other nations. Certain ethics and specific norms and forms had been considered typical and as creating a sense of identity for one’s nation. After the destruction of the old world and its ideas and values by the war, Pool found in art and artistic expression a surrogate religion: In such a seething epoch of personal tragedy, the only thing left in which we could believe was art. It was to us what religion was to the Middle Ages, discovery to the Renaissance and what science is becoming to the present day. Only art, if it were to fill the hollow left by chaos, must be revolutionary and new. It must find words that were not tainted by nineteenth-century associations, rhythms that fitted the purr of machines²¹ rather than the thudding of hooves, different colours and, above all, a sternly truthful approach. (Heart 241– 42)

This demand for a radically new art is the typical battle cry of the historical avant-garde and their aesthetic reaction to the havoc of their times. Pool were definitely part of Modernism as well as ambassadors of a technological modernity. Like other modernists, Pool strove towards an international art and culture whose forms and contents were not limited to one particular nation or society. Contrary to those artists of Modernism, however, who devised highly individualistic aesthetic styles, they strove towards a universal art of humanity that was rooted in all-human nature. (The theory chapter and especially the chapter on universal sympathy will elaborate further on the concept and nature of Pool’s art.) They too found in a visual language of imagery a universal language that was free from the restrictions of the spoken languages of different regional groups and a new international language in the medium of the silent film. (This idea will be more fully discussed in the chapter on a language of images.) The visual language of imagery was a signature feature of Modernism. Gabriele Rippl has pointed to the iconization tendencies at the time and the modernists’ fascination with images and hieroglyphs.²² Yet most of the ‘high’ modernists

 Even though Bryher calls for a consideration of the machine here, the quality of its sound is not one of a forceful and destructive machine, as for example with the futurists, but of a finer technology, the purring of a camera that in its cat-like sound quality is once more organic.  See her comprehensive study Beschreibungs-Kunst: Zur intermedialen Poetik angloamerikanischer Ikontexte ( – ) (München: Fink, ), also Rippl, “Hieroglyphen-Faszination in der anglo-amerikanischen Moderne,” Hieroglyphen: Stationen einer anderen abendländischen Grammatologie, eds. Aleida and Jan Assmann München: Fink, ):  – . In this context

1.2 A New Humane and Universal Art

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looked to the avant-garde visual arts for inspiration.²³ Pool’s turn to film and cinema culture however was still incongruent with most of their fellow ‘high’ modernists’ dismissive attitude towards popular mass culture and hostility to technological progress.²⁴ At the same time, Pool’s enthusiasm for film was also radically different from the idolatry of aggressive machine force exhibited by Pound and Lewis, who merely aestheticised modernity but deprived it of its potential liberal and humanistic spirit.²⁵ Film, as Pool envisioned it, would work to encourage communication and understanding among nations by means of art and thus at best might even guard against international conflicts (see Macpherson’s Close Up editorial of September 1927). Despite such considerations, Pool regarded themselves as apolitical and their art was primarily concerned with the essence of being human, with anthropological concerns, with life and life-experience, and with art as an agent of human compassion and a means of individual recuperation. Pool’s avant-gardism was deeply humane from the beginning and always remained so. While Ezra Pound’s fixation on the machine and an aesthetic of dynamic industrial force in Vorticism, which similar to Futurism glorified aggression, combat and war, eventually resulted in his falling for Fascism, Pool members’ interest in the genuinely human later manifested itself in their decided opposition and even keen resistance to the barbarities of National Socialism.²⁶ While there is a modernity that propagated the mechanisation and alienation

see also Deborah Madsen and Mario Klarer’s recent study The Visual Culture of Modernism (Tübingen: Narr, ), which examines “the concept of visuality in the modernist period as a paradigmatic historical case of media transition” ( f).  Stein’s, Woolf’s and Pound’s interest for example in Cubism is well known but also William Carlos Williams was influenced by Cubism and the avant-garde photography of Alfred Stieglitz, which had been referred to as “the hieroglyphics of a new speech”. The phrase is here cited after Bram Dijkstra’s The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Princeton: UP, ).  A counterexample is the American poet Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, who was intrigued with film, found film language ‘hieroglyphic’ and prophesised a turn from a verbal to a visual culture in his country. However, Lindsay was mainly concerned with Hollywood film to which Pool were adverse. See his The Art of the Moving Picture () (New York: Liveright, ³).  Following Viktor Žmegač, modernity shall be related to philosophical and cultural thought spanning a greater period of time. Drawing on historical theory and philosophy, Žmegač dates the beginnings of modernity back to the eighteenth century (:  f).  Pound developed into a stout fascist and anti-Semite. His politics and anti-Semitism enraged Bryher (Guest : ) and in  even caused H.D. to stop communicating with her longtime friend and one-time fiancé (Friedman : ).

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1 Introduction

of man, the de-humanisation of art (Ortega y Gasset),²⁷ and an anti-humanist stance, Pool embody a modernity that is profoundly human. Contrary to an anti-humanistic modernity, theirs utilised different and new media to give artistic expression to their humanism and concern with mankind, and they wanted to advance humanity towards liberal thinking and democratic understanding. Moreover, while classical Modernism was for a long time defined as ‘male’ (prominently following Wyndham Lewis’ notion of ‘the men of 1914’)²⁸ and has more recently been opposed with a ‘female’ alternative Modernism – viz such écriture feminine as the works of H.D., Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf²⁹ – I want to show, by looking at Pool, that sensitive, humanitarian, and ‘organic’ Modernism was not necessarily female and that Modernism was more heterogeneous and less gender specific than is still commonly assumed. They may have been in the minority but, as H.D. announces in her essay on Wing Beat, there are “these young men, in England, in France” who are subtle and sensitive and whose concern is with “the beat and pulse of the waters, of the seas, of the trees and of the sunlight across desert spaces and of the hearts of men” (“Wing Beat” 3 – 4). Even though Pool were avant-garde, they were in contrast to many other avant-garde modernists never elitist but instead wanted to reach common people with their work. Kenneth Macpherson expressed this concern in one of his CloseUp editorials in regard to film: “We are not against avant-garde experiment. Through such experiments has cinematography progressed. But they can interest only the technician and the few” (“As Is” 6:4, 252). Instead Pool promoted “universal films” (ibid., emphasis in the original) that would interest the multitude  Ortega y Gasset has famously expounded the idea of a de-humanised modernist art in depth in his essay “La deshumanización del arte (),” Obras completas, vol.  (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, ²):  – .  See, for example, Eric Svarny, ‘The Men of ’: T.S. Eliot and Early Modernism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press., ).  See Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope’s Web; Melody M. Zajdel, “’I See Her Differently’: H.D.’s Trilogy as Feminist Response to Masculine Modernism,” Sagetrieb: A Journal Devoted to Poets in the Pound-H.D.-Williams Tradition : ():  – ; Elizabeth Anne Hirsh, Modernism Revised: Formalism and the Feminine: Irigaray, H.D., Barnes (Madison: University of Wisconsin, ); Lynette Felber, “A Manifesto for Feminine Modernism: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage,” Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, ed. Lisa Rado (New York: Garland, ); Susan Stanford Friedman, “Creating a Women’s Mythology: H.D.’s ‘Helen in Egypt’,” Women’s Studies : (): ; see also Bonnie Kime Scott. Refiguring Modernism: The Women of ,  vols. (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana UP, ) and The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana UP, ) and Networking Women, ed. Marina Camboni, and Diana Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: UP, ), especially  –  as in distinction to on Pound’s self-styled “virile art”.

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because they dealt with life and the reality of common people. What Pool decidedly opposed were “reels of men and women doing incredibly stupid actions in order to achieve marriage, when they might just as well have married in the first scene of the picture” (ibid.) like the Hollywood film industry produced. Bradbury and McFarlane have described Modernism as “a search for a style in a highly individualistic sense” which often sustains a work with a structure specific for this one work only and endows it with a quality that is notable for the high degree of the author’s self-signature and its “autotelic constituents” (1976: 29). According to them, Modernism is highly aesthetic and its art turns from humanistic representation to abstraction and from realism to style and technique (Bradbury and McFarlane 1976: 25). Pool, on the contrary, were looking for more universally prevalent human images, structures, and forms in their works. Although they were enamoured with the new, experimental modernist aesthetics, Pool realised the human necessity for a representational art that the common individual could relate to. In the film medium they discovered the possibility of a new art that was representational yet symbolic, experimental yet appealing to the multitude. Film, to them, was not only the newest form of artistic expression but also the liveliest art,³⁰ offering lifelike images. That is why they wanted to advance avant-garde film in England, a country that, unlike Germany or Russia, had no avant-garde film at the time. Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom, England did develop avant-garde cinema and the most internationally noted theoretical approach to the avant-garde film aesthetic was British.³¹ Not least by means of film, Pool bridge a great divide within modernist aesthetics since their work was simultaneously objective, due to its documentary quality, and subjective, due to its psychological possibilities. Pool combined objective images and symbols of universal validity with the emotions and mental processes of human psychology; they embraced the lucidity of the classics together with the ambiguity of human passion. Consequently, Pool have to be situated at the intersection of the two major sets of Anglo-American Modernism which are headed by the poets Pound and Eliot, on the one hand, and by the novelists Woolf and Joyce, on the other. While Pound and Eliot, in their pungent dislike of all romantic diffuseness and subjectivism, tend to detach their art from the human subject and instead cherished the impersonal object and the symbol,

 I borrow the expression from Arthur Knight’s The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies (Penguin: Harmondsworth, Mentor, ).  Since I will come to speak of this again in the next chapter, references shall be given there at place proper.

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Woolf and Joyce in comparison tend to be more concerned with the interior psychological worlds of the individual, which they tried to capture in their streamof-consciousness technique. Thus while Pound and Eliot tend to champion objectivity and propagated an impersonal and detached art, the art of Woolf and Joyce tends to be more involved, personal and self-reflective.³² (It goes without saying that this is an abridged characterisation that serves as model to position Pool in the modernist field and will entail further discussion in due course.³³) Thus in distinction to the objective, detached and dehumanised images that characterise especially the art of a Pound or Eliot, I define Pool’s images as human and humane. Their images were bound to human nature and life-experience, and – in contrast to much modernist abstract art – predominantly to human form. (Naturally, the term includes also their opposition to any anti-humanist modernist stance.) Thus I derive my title of the humane images of Modernism.

Figure 3: The three pillars of Modernism.

1.3 State of Research on Pool The current state of research on Pool and the Pool works is very sparse. The first and only monograph on Pool to date is François Bovier’s H.D. et le groupe Pool: des avant-gardes littéraires au cinema “visionnaire” (Lausanne: Editions l’Age d’Homme, 2009). This post-structural study centres primarily on H.D. as the consecrated avant-garde artist of the group and on her ‘visionary’ poetry. Although

 Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Harvard UP, ), Louise A Poresky, The Elusive Self: Psyche and Spirit in Virginia Woolf’s Novels (East Brunswick: Associated University Press, ).  For more comprehensive accounts see specialist works such as, for example, Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (London: Faber & Faber, ), Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, ) and Willi Erzgräber, Virginia Woolf. Eine Einführung (München, Zürich: Artemis, ).

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this study pays more attention to the literary aspects in Pool’s film work than other studies about the POOL films, it is interested in film theoretical and film aesthetic aspects alone. Linking the works of Pool so strongly, almost exclusively, to H.D. and her status within modern poetry, Bovier naturally comes to position Pool among the cinema of the American avant-garde. By focusing so strongly on H.D.’s visionary avant-garde aesthetics, Bovier also fails to see the importance of nature and the universal, all-human concern that is the essence of Pool’s art works. Since Bovier’s study was published before the rediscovery of Monkey’s Moon it consequently does not take this film into account in its analysis. There are no discrete studies at all on Macpherson’s or the other Pool novels and the small number of studies on the villa Kenwin are so far mostly unpublished.³⁴ In recent years, since film and media studies have rediscovered the Pool films, predominantly Borderline, most publications on Pool have been on their films.³⁵ In the wake of rediscovering the films and apparently inspired by Anne Friedberg’s dissertation some small attention has also been given to the film magazine Close Up ³⁶ and lately Pool’s film magazine has even been ref-

 Elmar Kossel, Herman Henselmann und die Moderne (Ph.D. thesis, HU Berlin, , unpubl. manuscript, Mikrofich), Roland Cosandey and Guy Collomb, “La maison Macpherson: cinquante ans de mise à l’index pour avant-garde,” (), Stephane Link, La Villa MacPherson (diploma thesis , Ècole Polytechnique de Lausanne, unpubl. manuscript).  By far the most has been published on the one existing full-length film Borderline (full references will be given in the respective chapters): Deke Dusinberre, “The Avant-Garde Attitude in the Thirties” (); Roland Cosandey, “On Borderline” (); Anne Friedberg, “The Pool Films” () and “Introduction” to the chapter “Borderline and the POOL Films” in Close Up  –  (); Jean Walton, “Nightmare of the Uncoordinated White-folk: Race, Psychoanalysis and H.D.’s Borderline” () and “White Neurotics, Black Primitives and the Queer Matrix of Borderline” (); Annette Debo, “Interracial Modernism in Avant-Garde Film: Paul Robeson and H.D. in the  Borderline” (); Susan McCabe, “Borderline Modernism: Paul Robeson and the Femme Fatale” (); Keiko Nida, “Ekkyo no yuwaku to shinpan no kyofu: Modanisuto kan’no seijigaku/erotikkusu no kiken na kamihitoe” (); Susan Friedman, “Border Forms, Border Identities in Borderline: Contemporary Cultural Theory and Cinematic Modernity” (); Tirza True Latimer, “Queer Situations: Behind the Scenes of Borderline” (); and Judith Brown, “Borderline, Sensation, and the Machinery of Expression” (). Borderline is furthermore discussed in: Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black (); Richard Dyer, “Paul Robeson: Crossing Over” (); Scott Allen Nollen, Paul Robeson: Film Pioneer (); Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema (); Kimberly Bernstein, Modernism Goes to the Movies: T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and H.D. (Ph.D. thesis, Temple University, ); and mentioned in Martin Duberman’s biography Paul Robeson (). On Monkey’s Moon: Richard Deming, “Lost and Found” ().  Anne Friedberg, Writing about Cinema: “Close Up”,  –  (Ph.D. thesis, New York University, ); Close Up  –  (); Paola Zaccaria and Francesca De Ruggieri, “Close Up as Con(n)text” (). Jenelle Troxell, Shock and Contemplation: ‘Close Up’ and the Female

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erenced in companions to modernism and histories of modernist magazines.³⁷ The various studies will be classified still more closely in the respective chapters.

Avant-Garde (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, ); Francesca De Ruggieri, “Bryher and ‘Close Up’: An Extra-Located Glance at the Cinema and Culture of the Thirties” (); Jayne Marek, “Bryher and Close Up” ().  The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, ed. Maren Tova Linett (Cambridge: UP, ):  – . The contributions by female writers like H.D., Bryher, Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore to the magazine are mentioned. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland  –  (New York: OUP, ).

Part I Theory The Spirit of the Quest

2 The Autonomy and the Necessity of Art 2.1 The Autonomy of Art The preceding deliberations have shown that modernism was an international and heterogeneous artistic phenomenon. Particularly in its primarily AngloAmerican literary aesthetic formation as Modernism it stressed experiment and form over function and content and defined itself in distinction from popular taste and mass culture. To this end it also moved from familiar representational forms to abstract art. Modernist writers rejected commercial interests in favour of artistic commitment, turned to small presses and coterie magazines to avoid the other-directed economic considerations of trade publishing companies and were in every way anxious to free art from economic, political or moral concerns to ensure its autonomy. Pool were closely associated with many artists of Modernism and yet they did not share that sense of distinction from popular culture and public interest or amateur art. In order to examine Pool and their art it will be necessary in what follows to position them in the literary and artistic field of their time. To this end I want to rely upon Bourdieu’s theoretical approach to the literary and artistic field and its associated development of artistic autonomy.

2.1.1 Bourdieu’s Theory of the Literary Field Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the autonomy of art comprises the three central concepts that are of primary interest for the present examination of Pool: the concepts of the field, the habitus, and cultural capital (although in relation to Pool one is tempted to speak rather of ‘cultural common good’ or even of a ‘cultural common wealth’, if the latter term did not have such an imperialistic ring). Examining the production and social function of literature, Bourdieu delineates a historical progress towards the growing autonomy of the literary field, which is only one of many social fields. Bourdieu here uses the term ‘field’, which in physics connotes a dynamic of forces, metaphorically to describe the conflict and struggle for material or other goods in a particular structured social space. According to Bourdieu, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the literary field in France had grown relatively autonomous, i. e. independent from external economic, political, religious or institutional forces. To Bourdieu, “the movement of the literary field or of the artistic field towards autonomy can be understood as a process of refinement through which each genre is directed towards that which

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distinguishes and defines it properly” (Bourdieu 1985: 21). An important aspect in this context is the concept of l’art pour l’art since, as the term already announces, the artwork is freed from all other concerns or influences and suffices itself. L’art pour l’art is therefore the apex of artistic autonomy. The modern French literary field extends between two polar opposites: refined ‘highbrow’ and highly consecrated art and vulgar ‘lowbrow’ art with a low degree of consecration. The poles of ‘high’ and ‘low’ point already to a hierarchical structure of the literary field that is associated with the individual consumer groups and will be considered further in the context of the habitus. Since the more refined and autonomous the art the more removed it is from economic concerns and vice versa, the field further spans from the low economic profits of refined art to the high economic profits of popular art. This furthermore involves a division into the field of mass production and the subfield of limited production. The various genres of literature also play a part in this context. Journalism and popular novels and serials will sell and gain economic profit, while poetry – though considered highly refined and consecrated – never sells in commercially relevant quantities. This, of course, has to do with the circumstance that journalism and the popular novel pay tribute to consumer tastes and are hence more dependent, while poetry due to its subjectivity and concern with form panders less to common appetites and thus is more autonomous. The dualist structure of the literary field has advanced a clear differentiation and hierarchy of the individual genres.¹ The literary field shows moreover a chiastic structure as to economic profit and symbolic consecration. Therefore, in the modern French literary field, the Parnassians with their l’art pour l’art poetry range at the very top of the literary field, while popular fiction and entertainment such as vaudeville and cabaret are situated at the very bottom. In between these two extreme poles struggle the psychological novel, the Naturalist novel of Zola, the Théâtre de l’oeuvre and the Théâtre libre (which position themselves in distinction to bourgeois theatre), all orientated somewhat more to the consecrated low profit margin of the more upper-class Symbolist or the more lower-class Decadent poets. The individual avant-garde groups in turn act in dynamic relation to each other; they influence each other while at the same time they define themselves in distinction from one another. Bourdieu’s concept of the field, as indicated already, is closely connected to his concepts of habitus and capital. By habitus Bourdieu understands the man-

 For an in-depth account of this dualist structure see the chapter on “The Emergence of a Dualist Structure” in The Rules of Art.

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ner and appearance of a person as constituted by values, life-style, dress code, body posture, language, taste, food and more, which socially define this person. Thus habitus means a system of dispositions in the individual, dispositions that have been formed by the social structure and have been unconsciously internalised and in turn also unconsciously generate the social structures by the individual’s conduct. In this the habitus is determined by the social environment or class of an individual, so the individual’s habitus is a class habitus. The class habitus again is closely linked to economic possibilities and to different forms of capital, such as economic, cultural and symbolic capital. Bourdieu uses the term capital in an extended sense not restricted to financial or even material goods. Capital, with Bourdieu, can also mean immaterial but culturally significant goods such as prestige or prominence or power, which he calls symbolic capital, or goods such as art, literature, music and also education and academic credentials, which he calls cultural capital. In relation to artistic perception, the cultural capital transmitted by the family or by the school functions like a key that unlocks the code of a work of art and lets it be recognised as such. This concept of cultural capital will become important when looking at some of the elitist avant-garde art of the twentieth century, which often could only be understood by the specialist. Bourdieu opposes basically two forms of aesthetics, the bourgeoisie aesthetics of the ‘pure gaze’ and the popular aesthetic of ‘first-degree perception’ (Codd 1990: 143). While the bourgeoisie have learned the ‘pure gaze’, which means they have learned to appreciate an object isolated from its function in the ordinary world and thus learned to appreciate pure form over function, the workingclasses, in contrast, lack this artistic perception. What is more, they do not have the cultural capital to understand or appreciate such refined art either. Since working-class people lack the means to decode ‘pure’ art they reject the exclusive aesthetic aims of l’art pour l’art. Thus, while the bourgeoisie appraise the highly aesthetic and the formal refinement, the working-class attitude to such refinement as well as to experimentation with artistic media is hostile. Although Bourdieu maintains that the working-class aesthetic attains significance only in opposition to the refined bourgeois aesthetic, it appears that the working-class aesthetic is closer to the ordinary human perception of the world. It perceives those objects as ‘beautiful’ which immediately appeal to the senses, whereas the ‘pure gaze’ is grounded in a detached and indifferent attitude towards the object of interest that has severed itself from a ‘first-degree’ perception. The cultured aesthetic of the ‘pure gaze’ that has detached itself from the common and general experience of life and the world, that has severed itself from a sensitive perception of and emotional involvement with the work of art, has grown to some extent inhumane. Bourdieu links the progress of art to-

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wards autonomy to a process of refinement and the cultured aesthetic works along the same lines. This would mean that the cultured aesthetic has developed from some point of common origin, which seems to be the working-class aesthetic, which in Bourdieu’s theory appears to be synonymous with the popular taste and the popular arts. Yet the working-class aesthetic is not synonymous with the popular taste but cultivates in its artistic expression a work ethos that is hostile to the element of leisure and recreation in popular art. The working-class aesthetic, then, does not perceive as ‘beautiful’ that which immediately appeals to the senses but that which is ultimately utile and appertaining to the principle of work. In this the working-class aesthetic, like the bourgeois aesthetic, has developed away from the popular taste. This is a distinction that Bourdieu does not really make but that will become relevant when looking at the literary and artistic field of the twentieth century, especially in the context of film. By his concept of the habitus Bourdieu wants to introduce “the ‘creative’, active, and inventive capacities of habitus and of agent” (1985: 13). The habitus is not only a personal set of dispositions generated by the social structure but on the subjective side also provides strategies for action. These may be used as strategies of self-presentation or to change categories of perception and appreciation (Mahar, Harker, Wilkes 1990: 6). This idea of habitus in its function of strategy to change categories of perception and position oneself within a group and within the field seems a particularly fertile notion in relation to the avant-garde artist as a rebellious agent in the artistic field. Especially the anti-bourgeois habitus of the bohemian artist becomes from this perspective a rebellious habitus of symbolic distinction in the literary field. This will become relevant when looking at the anti-bourgeois habitus of the modernists and their positioning in the literary and artistic field.

2.1.2 The Literary and Artistic Field of Twentieth-Century Modernism There are some catches in applying Bourdieu’s theory, which is based on the literary and artistic field of the nineteenth century, to twentieth-century modernism. One significant problem stems from the internationalism of modernism. Bourdieu’s model of the nineteenth-century French literary field is neatly confined to the national literary field of France and to that particular society and its mechanisms. The literary and artistic field of the twentieth century transgresses national boundaries. In order to delineate the literary and artistic field of modernism, the individual national literary and artistic fields of England, France, Germany, Italy, America, Russia, etc. all have to be regarded. Now, inter-

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nationalism is not a completely novel phenomenon of the twentieth century,² yet the complexity of the artistic fields is indescribably greater in the twentieth century. Furthermore, while in the literary field of nineteenth-century France the genres had been distinct from each other, the interdependency of individual genres and media is greater in the twentieth century, especially in literature and the visual arts. This seems to suggest an increased struggle for an autonomous field of art which, severed from national social, economic and linguistic concerns, tries to establish itself on an international level. A special role in this international literary and artistic field was held by film, since silent film freed artistic production from national language restrictions by substituting language with images and symbols yet subscribing to the popular form of narrative. Freeing artistic production from national language restriction and the social distinction related to language, film at the same time liberated the work to a considerable extent from its national cultural capital codes. This aspect was one of the major reasons that sparked Pool’s interest in film as an art medium, as we will see. Since the formation of Pool occurred in 1927, the moment of modernism surveyed here falls into the time of the late twenties and early thirties, when most of the ‘high’ modernists were already established artists. Considering the complexity of the literary and artistic field of modernism it is obviously only possible to loosely outline it in relation to Pool and allot the individual agents in this field. The national social and power fields differed greatly in the individual countries in that in Russia and Germany war and revolution had caused a notable restructuring of society, while in England and France such a profound change of the social structure did not occur – a factor Bryher mentions already in her Film Problems of Russia (1929). This difference in social structure again appeared to be related to art and artistic media, since in Russia and Germany experimental art was not completely separated from popular art, whereas in England and France experimental ‘high’ art and popular ‘low’ art were still at the extreme poles of the artistic and social fields. This division becomes most obvious in relation to the medium film. In Russia, film was highly avant-garde and experimental in form, as visualised best by its revolutionary montage technique. Yet the revolutionary new form was not purely aesthetic but, on the contrary, was in the service of the didactic function that was the major concern of this art, the education of the masses to communism. The situation in Russia was a special

 In the nineteenth century, for example, Dickens’ novels were received contemporaneously in England and in Russia and were very popular in Russia without the Russians having the Victorian cultural capital to decode Dickens’ aesthetic (Gifford :  – ).

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one since the revolution, in reversing the social structure, had consequently also reversed the Russian literary and artistic field. In Soviet Russian society, the working-class aesthetic provided the standard while the bourgeois aesthetic, as the one in opposition, was positioned at the bottom of the literary and artistic field, together with commercial and ‘wanton’ popular taste. In Germany, film was also very experimental, having been for example much influenced by avant-garde Expressionism. Yet at the same time it was strongly tied to the economic field and the commercial concerns of a film industry. Film in Germany was avant-garde but not autonomous. Often the experimental was a result of necessity, since the German reparation-shaken economy was simply lacking the financial means of an industry like Hollywood and had to come up with creative alternatives. Like Russian film, German film was an experimental popular art that was not severed from function or public concerns. It can be seen as dealing with the social misconditions of post-war society or as having been employed as a didactic medium, albeit not to teach communism but rather to advance democracy in the still young Weimar Republic.³ In the film specific subfield of the modernist artistic field, English film ranked at the very bottom of the hierarchy of the art disciplines. Experimental film simply did not exist in England. Macpherson was to complain about this in Close Up (see the discussion of his editorial in the chapter on Close Up).⁴ England had a commercial film industry only, which did not deviate from the conventions one iota because it worried that digressing from the conventions would ultimately result in financial loss. All it produced were tacky films and bad Hollywood imitations. Consequently, film in England was considered utterly vulgar and a non-art by most. In addition to commercial film, France already had art films, since some of the avant-gardes in Paris had discovered film as an art medium. These French films in turn have to be placed, in exact opposition to English film, towards the low-profit top of the field. The experimental films by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Luis Buñuel, Germaine Dulac, Fernand Léger, Viking Eggeling and others most obviously emphasise form or film technique over social function and narrative content. Many of these films are entirely abstract, so called absolutes, and

 See for example the discussion of Fritz Lang’s M or Richard Oswald’s Different From the Others in Betsy van Schlun, “Berlin – A Mazing Metropolis: Representations in Films of the Weimar Republic,” Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film, eds. Jens Martin Gurr and Wilfried Raussert (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, ):  – .  On the history of British film see furthermore Kenton Bamford, Distorted Images: British National Identity and Film in the s (London: Tauris, ) and Sarah Street, British National Cinema: Second Edition (London: Routledge, ).

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Figure 4: Pool in the literary and artistic field about 1927 (the diagram is simply intended as a heuristic blueprint for orientation and claims no academic authority).

many follow in the tradition of an art style or movement such as abstract art or Surrealism. The filmmakers were usually avant-garde painters and artists and not concerned with narrative. Their film experiments were only for a very small

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group of recipients who had the cultural capital to appreciate them. Here, next to the popular commercial films, the artistic field had already successfully detached film from the economic field and its narrative function and produced films according to the concept of l’art pour l’art. In its predominantly literary form, however, Modernism was more often than not opposed to the medium film. In the present context it is only possible to briefly sketch the literary field of Modernism. For this purpose some key figures of Modernism shall now be approximately situated in the field to mark out its most relevant positions and cornerstones. Such a sketch inevitably cannot do justice to the complexity of the field and its individual agents and necessarily their positions will seem somewhat pointed. Some of these key figures have already been mentioned in relation to Pool in the introduction. These artists are representative of the various forces at work in the field, which are significant in order to position Pool within this field. All of these artists have to be positioned at the top of the literary field of their time, since they were eager to defy commercialism and distinguish themselves from popular culture. Modernism put a strong emphasis on experiment and valued form over social function and content, at least such a social function as promoted by writers such as H.G. Wells. At the same time, many modernists cultivated an anti-bourgeois habitus, which puts a twist on the French literary field examined by Bourdieu. (The literary and artistic field experienced a notable shift from bourgeois art in the nineteenth century to anti-bourgeois art in twentieth-century Modernism.) Furthermore, all of the key figures listed here move within the subfield of limited production in the greater field of cultural production, and by the time of the formation of Pool in 1927 they all belonged to the established ‘old’ and consecrated avant-garde. One of the celebrated icons of Modernism is Ezra Pound. As a lyric poet, Pound already by genre has to be positioned at the top of the consecrated end of the literary field. Pound at first resided in London before moving to Paris in the 1920s, where he joined the avant-garde artists of Montparnasse. But even while he was in London he ‘imported’ French and Japanese aesthetics into the English literary field and adapted them to his Imagism, which was originally coined imagisme and thus by name positioned in association to as well as in distinction from French symbolisme, the movement that had first attempted the liberation of verse. Pound conducted himself in an extremely eccentric manner and posed as the detached aesthete in order to acquire the reputation of a ‘pure’ artist. His appearance was flamboyantly bohemian and he assumed the role of poèt maudit, defying conventions and always looking for an opportunity to shock the bourgeoisie. He called for a purification of poetry, which gives an idea of where Pound situated himself and his disciples within the literary field. Yet he carefully and strategically set up his poetic movements, used clever

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marketing strategies to advertise them,⁵ and found sponsors to financially support himself and his protégés. He was not only what today would be called a literary ‘agent’ but was also editor to several literary magazines and a literary critic, and in this function related to the institutional forces of art consecration as well.⁶ As foreign editor to American literary magazines he influenced the American literary field, too. The ‘detached’ aesthete held several positions of poet, editor, ‘agent’, and critic in the field of art production and was much involved in the symbolic production of art. Although he demanded the purification of poetry from stale conventions, he distinguished himself from the Aestheticists. He also staged himself in opposition to Romanticism, an opposition which, of course, was also marked by T. E. Hulme’s essay “Romanticism and Classicism” (1913, posthumously 1923).⁷ His art is concrete, of the ‘thing’ itself, rather than mystifying and Pound, as an artist, represented an intensive being and acting in the world. The other great figure of modernist poetry is Thomas Stearns Eliot. He can be allied to Pound in the literary field; for one, he shared the same aesthetic of impersonal objectivity and, for another, he also united the function of poet and literary critic and theorist, and therefore the positions of artist and member of the art consecrating institution. Eliot was not part of any of the avant-garde groups or movements and worked mainly independently, but apart from his collaboration with Pound he was associated with Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group. He also was more or less financially autonomous since, in contrast to Pound, he did not depend on his literary productivity or any patrons but had a regular income working at a London bank, before working for the publisher Faber and Faber.⁸ Following Bourdieu’s theory, such a bourgeois profession prevented him from attaining the bohemian artist status held by Pound or Joyce; it

 For a fuller account of Pound’s marketing strategies see Timothy Materer, “Make It Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism,” Marketing Modernism: Self-promotion, Canonization, Rereading, eds. Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbout: University of Michigan Press, ):  – .  See the “Diagram of the twentieth-century literary field” in Kees van Rees and Gillis J. Dorleijn, “The Eighteenth-Century Literary Field in Western Europe: The Interdependence of Material and Symbolic Production and Consumption,” Poetics  (): , fig. .  Hulme understood the two contrasting categories in terms of human thinking and defined the romantic as ‘soft’, liberal thinking, while the classic stood on the contrary for an aesthetic of the ‘hard’ and precise and in analogy for tough thinking and discipline, also in a political sense. On Hulme’s radical conservatism, his machine aesthetic and his anti-humanist absolutism see Andrzej Gasiorek, “Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?: Politics, Machine Aesthetics, and Religion,” T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, eds. Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek (Aldershot, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, ):  – .  On Eliot’s live see Craig Raine, T. S. Eliot: Lives and Legacies (Oxford, New York: OUP, ).

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did however secure him artistic autonomy for his literary work. Eliot did not position himself as a bohemian enfant terrible but as an open apologist of tradition and the literary canon. His poetry drew strongly upon cultural capital, by citing extensively from the consecrated Western canon, and was very elitist and not altogether reader friendly. As novelists James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have to be positioned in distinction from the poets Pound and Eliot in the literary field. Their increasingly experimental forms, with their growing tendency to question traditional concepts of plot and coherence, break consistently with the conventions of the realistic novel, with its social and sociological concerns.⁹ But they also distinguish themselves from previous avant-garde novel forms, such as the psychological novel and the naturalistic novel, and move closer to the genre poetry due to their lyricism and symbolism. By putting the emphasis on form and structure rather than meaning, theirs become what Bourdieu calls ‘pure’ novels (1996: 138) and the genre novel is elevated to the status of the previously superior genre poetry in the field. Like Eliot’s Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses is ‘difficult’ and not intended for the common reader but for the specialist, who is familiar with literary devices and narrative techniques and therefore able to recognise and decipher Joyce’s literary code. Living as an expatriate in Paris, Montparnasse, James Joyce by geographical location already followed in the wake of the French avant-garde and their efforts for an autonomous art. As the protagonist in his autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce too had disengaged himself from home, family, friends, and a bourgeois life in favour of personal autonomy and independent artistic creativity.¹⁰ Nevertheless, such autonomy is closely linked to the solitude of exile. Of all the avant-garde modernists discussed here, Joyce was the only one who, up to the economic success of Ulysses, struggled with poverty, a fact which following Bourdieu provides furthermore an explanation for his naturalistic approach. By these standards he is, according to Bourdieu, in contrast to Pound’s affected pose, a true bohème who lives for his art alone. Joyce represents the art principle of non serviam, a motto stated in A Portrait of the Artist, which means he represents the ‘pure’ art that will not compromise. He seems to embody the arch-romantic figure of the brilliant but struggling artist without means. On the one hand he was economically unsuccessful; on the other hand his works were attacked and banned due to their obscenity. These travails in combination  Even though Woolf and Joyce started out rather conventional – Woolf in The Voyage Out and Joyce in Dubliners – by this moment of Modernism their forms had become highly experimental.  On Joyce’s live see Andrew Gibson, James Joyce: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion Books, ).

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lifted him to the status of an artist consecrated by the avant-garde and made him an alleged icon of Modernism as well as of the true artist. Virginia Woolf sided with Joyce in the literary field and positioned herself especially in opposition to the social realist novels by such popular writers as Herbert George Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, writers she defined as ‘materialists’ in contrast to such ‘spiritual’ ones as Joyce and herself.¹¹ Against their conventional narrative technique, which she found inapt, she devised her programme of the ‘new novel’ that attempted to adapt genre conventions to modern life. She criticised in particular Wells for turning the novel into a propagandistic vehicle for social and political ideologies, emphatically insisting on the autonomy of the art work that must not be appropriated for ulterior purposes. Woolf replaced the predominantly male protagonists with central women figures in her novels and opposed her ‘feminine’ perspective to the ‘masculine’ perspective of such realistic writers as the ones just mentioned. This has gained her prominence with feminist criticism and she has usually been considered the leading figure of a female Modernism. As a member of the Bloomsbury group, she was part of an avant-garde group of upper-class intellectuals that included writers and literary critics, painters, social reformers and economists, and therefore intersected with various fields. She and her husband also ran the Hogarth Press that published the group’s works and granted them autonomy from trade publishing. As daughter to the respected literary critic Leslie Stephens, Woolf had moved among writers and within the literary field from early on. She had grown up with the strategies, was familiar with the power relations, and knew how ‘to play the game,’ as Bourdieu likewise calls the utilization of one’s class habitus. And she used this knowledge in positioning herself as a woman in this field, in distinction to certain territories that were taken by men. Dorothy Richardson, with her concern for the role of women in society, can be located close to Woolf and the Bloomsbury group in the literary field, but the often neglected forerunner of the modernist novel was less concerned with form and had a stronger sociological interest than Woolf. Gertrude Stein in turn has to be positioned in marked opposition to Woolf. Her objective and entirely unemotional style corresponds rather with the ‘hard’ and ‘male’ art of Pound, Hulme, and Lewis, at least at first sight. Stein clearly seized male territory in the literary field. Like many of the ‘high’ modernists, she too favoured the visual arts and was the one most famous for her expansive modern art collection, which included works by Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse.

 See Woolf’s essays “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” () and “Modern Fiction” ().

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I have already said that many of the literary ‘high’ modernists distinguished themselves from film and the cinema. Joyce’s interest in the cinema is documented (McCourt 2010; Füger 1994: 55, 215), although it was originally the interest in a business venture and for making money (McKernan 2010: 16, 19); but I will yet have to come to speak of Pound’s and Woolf’s very critical essays on the cinema in the context of Pool. So in the literary and artistic field of Modernism the medium film per se ranged at the very bottom. But while Pool were acquainted with and befriended many artists that constituted the literary field of Modernism, they transgressed into a field of modernism that integrated a technological modernity and the mass medium film. So, in the following I will span this field by looking at two key figures of film that were important to Pool, Eisenstein and Pabst. Sergei Eisenstein, even though his art was intended for the masses, has to be positioned towards the top of the literary and artistic field, due to the particular situation in Soviet Russia and his role as an intellectual avant-garde artist. Not only did Eisenstein write extensively on film and contribute much to film theory, he also taught professionally at academic institutions. This shows that film in Russia, in opposition to England for example, was already consecrated by the academy and that Eisenstein was a consecrated artist of the established avantgarde. It also shows that Eisenstein himself was part of this institutional force in the artistic field. Since these academic institutions were state institutions, the artistic field here intersects with the social and political fields and reveals that film art was already rooted in Russian society, and that it was not autonomous from politics. Bryher already points out the institutionalization of the cinema in Russia in her non-fiction book on Russian film.¹² Furthermore, since the form of society was communist rather than capitalist and the influence of the economic field had been replaced by the political, Eisenstein’s position in the Russian literary and artistic field, due to the reversal of the field’s structure, is alike to that of an author of the Boulevard theatre in Bourdieu’s nineteenth-century French literary field. His position in the European artistic field is virtually chiastic, since Eisenstein’s innovative montage technique was most influential on European film and inspired many European avant-garde artists. Outside Russia, however, it was usually detached from its didactic popular function to promote communism, as well as from its sociological concerns, and ‘elevated’ to autonomous ‘pure’

 Bryher notes that “the Nationalisation of the [Russian] cinema was decreed in ” (Film Problems ), and the State School of Cinematography at Moscow was founded in the same year (ibid. ).

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aesthetic form. Cutting is the one truly artistic act in the process of filmmaking¹³ because the technology of the camera replaces most of the former craftsmanship and technique of the artist. Since Eisenstein became synonymous for montage, he has to be situated with the ‘young’ and experimental avant-garde in the European artistic field. Whereas in Russia Eisenstein was an artist of the (new) establishment, in Europe he held a rather consecrated status among the avant-garde, due to the severe censorship imposed on his films because of their communist content. So while he was, more or less, a regime conformist artist in Russia, he was a ‘rebellious’ anti-bourgeois filmmaker in Europe. The second key figure of film, the German film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst has to be positioned towards the other end of the film artistic field. Although an avant-garde filmmaker, Pabst produced popular and commercially successful films. Even though his films radically addressed social issues, they still took a bourgeois audience into account. Where the Russian director with his intellectual film for the masses somewhat paradoxically has to be aligned with the elitist modernist artist, the German filmmaker with his psychological, realistic films belongs more to popular art. Where Eisenstein wrote extensively on the theory of film, Pabst had more pragmatic concerns that sprang from working for and dealing with a film industry. He engaged, for example, in organizations of film workers and raised the idea for a European film union that would work towards good films.¹⁴ Whereas Eisenstein’s films had a higher degree of consecration and in the literary and artistic field came to be aligned with ‘high’ art and the avantgarde aesthetic, Pabst, although experimental, was more dependent on the public taste and his commercial films consequently were not as highly consecrated. Furthermore, even though Pabst too had to struggle with censorship due to the provocative social themes of his films, censorship in his case was not as spectacular as with the Soviet films but rather invisible, since usually scenes were simply cut out but the films not entirely banned.

 It was Macpherson who remarked in his editorials that “the only real creative work in film making [is] cutting” (Close Up : (December ): ) and that “the process of cutting is very much akin to other arts, which can be achieved only by the individual” (Close Up : (February ): .).  Pabst’s activities in this direction will be discussed in the chapter on Pool’s film magazine Close Up.

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2.1.3 The Pool Members’ Positioning within the Literary and Artistic Field of Modernism Obviously Pool occupy a rather unique position in the literary and artistic field of their time, especially in the literary one. On the one hand they were completely independent from financial concerns, due to Bryher’s money, and consequently their art was fully autonomous in this respect. On the other hand they did not position themselves in distinction to popular art and mass culture but insisted on the importance of an entertaining and functional art for the public and engaged in advancing the much disregarded popular medium film. The core of Pool consisted of three very different personalities, who also embodied different artistic energies. These variant personalities exchanged ideas, shared interests and enthusiasms, and collaborated on projects, but sometimes they also disagreed or pursued individual concerns and activities. They harmonised but they also quarrelled, and their interacting heterogeneous composition enriched their work. In the following I want to position Pool, as a group, in the literary and artistic field of their time. But I also want to look at the individual members in relation to this field and give consideration to their respective personalities and the various influences that shaped them in the hope that it will shed some light on Pool’s unique constellation and artistic character. b Bryher held a notably unusual position in the literary field for any artist, particularly for an avant-garde one, due to her family background. As possibly the richest man in England, her father, Sir John Ellerman, was at the very top of the economic field. His powerful financial position was further augmented by his influential social and political standing, which his services during the war and his peerage had earned him. (Although, being a self-made man, he had hardly any social contacts with the upper-classes.) In addition, holding large shares of the British press gave him a certain influence over the mass media. Consequently, Ellerman not only dominated the economic field but acted in the political field and at the profitable but not consecrated end of the literary field as well. Bryher’s powerful financial family background provided her with all the money needed for her artistic endeavours and granted absolute autonomy to her and her art projects in this respect. Using her financial autonomy to become a great patron of avant-garde art and support many experimental artists of her time, she represents an intersection of the economic and artistic field. However, she neither used her patronage to buy her way into the artistic field and secure herself public recognition therein, nor did she to any knowledge impose in any way upon the artists or their art work, but rather remained in the

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background. Her modest and unobtrusive movements within the artistic field may very likely have been a key reason for her being forgotten in academic histories of Modernism.¹⁵ Despite her plain appearance and modest conduct, her habitus was nevertheless rebellious and most unconventional. Not only did she defy conventions in art, but she defied social and gender conventions as well.¹⁶ Bryher was wary of the good and adaptable citizen (Heart 302), and her life-style as head of the triangular family model was truly anti-bourgeois, unlike the ostensibly bohemian Pound’s traditional married life. She had grown up in a conservative Victorian household regulated by manifold conventions, an environment which her first husband, Robert McAlmond, described as “frighteningly anti-social” and unpleasant (McAlmon 1997: 2).¹⁷ However, it was also a home of books and art. Her father, despite his pure business intellect, “maintained a lifelong interest in art” and “acquired a collection of contemporary French paintings of some note” (Rubinstein 1984: 258) – although the paintings were mostly of the Royal Academy type (Morgan 1975: 257).¹⁸ From early childhood on Bryher had been exposed to ‘culture’, to travelling extensively, and to ‘internationalism’. Her autobiography recalls her early trips to Italy, France, Switzerland and Egypt. Her childhood memories also state that from early on she was given many books to read. Originally she had wanted to go to an art school and become a painter, then she tried to study medicine, but both were denied her by her family.¹⁹ The two cherished interests of medical science and art seem to combine in her pursuit of psychoanalysis;

 Jayne Marek claims something similar in Women Editing Modernism: ‘Little Magazines’ and Literary History (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, ):  – . Susan McCabe in turn asserts that the reason lies rather in “her transgressive ‘husband’ role in curating modernism than [in] her character” (: ).  Bryher was born an illegitimate child. Her parents only married secretly fifteen years after she was born to legitimise the birth of her younger brother. Bryher did not learn of her illegitimacy before she was twenty-four and when her father then offered to legitimise her, she resolutely declined. See the entries on Bryher in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature.  According to McAlmon, Bryher herself had warned him of her parents’ home being “a stuffy old museum” (McAlmon : ).  The Dictionary of National Biography even states that Sir John himself was of an artistic nature (), although McAlmon noted that Sir John’s art collection was “of the photographically sentimental and academic kind at their most banal” and consisted of artists that he, McAlmon, had never heard of (: ).  John Ellerman’s [E.L. Black’s] thinly veiled autobiographical account of his public school experiences supplies this information. See Why Do They Like It (Paris: Shakespeare & Co., ): .

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she was to become an early supporter of Sigmund Freud and a certified amateur analyst. Although to all accounts she loved her parents, Bryher, with her strong desire for independence, wanted to free herself from the powerful aegis of her family. Partly to this end she substituted her pseudonym for her family name. She stressed that in addition to symbolising freedom to her another consideration had been that “it was a common Cornish surname” which she had seen many a time “up over offices and shops” (Heart 224). She had spent several summer vacations there in her childhood and Bryher Island “was the only place where she could remember having had a carefree and unfettered existence” (Carroll 2006: n. p.). A pseudonym was further necessary since Bryher wanted “to kick [her] way up the ladder alone” (Heart 224) and thus had to hide her father’s powerful name. What was a pseudonym at first later came to be her legal name, so that now it is no longer quite correct to term ‘Bryher’ a pseudonym.²⁰ Bryher had a strong-willed personality and is said to have been opinionated and controlling. Reportedly she even threw tantrums at times. She was eccentric but at the same time pragmatic, very rational, and completely fearless. Despite her close alliance with Modernism, she was not hostile to technological inventions but on the contrary loved aeroplanes and was a great proponent of typewriters. Bryher was of a stern nature and is said to have dressed in plain and austere style, to have been “a sort of robot,”²¹ but also a “demanding child” (Guest 2003: 186 ff). However, Adrienne Monnier emphasises her “most noble human faith” (1976: 205). Her special interests were questions of education and social life, and her “sociological concern” was also responsible for her interest in the cinema, according to Monnier (ibid.).²² Bryher was said to be characterised by her individuality, independence and courage as well as by great intelligence and unusual memory (Rubinstein 1984: 259; Walwyn 2004: 141 f). People believed that “had she been a man she would inevitably have succeeded her father and carried on in his singularly successful

 “Some years later I took the name under Deed Poll, and under English law it is incorrect to speak of it as a pseudonym. My passport is issued to me under that name and no legal document is valid that I sign in any other way” (Heart ).  H.D. has her autobiographic persona utter this statement in her novella The Usual Star (quoted in Friedman : ).  Taking one look at several of Bryher’s contributions to Close Up instantly confirms this. On war: : (July ), : (August ), : (June ); on education and cinema: : (August ), : (March ), : (May ), : (August ), : (September ), : (February ).

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manner” (ibid.), but since she was a woman she instead became a writer, mostly of historical novels, and a patroness of writers. She knew and socialized with many celebrated literati throughout Europe and financially supported Hemingway and many others (Walwyn 2004: 142).²³ She demonstrated her great bravery in the 1930s, when she became keenly involved in anti-Nazi activities and endangered her own safety in aiding others. She helped hundreds of Jews as well as non-Jewish opponents of Hitler, among them the philosopher Walter Benjamin, to escape from Nazi Germany, as did her younger brother John. Both of them are said to have been on Hitler’s “death list” (Bryher, Heart 327; Rubinstein 1984: 259; Walwyn 2004: 142; McCabe 2007: 122). According to McCabe, she was at that time even working for the British government undercover (2007: 122). Upon the death of her father in 1933, Bryher inherited £800,000 which secured her financial independence. As already mentioned, it was in fact her money that launched McAlmon’s Contact Publishing Company, which published works by many of the prestigious modernists. She also assisted Joyce and his family with a monthly allowance and helped out George Antheil, Dorothy Richardson and Sylvia Beach with her Shakespeare & Co. bookshop (Winning 2000: x), and several others, “fostering an international modernism” (McCabe, 2007: 122).²⁴ Bryher moved freely and continuously between the artistic centres London, New York, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, visiting her modernist friends.²⁵ In short, Bryher seems to have been intimate with large parts of the modernist literary and artistic field; she “moved in distinguished circles,” as Perdita once wrote (quoted in Kenwin [55:58]), without apparently being recognised herself as a great artist. Only later, in the 1950s and 1960s, did she become known for her historical novels. By the time Pool originated, she had already published a volume of poems, at age nineteen and at her father’s expense, three imagist poems, and the three novels Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923) – fictional autobiographies “in imagist Prose” (Radford 134) – and West (1925).²⁶

 For a fuller account of Bryher’s editorial and financial support of magazines see Jayne Marek, Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, ).  According to Joanne Winning, “Bryher’s regular ‘loans’ undoubtedly secured the ongoing production of Richardson’s lifework, Pilgrimage” (: x).  See the autobiographies of Bryher and McAlmon.  The collection of poems was entitled Region of Lutany,  (Bryher, Heart ), the three imagist poems “Wakefulness,” “Rejection,” and “Waste” were published with the help of the Imagist Amy Lowell and the second novel was published by her husband’s Contact Publishing Company.

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As to the specific literary field of her time, she personally favoured Richardson, the Imagists and André Gide. Richardson’s Pilgrimage she treasured inter alia for sociological aspects: “There is no better English social history of the years between 1890 and 1914” (Heart 282) and declared Richardson to be “a writer’s writer” (ibid.), whose style she saw as “a precursor of the cinema” (ibid. 199) due to its continuous association. The Imagists she loved because they “used new rhythms and exciting sounds” and were fresh and rebellious (ibid. 183), and Gide for he “spoke directly to [her]” and his “books [she] read passionately” (ibid. 254). Her admired literary paragon, however, was Mallarmé,²⁷ the most abstract of the Symbolists, who was missing from Pound’s list of commendable authors but who to her represented la poésie pure (ibid. 257), and she was fond of the Elizabethans. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land reminded her of furniture polish, disinfectant soap and the School Hall at preparation (ibid. 159) and Virgina Woolf was to her a problem writer (ibid. 16) whose characters were alien to her or simply non-sympathetic (ibid. 279). She recognised Joyce’s greatness but felt that he was a “naturalist of cities” and that “Ulysses was about the nineteenth century from which [she] was trying to escape” (ibid. 254). Bryher also claimed that personally she had “never been interested in popular fiction” yet admitted “that it is truer to life than philosophical speculation” (Heart 358). But even though she affirmed that she had “full respect for the popular arts” she still believed that “the function of the artist is vision” (ibid. 182). Her time at Montparnasse in the early 1920s she describes as a moment “when the artist, it seemed, was more influential than the politician” (ibid. 241). Reflecting on the mechanisms of the literary and artistic field of Modernism she records: If a manuscript was sold to an established publisher, its author was regarded as a black sheep and for his own safety moved to the Right Bank. We boasted, we knew that we were good and to hell with the bourgeoisie including all reviewers, but we did not write with an eye on fame, security or television appearances. We were permitted to appear without loss of prestige in [the journals] Contact, Broom, Transition, the Transatlantic and This Quarter. (ibid. 243)

Bryher here points to the anti-bourgeois habitus of the avant-garde artists and the opposition of economic versus symbolic success. Although she was to make lifelong friends, Bryher still never felt quite at home in this environment. Paris did not mean to her what it meant to her companions; it did not offer her

 Her admiration for Mallarmé was so great that she dedicated her autobiography “to the memory of [her] master, Stéphane Mallarmé.”

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the same enchantment and she describes herself as “a Puritan in Montparnasse” (ibid. 244). Instead, she later came to love Berlin because it was “the centre of a volcano, it was raw, dangerous, explosive” (ibid. 291) and because there she found “so vital a response to experimental art” as she had “never encountered before or since” (ibid.). Bryher loved adventure, while Montparnasse was too ‘tame’ for her and its art community probably too enclosed and hermetically sealed. It was America and American literature in particular that captivated Bryher’s interest. Already during the First World War, when few had heard of it, she had publicly stated her “belief in American literature [i. e. modern poetry]” in a journal (ibid. 215). She had books sent to her from America by a friend of her mother’s and in 1918 wrote an enthusiastic review of Amy Lowell. Even though Bryher had originally been captivated by the radical newness declared in the Imagist manifesto by Pound, it appears she later came to be in league with the Amy Lowell side of the movement. It may well be that it was Lowell’s more open and ‘democratic’ attitude which she bestowed upon Imagism that Bryher felt closer to.²⁸ According to her own testimony, Bryher was never liked by Pound’s rather elitist young London Parnassians, who found her “unmannerly”. Conversely, she never liked Pound after he unsuccessfully made a pass at her (ibid. 226) and was positively contemptuous when he began expressing his anti-Semitic and fascist attitudes. Politically she stood at the exact opposite end, siding with the democratic liberal left, supporting Jewish refugees and engaging in anti-Nazi activity. Despite her committed role in promoting Modernism and modernist aesthetics, Bryher had a lifelong interest in economics and she once stated that: “My destiny was to write books rather than run a factory but I have always been passionately interested in economics” (Heart 118). She had wanted to go into business but her father had forbidden this because she was a girl (ibid.). So, she had instead chosen the field most opposed to the economic field and provided autonomy to many avant-garde artists. After her divorce from McAlmon she secured him with such a generous sum that he came to be known as “McAlimony” in Paris and H.D. she was to settle later with an income of £70,000 for life (Guest 2003: 264).²⁹ On Macpherson she bestowed two villas in the Mediterranean after their divorce (ibid. 297) and, taking into account the references to his life-style in Guggenheim’s autobiography, Bryher almost certainly must

 Lowell changed Pound’s autocratic editorial practice – as she announced in her Preface to Some Imagist Poets () – and invited D.H. Lawrence, then known as a Georgian poet, and Marianne Moore to join the group.  Although H.D. was anything but an impoverished artist; in fact she was extremely well-off, having inherited family money (Guest : ).

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have settled him financially as well. According to Guest, Bryher was perfectly fine spending money on anyone but herself (ibid. 297) and her “money fuelled and preserved a significant portion of modernist culture” (McCabe 2007: 119). Giving her personal money to secure autonomy for modern art and diverse artists, Bryher was the guarantor of l’art pour l’art. Yet in contrast to her refined taste in art reception, her personal interest was with educational and sociological concerns and with the function of art. Her own works reflected awareness of the social and functional and the genres she preferred to work in were the novel, particularly the historical novel, and non-fiction. ₪₪₪ H.D. was the one consecrated artist of the Pool group. By the time Pool originated H.D. had already been a recognised avant-garde poet for over a decade. She had joined Pound and his literary circle in London in 1911 and Pound ‘created’ her an Imagist poet in 1912, when he signed one of her poems “H.D. Imagiste” (Guest 2003: 40 – 46).³⁰ This was the moment in which Pound transformed Hilda Doolittle into the poet H.D. and she was to keep those initials for the rest of her career. At least Modernism myth has it thus; there are nevertheless educated guesses that H.D. was uncomfortable about the inherent insinuation of her last name and chose the initials herself. But Pound had been her mentor and introduced her to the classics and the Latin and Greek poets long before (ibid. 3–4; Ecker 1994: 162). They first met in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, when Doolittle was still at school there and Pound a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and they had even been engaged at one point. Another literary friendship that she formed during her college days at Bryn Mawr was with Marianne Moore that was to last all her life. Pound brought Hilda into contact with London’s literary world and established the contact to Harriet Monroe, editor of the Poetry magazine that published H.D.’s first poems and launched the imagiste movement. He acquainted her with such established literary celebrities as the novelist May Sinclair, poet and editor Harold Monro, and the writers Ernest Rhys, Viola Meynell, and W.B. Yeats – of whose spirituality H.D. approved (Guest 2003: 29, 31). Especially May Sinclair became a strong advocate of H.D.’s poetry and “promotion by May Sinclair meant a good deal” in that time (ibid. 30), although Sinclair, like other accomplished British intellectuals, was at first shocked by H.D., who played the role of adventuress and pagan mystic (ibid. 29).

 For H.D.’s significant role in Imagism see Gabriele Rippl, Beschreibungs-Kunst: Zur intermedialen Poetik angloamerikanischer Ikontexte ( – ) (München: Fink, ):  – .

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As mentioned, Pound carefully and strategically set up the movement to launch his protégé and used a clever marketing strategy to advertise it (Materer 1996: 17– 36). H.D. became “the Goddess of Imagism” (Guest 2003: 44) but for most of her later career she would try to disassociate herself from the Imagist movement and the poetic patronage of Pound to gain artistic autonomy. She had discovered the Greek or Hellenic style, by which was meant a style simple and unadorned, before Imagism and Pound coined such ideas. She wanted to emphasise poetic inspiration and get away from any air of didacticism (ibid. 43). After her first poetic success, the goddess is said to have behaved rather aloof and superior and with an Olympian air, which seems to have annoyed some people.³¹ Her habitus might also have been partly influenced by or modelled on Pound’s conceited eccentricity and bohemian pose. Although Pound presented her as an example for his classicist idea of hardness, H.D.’s understanding of the classics never corresponded to Pound’s Hulmeinspired idea of classicism. Instead of proposing a ‘hard’ thinking, she rather found continuity in the ‘soft’ and ‘effeminate’ position of the English aestheticists, of Wilde and Swinburne.³² In doing so she positioned herself in opposition to the ‘male’ classicism of Pound and Eliot.³³ Yet at the same time her art is set in decisive opposition to the ‘feminine’ perspective of Virginia Woolf. H.D. reversed and exploded gender categories. Erotic passion is more often than not male, while hard and precise form is usually female in her works. She also devised an alternative ‘feminine’ classical canon in opposition to the ‘masculine’ classical canon of her male modernist contemporaries, challenging their Homer and Vergil with more marginalised or female classical authors. In her Helen in Egypt,³⁴ for example, she replaced Homer’s Illiad with Stesichorus’ Pallinode and I will discuss the role of the ancient Greek lyricist Sappho and the Alexandrian poet Hedylus in the section on H.D.’s mythopoetic montages.

 Louis Wilkinson satirised “the queen” in his novel The Buffoon ().  For a more detailed study of H.D.’s relation to the Aestheticists see Cassandra Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (Cambridge: UP, ).  For H.D.’s very own constructing of antiquity see Rippl, “Hieroglyphen-Faszination in der anglo-amerikanischen Moderne,” Hieroglyphen, eds. Aleida und Jan Assman (München: Fink, ):  – ; Rippl, “’I remember – You Have Forgot’. Gedächtnis, Körper und Geschlecht in der angloamerikanischen Moderne: Hilda Doolittles ‘Kora and Ka’,” Arbeit am Gedächtnis, eds. Michael C. Frank and Gabriele Rippl (München: Fink, ):  –  and Gisela Eckert, Differenzen: Essays zu Weiblichkeit und Kultur (Dülmen-Hiddingsel: tende, ):  – .  For studies of H.D.’s use of mythology in her Helen of Egypt see Susan Stanford Friedman, “Creating a Women’s Mythology: H.D.’s ‘Helen in Egypt’,” Women’s Studies : ():  –  and Gabriele Rippl (:  – ).

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H.D.’s ‘Greekness’ was not only poetically avant-garde but her Greek style, which also showed in her outer appearance, was also en vogue in London at the time. Guest mentions that the classics were no longer restricted to the academic domain then but had invaded popular culture, even to the extent of dress fashion.³⁵ So H.D. not only wrote poetry in the Greek style but “looked the part” (Guest 2003: 33) and was riding the top of the fashion wave. She dressed in soft flowing garments, long blouses, and at times wore a band around her head Greek-style. The British liked her ‘Greekness’ and her difference, as well as her physical height, which had embarrassed her in America but was now an admired quality. Her Greek habitus was very different from Eliot’s endorsement of traditional classicism and the consecrated academic canon; it was rather aligned with a popular star cult.³⁶ H.D.’s own contributions to the film magazine Close Up, titled descriptively “The Cinema and the Classics,” would later give testimony to such a notion of a classicist revival in popular culture. H.D., the oldest of the three friends (eight years Bryher’s and sixteen year’s Macpherson’s senior), was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Guest points out that the influence of this Moravian community upon H.D. should not be neglected, for “she always sought out the world of the beyond, whether through table tipping, Tarot cards, crystal gazing, astrology, or numerology” (2003: 9). Moravianism propounded a notion of universal grace, emotion over doctrine, a belief in divine illumination and, most important, the radiance of love.³⁷ H.D. positioned herself as the visionary poet. H.D. came from a home that had “rigid scholastic standards” (ibid. 22). She was the only daughter of six children, and her father used to claim that his “one

 “Sandaled or bare feet marked a complete break from buttoned boots. Gone were the curves and boned collars. Fashion switched to Poiret of France and Fortuny of Venice. Fortuny dresses were cut straight from the shoulder to flow unimpeded, with just a hint of chiton. Poiret, the new French dressmaker everyone took up, introduced dresses cut to resemble the maidens on Greek vases, a loose overblouse falling over a long skirt. Hair was loosely knotted and worn with a band across the forehead à la grecque. […] This had all begun around ” (Guest : ). On the Greek style in popular culture see also Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History for Hellenism (Cambridge: UP, ). On the Greek styles of Arthur Liberty, Paul Poiret, and Mariano Fortuny see also Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion,  – : Politics, Health, and Art (Kent: The Kent State University Press, ).  A Grecian style star cult had first emerged in late nineteenth-century theatre and opera before it then influenced dress fashion. See the photographs in the Tatler and The Sketch reproduced in Goldhill, Who Needs Greek?.  For a fuller examination of the influence of Moravianism on H.D.’s work see Tony Trigilio, “Strange Prophecies Anew”: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, ).

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girl was worth all her brothers” (quoted in ibid. 14). But then she disappointed her father because she failed at Bryn Mawr, her English class of all classes, and left college (ibid. 22). Guest describes the home in which H.D. grew up as “an oldfashioned Emersonian American home with an empty, yet productive, countryside surrounding it, and intellectual labors taking place inside” (ibid. 16). While H.D. was acquainted with science on her father’s side, she was introduced to music and a more spiritual idea of the world on her mother’s. Although she grew up in the American provinces her “immediate family, despite their involvement in a provincial community, were not insular,” as Guest emphasises (ibid. 12). There was a tradition on her mother’s family side to go to Europe that extended down to H.D., who at age twenty-five set out for Europe, where she was to spend most of her life. H.D. was rather impractical in domestic things and often lived in elite spheres, as her daughter Perdita remarked. But Perdita also attests to her mother’s great sense of humour and remembers that she laughed a lot. She furthermore cherished friendships and was a wonderful host (Friedman 1990: 218; Debo 2012: 211). Perdita also remembers that, despite her aloof spheres, her mother read sensational bestsellers and detective stories and liked going to the movies. In short, the consecrated poet also enjoyed popular culture. b Kenneth Macpherson is the modernist variable of the trio. It is at this point somewhat difficult to place him in the literary and artistic field of his time, since there is so little information on him at hand in general and in particular on his life before his time with Bryher and H.D. When the two women first took him along to Paris, H.D. remarked that he seemed “very un-travelled” to her (quoted in Guest 2003: 183). He had never seen Paris before and “was scarcely out of the Highlands,” as Guest somewhat haughtily remarks (ibid.). So Bryher and H.D. set out to ‘create’ him a cosmopolite and Macpherson adapted quickly to the new life and luxuries offered him (ibid. 186). In her autobiography, Bryher supplies the information that “his ancestors had been professional artists for six generations, his father was a painter and he [Kenneth] had himself received a thorough training in art” (Heart 289), which led her to conclude that it was natural that he became interested in film. Guest on the other hand mocks his artistic ancestry, calling his father rather derisively “a painter of flowers” (2003: 181). H.D. is more specific as to Macpherson’s training, reporting that “his actual ‘trade’ at one time was that of pen and ink designer” (quoted in Scott 1990: 121) and that he devised posters and advertisements. She again describes his father as a “delicate portrait painter” (quoted in Scott 1990: 115) and Friedman in turn as a miniaturist (2002: 567). From Friedman we also learn that Macpherson at-

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tended commercial art school from 1923 to 1926 and did posters and illustrations for commercial catalogues (ibid.). What seems safe to conclude from this apparently variable information is the certainty that the Macphersons were commercial artists depending on their art for a living, and that they were not artists consecrated by the artistic field. Macpherson’s father, we learn from H.D.’s pamphlet on Borderline,³⁸ painted the backdrops for Pool’s film Borderline and helped with the setting and lighting, and H.D. in this context emphasises his professional skill in working with faces. Bryher reports that Kenneth had little money and that chances of him finding work as a commercial artist at the time were low (Guest 2003: 184). Considering Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus in this context, Macpherson’s family background of commercial or applied arts would provide an explanation for his espousal of an art that was in touch with the populace and his openness towards popular media. It also explains his assertion in the first editorial of the first Close Up issue that “really good art IS commercial” (“As Is” 1:1, 9), a remark that is entirely at odds with modernist principles and rather puzzling in an introduction to a journal that claims to be “devoted to the art of films,” as the subtitle announced, and which as a general tenor propounded “the film for the film’s sake” (ibid. 14). As a scion of a family of artists, his family-transmitted cultural capital was a familiarity with the production of art, with which he had been acquainted from childhood on. He may not have had international cosmopolitan polish, as H.D. asserted, but in turn he was acutely aware of the mechanisms of the artistic field. Macpherson himself was apparently without means, but Bryher decided to financially support him as she had and would support H.D., and so many other writers and artists. Once given the chance and the economic autonomy, he proved a talented artist, launching several creative projects, writing books, editing a film journal, and making films. Even though he started out an amateur in film, his work soon became appreciated by many prominent figures, among them the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the German film director G.W. Pabst. His films were never commercial successes, although Monkey’s Moon seems to have been popular, but that was not because of a conscious rejection of such success on his part. However, he did gain recognition among the modernist filmmakers of his time.³⁹

 Borderline: A Pool Film with Paul Robeson (London: Mercury Press, ); reprinted as “Borderline Pamphlet” in Scott (:  – ), also reprinted in Donald, Friedberg, Marcus (:  – ).  Pabst complimented Macpherson on his film Borderline (see the chapter on Borderline), Eisenstein complimented him on his film magazine Close Up (see the chapter on the magazine),

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After the time of Pool, he moved to New York in 1937 and became a connoisseur and art collector and a familiar figure in the New York modern art scene. He supported especially young black artists of the Harlem Renaissance but also celebrities of modern art before they became famous. Living together with Peggy Guggenheim for a couple of years in the 1940s, he was as her associate part of her glamorous circles. In her autobiography, Guggenheim mentions that before ever meeting him she had already heard of Macpherson as a “myth” (Confessions 287). He was reportedly of a joyful and charming nature and of most attractive appearance. Apparently he liked children and animals and soon became friends with H.D.’s daughter Perdita and her cat Peter. Within the Pool ménage, he seems to have taken on the role of the calm and soothing one among the two headstrong women. Guggenheim dedicates two full chapters to him in her autobiography, one of them tellingly titled “Peace”. His caring disposition also becomes evident when thinking of how he cared for the aging novelist Norman Douglas, housing his old friend for several years in a separate apartment of his villa on Capri, until Douglas’ death in 1952, after which Macpherson became his literary executor. It was also Macpherson who helped Max Ernst come to the States, not Guggenheim, as commonly claimed (Confessions 287). Macpherson was to accumulate an impressive collection of modern art, including works by Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Giorgio de Chirico and many others. Guggenheim testifies him “an incredible eye” for the best art pieces (ibid. 303). Most of the pieces of his art collection, however, Macpherson acquired before the artist grew famous and his art works became expensive. So in the 1940s Macpherson was to be situated at the intersection of the economic and the artistic fields, providing a graphic idea of his earlier notion that “really good art IS commercial.”

2.1.4 Pool’s Attempt to Unite Avant-garde Aesthetics and ‘Pure’ Art with ‘Popular’ Culture By the time the three friends formed Pool, Bryher and H.D. had already had their thorough Montparnasse experience. They had absorbed ‘pure’ art and avantgarde aesthetics or rather, in the case of H.D., were a recognised part of avantgarde modernist aesthetics. Macpherson contrariwise had just left the Highlands and was as yet unaffected by such an experience. With Macpherson there arrived

and the popular German film magazine Film für Alle published an account by Macpherson on his film Foothills (see the chapter on Pool’s film fragments).

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a new and much younger creative force on the scene, and an interest in a pioneering artistic medium. Pool’s interest in film started initially with Macpherson and primarily has to be connected with his person. H.D. was a champion of modern poetry and already by association with her lyrical genre ‘elitist’. Bryher noted about herself that she “had been born before the cinema age” and had seen only one single film, of an Antarctic expedition, when a teenager (Heart 289). She realised its possibilities but found that “the screen restricted [her] imagination as a writer” (ibid.). Nevertheless she thought it magnificent training for writing “because it taught me speed, not to hang about looking at my characters in a novel but to get them moving and to try to fix a landscape in a sentence as if it were a few feet of film” (ibid. 289 – 90, my emphasis). But it would be inaccurate to distinguish all too neatly between Bryher and H.D., as representatives of ‘pure’ art, and Macpherson, as the representative of ‘popular’ art. Macpherson, too, was much concerned with beauty and aestheticism while Bryher was interested in the educational means of film and H.D. was fascinated by the ‘visionary’ and projecting quality of the new art medium. H.D., who in contrast to Bryher had already liked and often gone to the cinema before meeting Macpherson (Heart 235), was captivated by the star cult and grew quite fond of acting herself. Her Close Up contributions titled “The Cinema and the Classics” show most obviously that she played an active part in uniting the ‘popular’ form film with the high aesthetics of refined art. Bryher in turn once even wrote an article on the “Defence of Hollywood” in Close Up (February 1928), despite Pool’s generally adverse position towards most Hollywood film productions. While cultural elitism, especially in England, branded film cheap and base entertainment or even trash, and nothing but a manufactured product of some industry, Pool welcomed its “utter newness” (Macpherson, “As Is” 1:2, 8). In film they sniffed a chance to ‘make it new’, because it was not yet an ‘outworn’ medium (“As Is” 1:1, 6). It promised a possibility to rejuvenate an art that had fossilised into static forms and conventions, while at the same time it was not ‘elite’ but a medium of the public. Pool were rather suspicious of cultural elitism and capitalized Art in its function of cultural capital. Macpherson once declared in his characteristically flippant tone: “Certainly it [i. e. capitalized Art] sends shivers down my back at this minute, seeing it as apparently it is seen […]. Art isn’t that ghoulish, witless sort of plaster-of-paris morgue where you go to identify the dead” (“As Is” 1:4, 6). What fascinated them most about this “most forceful and dynamic means of artistic expression in existence” (“As Is” 2:2, 10) was its vitality and true to life depiction. Film recorded life, actually looked at life with the objective and clear eye of the camera. It was not stylised or fancy but an art that presented “straight-from-the-shoulder, vital slices of life” (ibid.). An art appealing to all

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alike, to the multitude as much as to the few, needed to reproduce life and had to be representational of human life experience. Purely abstract art, Pool realised, could only appeal to the specialist, since there was no pure abstraction in human life experience (Macpherson, ibid. 11). Yet even such abstract experiments in form and method could eventually inspire the film industry and improve the general standards of films. Although Pool believed in film’s great creative potential as an art form, they discovered even in commercial cinema at its most base an appeal to universal human needs because it provided a communal entertainment experience. But despite granting commercial films their due, Pool’s concern was not with the masses but with “a minority of millions” (Macpherson, “As Is,” 1:2, 16). This is also the reason why I want to avoid the term ‘masses’ and consequently terms such as mass-culture, mass-medium and art for the masses when speaking of Pool’s artistic activities, for ‘masses’ presumes a more or less homogeneous collective entity, connotes an unthinking mob, and often bears ideological implications. (Eisenstein’s films were art for the masses; they were mass-propaganda intended to teach the proletariat class-consciousness.) So instead I will prefer to speak of ‘the public’ and ‘the many’ or ‘multitude’, as this preserves the idea of the single item within a collective and thus of the individual among a heterogeneous set. This may be a more appropriately democratic term for the art endeavours of Pool. (This is not to exclude that Pool in their reflections use the term masses.) Pool found that films could be “stimulating to mind and perception” (ibid. 17), that they could look consciously at life instead of being escapist, promote curiosity and empathy for the unknown and strange and in addition excite pleasure and understanding (“As Is” 1:3, 16). Especially in film they saw a chance to create a high-quality art for the multitude by uniting ‘high’ avant-garde aesthetics with popular film culture, since film provided a possibility to express the lyric quality and poetics of life in an easily comprehensible manner. Their goal was to inspire a general interest in cinema culture and filmmaking and to encourage the amateur to experiment with this new medium of artistic expression. Amateur films were independent from the usual conditions of the film industry, which ensured that the amateur experimented freely, while the industry, anxious about commerce, would rely on established standards. But their experiments and innovative methods might still be brought to the attention of the industry. Several of the great film directors had started out as amateurs and later worked for commercial film companies. Amateur experimental films were often highly creative because they had to compensate for insufficient funding with creativity. A sum of about £100 was sufficient to make a good film, according to Macpherson (“As Is” 1:1, 10), and most of the truly excellent experimental films had cost

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much less.⁴⁰ At the same time, experimenting would ultimately improve the amateurs’ knowledge of films and their artistry and would result in competent judgment and desire for good quality films. Pool propagated film art not only for but by the populace. ‘Popular’ art with Pool does not mean perforce products made for brainless consumption by the masses but amateur experimental art and high-quality art for the many, using especially the new, popular medium film. To this end they became particularly engaged with film: producing films, editing a film journal, publishing non-fiction books on film to instruct the amateur in film technique and so on. This shows that to Pool high quality was not a privilege of consecrated art and that ‘popular’ art did not necessarily exclude good quality, as it did not exclude experiment. Thus popular art, to Pool, not only meant a commercially successful art but also the art of the populus (the public) and the common amateur. Pool realized that in its experimental nature and independence from the commercial considerations of the industry, amateur film guaranteed the autonomy of art and was most alike to avant-garde modernist art and its endeavours. Yet within the artistic field, amateur art ranked low since it lacked the ‘professional’ status of the specialist and symbolic consecration. In this it was most opposed to avant-garde art, which was very concerned about its professionalism and anxious to position itself in distinction from amateur work. In their desire to unite avant-garde art and aesthetics with popular art and film, Pool were constantly negotiating between the two extremes of the artistic field. There was a constant dynamic positioning between ‘pure’ art and ‘popular’ art or highbrow and lowbrow culture, and a constant promotion of avant-garde aesthetics and amateur experiment simultaneously that often seemed curious and contradictory and apparently was often misunderstood. In particular, the chapter on the film magazine Close Up will continue and enlarge upon several aspects that could merely be touched on in this section and shed light on the strategies and activities by which Pool worked towards uniting avant-garde art and popular culture.

 Florey’s The Life and Death of , his Sad Love of Zero and Johann the Coffin Maker had each only cost about £. Ivens had produced a noteworthy absolute which cost less than £ using only an Ica Kinamo camera, Man Ray’s Emak Bakia and Star of the Sea, Knight’s Rachmaninov, Ruttman’s Operas, Eggeling’s absolutes and Reiniger’s Prince Achmed were all low cost experimental films (Macpherson, “As Is” :,  – ).

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2.2 The Necessity of Art It has become quite obvious by now that Pool were special among the avantgarde modernists. They approved of a representational art in contrast to Modernism’s abstraction and reclaimed an art of the human or animal that opposes the ‘dehumanization’ which Ortega y Gasset has ascribed as fundamental to the art of the avant-garde. Bourdieu’s theory provides a valuable instrument for delineating the literary and artistic field of modernism with its various positions and avant-garde groups and helps situate Pool and their work within this field and among these artistic clusters. But his approach offers no means for coming to terms with probably the most essential aspect of Pool’s art and aesthetic, and also their life-style: a universal anthropological root for creative aesthetic activity in humanity. The aesthetic and philosophical characteristics of Pool reveal the narrowness of the sociological perspective and a blind spot in Bourdieu’s theory. Pool can be comprehended in the literary field only to a certain extent; philosophical and aesthetic perspectives are also needed to understand Pool. As John Codd concludes, Bourdieu “is less concerned with the nature of art per se and more with the social conditions in which works of art acquire meaning and value” (1990: 157). Bourdieu distinguishes between the autonomy and economic necessity of art, which constitute the two poles of his literary and artistic field and propel the dynamic relations within this field. There is, however, beyond the production and social reception of art a fundamental psychological and biological necessity for art in human nature. To this end an additional theoretical component is needed to complement Bourdieu’s sociological approach and, after sketching a historical frame that exemplifies the human need for aesthetic creativity throughout ages and cultures, I will expound Eibl’s theory of a biological aesthetic disposition in humanity, which shall constitute the complementary component to Bourdieu.

2.2.1 The Idea of Art as a Human Necessity throughout History Art as a human necessity is no novel idea of Pool’s but, on the contrary, the concept of the homo ludens can be traced throughout history: Aristotle’s (384 – 322 BC) concepts of mimesis and catharsis link drama to human nature and find therein the healing power of stress relief (Poietikes);⁴¹ Cicero (106 – 43 BC) de-

 On mimesis see especially chapter . §.–. and on catharsis see especially chapter . §.

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fined works of art as sources of pleasure (De Finibus II. 207, 23 – 24);⁴² Horatius (65 – 8 BC) pointed to the purpose of art to delight and be useful and to the poets’ desire to benefit or to please and to relate to life (De Arte Poetica, vss. 343, 333);⁴³ and Sanskrit poetical theory, such as the Nātyaśāstra (500 BC-5 AD), discusses the concept of rasa. ⁴⁴ Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamerone (ca. 1349 – 1353) is a literary example of the human instinct for self-preservation that masters the horrors of reality, i. e. the plague, by escaping into art, i. e. telling tales. Similarly the Chinese poet of the Wei dynasty Cao Pi had trusted poetry to ban the sorrow of death and loss after the horrifying epidemic of 217 (Watson 1971: 48 – 49), and for the Arabian Scheherazade storytelling was most essential to preserve her life, since by entertaining the bloodthirsty monarch she prevented him from killing her. William Shakespeare (1564– 1616) inscribed upon his theatre-house the motto “all the world’s a stage”⁴⁵ and the Elizabethan court masques were part of festivities, often weddings, and terminated in a dance of the performing nobility. In ancient Greece, Sappho’s poetry (seventh century BC) had been bound to a female initiation cult preparing young women for marriage (Reynolds 2000: 20), while Ludovico Ariosto’s (1474– 1533) Orlando Furioso was written “for the amusement and recreation of gentlemen, persons with sensitive souls, and ladies” (Rebay 1969: 67). François Rabelais’ (1494 – 1553) Gargantua et Pantagruel, written during the great religious wars, was one great joke intended to make the reader laugh and to soothe in times of pain, as the introductory poem suggests,⁴⁶ and Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) published his Narodnye Rasskazy (Stories for the People) for old and young to find pleasure therein

 He speaks of voluptas and delectatio.  “Utile et dulce” and “aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea decree vitae.”  Rasa means the psychological joy of experiencing a work of art. Patrick Colm Hogan translates rasa as “sentiment” and describes it as “what we feel in experiencing a work of art” (: ). Examining the concept of rasa and the Sanskrit theoretical works by Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta, Hogan finds striking parallels to contemporary cognitive science and works out universals of narrative structures whose centrality, he argues, is due to “a universal prototype for happiness” (: ). Cf. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: UP, ). Thomas Anz has examined emotions in the act of reading, the delight in beauty, the fascination of horror, and the parallel to erotic lust in Literatur und Lust: Glück und Unglück beim Lesen (München: Beck ).  He used the Latin dictum totus mundus agit histrionem, said to go back to Petronius’ quod fere totus mundus excreat histrionem. The line also comes up in one of his comedies: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” (As YouLike It II. vii.  f).  The introductory poem also claims: “Pour ce que le rire est le propre de l’homme.” Cited from François Rabelais, Œuvres de François Rabelais: Édition Critique, eds. Abel Lefranc et al. vol.  () (Paris: Champion,  – ): .

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and be purged. The fairy tales that the Brothers Grimm (1785/86 – 1859/63) assembled were originally tied to social interaction and entertainment. Berthold Brecht (1898 – 1956) believed in a life purpose of the arts and that “all arts contribute to the greatest of all arts, the art of living” (Brecht 59)⁴⁷ and Jorge Louis Borges (1899 – 1986) again held that reading was a form of happiness (Borges, “Das Buch” 234– 35).⁴⁸ In Dante (1265 – 1321), Francesca and Paolo’s adulterous passion is sparked by reading the tragedy Galeotto (Divinia Comedia, “Inferno” V, l. 118 ff ) and, in Goethe (1749 – 1832), Werther and Lotte’s ardent passion is triggered by the reading of Ossian’s poetry (Werther 142– 51). The author of The Sorrows of Young Werther further intended his book as a comfort to ease the suffering of those experiencing unrequited love, as the epigram proclaims.⁴⁹ For Rafik Schami (1946 –), stories and storytelling have healing powers and are a cure against dumbness and a desolate heart,⁵⁰ just as for Michael Ende (1929 – 1995) fantasy is a powerful antidote to deal with the hardships of reality and can have curative effects.⁵¹ Salman Rushdie (1947–) again tightly connects storytelling to the human environment, to ecology and to human emotions and happiness,⁵² while for Maori poet Robert Sullivan (1967–) poetry is a great communal act and part of human life and works in analogy to the human organism.⁵³ In the trenches of the First World War originated a new category of poetry, capturing and aesthetically digesting the horrors of an entirely new form of warfare.⁵⁴ The list of these, by intention, randomly assorted examples across

 “Alle Künste tragen bei zur größten aller Künste, der Lebenskunst.”  “Ich halte die Lektüre für eine der Formen der Glückseligkeit” (I believe reading is a form of happiness).  Although the book appears to have effected quite the contrary in its time, igniting a Werther phenomenon and resulting even in Werther suicides. See, for example, Richard Friedenthal and Martha Friedenthal-Haase, Goethe: His Life and Times (New Brunswick: Transaction, , ¹): .  The protagonist in Damascus Nights is suddenly struck dumb and his friends have to come up with stories for his cure.  In Die Unendliche Geschichte Bastian has to go to Phantásien and return to cure the world ().  In Haroun and the Sea of Stories ().  “A great living Library of people, / trillions of brain cells indexed / from the heart, cross-referenced / through usefulness to life, powered / by the stuff of life itself.” (“Waka ” )  Some such examples are Siegfried Sassoon’s “Repression of War Experience” and “Dreamers” or Isaac Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” and “Returning, We Hear the Larks”. See further: Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), especially the section “War as Art” ( – ); Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, ); Richard van Emden, The Trench: Experiencing Life on the Front Line,  (London: Bantam, ), and

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ages and cultures could be expanded at length. In all ages and cultures art has been found to be a balm that helps one cope with the strains of life. In these examples there intermingle two ideas of the function of art: art as a means to instruct and to have a definite purpose, and art as a means to instil pleasure without being necessarily useful. In his book Von der Notwendigkeit der Kunst (1959), the Austrian writer and politician Ernst Fischer distinguished already into two, apparently paradoxical, functions of art: Art as a medium for the individual to emotionally identify and thus unite with the collective and to participate in the universal experience of mankind, and art as an instrument to master reality by gaining distance from the seriousness of life. Here he differentiated between an “‘intuitive’-ecstatic” experience of art, a “‘Dionysian’ self-abandon” to it, and a “highly conscious” experience and “Apollonian” liberation from the restraints of reality by and in the work of art (1959: 7).⁵⁵ Thereby he attributes a social function to art as well as one of individual endurance. Although for the Marxist the function of art is always linked to the collective and the work process, he concludes that art needs the dialectic contradiction of experienced reality and artistically created form. A communal function of art is also championed by American literary critic Harold Bloom who, insisting on the importance of a Western literary Canon, has argued that some literary works are representative of certain cultures and nations. These works become part of the “communal or societal memory” (Bloom 1994: 19) and necessarily have an influence on later works, and hence to Bloom the Canon is “the true art of memory, the authentic foundation for cultural thinking” (1994: 35). Thomas Cooksey, who has presented something akin to a ‘counKlaus Vondung (ed.), Kriegserlebnis: Der Erste Weltkrieg in der literarischen Gestaltung und symbolischen Deutung der Nationen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ). Vondungen’s study concentrates particularly on the aspect of sense-making ( ff) and looks at literary processing of the war across the participating nations. Paul Goetsch has pointed to “The Fantastic in Poetry of the First World War” in his Monsters in English Literature: From the Romantic Age to the First World War (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, ):  – . On the First World War and autobiography, with an emphasis on remembering and generating memory discourse, see Ralf Schneider, “Erinnerungsdiskurs in der Autobiographie,” Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Mediendiskurse der Erinnerung in Großbritannien: Autobiographie – Roman – Film ( – ) (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, ):  – .  Fischer deduces art from work and in doing so traces it back to the Stone Age and the omnipresent hand-axes. However he does not link art and aesthetics to an evolutionary biological disposition ingrained in humanity but rather the communist sees art as being the result of a growing differentiation and abstraction of the work process and its tools, defining work as social activity, and as being the result of an increasing abstraction of objects first ‘imitating’ nature (:  – ). Consequently art, to Fischer, is never individual creativity but always collective productivity and production (: ).

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ter’ Canon of ten “‘classical’ masterpieces of non-Western world literature” (2007: 1), in line with Bloom understands canonical works as constituting a communal and societal memory (2007: 4). Both Bloom and Cooksey eventually disintegrate the Western/non-Western confinement of their Canons, emphasising that their chosen works are great because they transcend time, specific culture and national boundaries. These are works that are in a special way related to human life experience and human cognition, works that enrich as well as challenge the individual (Cooksey 2007: 3 – 4; Bloom 1994: 35, 38 – 39). In short they are works that are universal (Cooksey 2007: 3; Bloom 1994: 38, 524). More recently, Patrick Colm Hogan has translated ancient Indian theories of poetics and concepts of human emotion into modern cognitive science. In his theoretical narratological approach he points to a set of human emotions, five in number, that constitute five universal plots of narrative (cf. footnote 44). These emotions may vary in their composition according to the individual but they are universal components of all human life. While Hogan attempts to explain how it works, how narrative is part of human psychology, Karl Eibl tries to explain from where it comes and why, where the human aesthetic disposition originates and why there is a necessity for art in human biology and psychology.

2.2.2 Eibl’s Poetical Animal and the Biological Need of the Human for Art Bourdieu has delineated the process of the autonomy of art and distinguished between art that is economically or otherwise dependent or somehow purpose oriented and art that is without a definite purpose but aesthetically suffices itself. He has revealed the hierarchy of art and art consumption and differentiated between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural pleasures that are inseparably linked to social differences. While the lower social classes display a taste for the vulgar and unrefined, which Bourdieu classifies as ‘natural’ taste, the higher classes distinguish themselves by negating such profane pleasures and instead savour a consecrated, distinguished and ‘pure’ art. Eibl in turn shows that, despite any such historically developed relation of art and social distinction as Bourdieu works out, both the simple pleasures of play and the more refined pleasures of the beautiful originate in the same biological disposition of all humans, which Eibl calls the evolutionary ‘pleasure factor.’ This ‘pleasure factor’ in animal biology constitutes the stress relief that balances the stress factor in the biological system of the animal organism. As Codd has pointed out, Bourdieu is concerned with the social conditions in which art acquires meaning and not with the nature of art as such (1990: 157); Eibl, in contrast, is interested in an aesthetic disposition in humanity and the biological motivation for art. His evolutionary ‘pleasure

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factor’ corresponds to a great extent with Pool’s interpretation of Freud’s concept of a ‘pleasure principle’ in human psychology. Macpherson thus believed that making one’s own film could be just as pleasant and recuperative as taking a vacation trip (“Meisterstück” 2). In addition to the beneficial relaxant effects it furthermore would enhance personal expertise in this field, just as the recreational play of animals, according to Eibl, simultaneously trains their future hunting skills. Bryher in turn found the happiness factor in the ancient philosophy of Epicurus. She once declared that she “had always been Epicurean. To seek for happiness is the bravest of the philosophies and one, though not all, of the Mysteries” (Heart 211).⁵⁶ Considering that Pool sought “to fill the hollow left by chaos [i. e. the First World War]” through art and that they were searching for new forms not associated with this human catastrophe, considering further that they encouraged the amateur (which meant anyone interested) to experiment with the new aesthetic medium film, the universal biological disposition to art in mankind that Eibl retraces and which is missing from Bourdieu’s concept of social dispositions seems to be a vital thought in understanding Pool’s art and its elementary matter of concern. In Animal Poeta (2004), an interdisciplinary, evolutionary-biological anthropological approach, Karl Eibl laid the foundation for a biological cultural and literary theory. He critically incorporates the individual scientific fields of evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and socio-biology, and their several theoretical approaches and makes them utilizable for literature. His theoretical approach aims at reducing the gap between the natural sciences and cultural studies and gives attention to the evolutionary importance of art in the context of natural selection. Much of what Eibl delineates in this direction will not apply to the context of investigating Pool, but Eibl’s approach reveals the deficiencies of a purely sociological approach and points to the important biological function of art and entertainment for human life. His idea of the poet or artist as someone who secures survival, just as much as the successful hunter or strong fighter, presents the poet as an integral and beneficial part of a community. According to Eibl, the artist, due to his art, is able to relax the minds and bodies of the members of a community, which again has a beneficial effect upon their immune system, and thus contributes to procreation and survival (2004: 315 f). This then makes art a natural necessity that is just as important to human life as muscle force or success in hunting. Eibl encourages a revision, or maybe rather extension of typical evolutionary biological concepts. Following Eibl, art becomes a

 Epicureanism did not mean hedonism to Bryher but has to be rather understood as a modest happiness; it also was closely aligned to friendship for her (Heart ).

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‘soft’ survival strategy that supplements the ‘hard’ strategies commonly related to Darwinism. In the philosophy of Pool the poet or artist as well was to supply a means that would help heal the injuries of humanity, be it tremendous injuries caused by the horrors of war or daily afflictions, and deal with the conflicts of the modern age. Eibl’s approach ultimately revalues the position of the artist considerably by including him among the strong and mighty figures of a community, as opposed to seeing in him an asocial dreamer situated apart from social life. After complementing Bourdieu’s theories with Eibl’s, the social status of the artist becomes newly defined and the artist just as powerful a figure in the greater social field as the political ruler or the business magnate. The crucial literary core of his biological cultural theory on “Die Lust, das Schöne und das Spiel” (“pleasure, beauty, and play,” 2004: 277– 352) centres on entertainment and delight in aesthetic appearance and is the most interesting part for investigating Pool’s philosophy and theory of art. Eibl himself points out that, strictly biologically speaking, there is no art but that art too is a cultural universality (ibid. 277).⁵⁷ For Eibl argues that there exists the universality of a biological disposition to art in humanity. He traces this disposition back to a “forgotten evolutionary factor” (ibid. 310 – 19), a stress-pleasure mechanism, which he opposes to the long-standing general paradigm of a ‘red in tooth and claw’ Darwinism (ibid. 13).⁵⁸ In this stress-pleasure mechanism he finds a crucial evolutionary factor of survival, in that pleasure balances stress and secures recreation and health.⁵⁹ The ‘pleasure factor’ is furthermore one that is related to communal life and opposes a purely egocentric self-preservation instinct. Eibl attempts to explain where the necessity for art that has been recognised throughout history and by numerous nations originates from. Eibl had already demonstrated earlier, in Die Entstehung der Poesie (1995), how a biological human disposition to empathise and feel and a universal human need for socialising and mutual entertainment had led to the institution of the Nationaltheater, in the sense of a theatre for the people and popular bourgeois art, in eighteenth-century Germany. Eibl concentrates chiefly on theatre, as drama was of primary importance to the art philosophy of Storm and Stress in its

 This actually precludes any misinterpretations of a ‘culturally civilised people’ and assumptions of racial superiorities that Eibl might be accused of.  That Eibl, contrary to his own statements, is not the first to reconsider Darwin in this respect and discover the importance of socialising and cooperation in the evolutionary process is an issue that cannot be further discussed here.  Eibl explains further that if momentary stress (i. e. activating energy reserves, triggering off escape mechanisms, etc.) turns into permanent stress this can cause considerable loss of viability and capability of reproduction (e. g. by an increased susceptibility to infection) (: ).

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function as a popular medium for didactic purposes of enlightenment. He delineates how the Nationaltheater was employed to teach the bourgeois compassion, empathy and understanding. It is only valid to see the cinema as a natural successor to the popular dramatic medium of old and draw a connection with Pool’s activities in film and cinema culture. Eibl’s Entstehung still follows largely in the wake of the sociological system theory by Niklas Luhmann and affixes only a small part on biology at the end. To me, this is an evident indication that Eibl also found an exclusively sociological approach lacking in respect to certain aesthetic phenomena and in tackling his subject matter. The entire Poetogenesis series, in which Eibl’s Animal Poeta was published, can be sited at this point of divergence.⁶⁰ Eibl’s biological approach complements Bourdieu’s sociological theory by a ‘natural’ component that is also part of Pool’s art conception. While Bourdieu reveals the origins of the autonomous literary field in nineteenth-century France by means of the concept of l’art pour l’art, Eibl delineates how in eighteenth-century Germany there originated a ‘national’ art, in the sense of a popular bourgeois art, of mutual entertainment and with the specific social purpose of bringing the people together. By means of theatre, dance, and opera this public art wanted to instil communal sentiments and further a sense of security. Eibl finds the root of popular arts in a biological and thus universal human need for communal activity and socialising, and for establishing communal security, and in such universal dispositions as empathy, love, and emotion. Thus, where Bourdieu supplies a genesis of aestheticism, l’art pour l’art, and avant-garde art, Eibl provides a genesis of the popular or ‘folk’ art that Bourdieu does not care to examine further. Furthermore, Eibl’s biological dispositions of a communal animal poeta complement Bourdieu’s socially generated aesthetic dispositions for distinction. The two theoretical approaches come together in Pool’s idea of what may be termed, in continuation of Eibl’s term, a universal homo artes. Pool strove to unite the two apparently incompatible poles of art by bringing together the popular form  In Anthropologie der Literatur: Poetogene Strukturen und ästhetisch-soziale Handlungsfelder (Paderborn: Mentis, ), the editors Rüdiger Zymner and Manfred Engel follow the question why humans are the only known living beings that compose poetry and tales and what is the purpose of their doing so. What are the biological and anthropological preconditions of such a human poetical disposition? In Emotionalisierung – Von der Nebenstundenpoesie zum Buch als Freund: Eine emotionspsychologische Analyse der Literatur der Aufklärungsepoche (Paderborn, ), Katja Mellmann develops the literary psychological equipment for a literary historical research of emotion in order to study early Enlightenment texts and shows how these texts already provided structural basis modules for the emotionalising tendency of the Age of Sentimentalism. Im Rücken der Kulturen (Paderborn, ) continues in this line and examines the connections between culture, aesthetics and human nature.

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film with avant-garde aestheticism into “film for the film’s sake” and experimental film art by the amateur. The two different natures of these theoretical approaches define and roughly structure the two different aspects in the art of Pool: art in its social context (Bourdieu) and art as related to human emotions and universals (Aristotle to Eibl). This theoretical construct is designed to provide an assisting conceptual structure and instrument for analysing the phenomenon of Pool. The two approaches, which might seem rather incongruous at first, help to examine two different sides of the creative work of Pool and will become intertwined throughout the analysis. Thus the present study of Pool is structured akin to a double helix, with two complementary regions: One strand is concerned with the “system” of literature and art, i. e. with its production, social presentation and reception. The other strand considers biological anthropological aspects of art and the relation of art and (human) nature.

2.2.3 The Importance of Nature and Biology for Pool and Their Art “Why should one trouble to photograph a match stick when a birch tree is so interesting?” H.D. quotes Macpherson once saying in a conversation with her (quoted in Scott 1990: 111). This simple question is paradigmatic for Pool’s artistic attitude. H.D. explains that Macpherson was “not out of sympathy with any form of realistic cinema abstraction,” but he was not of “the ultra-modern abstract school” (ibid.). His art was organic, dynamic, was ‘natural’ and ‘real’ because art was life. His films display shots of sun reflecting on water, of trees swaying in the wind, and of moving clouds. Animals are running, flying, or climbing in his films. Pool rely on images from nature and sensory life experiences, which are part of ordinary and thus anyone’s life experience, to create an art that is comprehensible even to those who lack the cultural capital to enjoy ‘high’ art. An orchid will immediately suggest exoticism, a storm sensory turbulences, heat and humidity oppressive discomfort, sun and brightness happiness and so on. Yet, Pool also praise the aesthetic form and even use an avant-garde style to do so, but the aesthetic form is never completely severed from ordinary life. On the contrary, it only works its associations and suggestions based on this relation. Pool worked towards a highly aesthetic art that could be sensed. Nature was also closely linked to Macpherson, H.D., and Bryher’s lives. They resided in Switzerland, in the foothills near Lake Leman, surrounded by mountain

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ranges, with a spacious park and a private zoo at their Villa Kenwin.⁶¹ Their zoo contained at various times douracouli monkeys, lemurs, gibbons, cats and dogs (Friedman 2002: 565), and was apparently even once sought out to provide refuge for animals from the Zurich zoo. Macpherson would write of the blooming Rhododendron there in a letter to the absent H.D., and how it inspired happiness (quoted in Kenwin [47:29]).⁶² The menagerie, as they sometimes called themselves and were called by friends, also gave each other pet names:⁶³ Bryher was ‘Fido,’ the loyal little dog, Macpherson ‘Rover,’ the vagabond big dog, and H.D. was ‘Cat’, an animal of a slightly different, more elegant and aloof species.⁶⁴ In the context of Pool, the three friends themselves seem to relate their respective habitus to biological dispositions of animal nature, since they choose animal characteristics to symbolise their different individual ‘natures’ but also to symbolise their artistic and aesthetic dispositions. Here they deviate from the Bourdieuean notion of a solely socially conditioned habitus and are closer to Eibl’s poetic animal. As to their personalities, in the case of Fido and Rover nomen est omen and Cat suggests the elite nature of H.D. As to their artistic and aesthetic dispositions, Fido signals reliability and ethical virtue and therefore a strong emphasis on social function, Rover connotes movement and change but at the same time represents the ‘ordinary’ and popular, and Cat signifies elegance and style and thus a strong emphasis on form. The dogs represent the communal and a more social art, while the cat embodies independence and thus aesthetic and detached art. Nature here is representative as well as symbolic. Nature included man’s animal nature as well. H.D.’s Imagist poems, although not ‘nature poetry’ by any conventional standards, circled around nature – albeit a nature of a more mythical spirit. Nature, moreover, was part of each one’s cultural heritage. Macpherson with his Scottish Highland ancestry had a Celtic background. The Celtic represents a wilder, Nordic nature spirit. Celtic and Highland culture is said to be characterised by the irrational, natural

 For Pool’s pet zoo see the various photographs of the H.D. and Bryher Papers in the Beinecke collection: and (accessed  August ). Guest in her biography of H.D. supplies a photograph of Macpherson with Perdita’s cat Peter. For evacuated animals from the Zurich zoo see the letter from Bryher to Macpherson, Villa Kenwin,  March , quoted in Kenwin [::].  In a letter from Macpherson to H.D., May .  Pool would also give animal nicknames to their friends. On the pet names of Bryher, H.D., Macpherson and their friends see Louis Silverstein, “Nicknames and Acronyms Used by H.D. and Her Circle,” H.D. Newsletter : (Winter ):  – , also the appending “Biographical Notes” in Susan Friedmann’s Analyzing Freud.  It was for a similar reason that Disney in his film Aristocats chose the cat for his aristocratic animal.

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Figure 5: Macpherson in Celtic costume

magic, and the combination of the realistic and fantastic. It became also known as a folk culture characterised by legends, folk and fairy tales.⁶⁵ Especially in the nineteenth century there were several works that centred on the special importance of nature in Scottish poetry, such as The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry (1887) by John Veitch.⁶⁶ Matthew Arnold had once proposed that a Celtic influence effected a “turn for natural magic, for catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and vivid way” in English poetry (Lectures and Essays 341). Celticism had once inspired the Romantics, and even though Romanticism is never directly credited by Pool, Macpherson’s emphasis on emotion and sensitivity, which he finds particularly strong in the German national character, ties back to this cultural heritage of Sensibility. To Macpherson, as expressed in his two novels, a Celtic nature meant a certain Celtic imagination as well as a wild Celtic streak.⁶⁷ While the Celtic imagination was associated with a particular spiritual sensitivity, a clairvoyant or hysteric nature, a wild Celtic streak signified animal joy and vitality, a Dionysian quality of life.

 See for example Gerard Carruthers, Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: UP, ).  Carruthers continues to list further works (ibid. –).  The terms “Celtic imagination” and “wild Celtic streak” in Poolreflection (, ). Gaunt Island centres on Celtic presentiment, doom, madness and hysteric nature.

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The Highlands, more specifically the Hebrides, are the central theme in Macpherson’s second novel Gaunt Island. The nature prominently described therein is a wild, harsh and dangerous one. The sea is turbulent and roaring, gales are blowing, rain is beating. The rugged and rocky landscape is obscured by thick mists. Nevertheless, this nature is grand, tremendous and awe-inspiring. An atmosphere of the supernatural and a prescience of some impending doom are attached to this twilit scenery. This Nordic nature expresses human moods and emotions. It is also the home of fairies, goblins and sprites and of legends, tales and folksongs. It is the wild Nordic nature that inspired the Romantic Felix Mendelssohn to his “Hebrides” and even Beethoven set some Scottish folksongs to music. Bryher’s rootedness in nature becomes obvious already by choice of name. The Scillonian island in the Celtic sea with its wild, primeval nature symbolised freedom and adventure for her. The summers she spent there when a child had been the most treasured time of her life. There she had roamed the island freely, together with a friend, exploring and living through adventures – which, up to that point, had merely been possible by reading adventure stories. The time on the island had been a happy contrast to her restricted life at her parents’ home, where she grew up secluded and fettered by the Victorian conventions that were imposed upon a girl at that time. Bryher Island meant rebellion, breaking out of the social prison, leaving conventions and institutions behind and finding life. Although Bryher was critical of exaggerating the ‘goodness’ of the country and pointed out that most “humane and progressive movements have originated in cities” (Heart 208), she at the same time insisted that: all the same we have half a million years of dependence upon nature in our blood and only a thin crust of what we please to call civilisation over it. To be cut off from the breakers and the rain or the dawn rising on a windy morning is an impoverishment for most of us and if I had not been able to go back to the wilderness for an all too brief month each year, I am sure that I should have died. (ibid.)

From early on she had always needed to balance culture with nature, the ‘dead’ art in a museum with animated natural life outside. In her autobiography she recounts how she once, as a child, almost burned down the Uffizi by crashing into a pan of charcoal while having a fit. Her parents had taken her along to look at the pictures “for her future good” but Bryher refused to look and screamed that she hated museums. Instead she wanted to run along the river Arno and watch puppies chasing in the sunlight. Despite all her pragmatism and rationality, Bryher, even as an adult, needed adventure and wild nature. Adrienne Monier once concluded that while nine-tenths of Bryher were “all

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that is practical and balanced” the other tenth was “follement Romanesque” (quoted in Heart 248). In spite of her early and frequent exposure to ‘high’ culture, her extensive reading, and her avant-garde “apprenticeship,” as she called it (ibid. 243), Bryher never unlearned to appreciate a sunset (ibid. 311). The topic of the sunset, according to Bourdieu’s extensive empirical studies, is a key moment in distinguishing ‘pure’ from ‘vulgar’ or ‘popular’ taste. While less educated people find an aesthetic quality in a sunset, highly educated ones are less appreciative of or even disinterested in this particular motif or may even find it ugly. Bourdieu explains this by a will to distinction in the educated ones, who have come to learn that the sunset is a clichéd motif.⁶⁸ Bryher does not shy from describing a “magnificent sunset” of “gold and scarlet,” which in addition is given a certain symbolic connotation.⁶⁹ At the same time, she experiences the common ‘cliché’ motif in a new way, through a new medium, and from a fresh perspective, since Bryher at the time was sitting in the still novel invention of an airplane. Bryher had a lifelong desire to be free. The freedom of the Scillies she was to rediscover again in H.D.’s Sea Garden (1916). These poems “evoked for [her] both the Scillies and the South, it touched Mallarmé’s vision” (ibid. 216), as did in a somewhat similar way Marianne Moore’s poem “The Fish” (ibid. 237). When Bryher met H.D. in the summer of 1918, nervous that her knowledge of poetry was not sufficient for the occasion and might embarrass her, the first thing H.D. asked was if Bryher could tell her what a puffin was like. Of course, Bryher could since there were plenty of these sea parrots in the Scillies. Relieved and happy, Bryher recounts that her “test had come through the islands and not through books” (ibid. 217). H.D. herself had a sense of the wild nature spirit within her. Growing up in a place that had then been all fields and countryside, wild flowers and hidden paths, she had been a country girl before being ‘refined’ by Pound – albeit one growing up in a very intellectual as well as piously Protestant family. William Carlos Williams testified to her untamed spirit when he remembered that “she leaped over stiles in the fields, a hoyden, careless of her dress [or] ran out in the rain, calling it to fall down on her [or] plunged into the dangerous surf at Watch Hill, New Jersey” (quoted in Guest 2003: 3). She had been a ‘wood nymph’ and Pound had called her “Dryad”. There are some nude in nature pho-

 See the chapters “Pure and ‘Vulgar’ Taste” and “The Aesthetic Sense as a Sense of Distinction,” as well as the accompanying charts in Bourdieu’s Distinction.  Bryher describes seeing this sunset while being on the way to her dying father.

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Figure : Nude Bryher

Figure : H.D. as ‘Oread’

tographs of H.D. and of Bryher, when young, that evoke an ancient Greek spirit.⁷⁰ Their pose resembles Greek images on vases or ancient statues and H.D. is wearing a headband à la grecque in these pictures. Yet this idea of Classic Antiquity is remote from canonical academic Classicism and rather associated with the enthusiastic revival of nudism and the naturist movement around the time, and the idea of nature as a means of freedom from the confines of bourgeois society.⁷¹ The nature in H.D.’s poems was also Greek in style, with clear, hard and precise images rendered without any flourish in a rather ascetic manner. H.D. once

 The photographs are in the digital images collection of the Beinecke Library: Bryher Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Collection.  See John Alexander Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation,  –  (Stanford: UP, ). For a contemporary autobiographical account of nudism see Maurice Parmelee’s Nudism in Modern Life: The New Gymnosophy ().

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lectured her disciple Bryher on the two forms of art: “the wild Dionysiac, it might be called, and the cold, stately Helios metres” (quoted in Heart 225). While Bryher wanted “to be as wild as possible,” symbolised by her beloved Scilly Islands (ibid.), and Macpherson also bore in him the wild Dionysian Celtic strain, H.D. was rather the ‘Athenian’ one. Then again, H.D. could be wild and passionate and in her poems Bryher had sensed the freedom of the Scillies. H.D.’s poetic nature was not solely composed of clear and hard images but at the same time presented “sharp and violent landscapes of withheld passion” and a “sensuous remaking of Greek settings caught up in flux” (McCabe, 2007: 121). It was the ‘Dionysian’ Bryher who favoured the simple and clear forms of Bauhaus architecture, and Macpherson’s Dionysian qualities mingled with his precision and perfectionism and his longing for beauty in his art. The regenerative conflicts of classic and romantic forms, of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, of the ‘purely’ aesthetic and the ‘popular’ joy of life characterise all Pool’s works and are most prominently captured and symbolically theorised in Macpherson’ two novels Poolreflection and Gaunt Island.

Part II Technique and Style Towards a Universal Language of Art

3 A Language Composed of Images and E/motion 3.1 Montage & Metaphor and the Stream of Narrative Metaphor, along with symbols, similes and allegories, is a fundamental literary trope that conveys meaning figuratively by embodying an abstract notion in a concrete image, thus allowing a transference of meaning. Metaphors are central devices in poetry because they create analogies between images and indicate previously unperceived conceptual connections, thereby accomplishing a layering of meaning. However, metaphors are by no means restricted to poetry but extend into our everyday life and language as well: We are burning with love or are inflamed with rage, we may stab with words or fall to pieces. More recent studies understand metaphors in a more extended cognitive sense as “conceptual metaphors” and “concepts”.¹ Metaphors have furthermore been found to play an essential role in expressing emotions.² The study of metaphor in Western culture goes back as far as Aristotle, who discussed the subject in his Poetics, but metaphor is central to other literary cultures and art forms as well. A crucial inspiration for Modernist aesthetics was the haiku, a traditional Japanese short poem, which also functions on the principle of metaphor. The haiku is a three-line poem that typically yokes two disparate images together to create a sudden flash of insight, a new perception that connects two previously distinct facets of experience. It became popular with modernist writers around Ezra Pound, who were searching for a more concrete visual language because they felt verbal language to be imprecise, but avant-garde writers were not the only ones discovering the haiku for aesthetic purposes. Perhaps even more influential were the Soviet filmmakers, led by Sergei Eisenstein, who explicitly based the new film technique of montage on the Japanese tradition of metaphor. Eisenstein, searching for a new language that could teach socialism to the masses, openly  In his study Metaphors of Anger, Pride and Love: A Lexical Approach to the Structure of Concepts (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, ), Zoltán Kövecses shows how abstract concepts such as ‘love’ become accessible by the language we use to talk about them, and thereby reveals how portions of our conceptual system work. The term “conceptual metaphors” goes back to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s cognitive linguistic theory in Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). For a brief but helpful overview of metaphor theory in this context see also Ralf Schneider, “Metaphor,” Bielefeld Introduction to Applied Linguistics, eds. Stephan and Vivian Gramley (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, ): –.  In his Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (Cambridge: UP, ) Kövecses explores how metaphors express concepts of emotion.

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connected montage with the haiku, thereby implicitly claiming the mechanical medium of film and its montage technique to be both poetic and an art form. Montage is a term from industrial manufacture and originally meant the manual assembling of individual components. It was then used to describe the mechanical process by which individual ‘takes’ of film material are joined together to compose a film sequence. (Artists like Pablo Picasso, George Braque or Kurt Schwitters would introduce the manual process of montage to their art, and authors like Alexander Döblin, John Dos Passos and James Joyce adopted montage in their writings.) Clearly montage is a major component of the technical side of film, but it is at the same time related to metaphor, poetry and human cognition. Just like in the haiku, the sudden juxtaposition in montage of two contrasting images can create a new, third notion that connects the first two. Eisenstein realised that montage could work analogously to the principle of metaphor. Eisenstein’s disruptive montage style of editing, however, is only one form of film editing. Perhaps the dominant tradition in film aesthetics is continuity editing, which aims to create a continuous ‘flow’ that draws the spectator into the narrative by concealing the artifice of the medium. Even though this technique is the exact opposite of Eisenstein’s, it is similarly related to the nature of human conception in that we think or dream in a continuous stream of images and associations. Modernist writers such as Dorothy Richardson or Virginia Woolf tried to translate this theory of human conception into literature by using what came to be known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. The paragon of continuity editing at the time of Pool was the German film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst. By the time Pool became interested in film, there were thus two established modes of editing: On the one hand there was the ‘montage editing’ of Eisenstein, also known as ‘Russian montage’, and on the other the ‘continuity editing’ of Pabst. These two different techniques are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they do indicate different artistic approaches, intentions, and aesthetics, just as a poem is distinct from narrative and the compendious, clear image of Imagism distinct from the stream of associations in Richardson’s extensive novel cycle. Pool’s ambition was to bring these two diverging artistic directions together.

3.2 Eisenstein and Cinematographic Metaphor According to Eisenstein “film art³ is, first and foremost, montage” (“Beyond the Shot” 138). Even though Eisenstein developed his idea of montage and film art

 I here, on purpose, digress from Robert Taylor’s translation (which gives ‘cinema’) because his

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with the decidedly ideological purpose of creating a new collective language of socialism for the young Soviet Republic, his theoretical ideas became fundamental to cinematography and influenced filmmakers throughout the world.⁴ I have no intention of denying Eisenstein’s ideological bias, but my interest here is in his fundamental concern with a universal language or way of expression. Herein I find a matter of concern that he shared with Pool, who being interested in individual psychology and moreover rather apolitical in their works otherwise had distinctly different concerns from Eisenstein. Eisenstein, like the members of Pool, was interested in human emotion, the secret of what affects mankind, how the visual works upon the human psyche or intellect, and how to employ the new medium film and film art as a means for enlightenment and for the advance of humanity. His importance to Pool becomes already obvious by the fact that some of his film theoretical writings’ first translations into English were published in Pool’s Close Up magazine, and I will revert to some of them for the following discussion of Eisenstein’s film method.⁵ What was then known as ‘Russian montage’ was a revolutionary method that influenced in particular European avant-garde film technique.

3.2.1 Eisenstein’s Collective Language of Emotion In striving for a new collective language, Eisenstein thought about the basics of human expression. What was common to language and mental processes beyond the confines of nationality, culture and class? Two elements he thought to be translation does not differentiate between the commercial side of cinema (studios, capital, ‘stars’) and film as an art form, a distinction that Eisenstein at this point in his text emphasises and that also Lenz and Diederichs make in their German translation. See Sergej M. Eisenstein, Jenseits der Einstellung, eds. Felix Lenz and Helmut H. Diederichs (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ): .  See for example David Bordwell. The Cinema of Eisenstein (Harvard: UP, ); Jean AntoineDunne and Paula Quigley (eds.), The Montage Principle: Eisenstein in New Cultural and Critical Contexts (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, ); Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: UP, ); Andrew Dudley, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford UP, ); Ian Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, ); also Joachim Paech, Literatur und Film (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, ²).  The first of the Eisenstein publications in Pool’s film magazine, spanning from –, was “The Sound Film: A Statement from U.S.S.R.,” (together with Pudowkin and Alexandroff) Close Up : (October ), followed by “The New Language of Cinematography,” Close Up : (May ), “An Introduction to ‘The Fourth Dimension in the Kino’, Part I and II,” Close Up :–: (March – April ), “The Dinamic Square, Part I and II,” Close Up :–: (March – June ), “The Principles of Film Form,” Close Up : (September ), “Cinematography With Tears!” Close Up : (March ), “An American Tragedy,” Close Up : (June ).

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fundamental: images and emotion. In their primitive state, he discovered, all languages were constructed of pictures, then gradually those pictures lost their ‘naturalistic’ representation and became abstract, embodying concepts in the form of metaphors or allegories (“Dickens, Griffith” 246–249). Eisenstein grounds his cinematography in language rather than in such visual arts as painting (“Dramaturgy” 178), but it is a language of images in which abstract meanings are conveyed through visual codes called tropes and sub-divided into metaphors, similes, and symbols. Metaphor, for Eisenstein, was the origin of all language: “the primitive metaphor necessarily stands at the very dawn of language” (“Dickens, Griffith” 248), and he developed his theory based on the academic research of international linguists. With Mauthner⁶ he held that language, especially spoken language, is composed of witticisms that lost their stories and only remain as metaphors (ibid. 246–247) and with Potebnya⁷ he agreed that “at the threshold of the creation of language stands the simile, the trope and the image” (ibid. 247). In Potebnya he furthermore found the idea that word and image are closely connected to an active process of thought, and that it is “a universal historical phenomenon of human thought [that] word and image are the spiritual half of the matter, its essence” (ibid. 248). With Werner⁸ he came to believe that indeed the “fact word” as such is already “a rudiment of the poetic trope” (ibid. 247). I will come back to this point once more when discussing Eisenstein’s ideas concerning Japanese ideograms and the haiku. Eisenstein found in montage not only a means to produce effects, but above all ‘a means to speak’ and hence a means to present ideas (“Dickens, Griffith” 245). “The emotional principle is universally human,” Eisenstein wrote in one of his Close Up articles, while to him the intellectual principle “is profoundly tinged by class” and by the prevailing social system (“Fourth Dimension” 268). Thus in devising a collective language, it had to be initially a language that appealed to human emotions. Consequently, “the secret of the structure of montage,” he was convinced, lay in the “secret of the structure of an emotional language” (“Dickens, Griffith” 249). The chief concern in montage is that the individual segments be united to a generalized image by means of emotion. Emotional excitement alone is able to produce an imagist turn of speech and have it resonate (ibid. 252). For his analysis of an affective emotional language manner Eisenstein relied upon Joseph Vendrye’s Language (1921), which stated that the basic difference between affective, i. e. spoken language, and logical (intellectual) language,

 Fritz Mauthner (–), Austrian philosopher and author.  Alexander Afanasjewitsch Potebnya (–), Russian linguist and philologist.  Richard Maria Werner (–), Czech literary historian.

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i. e. written language, lies in the construction of the sentence. The verbal image, split up into its components in relation to the speaker’s impressions, is dramatic and becomes kinematical, and functions in accordance with the principles of montage in film. Written language, in consequence, is somewhat static and similar to the long shot (ibid. 249–250). The film pioneer apparently wanted to devise “a sort of Film-Grammar” (“Principles of Film Form” 179). To this purpose he dissected language into its rudimentary elements, in which he saw the equivalent to the ‘montage molecule’ in film, in order to analyse the composition of language and then to devise a film language parallel to it. However, Eisenstein claims that the source of ‘affective logic’ has to be looked for especially in “inner speech” because inner speech sustains the affective structure most perfectly and cannot be severed from “sensual thinking” (“Dickens, Griffith” 250–251). In a late Close Up article, Eisenstein realised the great advantage of film concerning “the idea of the ‘internal monologue’” (“American Tragedy” 120). “Film alone,” he believed, “has at its command the means of presenting adequately the hurrying thoughts of an agitated man” (ibid.). Literature was almost powerless therein, unless it “transgressed its orthodox bounds” (ibid.). Such a transgression he found “brilliantly achieved, as far as is feasible within the harsh framework of literary limitations” in James Joyce’s Ulysses, in the “immortal ‘inward monologues’ of Leopold Bloom” (ibid.). Here Eisenstein’s emotional language becomes linked with psychology, thought processes, and the mechanisms of the human mind and intellect. Eventually the language of emotion was to be used for what the Russian called ‘intellectual film’.

3.2.2 Intellectual Film: Eisenstein’s Dialectical Language for the Masses According to Eisenstein, optical superposition of motion resulted in spatial dynamisation and achieved a ‘primitive-psychological’ effect. The next step for film language was to progress from spatial dynamisation to emotional dynamisation. By means of associational montage, i. e. the emotional combinations of chains of psychological associations, it was possible to sharpen or heighten a situation emotionally (“Dramaturgy” 174). The sum of several montage pieces that each provoke a certain association “amounts to a composite complex of emotional feeling” (“Dramaturgy” 178). However, this complex could deteriorate into kitsch⁹ or mere aesthetic play that “ossifies into lifeless literary symbolism

 Eisenstein exemplifies such an instance of kitsch in the standard montage presentation of murder (“Dramaturgy” ).

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and stylistic mannerism” (ibid. 177). His foremost concern was with an art that was ‘popular’ in the sense that it was designed to captivate as well as advance the average recipient.¹⁰ While conventional film language had already progressed from purely optical to emotional, Eisenstein wanted to take it even one step further, from the emotional to the intellectual, by combining the representation of a conventional idea with incongruent symbolic pictures to prompt an intellectual resolution. To illustrate his concept, Eisenstein gives an example from his film Ten Days: In one scene, the intercutting titles of ever higher rank are combined with Kerensky ascending the staircase in the Winter Palace, but since he is each time ascending the same flight, the conflict of the two montage cells produces an effect of absurdity (ibid. 179). Thus emotional dynamisation might be transformed into intellectual dynamisation, and whereas conventional film operated upon the emotions, Eisenstein saw in this method of expressing ideas “a hint of the possibility of likewise developing and directing the entire thought process” (ibid. 180). Herein he saw the possibility of a “quite new form of filmic expression” and of a “purely intellectual film which, freed from traditional limitations, will achieve direct forms of thoughts, systems and concepts” (ibid.). Eisenstein’s desire to develop a ‘purely intellectual film’ and a didactic film language that directed cognitive processes and conveyed ideological concepts shows some parallels to Brecht’s idea of an ‘epic theatre’. In contrast to Brecht, however, Eisenstein wanted his spectators to sympathise and identify with his proletarian heroes. The example of Kerensky ascending the flights of stairs aptly demonstrates how Eisenstein’s intellectual dynamisation works primarily by knowledge instead of emotion. The combination of the conventional idea of rank and hierarchy with the symbolic picture of the Jordan staircase in the Winter Palace only results in an intellectual resolution if one has a clear idea of the symbolic setting. Someone knowing the architecture of the staircase will realise that Kerensky is not ascending continuously upwards but instead is ‘ascending’ the same flights over and over, one time using the right wing, one time the left of the pompous Baroque staircase. Kerensky is literally making no progress. In combination with the ascending ranks this treading on the spot reveals the absurdity of the hierarchical concept. However, if someone not knowing this particular staircase simply perceived the universal symbol of stairs and the familiar sensation of contin-

 Even though Eisenstein’s understanding of ‘popular’ art was strongly influenced by his communist-ideological concept of propaganda art, his intentions are similar to Pool’s pursuit of a universal language of art for the advance of humanity. Pool’s conception of film art also called upon the average, interested recipient and was as averse to kitschy Hollywood commercial productions as it was critical of purely elite avant-garde art.

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uous upward movement, he or she would not sense any incongruity. The symbol of the stairs and the unconscious sensation of ascending stairs would be quite in line with the rising in rank and the moment would be lost or, if isolated from its context, may even confirm a conception of hierarchy. The scene demonstrates that Eisenstein’s ‘intellectual film’ entails the risk of becoming too detached from the representational and therewith too detached from universal human sensations and emotions. In relying on national cultural capital for symbolism, the film hampers the understanding of those unfamiliar with this capital. b Although Eisenstein had originally rooted montage in the works of Dickens and the great nineteenth-century novelists,¹¹ the bourgeois European tradition no longer met the demands of Soviet Russia; montage and its emotional language needed to be further developed to fit its new purpose and Russia’s new mentality. Eisenstein wanted to advance montage from the epic tradition of parallel montage to a dialectic tradition of metaphorical montage; he wanted to advance from representation to abstract conception. He found this principle of montage not only in the narrative literature of Europe and Western culture but in the symbolic and poetic tradition of Eastern culture as well. He discovered that montage was the principle nerve of Japanese culture. Eisenstein recognized his montageidea in Japanese calligraphy and the poetic form of the haiku. Japanese script to him is principally pictorial: the hieroglyph.¹² He delineates a genesis of Japanese writing from its origin, when the sign was an almost naturalistic representation of the original object, over several centuries of different styles of script to the hieroglyph’s freeze in its present abstract form (“Beyond the Shot” 138). This he sets in analogy to the development of film language from a representational naturalism to his intellectual film. In another category of the hieroglyph called huei-i, Eisenstein discovers his idea of montage in that in huei-i the combination of two hieroglyphs does not result in a sum total but in a product of another dimension: a concept. By com-

 See his renowned essay “Dickens, Griffith, and Film Today” ().  On Eisenstein’s film theory of the hieroglyph see further Joachim Paech, “Zur filmtheoretischen Hieroglyphen-Diskussion,” Hieroglyphen: Stationen einer anderen abendländischen Grammatik, eds. Aleida and Jan Assmann (München: Fink, ): –. Already as early as  the American poet Nicholas Vachel Lindsay had presented a theory of hieroglyphics for early film and thus one of the first aesthetics of film at all in his study The Art of the Moving Picture (Paech : –; Rippl : –). Gabriele Rippl points out that the term ‘hieroglyph’ became important in the first decades of the twentieth century especially in discourses about the new, technically produced pictures (Rippl : ).

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bining two ‘representable’ objects something graphically unrepresentable is illustrated. In his Close Up article, he gave the following examples: Eye + Water = To weep Door + Ear = To eavesdrop Child + Mouth = To cry Mouth + Dog = To bark Mouth + Birds = To sing Knife + Heart = Sorrow (“Principles of Film Form” 124)

Eisenstein comes to the conclusion: “[T]his is montage!! Yes. It is precisely what we do in cinema” (“Beyond the Shot” 139). In this principle of montage in its “condensed and purified form” (my emphasis), Eisenstein sees the instigation for what he calls “intellectual cinema” (ibid.). He recognizes in the ideogram – as the term already suggests – a “laconicism in the visual exposition of abstract concepts” (ibid.). He discerned, like Pound, the same economy of expression in the haiku and tanka. The haiku and tanka juxtapose two pictures to present a third, abstract idea or meaning and thus work metaphorically. In the richness of their semantic combinations they unfold “a profusion of figurative effect” (ibid. 140). They become to Eisenstein formulae and concepts “transformed into an image” and “concentrated Impressionist sketche[s]” (ibid.). To him these poems are montage phrases or montage lists. The plain composition of two to three details of a material series in them presents a complete idea of another, psychological order (ibid.). Moreover, in this form of poetry, in the arrangement of hieroglyphs, the intellectual concept “blossoms forth immeasurably in emotional terms” (ibid. 141). The filmmaker here finds a language of emotion that is able to present the abstract. It is exactly this language that also found its way into Pool’s film Borderline, as I will show. Eisenstein admits that his demonstration of the hieroglyphic tradition in the lyrical form of the tanka is “not historically consistent but consistent in principal in the minds of those who have created this method” (ibid.). Therefore his approach is rather of an anthropological nature. He is interested in a universal language grounded in human thought and perception. He finds in montage a language common to humans in many different cultures throughout the ages, in Japanese and Chinese ideograms, in Dickens’ novels, in hieroglyphs and in early primitive forms of various languages. Accordingly he concludes that thinking and expressing abstract thought and emotion by means of pictures and in a metaphorical way is universal to humanity. Eisenstein had a strong notion of ‘transcendental’ vision that he intended to induce by his cinematic technique. Just as in Japanese the juxtaposition of the two

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material ideograms results in what Eisenstein called a “transcendental” (“Principles of Film Form” 175) concept, the juxtaposition of the two material images or shots in his montage was to result in a ‘transcendental’ cognition as well. His metaphorical montage concept and his symbolism (Aitken) show some affinity to poetic Imagism, with whose members he shares the West’s discovery of the haiku.

3.3 Imagism 3.3.1 Ezra Pound and the Clear, Objective Image Pound, despite working more than a decade before Eisenstein and not with the new medium film but in the old medium poetry, also arrived at the form of Japanese haiku and tanka in his endeavours to substitute a precise visual component for the superfluous verbiage that he found cluttered and obscured the poetry of his time.¹³ He wanted to free the old, convention-ridden medium of poetry of its traditional confines. One way to break free from regulated metre in general and the monotony of the iambic metre in particular was through free verse, to which the syllabic nature of the haiku opened a door. Another way was to transform the verbal into the visual, a possibility also contained within the form of the haiku.¹⁴ The immediacy of the image also led Pound to become interested in Chinese written characters, since the Chinese ideogram was originally pictorial in nature and therefore a more immediate form of communication. This interest in the Chinese ideogram constitutes another parallel to Eisenstein, who, as I have mentioned, discovered therein a “visual exposition of abstract concepts” and the beginning of his intellectual cinema. Pound had come across the Chinese ideogram in his readings of Ernest Fenollosa¹⁵ and his concern was with the art of poetry and with discovering ‘new’ means of expression to revive this

 On Pound’s role in modernist poetry and his poetry see Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, ), Walter Baumann, The Rose in the Steel Dust: An Examination of The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Bern: Francke, ), Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, ), Hugh Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal, –  (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, ).  For Pound’s endeavour to reform poetry and generate in Imagism a new pictorial writing see Rippl (: –).  It was Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (c. ) that stressed the pictorial nature of the Chinese ideogram. Pound had edited and published this essay after the author’s death and in his short preface declared it to be “a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics.” Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (San Francisco: City Lights Books, ): .

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art. His interest in capturing an abstract idea in a concrete image and in generating a moment of cognition is somewhat similar to Eisenstein’s, yet his motive is distinctly different. In contrast to Eisenstein’s socio-political desire to raise class consciousness and advance communist thought, Pound’s concern was purely with literary aesthetics and poetic form, at least in this early phase of Imagism.¹⁶ Beasley has shown that Pound’s poetics were grounded “on a principle of verbal insufficiency” (2007: 50) and that his conception of the precision of the visual was rooted in contemporary continental thought on the discriminating eye (ibid. 53 f).¹⁷ She has further demonstrated that Pound’s engagement with the avantgarde art scene in London and Paris not only resulted in formal poetic experiments but also shaped his critical vocabulary, which laid the foundation for a “literary modernism [that] is, paradoxically, a visual culture” (2007: 4). Beasley reveals that Pound aligned himself with the visual culture of modernism primarily through high cultural forms. He went to art exhibitions and visited art galleries, he wrote on contemporary painting and was interested in avant-garde sculpture, but he completely dismissed popular forms such as photography and film.¹⁸ Pound believed that form and style can express an idea. He wanted to revive the beauty of poetry and ‘to transgress its orthodox bounds’ and find new forms that were more dynamic and would ask for active participation by the reader. First and foremost he insisted on “objectivity and again objectivity” (Pound, The Letters 48 f) in his intent to free poetry from its effusive subjectivity. Like a sculptor he wanted to carve out hard poetic images.¹⁹

 On Imagism see Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (Stanford: UP, ), William Pratt and Robert Richardson (eds.), Homage to Imagism (New York: AMS Press, ), William Pratt, The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature (Ashland: Story Line Press, ), also John T. Gage, In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism (Baton Rouge, London: Louisiana UP, ).  Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge: UP, ). Beasley again relies for her account of this contemporary continental thought on Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (New York: Oxford UP, ).  For Pound’s interaction with visual artists see Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge: UP, ), Andrew Clearfield, These Fragments I Have Shored: Collage and Montage in Early Modernist Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, ), Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ), Michael North, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca: Cornell UP, ), Marjorie Perloff, Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy (London: Tate Gallery, ).  I refer here to Donald Davie’s book Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ).

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In 1913, Pound publicly inaugurated Imagism by stating the three main principles of imagisme in a ‘non-manifesto’²⁰ as: 1. 2. 3.

Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

Their ‘Doctrine of the Image’, they decided, did not concern the public and therefore was not published (Flint “Imagisme” 199). But Pound defined the ‘Image’ as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Pound, “Few Don’ts” 200). Imagism was considered to be the first English avant-garde movement, even though it was decidedly anti-revolutionary and distanced itself from the political and social radicalism of Futurism; it proclaimed that its “only endeavour was to write in accordance with the best tradition as […] found in the best writers of all times” (Flint “Imagisme” 199).²¹ The small group of authors that formed under the term Imagism – Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington, and F.S. Flint – met in the British Museum and discussed the haiku and the classics. Nevertheless, their concern with a poetry composed of purely objective images was radically new. By the time free verse had become a mark of a democratic art form, however, Pound was no longer interested in Imagism, pronounced free verse to be non-artistic and instead now favoured working in a variety of metres and intricate Provençal forms for a more elite poetic mode. The most famous and most anthologised haiku by Pound is “In a Station of the Metro” (1916); in only three lines it captures an ‘emotional complex’. In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.

The poem juxtaposes two images, a metropolitan crowd of people and a tree branch. It aestheticizes the urban crowd by transforming it into an image of beauty, the poetic symbol of the flower or blossom. Yet it does not use the con-

 “A Few Don’ts By an Imagiste,” Poetry : (March ): –. Although usually ascribed to Pound these principles were originally published in the preceding contribution “Imagisme” by Flint (–).  In consequence, Lawrence Rainey, in Institutions of Modernism, terms it “the first anti-avantgarde” (: ).

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ventional flower symbol but equals the single faces to single petals. Pound wrote that he tried to capture in words an emotional experience he once had in the Paris metro when he got out of a train and suddenly saw one beautiful face after another in the crowd. First he “wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it. … Six month later [he] made a poem half that length; a year later [he] made the following hokku-like sentence” (quoted in Pound 1988: 381, note 9). The technique is reminiscent of Eisensteinian montage. In his film Ten Days that Shook the World, Eisenstein “gives the effect of the crowd by quick flashes of different faces from different angles” (Bryher, Film Problems 15). Pound’s ‘montage’, though, shows a certain aesthetic arrest. The extremely condensed poem finally captured Pound’s “metro emotion,” as he called it (quoted in Pound 1988: 381, note 9), by two ‘snapshots’ of the moment. Pound defined his haiku as a ‘one-image poem’ that was “a form of super-position” by which he meant “one idea set on top of another” (quoted in Sommerkamp 1984: 64). The two separate ideas or images are set in relation to each other syntactically by the colon, which functions as an equation mark to his aesthetic formula.²² Pound had asked for an image that ‘presented an intellectual or emotional complex in an instant of time’. Now, if one understands the faces in the metro crowd as an image for the idea of modern metropolitan and industrial life, and the petals on the bough as an image for the idea of supreme beauty that is super-positioned on the first, then the intellectual or emotional complex Pound talks of can be explained. The super-position of the two images generates in the reader the aesthetic energy of experiencing modern industrial life in terms of poetic beauty. Nonetheless, the haiku seems to ‘freeze’ a moment in time and has a rather static quality (cf. Sommerkamp 1984: 65; Rippl 2005: 200). It also depersonalises the humans in the crowd, turning them into purely aesthetic objects of stasis; yet these objects, the petals, are still organic in this poem. Furthermore the poem, despite being impersonal and turning humans into objects, emphasises their individuality in that it stresses the single faces within the anonymous mass of the urban crowd. In this relation Beasley has pointed out that “modernist individualism should not be collapsed into late Romantic subjectivity” (2007: 9). It presents Pound’s artistic credo of the individual versus the herd – two sides of the impersonal objective and the individual subjective that Beasley has considered in the political context of Pound’s contributing to the New Age, with its ‘Guild Socialism’, as well as to The Egoist with its individualist anarchism (ibid. 78–94).

 In some print versions it is a semicolon. On Pound’s technique of ‘super-position’ see Sommerkamp (: –; Rippl : ).

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Pound would later make the transition from the aestheticism of Imagism to the cruder and more blatant, populist form of Vorticism;²³ a change which seems unintentionally described in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” (1920: ll. 21–32). Although Pound had originally started out ‘organic’ with Imagism and the nature philosophy implicit in the Japanese haiku, he later developed toward the inorganic by his glorification of the machine in Vorticism.²⁴ Vorticism stood in direct contrast to the natural and organic facets of Imagism, a contrast that was defined early on by Amy Lowell, who asked: “But where were the Greeks; where were the Japanese with their unmechanized haiku and tanka; where was the ‘pagan mystic,’ H.D., or Pound himself? Talking machines, she’d be damned if she’d have anything to do with them” (quoted in Guest 2003: 68). As he moved from the organic towards the mechanic, Pound simultaneously shifted from the democratic principle (as represented, for example, by free verse) to the anti-democratic and fascistic.²⁵ Vorticism meant energy but it propagated the energy of the machine, a dehumanised and non-organic energy. Pound had written: “The Vortex is the point of maximum energy. It represents in mechanics the greatest efficiency. We use the words ‘greatest efficiency’ in the precise sense – as they would be used in a text book of MECHANICS” (“Vortex” 153). Pool may very well be conceived as a direct contrast to Pound and Lewis’ highly individualist concept of the vortex. Lewis had explained once: “You think at once of a whirlpool. At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist” (Hunt 1982: 211, also quoted in Guest 2003: 64) and Pound had stated: “All experience rushes into this vortex” (“Vortex” 153). Pool’s logo, explained as a stone thrown into a pool causing ripples to expand, is in its celebration of centrifugal force exactly opposed to the centripetal image of Vorticism. While the Vorticist whirlpool with the Vorticist at its centre signifies an egocentric principle, the centrifugal ripples symbolise the friendly, universal and humane principle of Pool’s enterprise.

 The first edition of BLAST, Vorticism’s magazine, displayed a cover of bright aggressive pink and the magazine was fashioned in an advertisement manner. This was Pound’s latest attempt to popularise the literary form, but I will discuss this in context with Pool’s film magazine.  For this development see Beasley, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (), Michael Harry Levinson, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: UP, ), Elizabeth Bruce, Pound and Vorticism (), Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ).  Frederic Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: Univ. of Cal. Press, ) and Miranda B. Hickman, The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D. and Yeats (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, ): –.

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It is consistent with his poetic philosophy that Pound would move from organic Imagism to non-organic Vorticism, despite the cause for his break with the Imagist movement being personal bickering. After all, the machine rather than nature is the more apt medium for indifferent objective precision. Nonetheless, despite his Vorticist praise of the machine and despite his later conclusion that painting and sculpture were luxury goods due to their materiality, Pound disregarded the mass arts of photography and cinema for his purposes (Beasley 2007: 8). The aesthete and elitist proponent of high culture and beauty would not stoop to such unrefined forms of mechanical reproduction and popular culture. Pound, and Eliot as well, simply “considered the medium outside the scope of their poetics” (McCabe 2005: 13), even though Pound’s haiku image ‘montage’ anticipated Eisenstein’s montage theories (ibid.) and he called for “a prose kinema” in Mauberly. Pound pronounced his derisive attitude towards popular art in his essay “Kinema, Kinesis, Hepworth etc.” (1918): “We hear a good deal about the ‘art’ of the cinema, but the cinema is not Art. Art with a large A consists in painting, sculpture, possibly architecture… Art is a stasis” (352).²⁶ Once more Pool seem to explicitly position themselves in distinction to Pound and his understanding of art as defined in this article when Macpherson in his Close Up editorial announces: “Art meant something, some static symbol or regime […] I mean… ART! Isn’t it getting to be rather an awful sort of word, or isn’t it?” (“As Is” 4:1, 6) and maintains that “films are the art of the future” (ibid. 15).

3.3.2 H.D.’s Ascetic Metaphors & Mythopoetic Montages H.D. was less enthusiastic about Japanese poetry than the other members of the Imagist group and she also did not participate in their stylistic ‘haiku exercises’ (Sommerkamp 1984: 8).²⁷ In contrast to Pound with his translations of Chinese and Japanese poets and his interest in the tradition of the haiku, H.D. was from the beginning predominantly influenced by ancient Greek poetry and in particular by Sappho and her cult of Aphrodite.²⁸ Bryher recalls that she always stressed that

 Pound wrote this essay under the pseudonym B.H. Dias in his “Art Notes” in The New Age : (September , ).  Sommerkamp concludes that individual poems by H.D. showing similarities to the haiku are not directly modelled on the haiku but rather inspired indirectly via coloured woodprints (: –).  On H.D., ancient Greek poetry and Sappho see Diana Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, – (Cambridge: UP, ) and Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (Cambridge: UP, ), also Susan Gubar, “Sapphistries,” Signs  (Autumn ): –; on Sap-

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whatever one did: “You must love. […] completely and with utter dedication” (Heart 226). The idea of love as the central driving principle in poetry and all art is missing from Pound’s cardinal poetic principles. To him hardness and clarity were of primary importance and he particularly found this economical clarity in the self-meditative and detached philosophy of Zen Buddhism that lay at the roots of the haiku.²⁹ Although he too wanted his images to start off a dynamic process of emotion in his readers, it was an intellectual process of (re)cognition (similar to Eisenstein’s concept of an ‘emotional dynamisation’ transformed into ‘intellectual dynamisation’ in the Russian’s intellectual cinema) rather than a non-rational but sensual experience of visionary powers. Even Pound’s interest in the troubadours relates him to an idealised concept of courtly love. H.D.’s ‘love’ poetry, though, was not a poetry of love in the conventional sense but rather an intense and passionate affective experience of life and art. Love was an energetic propelling force in life and nature and a passionate feeling for life and nature; it was Eros, in the sense of enthusiasm, ecstasy and furor poeticus. Such love need not necessarily be high-spirited euphoria but may also include the exact opposite, such as an intense experience of pain and suffering, or even join the two in the ‘bittersweet’ love experience that was so characteristic for Sappho (Carson 1986: 3–9). H.D.’s poem “Sea Rose” (1916) provides an example of such ‘bittersweet’ intensity; the “marred” and “stunted” sea rose surpasses the luscious spice-rose in the “acrid fragrance hardened in a leaf.” In her poem “Pursuit” (1916) the purple

pho’s poetry see Jim Powell (ed.), The Poetry of Sappho (Oxford: UP, ) and on Sappho’s life and works, and her religious writings addressed to Aphrodite see Marguerite Johnson, Sappho (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press and London: Gerald Duckworth, ).  On Zen philosophy in the haiku and Pound’s adaptation of it cf. Yoshinobu Hakutani, “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism,” Modernity in East-West Literary Criticism: New Readings, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (Cranbury: Associated University Press, ): –. The Zen vision of enlightenment is “a vision devoid of thought and emotion” (Hakutani : ). Hakutani points out that Pound’s poetics “in its philosophical aspect considerably differs from Basho’s” because he relates it to Western thought categories and to ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’: “Pound’s observation [of the enlightening vision], however, is very much a Western formulation of an experience familiar to Zen-inspired artists” which leads to an “impersonal conception of poetry” (: ). Hakutani in this context also points to T.S. Eliot. However, since Pound and Eliot do not seek to transcend “the consciousness of self” (ibid. ), like the Zen poet, but combine an Eastern philosophical concept of depersonalisation and detachment with Western intellectualism and ideas of consciousness, their poetry on balance becomes a dehumanised art of nonsympathy and in the end is egoistic. Appropriately Pound edited the magazine The Egoist and Beasley has demonstrated how the philosophy of the magazine is connected to his poetics. (According to Margaret Reynolds, Pound had also been interested in Sappho and initially introduced her to H.D., and she found his early poetry much indebted to the Greek poetess (: –). Still I hold that H.D. gives the quality of love in Sappho a different weight.)

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buds of a wild-hyacinth are bruised, “show deep purple where your heel pressed,” with the symbolic colour of sensuous passion growing into the colour of passiō.³⁰ H.D. was to describe this as “Dionysius Zagreus”, the suffering or dying god whom she pictures as “the flower torn, broken by chemical process of death […] white lily flesh bruised, withered” (Notes 32). H.D.’s flowers are metaphors of ascesis that renounce the conventional and the sentimental. The pain around which her poetry often circles is not presented as a subjective emotion but as a torturous quality of life that on the one hand is sensuous and on the other will be bravely endured. H.D. often uses invented sea flowers, which she opposes to conventional poetic flowers of passion and beauty, to visualise this sensual but painful quality, which is symbolised by the “marredness” of her sea flowers. Neither the sea violet, sea lily,³¹ sea iris nor the sea poppy that title her poems are existing flowers but poetic products of H.D.’s imagination resisting poetic convention. These flowers are ‘montages’ of the natural or naturalistic and the mythic, of the sensuous and the symbolic, and describe emotional or psychological qualities. H.D.’s reference to Dionysius Zagreus furthermore documents that, like the ancient Orphics, she visualised her poetics by means of body mysticism. She found in the human body an approach to poetic vision and particularly the classic athletic body, with its sharp cut symmetry and geometrical precision, embodied perfection of form for H.D. (Notes 24–26). But the Greek athletic body was not only her arch image of beauty; the Greek word already contains etymologically ideas of ‘suffering’, ‘struggle’, and ‘athletic’ and thus it became a metaphor for her poetical ascesis. H.D.’s lyric form was ‘purified’ of any superfluous décor; like the ancient Greek marbles it was hard and clear cut and distilled into its very essence. Ascetic form thus corresponds to the ascetic content, the emotional struggle and pain, but since her form is lyrical it does not correspond to the monumental but to small figures or fragments of marble. At the same time, the ‘purified’ and static form balances the emotional storm of the content. In her combination of the ‘Athenian’ and the ‘Alexandrian’, H.D.’s ascesis is an oxymoronic concept of ‘sensual ascesis’ and ‘ascetic ecstasy’.

 Robert Babcock has made out Sappho as the source for this poem and has pointed to the significance of colour in relation to Sappho, which H.D. mentions in her essay on Sappho. See “H.D.’s ‘Pursuit’ and Sappho,” H.D. Newsletter : ():  f.  The sea lily actually is an animal of the deep oceans and a member of the class Crinoidea and the sea violet is a type of edible ascidian or sea squirt. In H.D.’s poems, however, they are purely imaginary revisions of poetic convention.

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Such passionate ascesis also sets the tone in maybe the most anthologised of her poems. In “Oread” (1913) the sea whirls “pointed pines” and splashes them on rocks, once more visualising the energetic propelling force that infuses nature as well as sense experience. Although H.D. was little interested in the Japanese haiku, this poem was discovered to be inspired by nineteenth-century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s woodprint “The Wave of Kanagawa,” a copy of which was exhibited in the British Museum that H.D. visited frequently for inspiration.³² The discovery has led to the assumption that H.D. here models her lyric on the haiku, and indeed the ‘superimposition’ of forest and sea generating an ‘emotional complex’ seems to confirm the idea of a haiku ‘montage’. If in fact H.D. did model “Oread” on the haiku, she did so only indirectly and by means of the woodprint. Furthermore, there is a wild and passionate quality to her poem that is decidedly non-haiku. The dynamism that exists within her composition is quite contrary to the aesthetic stasis of Pound’s “Metro”.³³ I would rather assume that H.D. saw a universal image of nature in the woodcut that she also found in other ancient cultures. In turn, her poem bears notable parallels to Sappho’s fragment 44.³⁴ “Oread” Whirl up, sea— Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks, Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir.

₪44 Without warning As a whirlwind Swoops on an oak Love shakes my heart.

Even though H.D. does not explicitly mention the word love in her poem as Sappho does, the sensual experience of natural force is related to human life experience and emotion through the invisible plural speaker. While Japanese haikus are nature poems that are depersonalised and detached, H.D. personalises forces in nature by having nature speak and by attributing the voice to ancient Greek wood-spirits. While the haiku detaches the vision from the human body, H.D.

 Sabine Sommerkamp (: –). Hokusai’s “Wave” had also inspired Claude Debussy to his symphonic sketches La Mer (–), although his piece is of a very different, softer sensory quality than H.D.’s poem. Cf. Simon Trezise, Debussy: La Mer (Cambridge: UP, ): .  Gabriele Rippl also points out this difference to Pound’s poem and sees in H.D.’s “Oread” an example of her poetry that is precisely not imagist but instead vorticist (Rippl : –).  H.D.’s poem in Amy Lowell, Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ) and Sappho’s in Sappho: A New Translation, trans. Mary Barnard (Berkeley: University of California Press, ): n. p.

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manifests spirit in body, the abstract in the aesthetic affective. Greek nature was animated and personified in that the gods and spirits had human shape and emotions. Thus without the subjectivity of an ‘I’ in the poem, H.D. humanises natural force and transforms it into an emotive quality. This gives her poem a quality of ‘objectivity’ that Pound found in the haiku. H.D. combines the objective and detached with the passionate and energetic of Sappho’s subjective lyric, and seems to unite both in her poetry into a non-subjective since collective yet acutely passionate dynamic emotion. Striking differences emerge when comparing “Oread” to Pound’s haiku “In a Station of the Metro”: H.D.’s poem is dominated by active verbs – “whirl,” “splash,” “hurl,” – while Pound’s is composed of nouns and adjectives and lacks verbs completely. H.D.’s syntax is structured by repetitions of words and sound and thus circular, while Pound’s is linear, in that the first sentence opens the scenario, the second zooms in and the third substitutes an image of contrast. The two contrasting images are neatly divided syntactically by the colon, so the ‘cut’ that montages the two shots and thus fits the two impressions together is visible. In H.D.’s “Oread” the ‘montage’ is a cutting back and forth³⁵ between the elemental forces of land or woods and sea so they merge into one image and generate a novel natural force of stinging hydro-energetic power. Pound’s haiku presents a calm state of ‘classic’ beauty, with its syntactical symmetry and absence of verbs and activity providing a certain static quality. Pound did indeed cite “Oread” as a perfect example of vorticist technique in his essay “Vorticism” (1914);³⁶ ironically his own metro haiku, which falls already into the time of Vorticism, is usually anthologised as a key example of Imagism. H.D. found in Sappho, beyond the obviously erotic, “a continent, a planet, a world of emotion” (Notes 58). It was a violent and painful world, characterised by the forces of the elements, by “wave upon destructive passionate wave” and by “the sweat of Eros” (ibid.). But it is a lasting world of endurance. Along with Sappho, she prized Euripides for “erotic-emotional innovation” (Collecott 1999: 131, quoting H.D. from her unpublished manuscript on Euripides). H.D. was fascinated by the clear and simple detail of Sappho’s lyric, the small but precise gestures and the simple phrase and the trivial tirades (Notes 60, 62). She discovered the harsh and wild emotional quality already in the form

 For H.D.’s moving images see also the chapter “From Imagism to Moving Image” in Rachel Ann Connor, H.D. and the Image (Manchester: UP, ): –. Macpherson would later devise the film technical device of the ‘clatter montage’, a cutting back and forth between images in such rapidity that the montage appears to be a superimposition. Macpherson’s film technique seems almost like a translation of H.D.’s poetic device.  Pound closes his essay by citing H.D.’s poem in full. See “Vorticism,” BLAST  (): .

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of Sappho’s lyric fragments, “these broken sentences and unfinished rhythms” that to H.D. were “rocks – perfect rock shelves and layers of rock” and wild untamed nature (Notes 58). It is the ascesis of form and expression that tempers the sensuality and ecstasy in Sappho and that made this ancient lyricist so valuable to H.D. (ibid. 63). Gregory has shown how H.D. opposed Alexandria to Athens, in line with the imaginary geography of classical Greece within the discourse of her time (1997: 43–52). The Athenian defined the classic as hard, clear, rational, impersonal, and ‘masculine’, while the Alexandrian was seen as the late romantic decadent and ‘effeminate’ corruption of classicism within modernist discourse. H.D. redefined the Alexandrian as a Graeco-Egyptian high culture whose aesthetic principles were very much alike to modernist aesthetics (Gregory, ibid. 47). By means of her redefinition of classicism, H.D. created a position in the modernist literary field that was independent of Pound, Eliot, and Hulme.³⁷ Gregory admits that spanning the Alexandrian rubric from Euripides to Pausanias may seem somewhat strained (ibid. 48), but what is more relevant in this context is that Athenian and Alexandrian constituted poetic styles or qualities and H.D.’s Hellenism was a fusion of the two. She gives shape most explicitly to her poetological concept in her fictional narrative Hedylus (1928), which apparently originated in parallel to Macpherson’s Poolreflection, and much later in Helen in Egypt (1952–54), which contains the concept of Alexandrian Hellenism already in the title. Hedylus is the son of Hedyle the Athenian, who represents classical beauty. Mother and son live on Samos, a Greek island between Athens and Alexandria. While Hedyle embodies the beauty of regular form and classical symmetry, she is at the same time cold and her constant gazing into the mirror reveals her self-absorbed nature. Furthermore, she seems devitalised and dead. In spite of his Athenian heritage, however, Hedylus dreams of going to Alexandria. Although he is, by name already, a mirror image of his mother, he realises that her subtle iambic metre is not the adequate form for expressing “the fervour of his vision” (Hedylus 29). While the mother is of pure intellect and “too stark, too metallic in her beauty” (ibid. 20), the son is passionate and adventurous, taking a dangerous slide every time he goes down to the seashore. As a child he fell down on the rocks of the Acropolis while wandering after wild flowers and ever since has borne a scar on his forehead, signifying the two sides of his poetic consciousness that battle within him: his Athenian heritage and his wild nature worship. When  For a closer study of H.D.’s particular presentation of “a ‘hot’ antiquity” based on Walter Pater’s ‘Alexandrian’ Hellenism and on her “’psychologisation’ of classical antiquity” see Gabriele Rippl, “Eine andere Ästhetik der Moderne: Hilda Doolittles Hellenismus,” Feministische Studien  (): –.

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Hedylus meets Demion of Olympia/Helios/Apollon, who turns out to be his adoptive father, the cleft on his head is healed and the two antagonistic parts within him become one harmonious self. Demion himself is composed of fire and ice, he is Greek with Asiatic influence, and he is god and human in one, the suffering god. Demion is wisdom personified, but he represents the scorching wisdom of passionate life; whatever he touches he sears. In contrast, Hedyle represents classic form and, as Athené, wisdom personified, but hers is the wisdom of cold intellect. It is worth noting that H.D. reverses in her narrative the categories established in her time, in that the woman Hedyle represents the clear, rational, symmetric Athenian, while the irregular, visionary, sensuous Alexandrian principle is represented by the male Hedylus. Nonetheless, H.D. here may simply be relying on ancient historical poets for her revision and to give figure to her poetics. Hedyle was an ancient Athenian Iambic poet (about 280 BC) and Hedylus, her historical son, was a poet of the Alexandrian school, best known for his Dionysian drinking songs (Dictionary of Greek 366). The narrative ends with Hedylus, although leaving for Alexandria (Hedylus 116), reviving the Athenian heritage he once denied. Demion’s final words define him as “the Athenian” (ibid. 141), bestowing his mother’s attribute on Hedylus. H.D. has transformed the historical Hedylus of the Alexandrian school, whom Meleager mentions, into a new Athenian and a symbol for her own Imagist poetry.³⁸ In her posthumously published Notes on Thought and Vision (1919, publ. 1982), H.D. explains that the human body contains a brain-region and a love-region and thus transfers her two poetic principles onto human biology. The loveregion is not necessarily sexual, though it can be and does mean that too, but represents the sensual and erotic in the sense of feeling intensely as opposed to understanding intellectually. Both brain-region and love-region can be the centre of consciousness (20). Both regions have a “brain” and their thought is vision (22). H.D. compares these “brains” to the lenses of an opera glass: “the love-mind and the over-mind are two lenses. When these lenses are properly adjusted, focused, they bring the world of vision into consciousness. The two work separately, perceive separately, yet make one picture” (23). H.D. saw her poetic concept embodied at the Diocletian Gallery in a small ancient figure: “It lay, not on a pedestal of cold stone, but on a soft black velvet cushion. It lay comfortably asleep. The Hermaphrodite” (quoted in Guest 2003: 51). The

 H.D. chose a line from The Garland of Meleager that mentions “the wild field-flowers of Hedylus” as the epigraph to her narrative. She cherished the notion of the palimpsest or over-written text “consisting of erasures as well as fresh inscriptions, of previous as well as subsequent writings” (Collecott : ), and turned Sappho and Euripides palimpsest-like into Imagist poetry. The palimpsest is another kind of ‘superimposition’.

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myth of the Hermaphrodite unites the beautiful form of a young man with the passionate love of a young woman in one body. The Hermaphrodite is an ancient mythical ‘montage’ of spirit and body, or in H.D.’s terminology of brain-region and loveregion. The Hermaphrodite as described by H.D., lying comfortably asleep, is no longer struggling but at rest; it is another image for the mythic sacred marriage of antagonisms. Further, this classic form is not on a pedestal but in a natural and common pose asleep on a soft cushion. In this the image joins stone, or in H.D.’s poetry ‘rock’, with the sensuous,³⁹ the rose, uniting Athenian with Alexandrian into H.D.’s “rose, cut in rock.”⁴⁰ It is important to stress the unaffected pose of the sleeping Hermaphrodite. Astonishing as it may seem, despite her lofty visionary hermetic poetics H.D. had a ‘democratic’ attitude and concern. She believed that anyone was capable of perceiving these visions and was most concerned with a simple and common voice. She notes that Sappho, for example, was aristocratic and substitutes the chorus of the collective voice supplying general information for her subjective speaker (e. g. in “Oread”). She uses free verse and Greek chorus, integrates elements of spoken language and is most fascinated by Sappho’s ‘trivial phrases’ and the simple gestures captured in her poetry. By (re)introducing the dramatic element to the lyric form, she opens up the lyric form and moves from subjective to collective voice and communal experience. She introduces the dramatic element of tragedy (Euripides) and passion into Pound’s Imagism with its classical image of emotional stasis. H.D. wanted to ‘translate’ the classics for the modern human and in the sense of a common good (Gregory 1997: 58). Therefore, for example, she translated Euripides in an Imagist style. Yet in this early phase of her career she concentrated on the highly refined lyric genre for her medium, which in its avant-garde cast was rather an elitist form. Unlike Pound, she turned to the popular medium film with the formation of Pool and became very much interested and involved in filmmaking and acting. Her autobiographical prose of the 1930s is marked by a montage technique of rapid cuts that apparently continues the energetic montage of early poems such as “Oread”.⁴¹ H.D.’s daughter Perdita was to write in her introduction to H.D.’s narrative Nights:

 In her essay “The Wise Sappho” H.D. describes Sappho’s “touches of Oriental realism” as “‘purple napkins’ and ‘soft cushions’” that are tempered by the Greek’s high craft, the beauty of her poetic form ().  This image appears in the poem “Garden,” included in the first collection Sea Garden, and has become a symbol for H.D.’s poetry.  See also Gabriele Rippl’s discussion of H.D.’s autobiographical story “Kora and Ka” (: –).

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My family was into filmmaking at that time, and it shows. H.D. has reversed the process – and also carried it a stage further – pretending the book is really a film. Her technique is cinematic, a restless dizzying montage. It darts and zooms, pans in on tantalizing closeups, veers off again, highlights vignettes in lost corners. Most of it at one remove – exposition, recollection. (1986: xii)

₪₪₪ The idea of a universal language of feeling or emotion is apparently a crucial concern of modernism. Eisenstein with his montage, the poets of Imagism (Pound and his Vorticism), as well as Eliot with his ‘objective correlative’, were all searching for a formula to express all human emotions and to raise the human unconscious to the level of consciousness. They were trying to find a formula by which to transform the subjective (impression) into the universal and to express it in visual terms, to find an image or a set of images or symbols that would evoke the emotional complex in the recipient. But emotion was seen as an energy propelling the intellect and not as the energy of the human heart. While the modernists around Pound were, although striving for objectivity, individualistic and concerned primarily with beauty, form, and aesthetics, Eisenstein was a communist interested in the public function of art and its collective social purpose. Furthermore, while Eisenstein places his visual medium of film explicitly in the tradition of language, literature and poetry and dissociates it from painting, literary modernists such as Pound, Woolf and Stein position their experimental writing within the field of the visual arts. Yet Eisenstein’s avant-garde concept of ‘intellectual film’ with its own new aesthetics does move him closer again to the literary modernists. From this perspective, we may see H.D.’s poetry as uniting the visual tradition, in particular sculpture, with the literary tradition of Greek tragedy in her form of Imagism. This combination of avant-garde visual form with a literary tradition of human passion will later become a vital characteristic of Pool’s films. Furthermore, in contrast to Pound, and Eliot’s attempt to capture and translate specific personal emotions into ‘objective’ images, the emotions in H.D.’s poetry are timeless and universal yet ‘sensualised’ by the image and H.D.’s kinematic style.

3.4 Collage and Photomontage – Pool’s Scrapbook and Art for the Sake of It: Playing with the Language of Human Psychology, Art and Film Technique Freud’s psychoanalytical concept of a visual language of the psyche composed of symbols and objects, and his idea that mythical figures signified collective arch

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human experiences and emotions will be outlined in the next chapter on universal man. The visual and symbolic language of Freud’s psychoanalytic concept is freed by Pool from the confines of sexual pathology and neurosis and instead married to an all-human creative need to aestheticize the experience of life. This is not to say that Pool erased all sexual connotations completely from their visual artistic language, but the issue of foremost importance lay in an interrelation of art and human emotions on a grander scale. Bryher, H.D. and Kenneth Macpherson made a game of bestowing nicknames upon each other and their friends and acquaintances.⁴² Freud, for example, as a scientist and accredited authority, was called “Papa” or “Owl”. Havelock Ellis, the renowned sexologist, was their “Chiron”. Being half man and half animal, the wise and goodhearted centaur symbolized Ellis’ particular field of science. Among themselves, it will be recalled, the threesome ascribed primarily animals, “big dog” or “Rover” to Macpherson, “small dog” or “Fido” to Bryher, “cat” to H.D., and Perdita was the “pup” or “puppy.” However, H.D. was also Hyacinth, the beloved of Apollo (God of poetry), or Dryad (nature spirit of the woods). This game of nicknames shows a playful desire to capture essences of personality and interests in a single graphic and vivid image or figure. The sketches and scribblings in the margins and throughout their letters to each other follow along these lines. They are funny little things, significant ‘not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them’⁴³ but because they reveal that the artistic creativity of Pool was ever active and infused their entire lives. The scrapbook, I argue, continues along such lines as an artful game. Although I would agree that H.D.’s prose⁴⁴ probably had a therapeutic function, as Vetter states, I feel Vetter overemphasises a personal need to artistically “enact a ‘bisexual epistemology’” (2003: 121). On the other hand I fully subscribe to her understanding of the scrapbook as a product of collaborative art and the importance of communal artistic production to Pool. She also points out the neglect of the scrapbook in academic research, with only one article prior to her own,⁴⁵ which most likely results exactly from the scrapbook’s collaborative nature.

 Friedman supplies an extended list of nicknames in Analyzing Freud (“Biographical Notes” li-lii).  The line is taken from Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry” ().  Primarily the pieces Asphodel (–, publ. ), Kora and Ka (), End to Torment () and HERmione ().  Diana Collecott, “Images at the Crossroads: H.D.’s ‘Scrapbook’,” Signets: Reading H.D., eds. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

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Even though the scrapbook consists of forty pages and constitutes, according to Vetter, a complete text (2003: 122), I will concentrate on only three or four for my purposes.⁴⁶ Vetter has also pointed to the fact that the digital reproduction in the online collection of the Beinecke library does not appear to reproduce the exact sequence of the scrapbook pages, making a complete examination somewhat difficult.

3.4.1 Macpherson – Dynamic Forces of Life and Nature The page presenting Macpherson features a shot of Macpherson in the bottom left-hand corner, presumably from one of his lost early films, with obvious allusions to Pabst’s film The Love of Jeanne Ney ⁴⁷ and German film.⁴⁸ Above it, in the top left-hand corner, is a photograph of tall trees and tree tops and abundant foliage. Following clockwise come a photograph of Macpherson half-naked in swimming trunks next to a pool, with some contemporary architecture and more trees and foliage in the far background, and a cut-out of a small bronze amoretto joined to a photograph of Macpherson in ancient Celtic costume with a winged helmet. The clockwise arrangement suggests a circular and dynamic reading of the images; in this the composition of the photomontages is similar to the medium of film. Film was particularly Macpherson’s artistic medium of expression. The circular reading also interlinks nature with human nature and psychology, and cultural as well as emotional disposition: The ‘wildness’ of the tree tops becomes associated with Celticism and Norse mythology, and thus with ‘raw’ life, passionate human nature and love, which by means of the theatre costume and

): –; an earlier version of the same article was published in H.D.: Woman and Poet, ed. Michael King (Orono: University of Maine, ): –.  The scrapbook is in the collection of the Beinecke Library and accessible online: H.D. Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: (accessed  January ).  Comparing this shot to stills from Pabst’s film The Love of Jeanne Ney in Close Up showing the young male lover in the film (played by Uno Henning), one finds a striking resemblance of facial expression, hair style and make-up. One of these Jeanne Ney clippings even shows the same striped pattern on the wall in the background. The still from Jeanne Ney is in the Beinecke Collection: Kenneth Macpherson, Photograph File of Close Up Magazine, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript, (accessed  January ).  The fragment that remains of Macpherson’s first film Wing Beat in the MoMA archive closes upon the German word “Ende” and thus demonstrates its affiliation with German film.

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Figure 8: Photomontage Macpherson

the film shot become linked to drama and film and thereby to performative, expressive art and popular art forms. Vetter does mention that the scrapbook opens with a full-page picture of the amphitheatre at Delphi which “frames the book” (2003: 120) but does not read this in a larger context of art and the history of art. She concludes that the theatre of Delphi sets the stage for the dramatic scene of their autobiography (ibid.) and continues to focus on their personal and sexual interrelationship. Such a tailor-made interpretation, however, disregards the profound symbolism of this opening picture. Delphi was the seat of Apollo and site of the Delphic oracle; the theatre was situated amid natural scenery on Mount Parnassus and offered its audience a grand view of the valley and the mountains. The theatre of Delphi is therefore symbolic for ‘high’ poetic art and form as well as a close affinity with nature. It later gave its name to Montparnass in Paris, which became the seat of experimental and avant-garde art. Mount Parnassus further symbolises worship of truth, knowledge, vision and prophecy, classical form, and athletics – all constituents of Pool’s art. In its association with Apollo on the one hand and its dramatic popular form on the other, the theatre of Delphi spans the literary and artistic spectrum, and the affiliation with Montparnass points to the literary and artistic field of Modernism. By aligning themselves with the history of the arts, its various periods, influences, and genres, Pool position themselves in this history and anthropomorphize art and its cultural icons. Art and cultural icons are not used in a narcissistic manner to become introspective images of hermetically sealed meaning but rath-

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er transform the personal into a universal. The photomontages capture abstract ideas of art in images of art and life. Thus the Eros in the Macpherson montage above is more likely symbolic of the principle of love and passion infusing life and art rather than a “god of sexual love” juxtaposed to the “feminized costume” (Vetter 2003: 120, the ‘feminized’ is actually a Celtic costume) which hints at “the sexual thematics of the pages” and Macpherson’s bisexuality. This would also tie in with the artistic composition of love god and winged helmet, which fuses symbols of love and spirit – in its symbolism exactly opposite to physical sexual desires. It more likely suggests the Celtic quality of clairvoyant power, a power of vision rooted in nervous sensitivity instead of in an intellectual capacity. Further, the Celt is standing in classic contrapposto, an artistic device suggesting motion or movement as opposed to static form. In association with the amoretto, standing with one foot on a scallop, the contrapposto echoes Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486), Renaissance art, a rebirth of beauty and regeneration of the arts.⁴⁹ In the contrapposto of the Celt and in the white sandals of Macpherson at the pool (possibly an implicit visual association to the group’s name) might very well be detected feminised décor. They may hint at his bisexuality but it is much more likely that they are primarily intended to suggest a flourish of humorous ornament and artistic playfulness. In Macpherson there is always something of the jester and the carnivalesque subverting the customary. A sensual principle may be detected in the Macpherson in swimming trunks arranged between wild nature and the cupido, but still I would maintain that it signifies primarily a sensual principle of art.

3.4.2 H.D. – Simple Form and Abstraction The page describing the art of H.D. displays a triadic composition arranged at the centre of the page, consisting of a photograph of H.D. nude in nature, a sculpture fragment of a wing and another one of an upper female torso. The nude H.D. is kneeling in a somewhat classic athletic pose, her face averted, on grassy ground with some sparse-looking shrubs in the background. The whiteness of her body echoes the white stone of the sculpture fragments. To the right is the fragmented torso, possibly suggesting Aphrodite, judging from the drape of the gown and the bare left breast. On top and reaching into

 For an allegorical reading of Botticelli’s Venus see Ernst Gombrich’s Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. In this context see also footnote  in the chapter on Macpherson’s Poolreflection.

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Figure 9: Photomontage H.D.

the two lower fragments towers the wing fragment, symbolising spirit. In conjunction with her ‘Greek’ athletic body the spirit suggests a nature spirit or Oread, the wood nymph. In conjunction with the torso fragment the spirit alludes to H.D.’s poetic form, inspired especially by Sappho. Assuming that the torso indeed denotes Aphrodite, the wings would be metonymic for Hermes and the two would unite in the hermaphrodite. This was one of H.D.’s favourite poetic symbols for it joined the two opposite principles in harmony. The individual components as well as the entire montage are strikingly plain and unadorned, free of all ornament and flourish. This photomontage is clearly an icon for her Imagist poetry. The athletic body hints at the ascetic principle of her poetic form. The averted face in the photograph, so obviously in contrast to the faces in the montage signifying Macpherson’s art, emphasises the objective and formal over the individual and expressive. The H.D. photomontage does not contain the same liveliness nor the humour and wit captured in the Macpherson montage, but its symmetry and the simplistic but even geometry of the objects and their arrangement are of sheer beauty: The wing fragment continuing the torso fragment in substitution for the missing arm, pointing heavenwards; the visual echo of hard angles alternating with soft curves, harmoniously uniting these two principles; the repetition of the triangular edges of the three objects – corner of wing fragment, corner of photograph, and shoulder of the torso – forming a trefoil shape highlighted by the contrast between the bright sculpture fragments and light photograph against the black of the scrapbook page. The swing of the wing is echoed in the gown curving outward and the central positioning of

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this montage together with the three blades of its trefoil suggests the dynamism of a propeller. It is this dynamism that prevents an art worked in the medium of stone and ancient sculpture from becoming static.

3.4.3 Bryher – ‘Pure’ Spirit and the Descent of the Gods The photomontage symbolising Bryher’s art principle displays (from top left to lower right): first, an out-of-focus photograph of an ancient Greek temple in the background with two columns in the foreground; second a photograph of a small Byzantine church or monastery, framed by two cypresses; affixed amidst these two pictures is an image of an ancient Greek statue; and lastly a picture of Bryher in nature, standing erect and with a tree to the left and a tree trunk to the right, with daffodils in the foreground.

Figure 10: Photomontage Bryher

None of the three photographs is clipped and the two pictures of the sacral buildings form one even perimeter at the top. The ancient Greek statue joined to these temples is the only clipped item in this montage and in its erectness repeats the symmetry of the columns, the cypresses and the other trees. The Greek temple is too blurred to define it as Apollo’s at Mount Parnassus but its shadowy silhouette of Gothic perpendicular style suggests cathedrals such as Notre Dame or Westminster Abbey. Yet it is merely a shadow of the Gothic in the art principle which Bryher embodies. These cathedrals metamorphose in

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the following pictures into nature. In the second image, the stone columns transform into the cypresses flanking the Byzantine monastery, and in the last picture they have become ordinary trees. The divine principle descends from heaven and infuses nature resulting in the sublime, just as the classic form seems by arrangement of the photos to step down a stair from marble to organic nature. The ancient Greek statue linking the two sacral buildings is Kore,⁵⁰ symbol for virginity, purity and chastity. Unlike most other Greek statues, Kore is always fully dressed, as Bryher is too in the picture among flowers and trees. Therein the statue of the priestess symbolising Bryher contrasts with the classical nudes of H.D. While H.D.’s living body assumes the ascetic form of Greek sculpture in athletic pose, the ancient statue becomes an allegory for believing in a divine principle inherent in nature.⁵¹ In correlation with the daffodils symbolising Narcissus this means ‘purity’ and ideal beauty and a rejection of the sensual principle. Kore and Narcissus are both figures of adolescence and in their innocence suggest an art sanctified and uncorrupted. Due to the recurring pillars and an emphasis on architecture this art principle has a certain static quality. It is also sterner and much more ordered, more solemn and serene than the boisterous and dynamic but somewhat irregular art of Macpherson. Moreover the photographic medium here does not relate to film but instead to a documentary form of art that stands for an exact recording of life and also indicates Bryher’s historical interest. Of course these photomontages also capture the individual personalities of the three friends and their different emotional constitutions, but what is crucial is that these three different temperaments are not seen as isolated entities but are set in context to each other. They conflict with each other and then harmonize and then conflict again in a dynamic dialectical experience of human emotional life. Since these three different personalities are not seen as idiosyncratic but understood in relation to humanity and as universals of human moods, the

 Pool choose here the Kore from Chios (c.  BC), a marble from the collection of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. The shape, drape and folds of her gown as well as her braids are strikingly similar to the Etruscan Apollo from the Sarcofago di Ceveteri (Museo di Papa Giulio, Rome). She is the female mirror image of this male Apollo, all the more so due to the reverse style of their gowns. A photograph of this Apollo statue is among the Bryher papers at the Beinecke library.  In this context it may also be worth looking at the photographs by Bruguière in Close Up, featuring a series of five pictures with superimposed Byzantine sculpture, one also being a Kore, and architecture, centring on mysticism and transcendentalism, as an additional note by Kenneth Macpherson informs the reader. Cf. “Note on Five Brugière Photographs,” Close Up : (March ): –.

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individual and subjective become transformed into the collective and communal and thereby enable others to relate. In the scrapbook art is not utilized to stage-manage personal sexual relations and sort out sexual identity but instead personal experiences, lives and dreams are transformed into art in a playful, sometimes humorous, sometimes highly aesthetic manner. Most likely, I would guess, the scrapbook was created out of a vivacious artistic creativity and for mere personal enjoyment and delight – and maybe the entertainment of family and friends. The scrapbook is certainly not a medium for addressing a large readership; nevertheless the booklet provides insight into Pool’s conception of art. According to Pool’s philosophy, art has to be taken from life and life is also an aesthetic experience; the scrapbook presents a life-art and an art lived. As a kind of family album the scrapbook documents personal lives but by means of the icons it detaches these lives and personalities from the merely idiosyncratic⁵² and transmutes them into a cosmos of art and into more communal experiences. Last but not least the scrapbook or photo album is an artistic medium accessible to anyone.⁵³ It is a simple medium, easily available at low cost, but hence all the better suited for the artistic expression of the amateur and the recreational function of art to the animal poeta. The scrapbook is exemplary for a combination of two, with Bourdieu, antagonistic art principles: It is at the same time an art that suffices itself and an art with a purpose to please – l’art pour la vie.

3.5 Continuity: Literary Cycle of Life and Psychological-Realistic Film At this point, the present examination of modernist language moves from the symbolic language of montage to the contrasting technique of continuity editing and the stream of narrative. This ‘organic’ technique of a continuous flow of narrative wanted to simulate the constant motion which is life. It furthermore took  Vetter argues that the scrapbook constitutes “an idiosyncratic retelling” (: ) of their lives. Jessica Helfand, who compares several American scrapbooks, comes to the conclusion that it is “revealing little autobiographical information” since it is “sequenced without captions” (: ) and consequently grants it a total of two pages in her study. She does describe the scrapbook though as “its own kind of experimental canvas” (ibid. ). See Scrapbooks: An American History (New Haven, London: Yale UP, ): –.  For a revival of this popular medium from Victorian times in today’s internet culture see Patrizia DiBello, “From the Album Page to the Computer Screen: Collecting Photographs at Home,” Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, eds. James Lyons and John Plunkett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, ): –.

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into consideration ideas of the human unconscious and attempted to reproduce such inner psychological experiences. In contrast to the more objective ‘hard’ and clear technique of montage editing, this technique was ‘soft’ and more subjective. It also worked primarily on the emotions and via sympathy, as it made the reader or spectator participate in another’s emotional world.

3.5.1 Dorothy Richardson and the Literary Series Richardson became best known for her series Pilgrimage, which comprises twelve volumes depicting the life and spiritual wanderings of the heroine Miriam Henderson from age seventeen to forty-two. This cycle of a personal life or biography by literary techniques of continuation captures the flow of life. The narrative is composed of a continuous flow of impressions and perceptions, memories and associations. Richardson became known for her unpunctuated prose and it has been claimed that she was the first to use the stream-of-consciousness technique in literature (May Sinclair). Her psychological writing technique inaugurated a new narrative style and modernists such as May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and others found therein a technique more true to human experience. Richardson herself, however, always rejected the term stream-of-consciousness for her work (Bluemel 1997: 22) and Bryher preferred to term it “continuous association” (Heart 199). A key stimulus in Pilgrimage springs from music. For Nietzsche, music is the Dionysian principle that affects recognition and wisdom. Richardson also tightly connects light, vision and recognition to music in her novel cycle. In the first volume Pointed Roofs, for example, Miriam’s piano playing stimulates a visionary experience: Miriam dropped her eyes – she seemed to have been listening long – that wonderful light was coming again – she had forgotten her sewing – when presently she saw, slowly circling, fading and clearing, first its edge, and then, for a moment the whole thing, […] She had seen it somewhere as a child […] and never thought of it since – and there it was. […] How beautiful … it was fading. … She held it – it returned – clearer this time. (44)

Music here works upon the senses, in particular the visual sense of the mind’s eye. It is “a wonderful light,” the light of a spiritual vision, but it is stimulated by a sensual experience and this sensation is induced by music.⁵⁴ Music

 On light and spiritual vision see also Eveline Kilian, Momente innerweltlicher Transzendenz (Tübingen: Niemeyer, ). Kilian points to the connection between vision and music, but she

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works directly upon the senses and the mind, and in this operates similarly to film. Through harmony or disharmony, by being played loudly or quietly it affects an instant sensational response. Not surprisingly the two became closely related in the history of film to work certain atmospheric sensations and moods in the spectator. Such Dionysian sensitivity triggers Miriam’s mystical experiences, for example, when listening to the wild and passionate storm of Beethoven’s music.⁵⁵ Like film with its continuous steady flow of pictures that offer ‘flashes’ of vision to the spectator, Richardson’s narrative continues in a steady flow of her protagonist’s impressions and associations, with ‘flashes’ of insights. The continuity of the mind stream again is connected with the continuous flow of music: The notes no longer bounded and leaped but went on dreaming along in an even, slow, swinging movement. It nearly seemed to Miriam that the sound of a far-off sea was in them, and the wind and the movement of distant trees and the shedding and pouring of far-away moonlight. One by one, delicately and quietly the young men’s voices dropped in, and the sea and the wind and the trees and the pouring moonlight came near. (Pointed Roofs 155)

The experience in its close affiliation to nature is furthermore ‘organic’, as is the uninterrupted cyclical structure of the Pilgrimage series. This ‘organic’ writing attempts to be more true to human life experience. Here the music is, in contrast to

does not tie music to the narrative structure of a stream or unpunctuated narrative nor to an experience of the senses. On the contrary, she understands these visions as moments of punctual escape from sequentiality (: ) and as purely mental and not unconscious experiences. David Stamm does link the music to the structure of the novel, to sensual experience and mood, and the aural to the visual; although he does not classify it as Dionysian recognition in a Nietzschean sense (A Pathway to Reality: Visual and Aural Concepts in Dorothy Richardson’s “Pilgrimage” (Tübingen, Basel: Francke Verlag ()). Thomas Fahy sees a parallel between music and the stream-of-consciousness in the novel cycle, especially in relation to Wagner’s music and his use of leitmotifs to establish coherence through association. He does not relate this to an emotional experience of recognition, however (“The Cultivation of Incompatibility: Music as a Leitmotif in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage,” Women’s Studies : (): –). Angela Frattarola is the first to point out that music in Pilgrimage is connected to an experience of self immersion that is directly contrary to typical Enlightenment notions of vision which indicate an analytical self (“Developing an Ear for the Modernist Novel: Virgina Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce,” Journal of Modern Literature : (Fall ): –). Francesca Frigerio, “Musical Aesthetics and Narrative Forms in Dorothy Richardson’s Prose,” Textus: English Studies in Italy : (July-December ): –.  “Through its tuneless raging, she could hear the steady voice and see the steady shining of the broad clear light. Daylight and gaiety and night and storm and a great song and truth, the great truth that was bigger than anything. Beethoven” (The Tunnel ).

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the aural storm by Beethoven, harmonic and even flowing but the experience of vision and light remains. The “even, slow” flowing of the dream-like music captures the even, slow flow of the novel series, which sometimes even borders on tedium. Richardson’s contributions to the film magazine Close Up, which were evocatively titled “Continuous Performance,” maintained this idea of continuance that had become her identifying literary mark and carried it into the popular form of the film journal.⁵⁶

3.5.2 Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Film and the ‘Invisible Cut’ Like Richardson, who won fame for her literary stream-of-life, Pabst became known for his remarkable film-technical device of the ‘invisible cut’ or cut-onmovement, which also attempts to aesthetically simulate an organic flow. Cuton-movement means that the cut coincides with a movement which bridges separate shots in one continuous optical flow. By means of this ‘invisible cut’ a film, if cut and edited artistically, could create the sensation of a continuous flow of action because the spectator did not perceive an interruption. Pabst’s technique was very different from the Russian montage that forced itself on the spectator’s perception. One can easily imagine what censorship did to such artistry by inconsiderate cutting of scenes, and Macpherson pointed this out in one of his editorial columns to Close Up (December 1927).⁵⁷ The ‘invisible cut’ can be compared to Richardson’s literary technique of continuous unpunctuated narrative. Richardson’s narrative ‘flows on’ due to ‘continuous association’ (as Bryher termed it), just as Pabst’s cut is imperceptible because it continues a movement from one scene into the next and thus, via optical sensation and impulse, simultaneously transports the narrative by (visual) association. The human mind will compensate for the gap due to the psychological tendency to construct coherence. At the same time this mental construction and unconscious participation in the film ensures a greater illusion of the sensitive experience, which again appeals to the emotions. In its attempt at illusion, Pabst’s film technique is the exact reverse of Eisentein’s. The ‘invisible cut’ works a ‘true’ sensation of life by means of sensitivity and in this continues the tradition of ancient tragedy and the concepts of mimesis and catharsis. Eisenstein, in

 María Francisca Liantada Díaz has discovered a key to Pilgrimage in these articles. See “Dorothy Richardson’s Articles on Cinema as a Key to Pilgrimage,” El Cine: Otra Dimenión del Discurso Artístico, eds. José Luis Caramés, Carmen Escobedo de Tapia and Jorge Luis Bueno Alonso, vol.  (Universidad de Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones, ): –.  Pool’s activism against censorship will be discussed in the chapter on the film magazine.

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contrast, traces the montage concept of his intellectual film back to the Japanese haiku and to lyrical form. Furthermore, Pabst did not shun such older popular forms as the melodrama, a form that continued the sentimental strain of the age of Sensibility.⁵⁸ He always balanced between the popular and commercial, on the one hand, and the avant-garde, on the other hand, which earned him the denomination “conservative avant-gardist” (Jacobsen). Unlike Eisenstein, Pabst did not put his film theory into writing; therefore a short survey of some of his films that were admired or reviewed by Pool shall supply insight into his method and reveal why and in what way he was influential to Pool and their work. Pabst is usually considered to be a follower of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), but his first film Der Schatz (The Treasure, 1923), a film about love, jealousy, greed, and hate, was one of the last great works of German film Expressionism, and psychology and atmosphere are essential to all his later works. It was the film Die Freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street, 1925) that classified Pabst as a film director of the Neue Sachlichkeit style.⁵⁹ The gloomy film with its social criticism, often censored wherever it was shown, was H.D.’s and Bryher’s favourite Pabst film. Although she had seen movies before, H.D. would always claim that it was Joyless Street that introduced her to the cinema and sparked her enthusiasm.⁶⁰ Bryher, who according to her own words came late to the cinema, would assert as well that: “I came because of Joyless Street” (“Survey” 58). H.D. admired especially the simple ‘classic’ beauty of Greta Garbo and the truly Greek tragic element in this film. Bryher was most interested in the film’s study of post-war society with its crime and corruption. She even claimed that she found in this film “what [she] had looked for in vain in post-war literature, the unrelenting portrayal of what war does to life, of the destruction of beauty, of […] the conflict war intensifies between those primal emotions, ‘hunger and eroticism’” (ibid.). It was the deep truth of his films and the authentic depiction of life that Bryher treasured in Pabst’s works. She ascribed him a ‘psychological eye’ that transformed the “intense realism” of his film into “poetry” (ibid. 60). Bryher discovered in Joyless Street, and in other of Pabst’s films too, universal symbols of human struggle: “And his drab rooms and their inhabitants […] become not only this actual world but abstractions of reality, like the myths

 On Pabst and melodrama see Bathrick (: –) and on melodrama as a descendant of Sensibility see Janet Todd (: ).  Lee Atwell, for example, titles his chapter on the film “The New Objectivity: Die Freudlose Gasse.” See G. W. Pabst (Boston: Twayne Publ., ).  She did so for example in her Close Up articles “The Cinema and the Classics I: Beauty,” Close Up : (July ):  and in “An Appreciation,” Close Up : (March ): –.

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men made of long ago seafarings or fights, like the statues men made through these myths, of pure ideas” (ibid. 60–61). Joyless Street is set in post-war Vienna and describes the lives and tragedies of people in the desolate Melchiorgasse. Only two people in this street profit from the desperate post-war conditions, the butcher Geiringer and Mrs Greifer, who under the facade of a fashion shop runs a private club. While the butcher rations out meat in return for sexual services, Mrs Greifer lets her female customers pay off their debts by offering sexual services in her nightclub. The story delineates the increasing ensnarement of the characters into misery, corruption, death and murder, and shows a society divided into the debauchery of the rich and the suffering of the poor. These contrasts are also expressed by means of colouration: The scenes outside in the street are tinted blue, while the indoor scenes are tinted yellow. The cool bluish colour sets off the street outside from the warmer interiors and emphasizes the coldness, harshness, misery and sorrow of life in the street. Subconsciously the spectator will immediately perceive the contrast between inside and outside, between the coldness in the street and the warmer interiors. The yellow of the interiors is by no means a warm golden hue, though, but mostly a lurid and noxious yellow. The only exception is the Hotel Carlton, where the rich dance and drink champagne. Here the yellow tinge is more delicate, with a shade of rose. The inside of Mrs Greifer’s nightclub, where debauchery and promiscuity prevail, presents itself in a bawdy tone of reddish-pink. Pabst not only employs colour to signal the different classes and the rifts in this society but also to symbolise different moods and atmospheres. While the sulphurous yellow of the Lechners’ hell of a home corresponds to the father’s violence and Marie’s feelings of fear, the reddish or pink interior of the nightclub evokes an erotic and intoxicating atmosphere. Pabst’s colour palette works a range of emotional overtones. In the midst of all the corruption and misery in this post-war society, Pabst, as was typical for his films, presents moments of sincere humanity, such as when Else shares her piece of meat with Marie. Else, the young mother, who has to take care of a baby and a sick, unemployed husband, has just purchased the meat by compromising herself sexually in return. Yet she is ready to give half of it to Marie, who is scared to go home without any meat. Marie, realising the misery of this homeless little family living in a stable, is unable to take their meat and instead gives Else her shawl, which Else gives to her sick husband. The scene, with the repeated act of giving from one to another, is a lesson in the (Christian) virtue of charity. It was apparently scenes like this that attracted Bryher to the film. She noted about Joyless Street: “love seemed less important than a sudden act of kindness” (Heart 294) and in post-war Germany and Aus-

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tria, which were the locales of Pabst’s films, she had noticed, among hunger, brutality and greed “also the sudden compassionate gesture” (Heart 303). Macpherson as well emphasizes the aspect of humanity in this film: “When Pabst […] opens your eyes to Vienna broken by war and war’s end, you understand so much more not only about Vienna but about casual villainy in general and much about humanitarianism” (“As Is” 5:2, 86). Pabst’s films showed the humane act and thus taught compassion and understanding. Pabst’s third film, Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul, 1926) was never really reviewed by Pool but there are a few references that mention the film and verify that Pool were familiar with the work.⁶¹ It may seem astonishing that the one film explicitly dealing with the method of psychoanalysis was not as emphatically praised in Close Up as were Joyless Street and Jeanne Ney. One reason for this was that, by the time the film reached the public, it had been so cut by censorship that it had pretty much lost all meaning.⁶² It was probably partly due to this loss of meaning that the film was little mentioned by Pool. But there is also some significance to the fact that the film was not as warmly recommended to the Close Up reader as were Joyless Street and Jeanne Ney, a significance that will become clearer in the discussion of Borderline and the film magazine. Since Borderline did refer to Secrets of a Soul it shall be briefly discussed here despite its relative neglect in Close Up. The film presents the case study of a neurosis in the form of a knife phobia and a compulsion. By means of dream analysis the attending psychoanalyst is finally able to decode the neurosis and treat the patient. The film copiously employs ‘Freudian’ symbolism – phallic symbols like razors, knives, Indian swords, letter openers or high towers – to visualise the neurosis and the interior of the patient’s mind. Secrets of a Soul was the first film that directly tried to represent psychoanalytic descriptions of a phobia and the method of psychoanalysis as treatment (Friedberg 1990a: 45). Freud, who did not believe that his scientific

 In her survey of Pabst, Bryher mentions that she has seen Secrets of a Soul (Close Up (December ): , Kenneth Macpherson maintains that the film lost all meaning due to censorship cutting (Close Up (December ): , Robert Herring even calls it “a stupid film,” at least in its censored form (Close Up (December ): , whereas German correspondent Andor KrasznaKrausz states that the film “definitely gained us for him” (Close Up (April ): . Oswell Blakeston complained about the censored English copy in his article “The Things They Do,” Close Up (February ): –. The announcement of the film upon its release in England also remarks that this “commercial version [is] horribly cut” (Close Up (July ): ).  Macpherson claimed that due to the cuts it was only comprehensible to students of psychoanalysis (“As Is” :, ) and Bryher called it “a ‘lost’ film because […] the producers had decided that the audience could not stand a purely psychoanalytical story and all the interesting portions had been cut” (Heart ).

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theory could be made comprehensible by the cinema, was most dismissive of the film.⁶³ The psychoanalysts Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, however, were won for the project and served as special advisors on psychoanalysis during production. It is in particular the participation of Hanns Sachs in the film that is important here, since the film brought Sachs and Pabst together, and it was at a party at Pabst’s house that Bryher and Macpherson were first introduced to Hanns Sachs and their friendship and collaboration began.⁶⁴ Pabst’s next movie, Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, 1927) was Macpherson’s favourite Pabst film and upon its release he dedicated a review several pages long to this film.⁶⁵ It would head the list of “First Choice” films in the “Films Recommended by Close Up” section for almost a year in the magazine and continued to be recommended in later issues.⁶⁶ In Uno Henning, the young actor who played the male lead, Macpherson found “a rare Nordic quality of intellect and personal charm” (“Jeanne Ney” 21) and thus the male complement to what Greta Garbo in Joyless Street was to H.D. The young, sensitive lover Henning portrayed has much in common with some of Macpherson’s figures. The Bolshevik ‘enemy,’ who was feared by the bourgeois as an image of terror and ruthlessness, is presented by Pabst not only as a decent person but as a loving human. The film revises prejudice against the violent, threatening Bolshevik and works to advance understanding and sympathy. Macpherson would later rely on the same strategy for the presentation of Paul Robeson in his film Borderline.

 On Freud’s negative attitude to a psychoanalytical film see Anne Friedberg, “An Unheimlich Maneuver between Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: Secrets of the Soul (),” The Films of G.W. Pabst, ed. Eric Rentschler (New Brunswick, London: Rutgers UP, ): –.  Bryher records in her autobiography: “Pabst […] had invited us both [Bryher and Macpherson] to a party at his house that evening. It proved to be an important moment for me because among the dozen people collected to meet us, there was a quiet, almost Eastern-looking figure sitting in one corner who was afterwards to be my analyst, Dr. Hanns Sachs. He had recently been acting as adviser on the first attempt to make a psychoanalytical film, Secrets of a Soul” (Heart ).  “Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney) and Its Making: An UFA film by Pabst,” Close Up : (December ): –.  Jeanne Ney appeared as the number one choice of recommended films in the Close Up issues : (February ): , : (March ): , : (April ): , : (May ): , : (June ): , and was furthermore among the recommended films in the issues : (October ): ; : (November ): , : (December ): . The premiere of the film had been on . December  in Berlin, which shows that for a full year Pabst’s film was a running favourite with Close Up.

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Whereas H.D. and Bryher favoured the more tragic Joyless Street, Macpherson preferred Jeanne Ney: “It is better than Joyless Street, more complete in some subtle way, swifter in action, more breath-taking not so tragic, more dynamic” (“Jeanne Ney” 18).⁶⁷ In contrast to Joyless Street, which is divided into Acts like classical drama, Jeanne Ney presents one continuous string of narrative. Macpherson had been shown the director’s cut of the movie by Pabst in Berlin prior to its release (ibid. 26). Although cuts-on-movements can be found already in Joyless Street, Jeanne Ney appears to be the film most representative of Pabst’s ‘fluid’ film technique. According to Pabst, “there are two thousand cuts in the entire film” but Macpherson assures his readers that in the uncensored version he saw, he “was not conscious of any” (ibid.). Pabst explained his special technique as follows: Every cut is made on some movement. At the end of the cut somebody is moving, at the beginning of the adjoining one the movement is continued. The eye is thus so occupied in following these movements that it misses the cuts. “Of course,” he added, “this was very difficult to do.” (ibid.)

Macpherson emphasises the damage censorship was to do to such a work of art because it destroyed the dynamic flow of the film and the fluidity of the narrative. He also points to the contrast between Pabst’s careful artistic cutting and the crude cutting of less artistic industrial productions. In this context, Macpherson referred especially to the factory-like Hollywood films that were cut by paid staff and not by the director himself. Macpherson would oppose these industrially manufactured products to such film art as Pabst’s. What appealed so much to Macpherson in this film was its sensitivity. He found it in the acting of Edith Jehanne,⁶⁸ who played Jeanne, in simple scenes of “curious beauty, nervous and restrained and intensely spiritual” (ibid. 23) and in “moments of exquisite beauty” (ibid. 22). One such moment of exquisite beauty he finds in the scene when the two lovers meet in the rain to say farewell to each other, standing amid a landscape marked by war and desolation. Another one is the scene when “in the cold morning light” the two lovers look from the window of their cheap Montparnasse hotel across the street at a window where they witnessed a wedding feast going on the night before and where now they see only the wreckage of that same feast (ibid. 23). Macpherson stresses that

 The film was also applauded for its spectacular open-air photography as well as for filming inside a moving train. See, for example, Bryher’s article in Close Up.  “Her [Jehanne’s] greatest attribute is a deep sensitiveness, a living the part she plays” (“Jeanne Ney” ).

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in these scenes the realism in the setting reinforces the realism of the characterisation (ibid.). It is a sensitive realism of atmosphere and spiritual mood: psychological realism. The two scenes just quoted represent a melancholic mood, but Macpherson also mentions a scene of joy and bliss, a scene “full of warmth and deep feeling” that suggests “flaming passages of sheer loveliness” (ibid. 19). It is a scene that was much criticised for its implausibility, in which the Communist Andrej follows his love Jeanne into church. Critics, Pabst reported, insisted that a Communist would not go to church (ibid.), but Pabst was not dogmatic and little concerned with ideological correctness; he was interested in human emotion beyond ideology and class differences. The scene is not supposed to be ‘realistic’ in a material sense but expressive or symbolic of the sacred rapturous mood of the two lovers. Jeanne Ney is a melodrama on revolution.⁶⁹ Like Joyless Street, it is a story about war, loss and misery, but in the midst of all the suffering gestures of humanity and consolidation prevail. The love of Jeanne and Andrej, a young man who was among the party shooting Jeanne’s father, is stronger than their opposing political stances. There is, further, the moment when one of the Bolsheviks offers coffee to Jeanne, who is still in shock after the murder of her father, and shares his fish with his suffering ‘enemy’ – a gesture of charity and comfort which, as in Joyless Street, stresses the humane above the political. Humanity appears here in the figure of a compassionate Bolshevik who is kind regardless of any political affiliations. Pabst, working mostly with an international cast, had this ‘sudden act of kindness’ bestowed by Russian emigrant actor Vladimir Sokoloff, who would repeat a similar act of sharing food in Pabst’s Westfront 1918. Jeanne Ney is also a love story with elements of Romeo and Juliet: Lovers hindered in their love by the animosity of their affiliated social groups, being separated and sorely tried before finally reuniting in a love that wins over all social and political hostility. Jeanne Ney, however, in contrast to the tragedy Joyless Street, has the happy-ending of classic comedy. In this the film digressed from the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg on which it was based, a change that was a concession to the public taste and that infuriated the author.⁷⁰ The film emphasizes the

 On melodrama in this film see also David Bathrick, “Melodrama, History, and Dickens: The Love of Jeanne Ney (),” The Films of G. W. Pabst, –. Especially considering its premier on . December  in Berlin, the film with its gloomy, melodramatic but happy-ending story almost seems to join in with the bourgeois tradition of Dickens’ Christmas tales.  Ehrenburg described his experience and dissatisfaction with the production of the film in his essay “Eine Begegnung des Autors mit seinen Gestalten” (), Über Literatur: Essays, Reden, Aufsätze (Berlin: Volk und Welt, ): –.

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gestus of reaching beyond politics and parties, bridging this divide by love and compassion. At the same time love and happiness are intricately linked with pain, misery and deceit, presenting a truthful picture of life in times of revolution and social change. Here, the congruence to Pool becomes obvious. It was this emphasis on the humane and the moment of consolidation within conflict that appealed to Pool and informs their works too, as well as Pabst’s disintegration of clear, dualistic categories of enemy and friend. One instance of Pabst’s wonderful humour in the film is the notable scene where the compassionate Bolshevik, supplying Jeanne with food, hands her some eggs he has hidden in his pistol holster. The pacifist concept of this humorously adapted and refreshingly new version of ‘swords into ploughshares,’ doubly humorous because of a subtle sexual connotation,⁷¹ once more stresses charity, brotherly love, and the survival of kindness in the midst of revolutionary turmoil and violence. It furthermore presents a memorable image for humanity and the idea of universal community by reviving the conventional pacifist metaphor. Love and compassion are presented as the way to master war, violence, corruption and greed. The film opens with this notion and establishes this idea as the theme of the film. The lovers Jeanne and Andrej first meet at a mass demonstration and their love commences under banners proclaiming the communist slogan “Soedinajtes′!” (“Unite!”). Pabst extents the political slogan from its class-restricted context to a more universal dimension and redefines its purely political into a human concern. Shakespeare-like, Pabst connects the personal with the social and presents a possible solution to social conflicts. Some elements of Pabst’s technique, especially his expressive film technique, were later adapted by the Pool members. For example, there is the marvellous expressiveness of the traitor Chalybieff’s hand wriggling snake-like into the white glove, symbolising his sleek viciousness. In a similar way, the clutched and twisted hands of Astrid in Borderline are a symbolic expression of her emotional agony. Pabst’s ingenious cut-on-movement technique would also make its way into Borderline, as will be demonstrated in the chapter on that film. Despite their passionate veneration of Pabst and his work, Pool also criticised some of his productions. Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929) was extensively reviewed by German correspondent and critic Andor KrasznaKrausz, who thought Pabst’s film rather an unsuccessful attempt to adapt Wede-

 German “eggs” being a colloquial expression for testicles, this in combination with the Freudian phallic symbol of the pistol holster. The moment presents a mixture of Shakespearean humour and Freudian symbolism; the latter would be particularly present to a spectator familiar with Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul of the year before.

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kind’s story to film.⁷² Pandora was a good example to show that “it is a mistake if one type of art takes up the section that was chosen by another one” (KrasznaKrausz, “Lulu” 28). Wedekind’s Lulu was a figure of the spoken word and “inconceivable without the words that Wedekind makes her speak” (ibid. 27). Therefore this figure was an utterly wrong choice for a silent film. Without words, the discrepancy between her outer appearance and her utterance could not be reproduced. Lulu, Kraszna-Krausz concluded, was too complicated a figure for film (ibid.). Another such little regarded film was Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost One, 1929), an example of social realism that centres on the destructive effects of dogmatic and hard-hearted morals and social codes. Thymian, seduced or raped by her father’s apothecary assistant Meinert and unwilling to marry a man she does not love, is sent to a reformative institution to be disciplined and her child is taken away from her. The institution presents merciless and cruel authorities enforcing a rigid, dehumanizing and mechanistic discipline. Running away from this place of torture, Thymian falls into further disrepute by becoming a prostitute. After a succession of events she eventually returns to the reformatory, now in the role of a respectable wife and benefactor, to accuse the institution of inhumanity. In his editorial, Macpherson outright condemned the story on which the film was founded: “Certainly Margarete Böhme’s popular romance did not seem ideal content for a Pabst film” and, he added, “the story is worthless” (“As Is” 5:5, 354, 357). He bristled at the material “one of the few masters of the screen” was given to work with (ibid. 358) and judged the film “not good as a whole, indeed far from it” (ibid. 354). About the lost one, Macpherson mockingly observed that she fainted each time she got into a ‘lost’ situation, four times in all, and about its star actor, Louise Brooks, that she had nothing to do except cry once.⁷³ Despite his severe criticism of the film in general, he did find “some of the finest work he [Pabst] has done” in the scenes in the reformatory, showing the routine life in such an institution (ibid. 354). To these scenes, Macpherson attested an “almost Delphic quality which Pabst alone possesses” (ibid. 354), by which he meant the monotonous rhythm that dominates the atmosphere in this institution, a rhythm dictated by the sadistic headmistress. She commands

 “G. W. Pabst’s ‘Lulu’,” Close Up : (April ): –.  Pool were not directly enamoured with Louise Brooks, since Pabst, prior to engaging her for his film Pandora’s Box, apparently had once insinuated that he was considering H.D. for the role. H.D., who adored Pabst and “felt that [she] had a personal right to Pandora,” seems to have been jealous of Brooks and she interspersed a Pabst interview with several subtly caustic remarks about the star. See “An Appreciation,” Close Up : (March ): –.

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the rhythm of the soup-spoons with a baton during meal times and the rhythm of the movements of undressing with a gong at bedtime. The rhythm transforms the scene into a sensory experience. Pabst’s device was most successful for capturing the psychology of “some demented ritual” (ibid. 356) and the increasing aggravation of this rhythm up to the rebellion of the girls against their tyrant. More applauded again was Westfront 1918 (1930), a pacifist film and an uncompromising accusation against any kind of war, which showed the misery of social conditions caused by war and the disruption of personal happiness on all levels. It was also Pabst’s first sound film. Bryher, who at first was not too “disposed to like” the film since of all the German war books she had read she least liked Vier aus der Infantrie on which the film was based (“Westfront” 106), was intrigued by Pabst’s experiment with the new medium sound. She even claimed that “Westfront 1918 […] will occupy the same position with regard to the sound film that Potemkin occupies in relationship to the silent picture” (ibid. 104 f), insisting that “it should be recorded that real creation with sound and movement began with Westfront 1918 and […] its use of visual image with auditory sensation” (ibid. 105). Unlike other sound films, which minimised movement, “there was no static moment” in Pabst’s (ibid. 106). There was further “little use of dialogue” in his film, but instead “much use of incidental sound” (ibid.) and, most extraordinary of all, “sound only with a blank screen” (ibid. 108, emphasis in the original). Although words were reduced to a minimum, they did contribute to the international momentum of the film, because voices spoke in German and French in a “blending of languages” (ibid. 107). Pabst’s next film Kameradschaft (1931) followed along similar lines of internationality. It is a film about a serious accident in a coal-mine that engenders Franco-German cooperation, despite the two nations’ hostile sentiments. The film promotes European solidarity and cooperation. It is a testimony to international understanding and compassion and a filmic appeal for a united European community (Atwell 1977: 97). Based on a mining disaster at Courriéres in 1906, the film transfers the incident to Lorraine in 1919 (ibid.), thus linking the mining disaster to the First World War and to post-war national sentiments. Bryher would mention this film in her article “What Shall I Do in the War?”⁷⁴ as an example of Pabst advocating for international brotherhood. Like all of Pabst’s films it was announced in Close Up, with several stills, and Ernö Metzner, the film ar-

 Close Up : (June ): –.

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chitect who designed and constructed the sets for the film, reported in the magazine on its production and the difficulties in filming.⁷⁵ b Compared to Eisenstein there is little academic research on Georg Wilhelm Pabst and his films never achieved the same acclaim, nor did they set their mark on film history or the development of film in the way Eisenstein’s did.⁷⁶ Nevertheless, Pabst and his work constitute the other dominant influence on Pool’s film productions, and very likely the greater influence on their related film activities. He surely seems to have been the predominant influence in their first years of film engagement. While Eisenstein, famous for his innovative montage principles, is representative of an avant-garde form in film, Pabst’s films are social and psychological studies and are much concerned with human behaviour and universal human emotions. While Eisenstein works with types – the soldier, the worker, the bourgeois – and is little interested in the individual’s psychology, Pabst’s main concern is exactly with individual psychology, with personal fears and jealousies as well as amities and compassions, with greed and hate but also with love and benevolence. His Secrets of a Soul presents a psychoanalytical study of a man’s phobia and reveals general structures of human fear and the mechanisms of the human mind, whereas The Love of Jeanne Ney describes the struggle of a personal love sorely tried in times of revolution, war, and corruption. Eisenstein developed his montage theory from linguistic theory, literary strategies and lyric form, especially the Japanese haiku. He concentrated on form – which was to become agitprop formalism (Bordwell 1994: 164–68) – and created a visual form of metaphor and symbol that was intellectually charged in a similar manner to the poetic ideas of Ezra Pound. His cinema was an intellectual one, as his numerous theoretical writings confirm, and he was an artist with a utopian vision. Pabst, on the other hand, came from theatre to film; he had actually studied stage acting and performed in several plays for years before

 “A Mining Film,” Close Up : (March ): –.  In addition to the studies already cited see Wolfgang Jacobsen (ed.), G. W. Pabst (Berlin: Argon ,); Hermann Kappelhoff, Der möblierte Mensch: Georg Wilhelm Pabst und die Utopie der Sachlichkeit. Ein poetologischer Versuch zum Weimarer Autorenkino (Berlin: Vorwerk , ); Gottfried Schlemmer, Bernhard Riff and Georg Haberl (eds.), G. W. Pabst (Münster: MAkS Publ., ); Enrico Groppali, Georg W. Pabst (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, ) and Barthélémy Amengual, G. W. Pabst (Paris: Seghers, ).

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he changed to film.⁷⁷ Naturally he had a strong concern for the dramatic and for expressive gestures that were to influence his films; and rather than being utopian, he had to be pragmatic and commercial. Eisenstein openly distanced himself from the bourgeois Pabst and the films he stood for.⁷⁸ By means of his intellectual montage, which was intended to direct an intellectual thought process, Eisenstein wanted to raise his audience to a higher level of rational understanding. Pabst, in contrast, strove to express universals of emotion in a way his audience could relate to and thus be inspired to feel compassion for the miserable rather than disgust at misery. Eisenstein wanted to raise class consciousness by means of his films, whereas Pabst presented emotions that were beyond all class or political affiliation. Such a categorisation of course can only be approximate, since Eisenstein intended his works for the masses and not the chosen few, while Pabst’s works, though commercial, were nevertheless also works of art, with their avant-gardism lying in their often radical and provocative social subject matter. However, when following Hanns Sachs’ concept of ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ schools and styles that will be discussed in the ensuing chapter, Eisenstein with his preference for rational lucidity and his emphasis on montage rather falls into Sachs’ category of ‘classic form,’ whereas Pabst with his imperceptible ‘invisible cut,’ his predominant interest in human nature and passion, and his provoking or sordid subjects has to be rather classified as ‘romantic.’ While the Russian films – and this is particularly true for Eisenstein – “are designed to transform the narrative into a dialectic process” (Kracauer quoted in Schlegel 1997: 215) and in this are abstract and detached, Pabst rather conceals his cuts and has his films work via sympathy, which deeply involves his audience. While some of Eisenstein’s film theoretical pieces were first published in English translation in Close Up, Pabst, although he suggested ways of action,

 Admittedly Eisenstein also first worked at the theatre before he came to film, but even then his interest was already revolutionary and engaged with theatre agitprop. Pabst, in contrast, performed at such bourgeois institutions as the Kurtheater Baden nearby Zurich, although later in  he was art director of the avant-garde Neue Wiener Bühne. Cf. Hans-Michael Bock, “Biografie,” G.W: Pabst, –, an English version of this study is included in The Films of G.W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, ed. Eric Rentschler (New Brunswick, London: Rutgers UP, ): –.  Despite meeting Pabst several times, Eisenstein does not mention him in his extensive writings. The two film directors held “controversial ideoaesthetic positions” and Eisenstein even publicly demonstrated distance from Pabst, defining himself in opposition to the German director of popular commercial films as a champion of independent film. For a full account of the irreconcilable dissent of the two different concepts see Hans-Joachim Schlegel, “Terra incognita: Die Rußlandbilder des Georg Wilhelm Pabst,” G.W. Pabst (): –.

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never submitted a written contribution.⁷⁹ But his ideas and suggestions for European film, film unions and public film companies were circulated by Close Up, and the lively correspondence and regular visits of Pabst and Pool confirms their intense exchange of ideas on film issues. Pabst was the earliest and probably the strongest influence on Pool. There were plans about a film collaboration between Pabst and Macpherson throughout 1928–1932, which for whatever reason never materialised (Friedberg 1990b: 50–54). Close Up reviewed and praised his films and followed his career from 1927–1933 throughout all the years of its publication. The last magazine issue of December 1933 reported on Pabst’s arrival in Hollywood and thus ‘closed up’ with a last look at Pabst’s career.

3.6 Light, Vision and Film Art While an elitist literary high modernist like Pound was dismissive of the popular medium film, which he believed to be mechanic and inartistic, other artists beyond the literary field of Modernism discovered film’s creative and art reformative potential. Eisenstein envisioned an enlightenment of the masses and intended his films to convert them to communist ideas, while Pabst wanted to enlighten the public and inspire them to human sympathy and compassion. Both demonstrated that kinetic sensation and dynamic flow could be wedded to momentum of beauty and high artistry. Due to its nature, film even translated modernist aesthetic attempts such as the stream-of-consciousness technique into a visual experience. But not all literary modernists were as disdainful of film as Pound was; some did recognise its emotional and aesthetic qualities. Bryher recalls that H.D. distinguished between two forms of art: “the wild, Dionysiac, it might be called and the cold, stately Helios metres” (quoted in Heart 225). Poetry and poetic form here become associated with the sun god and light, symbolic for the clarity and precision of H.D.’s poetic form. In extension of her poetic mysticism, this light also represents the illuminating knowledge acquired by spiritual vision. In her Notes on Thought and Vision, she relates a poetic vision as experienced by her imaginary Chinese poet Lo-fu from the Ming dynasty: Lo-fu sat in an orchard in the sun and scrutinised an apple branch with a scientific gaze and saw as if through a magnifying glass the minute lines of the bark and the fine veins of the leaves. Then he went into his little room to reflect and reproduced the picture he had seen in the sun in his mind’s eye, ex-

 Pabst suggested for example a European Film Stock Company designed to promote the production of good films and Macpherson quoted the letter in his editorial (“As Is” :, –).

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periencing a poetic vision. The apple branch from the orchard outside becomes “an approach to something else,” it becomes “the means of attaining happiness” and “a means of approach to ecstasy” (45). Although this is the vision of a mystic initiate, H.D.’s poetics were ‘democratic’ in that she believed all men were capable of such vision. I have already referred to her Notes and the comparison of the two ‘brains’ of the love- and the brain-region to the lenses of an opera glass, which when properly adjusted bring ‘vision into consciousness’. The optic device of the opera glass, which she relies on in her early poetic reflections, will later be succeeded by the film camera. In any case she connects poetic and spiritual vision to optical vision, and the mechanical device ensures the analytic clarity and precision of the picture. Furthermore, her conception of two lenses that work separately ‘yet make one picture’ is reminiscent of another artist who associated the cinema with vision and enlightenment. Eisenstein explained his principle of superposition in Close Up by aligning it with “stereoscopy” and in a second step to the Japanese ideogram and haiku. In his montage dialectics as well, the two separate pictures or ‘shots’ compose one picture of an advanced understanding: “From the superposition of two measures of the same dimension always arises a new, higher dimension” (Eisenstein, “Principles of Film Form” 174). Lo-Fu’s vision of the apple branch appears also as if magnified by a lens and the film technical device of the ‘close up’ will later constitute the name for Pool’s film magazine. H.D.’s association of poetic vision with film and projection comes to light most clearly in her “Projector” poems, which were published in the early Close Up issues and which shall be examined in the respective chapter. She furthermore had a unique experience of a vision herself once which also calls to mind film projection: She “saw a dim shape forming on the wall” in her hotel room. At first she thought “it was the sunlight flickering from the shadows cast from across the orange trees […] outside the bedroom window.” But she instantly realized this could not be, since the “house was already in early shadow.” These “pictures on the wall,” as she calls them, were colourless shapes, the first a figure with “no marked features.” It was “dim light on shadow, not shadow on light” and a silhouette “cut of light, not shadow,” impersonal and ‘yet somebody’. The second picture is a goblet that to H.D. suggests the mystic chalice, though its shape is that of an ordinary goblet, and the third a simple geometrical shape in perspective. The last turns out to be a kind of mental shadow of the little spirit lamp up on the shelf, used for boiling water, and to H.D. becomes symbolic of “the tripod of classic Delphi” and poetry and prophecy (Tribute 45–46). H.D.’s vision transforms her metaphor of the opera glass lenses, which properly focused bring ‘vision into consciousness’, into a picture story of projection.

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In her Notes, H.D. refers to the love-brain also as the womb-brain, which has often been interpreted in terms of hysteria, due to the Greek word for womb. More likely, though, H.D. was thinking of another Greek word that also meant womb and was associated with visions: δɛλϕυζ (delphys). The account of her vision illustrates the artistic principles of Delphi: the image or mask (drama), the chalice (passion and ecstasy), and divine recognition. H.D., who encountered this visionary series of light pictures in Corfu in the spring of 1920, related it later to Freud during her psychoanalytical sessions. In contrast to H.D., who understood her vision in symbolic terms and as the projection of poetic inspiration, Freud read them in scientific terms and as neurotic symptoms. While H.D. took it cum grano salis, dubbing the spirit lamp tripod “a neat trick, a shortcut, a pun, a sort of joke” (Tribute 46), Freud took it dead seriously and found therein an abnormal and “dangerous ‘symptom’” (ibid. 41, 46, 51). The scientist and the poet, as H.D. realised, “translated [their] thoughts into different languages or mediums” (ibid. 47). The poet spiritually transcends the merely physical. Artistic vision, though, was not limited to H.D.’s poetry nor was the optical lens solely a metaphor. Pool were also busy publishing non-fiction books on film technique and filmmaking for the amateur. These books are either concerned with the ‘mechanical’ side of cinematic vision, such as Elliott’s Anatomy and Blakeston’s Yellow Glass, or with its educational possibilities and social concerns, such as Bryher’s Film Problems. Then again, these are not mutually exclusive; H.D.’s poetic vision includes minute analytic scrutiny, whereas Elliott’s Anatomy also considers aesthetic effect and ‘spiritual’ message. What is more, the non-fictional texts attempt to put into practice the idea that everyone is capable of poetic vision and provide guidance to that end. Pool advertised their non-fiction books on film in Close Up as books “for students of the Cinema” (September 1931, 254). Eric Elliott’s Anatomy of Motion Picture Art (1928) teaches the interested novice to analyse films and recognise their artistry, using numerous examples for the purpose of demonstration. It explains how to ‘watch’ films, perceive beauty, and treasure film art. For this purpose it introduces various film technical devices and art techniques, such as the close-up, cutting, pictorial composition, the value of motion and continuity, and explains their functions and how they affect, how they can create different moods, moments of reflection, agitation or silence, and how mechanical devices and film effects can become dramatic devices of art. He delineates how physical sensations of film can at the same time be aesthetic impressions. One of his numerous examples is the “effect of out-offocus distinction” for visualising memories (127), a film technical device that Macpherson seems to have used in his film Wing Beat. Elliott also writes on

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the effects of film presentation. He describes, for example, the possibility of flooding the screen “with coloured light in order to create ‘atmosphere’,” objecting at the same time that this effect “extinguishes the photographic quality of the picture” (Anatomy 33 f). Elliott states in the introduction to his book that it presents the scientist’s approach, who impartially “dissects”, as opposed to the approach of the artist or connoisseur, who “judge form alone” and “only in accordance with their individual taste” (ibid. 12). Accordingly his title relates film construction to the biological body and to living organism rather than art form. For his instructive examples he relies on European films, mostly British and German productions, some French and Italian, and on American ones, mostly by Griffith. Examples from Russian film are absent from his book and consequently avant-garde Russian montage too. Instead, Elliott explains the “Continuity Graft”, which is reminiscent of Pabst’s ‘invisible cut’ and which, although Elliott does not mention Pabst, is attributed to a German film about 1926 (ibid. 110). Russian film seems to become a notable interest of Pool around the time of Bryher’s Film Problems of Russia (1929), one of the early European histories of Russian film.⁸⁰ Her film history also intended to ‘enlighten’ the public, who were unfamiliar with these films as they were not shown in England. Elliott’s Anatomy wants to train the eye and teach the reader to perceive film and its construction, but it also understands seeing and vision in a more spiritual sense and voices an avant-garde vision: “[The camera] can make each of us a discerning artist, each of us sensitive to the dramatic and spiritual messages latent in all things, in humanity and in nature” (73). “Each of us” signals the universal relevance and democratic approach of Pool’s vision, and the social function of their art. The public “needs enlightening” (ibid. 142) and film art was a means to accomplish such enlightening. Consequently, the “scientist” acknowledges the poetic vision as “a valuable quality in screen art […] because it discovers images that convey a message beyond their material import” (ibid. 128), i. e. present a metaphor or symbol. He cites Whitman’s image of “out of the cradle endlessly rocking” (ibid.), which Griffith employed in Intolerance (1916) as a symbolic motif. According to the possibilities of ‘enlightenment’ in film, light, to Elliot, is “the cardinal element” of motion picture art (Anatomy 106). It is prior in importance even to motion. Since film is light in motion (ibid. 151) to him, he prefers to speak of the photoplay instead of film.  Although E. Hellmund-Waldow contributed two articles on Russian film to Close Up as early as spring , a real interest only becomes perceptible with H.D.’s and Macpherson’s articles on Russian film, the statement by Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Pudovkin in the fall of the same year, and last but not least Bryher’s monograph.

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Compared to Elliott’s Anatomy, Blakeston’s study of cinematography Through a Yellow Glass (1929) adopts a more pragmatic approach. Pool’s third non-fiction book intended for amateur filmmakers and “students of the Cinema” is concerned with the practical side of filmmaking. It portrays the formation of a film from the script to its production in the studio, taking into account various problems that may arise and paying attention to financial and organisational aspects, questions of costume and more. Elliott imparts the expertise to competently judge the artistic quality of a film, while Blakeston provides a guide for the amateur aspiring to make his or her own film, and Close Up the international journalism and exchange forum to film culture. Art to Pool was related to insight and awareness. Working in many media from various positions of the literary field, from highly consecrated poetry ‘down’ to journalism, Pool furthermore sought to disrupt entrenched attitudes towards certain media, what Ralf Schneider terms, based on Bourdieu, “media habitus”. In relation to film and the cinema, they even attempted to discontinue the particularly British process of the “media habituation” (Schneider 2004)⁸¹ of film as a purely industrial and inartistic product. First and foremost, they wanted to encourage the public in creative activity and involve them in the development of the film medium.

 Schneider derives the term “media habituation” following Bourdieu’s theoretical approach and by taking into account his concept of the “habitus”. Consequently, “habituation” in this context must be understood in relation to the “media habitus” and not only in the usual English sense of the term as ‘becoming used to something’.

Part III Philosophy The Quest for a Universal Foundation of Human Life

4 Universal Sympathy and Universal Man: Pool’s Avant-gardist New Humanism The previous chapter’s focus on a language of images already demonstrated some attempts within modernist aesthetics to find an artistic means of expression that would be more precise or true to human nature and psychology than conventional ones. By looking at different cultures and their arts, modernist artists discovered that human language originated from pictorial expression and tropes such as symbols and metaphors, and developed from the concrete image towards the abstract. Pictures and images were related to the emotions, abstract thought to the intellect. But why it is that the concrete image is so closely connected to the emotions? Such an exploration into the nature of art and aesthetics is now necessary in order to examine and understand Pool’s art philosophy and aesthetic concept. At the same time, the following chapter will explore the mentality and philosophical thought of a time in which, as Bryher once claimed, “art was what religion was to the Middle Ages and discovery to the Renaissance.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, Romantic and neo-humanistic ideas merged with early scientific ethnology and psychology, and disciplines like anthropology and psychoanalysis, along with religious and classical studies, philosophy, and psychology, facilitated a rediscovery of mythology, folklore and religion, and of ‘primitive’ culture. ‘Primitivism’ inspired many avant-garde artists: Paul Gaugin painted Tahitian motifs, Pablo Picasso looked to African masks for inspiration, the Fauves painted ‘beastly wild’ in blatant colours, and Igor Stravinsky composed his Rite of Spring based on early pagan ritual; writers like Thomas Stearns Eliot or William Butler Yeats too had recourse to the archaic.¹ ‘Primitivism’ however was not only a reaction against certain academic artistic standards but moreover against ‘civilised’ Western culture in general, which was thought to be repressive and inhibitive to human nature. ‘Primitivism’ furthermore posed a reaction against such perceived afflictions of civilization as the advances of technology, against which it posited a simplified but freer life, and rationalization, which it opposed through the emotions, sensuality, and the irrational. It also promoted the idea that ‘primitive’ man was closer to art and poetic inspiration. These ideas were not new and had been around since Enlightenment humanism (Giambattista Vico) and Romanticism (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), yet they regained significance through  See Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, enlarged edition (Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, ) and Burkhard Schmidthorst, Mythos und Primitivismus in der Lyrik von T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats und Ezra Pound: Zur Kulturkritik in der klassischen Moderne (Heidelberg: Winter, ).

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psychoanalytical and anthropological works, such as for example Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). It was not least the human catastrophe of the First World War, a disaster to which nationalism and rigid conceptions of difference had contributed, that induced a reconsideration of what being human meant and shifted the focus again to the common nature of mankind. Universal to all humans and cultures respectively are emotions and moods. Their universality suggests that they are part of mankind’s common biological inheritance. Basic emotions such as joy, anger, fear, and distress even extend beyond human nature and are shared with the animal world. Other, higher emotions such as love, guilt, jealousy or envy, are universal to all humans too, although they may vary according to culture.² Then of course there are plain sensations such as hunger, thirst, eroticism, pleasure and pain that are inherent to all humans as well as animals. There emerges in the modernist mentality an awareness of the reality of internal, subjective worlds of emotions and passions in man, worlds of wishes and dreams and the imagination. Modernism, which emphatically defied realism, set psychological reality against external reality and endorsed a psychological realism. I shall not attempt to give an extensive historical cultural survey of this twentieth-century mentality in what follows but instead will highlight a few connections that are a direct influence on Pool and their works. b Psychoanalysis had a significant effect upon literature and art in the twentieth century and Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts and methods influenced writers, painters, sculptors and musicians – modernist artists in particular. His concept of the unconscious inspired them to experiment with the irrational and the ‘primitive’, while his practise of free association in treating his patients found its way into their experimental literary writing techniques, and his theory of dreams wakened their curiosity in dreaming and symbolism as well as exploring their inner subjective worlds. Aside from the particular mode of criticism to which his theory is prone, Freud has to be credited with rediscovering the importance of dreams. His Interpretation of Dreams, originally published in 1899 but intentionally post-dated to the beginning of the new era, symbolically inaugurat-

 See for example Keith Oatley and Jennifer M. Jenkins, Understanding Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell, ) and Paul Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). For a historical study of emotion that influenced European philosophy and very likely Pool, as I will show in the chapter on the novel Gaunt Island, see Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: Printed for A. Millar, Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, and J. Bell ).

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ed the twentieth century. Additionally, his method of treatment through the use of free association established a mode of expression that was liberated from censorship and stimulated creativity. Mark Micale has pointed to the fact that scholarship still continues to present Freud, and to a lesser degree Jung, as the two great influences of psychological Modernism,³ and has fortunately called for a wider scope of criticism concerning psychological thought so as to explore “the larger world of ideas, attitudes, and practices around Freud” (2004: 7) – although in his honest endeavour he runs the risk of changing to the contrary. In trying to “move beyond Freud” and to “abandon a simple popularizing model of influence” (ibid.), my own study must not ignore the historical combination of circumstances or personal and other affiliations. In England for example Freud’s influence and reception was closely connected to the Woolfs and their running of the Hogarth Press. From 1924 onwards Leonard and Virginia Woolf had been the only publishers of his work in translation (Willis 1992: 297) and The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytical Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by members of the Bloomsbury group and published by the Hogarth Press, remains the authoritative edition up to this day. Bryher once even stated that since “all literary London discovered Freud about 1920” Freud was to her literary England (quoted in Friedman 1987: 18). What is more, Freud was directly associated with Pool, as Bryher had met him through Havelock Ellis in 1927 (Bryher, Heart 230) and H.D. was to undergo psychoanalysis with Freud in 1933. Macpherson again mentions him by name and, as will be made clear in my analysis of the novel, he also has a role as a signifier in his novel Poolreflection. Bryher had an ardent interest in psychoanalysis. She was one of the early subscribers to the British Journal of Psychoanalysis (ibid.) and became a financial supporter of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement (Friedman 1987: 18), and was herself an analyst-in-training. She also points to the close conjunction of psychoanalysis and anthropology at the time, recalling that the early analysands not only attended lectures on psychoanalysis but on anthropology as well (Heart 299). Since the three friends were living together, H.D. and Macpherson naturally

 His argument, however, that “an astonishing share of the scholarship” presents Freud and Jung as “the sole exemplars of psychological Modernism” (Micale : , my emphasis) stretches his point. Also, citing one single study for “a clear example of this practise” and furthermore claiming a “library” of works on Freud and Modernism that lists a total of eight books, which are sparsely disseminated over a period of almost half a century at that (Micale : , note ), is not all that convincing as backup for his argument. The importance of Charcot over Freud concerning hysteria in fin de siècle France is also not quite such a novel discovery as Micale renders it to be (:  f).

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had access to the psychoanalytical journal too. The special composition of Pool, with Bryher a committed Freud disciple (Friedman 2002: xxvi), H.D. an enthusiastic interested party while at the same time a critical and defiant poet, and later a Freudanalysing analysand,⁴ resulted in a dynamic, eager yet critical reception of his psychoanalytic theory. The poet H.D. was most distinct from the scientist Freud, as Freud apparently admitted himself ⁵ and yet his practise of free association helped H. D. to eventually overcome her own writer’s block according to Friedman (2002: xxi). Stronger even than the relation to Freud was the influence of Freud’s disciple Hanns Sachs. Sachs always remained bound to Freud’s theories but, unlike Freud, he was most interested in the function of the “creative unconscious”⁶ on art and aesthetics. Furthermore unlike Freud, who was most anxious about his scientific reputation, Sachs endeavoured to acquaint a broader audience with psychoanalytical knowledge (Wild 2005: 332–333). This was also the reason for his participation in the film project Secrets of a Soul. Bryher and Macpherson, as stated, had been introduced to the Berlin psychoanalyst by their filmmaking friend Pabst (Bryher, Heart 295), and Sachs became a lifelong friend. Sachs and the three friends were in continuous contact during the ensuing years. Bryher spent several months a year in Berlin at that time, sometimes accompanied by Macpherson sometimes by H.D., and Sachs spent most of his summer in Switzerland, in the vicinity of Bryher, Macpherson and H.D., where Bryher visited him daily (Heart 196). What is more, Sachs became closely associated with their work, especially their film-work. In fact, Pool were not only familiar with his work and ideas, but since he became a contributor to their film magazine Close Up and published a pamphlet-size booklet with POOL,⁷ it is only legitimate to count him a member of the Pool group. Accordingly, his psychoanalytical thought should be given special consideration in this context. Another dear friend to Pool was the British physician, psychologist, social reformer and writer Havelock Ellis. Ellis was by all accounts an extraordinary personality; he was an ardent supporter of women’s rights, a socialist who stressed the im-

 H.D.’s analysis of Freud is laid down in her book Tribute to Freud as well as in her letters to Bryher, Macpherson, Havelock Ellis and others. Susan Stanford Friedman compiled and published these letters in Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle (New York: New Directions Book, ).  Friedman quotes H.D.’s poem “The Master” as evidence for Freud’s recognition on this point (: xx).  The term is taken from the title of Sachs’ book The Creative Unconscious: Studies in the Psychoanalysis of Art, ed. Dr. A. A. Roback (Cambridge: SCI-Art Publ., , ²).  Does Capital Punishment Exist? (Territet: Pool, ).

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portance of individualism,⁸ and an early proponent of naturism but who felt uncomfortable about unconfined nudism and was himself excessively shy.⁹ His socialism was fundamentally moral and cultural, and derived from William Morris rather than from Karl Marx (Thatcher 1970: 93–94). He was a courageous pioneer of many kinds with interests in ethical topics and the development of free spirits and founded several ethical societies (ibid.). It was Ellis who eventually introduced Bryher to Freud’s theory (Bryher, Heart 228), and despite his fame as a sexologist, Bryher seems to have had little interest in discussing his sexological studies with him;¹⁰ instead she would become a life-long enthusiast about his literary study From Rousseau to Proust (1935). Pool nicknamed him Chiron, after the wise and just instructor of Achilles. With Ellis they discussed anthropology and the idea of race memory. Bryher recalls that in one of these talks, Ellis suggested that “it is possible that some experiences are common to the race and that the more sensitive inherit a knowledge of emotional states that they have not felt themselves” (quoted in Heart 229). Ellis was curious about human emotions and (syn)aesthetic sensations, and his contribution constitutes the earliest noted influence of psychological thought in the present context. Bryher and H.D’s investigations of the human state with him began prior to the formation of Pool. Bryher recalls that he was then often gently chiding her youthful impatience and radical reformism and instead “trying to make [her] see that life was a balance of composite forces” (ibid.). Ellis substituted an integral dualism for an untenable critical one, stating that “the world is full of apparent contradictions, and every highest truth is the union of opposites” (quoted in Goldberg 1926: 71).

4.1 The Creative Power of Dreaming: Trans/Forming Affects into Visual Images, Symbols and Narrative Even though Freud rediscovered the power of dreaming for the twentieth century, dreams had of course been an ever present throughout human history. Formerly they were believed to be messages from the gods or the dead and had

 “While we are socializing all those things of which all have equal common need, we are more and more tending to leave to the individual the control of those things which in our complex civilization constitute individuality. We socialize what we call our physical life in order that we may attain greater freedom for what we call our spiritual life” (Ellis, The New Spirit ).  Cf. Chris Nottingham, The Pursuit of Serenity: Havelock Ellis and the New Politics (Amsterdam: UP, ) and on Ellis’ uneasiness about excessive nudism see the chapter “The Gospel of Nudism” in his My Confession ().  Apart from one exception she never discussed his Studies in the Psychology of Sex with him, although she read it (Bryher, Heart ).

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been related to prophecy, divination and vision, and to divine inspiration. Dreams are also, however, a succession of images that often present a pictorial code. Freud eliminated the visionary and prophetic power from dreams and related them to a biological necessity of the dreaming individual; dreams became projections, visualisations of subjective needs. Although they were no longer messages from the gods, they still presented a coded meaning to Freud that had to be deciphered, as they concealed subjective wishes. Proceeding from Freud’s acknowledgement that dreams were essential to the human individual, Sachs became more interested in dreams and symbols that moved beyond private wish-fulfilment and were collectively accessible, applying Freud’s psychoanalytical ideas to the creative process of poetry and narrative.

4.1.1 Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams: Human Libidinal Wish-Fulfilment and Pleasure Instincts Freud maintained that dreams “think predominantly in visual images” (Standard Edition IV 49) and that they “‘dramatize’ an idea” (ibid. 50). This means that in dreams abstract and invisible thought is transformed into concrete images and content. As a result “in dreams […] we appear not to think but to experience” (ibid. 50). In order for “dream-thoughts” to be changed into “dream-content” a certain process is required, a process that Freud came to name dream-work. In their dream-work the dreamers rely on special techniques such as condensation and association, displacement, representation and symbolism.¹¹ Representation translates a dream-thought into a visual image; symbolism substitutes a symbol for an action, person or idea; and displacement detaches the emotional significance of a dream element from its actual content and attaches it to an entirely different one, so as to avoid the censor’s suspicion. In condensation “the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts” is compressed into the comparatively “brief, meagre and laconic” dream (Standard Edition IV 279). This is accomplished in such a way that the most prominent and frequent elements of the dreamthoughts are worked into an associative chain or web, in which one dream element stands for several associations. Furthermore, since dreams think in images, ‘words are treated as though they were things’ (ibid. 295) and consequently can be assembled like objects. Thus words may be composed into neologisms or may

 For a full discussion of the individual techniques of dream-work see condensation and association (Standard Edition IV, –), displacement (–), representation (–) and symbolism (Standard Edition V, –, –).

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form jokes and puns. Freud concludes that dreams are not only amusing but ingenious (ibid. 289 note) and relates dream-work to the creative process of the poet (ibid. 278). This notion of a universal creative potential inherent in every dreamer subsequently becomes of importance for the art philosophy of Pool. Although Freud made the connection between the creativity of the dreamer and the poet, the person usually referred to in relation with association in the scholarly context of literature and literary studies is the philosopher and psychologist William James. He has frequently been credited as the father of the notion of the stream of consciousness, while the modernist literary writing technique of the same denomination is attributed to him.¹² However, in his two-volume The Principles of Psychology (1890) he ascribes only one, not very extensive, chapter to the ‘stream of thought’ and the definition of what he means by ‘stream of consciousness’ comprises of one short passage: Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (James, Principles I 239, emphasis in the original)

The marked difference between James and Freud is that James is primarily concerned with the conscious state of thinking and that he is skipping the “gaps” of sleep in human consciousness (James, Principles I 237–240), whereas Freud is precisely interested in the unconscious thought, or rather the process of experiencing, of the individual. It may be that here lies the reason for Dorothy Richardson’s dislike of having her writing style defined in relation to the idea of stream of consciousness, since she relates it so closely to music and thus instead to unconscious experiencing than conscious thought, something which will become more apparent when turning to Nietzsche later on in this chapter. Bryher chose to talk of “continuous association” (Heart 281) with regard to Richardson’s style. James’ stream of consciousness and in particular the cognitive processes he examines in relation to grammar and sentence structure (James, Principles I 262–265), seem to be much more applicable to the writing experiments of Gertrude Stein as will be discussed in the chapter on Close Up. What may have appealed to the literati and made them favour James’ term could have been the organic metaphor of the river or stream that provided a means of clearly distinguishing the stream-of-consciousness writers from those celebrating

 Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, ) and Melvin Friedman, Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method (Folcroft: Folcroft Press, ).

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modern technology. Freud’s conception of an associative chain, with its description of joining ‘objects’ as characteristic of dream-work, in turn calls to mind the technique of film montage, Eisenstein’s associational montage in particular. Even though Freud himself was most adverse to film, his mental picture processing in dreaming has frequently been related to film sequences especially by film theorists.¹³ Although predominantly concerned with an “unconscious process of thought” (Standard Edition IV 281), Freud did use free association with his patients as a method of treatment. However, he was convinced that the associations produced by the patient in analysis had already been active during sleep and had played a part in the formation of the dream (ibid. 280). Therefore the associations produced in their conscious state helped Freud to gain access to the patient’s unconscious. Freud realized, using a Shakespearean tenor, that ‘there is method in the madness of dreams’ (ibid. 60) and that their apparent absurdity followed along certain lines of composition. The problem is that the dream is entirely subjective and that the dreamer alone holds the key to the dream and its meaning. Freud compared the dream-content to a translation of the original subject-matter of the dream-thoughts into a different mode of expression. While the dream-thoughts are immediately comprehensible, the dream-content is not and first has to be decoded. The difficulty is that the pictographic script of the dream-content has to be read according to the symbolic relation of its characters and not according to their pictorial value (ibid. 277). What the dream-content codes in the form of images are emotions, desires, or affects, as Freud preferred to call them. Already Havelock Ellis had spoken of dreams as “an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts,” whose study might reveal primitive stages in the evolution of mental life (quoted in Freud, ibid. 60). Freud discovered in dreams a means of wish-fulfilment, and the wishes that were fulfilled in a dream originated, according to Freud, in human instincts and sexual impulses. In relating dreams to instincts and libidinal drives, Freud roots human psychology in biology and animal nature and moves it into the realm of Darwinism.¹⁴ Affiliating the unconscious thus closely to instincts and libido stresses on the one hand man’s kinship with the animal world, while on the other hand however it also introduces a biological determin-

 See for example Laura Marcus (ed.), Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: UP, ): –. Marcus points to the historical emergence of film and psychoanalysis that runs parallel, making them “twin sciences or technologies of fantasy, dream, virtual reality and screen memory” ().  For a full account of Darwin’s influence and the biological origins of Freud’s psychoanalytical theories see Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (Boston: Harvard UP, , ¹): –.

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ism into Freud’s theory. His emphasis on animal nature sometimes lost sight of the more humane and poetic qualities in man. The libidinal desires that emerge in dreams are coded but not all dreams are thus disguised. Some reveal themselves openly as fulfilments of wishes, as for example when the dreamer is hungry and thirsty and dreams of drinking or eating (ibid. 123). The dreams of young children are almost always pure wish-fulfilments and were of no interest to Freud (ibid. 127). He was interested in dreams as a means of treating neuroses (ibid. 104), neuroses that were acquired because civilization frequently forced the individual to suppress its sexual impulses. In this context he came to “treating the dream itself as a symptom” (ibid. 101). Consequently in Freud’s definition “a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish” (ibid. 160, italics in the original). Accordingly he read the pictographic script of the dream in symbolic relation to the sexual life of his patients. As a result, dream objects such as swords, knife, pens, tree trunks, candles or black reddish became phallic symbols, and vases, boxes, chests, windows or the flesh of eye lids yonic ones; overcoats were symbolic for condoms and climbing up or walking down were ultimately related to sexual intercourse. William James once stated that “the aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity” (Principles I 230), and Freud, in his burning desire to have psychoanalysis accepted as a science, tended to simplifying generalizations; however he also has to be given credit for modifying his theory throughout his lifetime. Freud was primarily interested in psychopathology and neurotic disturbances and rediscovered dreams for the medical sciences and as part of a medical cure. But even though with Freud dreams become closely linked to biological drives and the mystic idea of the dream as a power of transcending the material world is abolished, he also found a psychical function and biological necessity in dreams. Thus psychoanalysis brings together aesthetic creativity (symbolic expression) and essential human necessities (pleasure), and grounds them as interdependent in the natures of each individual. Freud’s theory furthermore demonstrates that in each human a creative, artistic principle is at work. The idea of a universal creative potential in mankind and a biological and psychological necessity for such creativity concurs with Pool’s art philosophy. But even though Pool did toy with the contemporary psychoanalytical discourse of sexuality in some of their works (see the chapters on Poolreflection and Borderline), they understood Freud’s sexual drives in a broader sense as infantile and innate pleasure instincts, which in turn they related to art and its psychological and social function.

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4.1.2 Hanns Sachs’ Community of Daydreams: From Subjective Wish-Fulfilment to the Social Function of Art Freud had shown little interest in daydreaming and had clearly distinguished it from “true dreams” in that the dreamer attaches complete belief to the appearances encountered in a dream and experiences them as real, whereas the daydreamer is conscious that they are not (Standard Edition IV 50).¹⁵ He did, however, write a short essay on “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1907) in which he hinted at the aesthetic pleasure that distinguishes the work of art from the common daydream. He had also indicated that some writers rely on prevalent subject-matters and that those are taken from myths, legends and fairytales that probably amount to the wish-fantasies of entire nations (Standard Edition IX 152). But as Freud himself points out in this essay, he discusses the phenomenon of fantasies rather than the creative writer (ibid.). In the end it was Hanns Sachs whose primary interest was “the exploration of the fundamental problems of aesthetics, with the help of Freud’s great discovery” (Creative Unconscious 7), and who more fully investigated the daydream and its relation to poetry and art. The core of his thought is focused on the idea of an essentially social nature of art and his 1924 study Gemeinsame Tagträume (the community of daydreams)¹⁶ forms the centre of his work. Sachs starts out from what he considers to be common viable knowledge, namely that daydreams are the universally human preliminary stage from which originates, in cases of the exceptionally gifted, its advancement to an artwork and to poetry or literature (Gemeinsame Tagträume 3). He notes that while psychoanalysis has already disclosed the connections of the daydream to the unconscious, it had so far not acknowledged the question of how the daydream becomes transformed into a work of art. Sachs points out the lucid differences between the daydream and art: For one, the daydream only has a single hero who is the sole centre of events and this hero is the daydreamer him or herself. Moreover, the daydream is without form. It may vary from the merely fragmentary to the fully elaborate “Privatroman” (private novel), but compared to the work of art it is without structure and composition (Gemeinsame Tagträume 5). Furth-

 Although the Standard Edition gives “day-dreaming” and “day-dreamer” in a hyphenated spelling I will use the spelling without a hyphen throughout, as given in Sachs, for the sake of consistency.  Since the English translation of  is a revision rather than a translation and deviates substantially from the much earlier original German essay that was published at the time of Pool, I henceforth resort to the German original at times and in these instances will supply my own translation.

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more, the daydream is not linked to concerns with style, rhyme or rhythm, and does not even need to proceed on the level of syntax but may instead indulge in a mixture of verbal associations and images. The daydream is designed for its creator only and consequently it can be understood and enjoyed only by the daydreamer him or herself (ibid.; Creative Unconscious 14, 16). Thus even though the subject-matter or emotional content of the two cannot really be differentiated, the most explicit distinction between the daydream and the artwork is that the former is created by one person for this person only while the second is created by one person for as many others as possible. Consequently Sachs sees the work of art as a great social accomplishment, similar to the myth (Gemeinsame Tagträume 6), while the daydream (as well as the nightly dream) is thoroughly asocial and purely egocentric (Creative Unconscious 14; Significance 95). Sachs relates the wish-fulfilment accomplished by the dream, such as the gratification of erotic desires or ambition, to narcissism – an aspect that I shall continue to discuss later on. Despite this, the nightly dream in contrast to the daydream allows for the significant exception of two companions in mind working out a daydream together (Creative Unconscious 24). The collective daydream expresses their mutual affects or desires, which are usually connected with feelings of guilt and suffering, and the sharing of it intensifies the sensation of relief for the daydreamers. Different from the ordinary daydream these mutual affects and desires are unconscious and are expressed by condensation and extensive use of symbolism. In its means of expression the mutual daydream transcends the limits of the ordinary daydream and is closer to the night dream. The function of this symbolic expression shall be examined in due time but prior to this it is necessary to look into what exactly turns the daydream into a work of art. It is well-known by now that the daydream has always had the daydreamer as its sole hero or heroine. The collective daydream, mutually composed by two authors, features two heroes or heroines of equal standing. The work of art now replaces this exceptional concerted duality by a multitude which joins in the dreaming and shares the fantasy. In order to achieve this task, the poet or writer has to create an impersonal or rather supra-personal hero, with whom any and all recipients will be able to identify, because this hero is at the same time everyone as well as no one in particular (Gemeinsame Tagträume 29). In his later revision, Sachs explains more closely how this is accomplished: the “characters and their emotional life” need be portrayed in such a way “that they seem to have their own individualistic existence and yet represent what is fundamentally universal” (Creative Unconscious 43, my emphasis). Without personal characteristics they would not be “sufficiently alive” and identification impossible (ibid.). This means by inference that the poet or artist must not forget about the observer or auditor but must compose his work, regarding content, structure

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and form, with consideration for the recipients’ delight and comprehension. The aspect of comprehension will become particularly important in relation to the artworks of Modernism. For many of the modernist avant-garde works were so preoccupied with form experiment and so little concerned with subject-matter that they were hermetic and became incomprehensible to the majority; often even intentionally so, because they no longer wanted to delight but were intended to be difficult and elitist for purposes of distinction. Sachs had already more fully examined the aesthetics of art in an earlier study called “Esthetics and Psychology of the Artist” (1913).¹⁷ He believed that the aesthetic effect could be most easily examined in poetry – the English translation of the German “Dichtung” into “poetry” here has to be understood in the broader sense of a literature with artistic merit and which for Sachs comprises of tragedy, epic, romance and novel (Significance 93). According to Sachs, poetry worked upon the listener in such a way that “as by suggestion, he is compelled to experience things which are related to him of another, that is, to transpose them into subjective reality, in doing which, however, he never completely loses the knowledge of the correct relation of things” (ibid. 94, my emphasis). This means that while the listener remains conscious of the illusion, he nevertheless experiences real emotions, he feels and sympathises with the events and figures in the poetic work. In order to fully achieve aesthetic pleasure, the listener has to leave behind his own ego, in the sense of the reality principle, and instead freely identify “with any feeling or with any figure” (ibid. 99). He has to lose himself because “only he who loses himself completely in a work of art can feel its deepest affect” (ibid.). Sachs describes such loss of oneself in art and turning away from reality as the true meaning of l’art pour l’art (ibid.). What is more, the listener experiences the sensation of another as his or her own and thus leaves behind his or her ego not only in the sense of the reality principle. Although Sachs does not explicitly draw the parallel, this act of experiencing poetry is somewhat similar to the state of being in love: the individual abandons the self and transcends the ego to lose itself in another.¹⁸ Ac-

 This essay is included as chapter five in The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences, trans. Charles Rockwell Payne (New York: The Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, ). It was first published in German in .  Freud had once described the state of being in love as a giving up of ones own personality (Standard Edition XIV ). In the state of being in love the individual abandons partly its own self in the infatuation with another and thus forfeits its narcissism to some extent: “A person who loves has, so to speak, forfeited a part of his narcissism, and it can only be replaced by his being loved” (Standard Edition XIV ).

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cordingly, the opposite of all narcissism is love. This association of poetry and love will become more relevant in relation to the art and philosophy of Pool. Due to this perceived power of art to transcend the confines of reality as well as individuality, Sachs thought of poetry as “the last and strongest comforter of humanity” and a reservoir of “buried sources of pleasure” (ibid. 95). The work of art enables the individual to leave its single conscious self behind and instead join into a communal experience of unconscious universal pleasure. In addition to its function as comforter of humanity, art further plays an important part in cultural development for it is working towards “taming and ennobling” the unconscious human instincts that are hostile to culture (ibid. 107). For art, especially by means of aesthetic form, sublimates instinctive and often violent forces (ibid. 10) and thereby secures communal life and harmony. But to return once more to the aesthetic effect that mediates this comfort, according to Sachs, the aesthetic effect is inextricably intertwined with the problem of form. He states that “[t]he purpose of the work is to attract and delight an audience” and form and beauty are an end to achieve this. If a work of art is incomprehensible and without form it does not attract attention. This means that to Sachs “the need for form and beauty is a consequence of the social function of art” (Creative Unconscious 45, my emphasis). Such artistic form is comprised of structure and symmetry, subsequent grades of intensity and expectation, retardations and accelerations, atmosphere, euphony and clarity of language, rhyme and rhythm and more (ibid.). Structure is necessary to raise the affect slowly from one stage to the next to its highest degree. Rhyme reawakens a childish pleasure in playing with words. Rhythm facilitates labour and has an additional erotic connotation (Significance 101). All these formal elements can be employed to confer a Lustprämie or Vorlust (a premium of easily attained pleasure). This forepleasure, which may be either the suspense or the beauty of a work, entices the observer’s or listener’s interest. Sachs distinguishes the forepleasure from the endpleasure, which originates from the unconscious and which achieves a relief of tension and discharge of affects (ibid. 31). Sachs’ notion of endpleasure recalls Aristotle’s concept of catharsis, which also denotes a purging of excessive emotions, one difference being that the psychoanalyst of course defines these emotions as affects springing from sexual impulses and instinctive infantile drives (ibid. 102). Sachs himself draws the parallel to tragedy and notes that it is in tragedy that “the purification of the soul of the hearer is most completely attained” (ibid. 98). It becomes obvious that Sachs’ idea of art, with its emphasis on the necessity of illusion to provide comfort to humanity, is diametrically opposed to another art concept of the time, namely Brecht’s epic theatre with its alienation effects, which were intended to prevent the observer from experiencing any illusion. Sachs continues to notice that tragic affects like sorrow,

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fear, horror or sympathy in no way compromise the aesthetic pleasure gained from an artwork’s beauty, but on the contrary even work more immediately upon the observer or listener (ibid. 31–32). To Sachs in tragedy instinctive forces of the unconscious appeared on stage in masks. Although Sachs finds the night-dream quite unsuitable for his investigation of the social function of art – firstly for the simple fact that the night-dream is without exception always secluded from the external world and all fellow human beings, and secondly because it is dependent on sleep and thereby causes different psychological preconditions – he recognises similarities between the true night-dream and the work of art which the daydream lacks. The night dream, as Freud noted, dramatises and therefore, according to Sachs, creates a “Privattheater” (private theatre) rather than a private novel. Furthermore, the dream rises from the mysterious depth of the unconscious, without any agency of consciousness, just like the poetic visions that rise from the poet’s inspiration (Gemeinsame Tagträume 6). Thus, according to Sachs, the work of art regains some of the merits of the dream which are lost with the daydream, as the work of art makes use of several of the techniques of ‘dream-work’ in transforming wishes, emotions, and affects into visual representations. I want to return now to consider the function of symbolic expression. Sachs, and Rank, defines the symbol as “a representative pictorial substitute expression for something hidden, with which it has perceptible characteristics in common or is associatively joined by internal connections” and further as “a kind of condensation, an amalgamation of individual characteristic elements” (Significance 13). This already shows that the symbol is the product of most other techniques employed in dream-work, namely representation, association, and condensation. But the symbol is also closely related to such figures of speech as the simile, the metaphor, the allegory, and the allusion; in fact it embodies “an ideal union” of all these pictorial means of expression (ibid.). Not only does the symbol “belong[] essentially to the unconscious” and is “close to primitive thought,” because it tends from the ideal and abstract to the evident and concrete (ibid.). What is more, the symbol is of universal validity (ibid. 14). Sachs and Rank place this universality in an anthropological or ethnological context and in this context extensively discuss the sexual symbolism in rituals of primitive cultures (ibid. 14–21). Freud, who originally had been adverse to seeing a permanently fixed meaning in dream symbolism and only later added the section on symbols in typical dreams, referred to Sachs and Rank on this topic.¹⁹

 In his  revision (Standard Edition V , note ).

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According to Sachs and Rank, “symbol formation is not […] arbitrary and dependent on individual differences, but […] follows definite laws and leads to widely distributed, universal, human structures” (ibid. 14). These structures, they believed, were typical as regards time, place, sex and race distinctions, and indeed the great languages (ibid.). Sachs and Rank back up their assumptions by drawing upon the aesthetician Dilthey, who defined the “natural symbol” as “the pictorial material which stands in close and constant relation to an inner state” and who claimed that “on the basis of our psychological nature, a circle of natural symbols exists for dream and delusion, as for speech and poetry” (quoted in Significance 14). To Dilthey such natural symbols were, for example, the relation of parent to child or the relation of man and woman. Dilthey concluded that it was because of the universality of such symbolism and since he believed “the heart of man [to be] in general the same,” that “fundamental myths pervade humanity,” (ibid.). I have stated that Sachs favoured poetry as the chief agent for the aesthetic effect because it was seen to work in a similar way to the dream and “makes the most extensive use of all those masks and means of representation” (ibid. 97). Sachs now believed that the immediate precursor of poetry was myth. For while the listener to or observer of poetry, despite all their experience of and feeling for the fantasy, remains conscious of its illusory nature, mankind of the myth ages fully believed in the reality of their myths (ibid. 95). As such in myths Sachs found the “universal human foundation” and the “universal psychic material” which to him were a prerequisite for any work of art that were to exert any influence beyond its particular age (ibid. 96). ₪₪₪ In view of the acknowledged influence on twentieth-century literature and culture that Carl Gustav Jung and his idea of myth and a collective unconscious had, it may seem surprising that it has not been mentioned in the context of the present chapter especially given H.D.’s interest in occult psychological matters. In fact, scholars have certainly associated H.D. with Jung,²⁰ and in her later years in Küsnacht she even lived very close to him. In reality though, H.D. refused to meet Jung, out of loyalty to Freud (Friedman, Analyzing xxxvi). The origins of her mysticism, Hermeticism, and seeking for the numinous, seems to have sprung instead from her religious family background and the Moravian be See, for example, Barbara Guest in her H.D. biography and Norman Holmes Pearson in his introduction to H.D.’s Hermetic Definition, further, Susan Josephine Acheson, Catching up to Jung: A Study of the Occult Relationship between H.D. and Jung (London: University of London, ).

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lief in a “God of direct perception” (Trigilio 2000: 28 f). Bryher in turn announced herself “a convinced Freudian” (i. e. especially in relation to the analysis of small and apparently incongruous daily incidents) and declared outright: “I could never feel myself that a myth was the slightest use to me in everyday life” (Heart 302). She had already been sceptical about Ellis’ cautious suggestion that there might be ‘experiences common to the race’ and that some may ‘inherit a knowledge of emotional states’. To her such concepts of race memory seemed to rule out imagination (ibid. 229). Bryher furthermore found Jung’s treatment “horizontal and shallow” and stated that she herself had not known anyone helped by Jung (ibid.). Scholarship, as Micale has pointed out deprecatingly, still unjustly presents Jung, next to Freud, as the greatest influence on psychological Modernism, and in regard to Pool his impact is apparent as “a simple popularizing model of influence.”

4.2 Myth Worlds and Anthropological Universalities: The Great Dynamics of Being In the preceding sections Freud was shown to have demonstrated how symbols and metaphors are related to the universal human creative act of dreaming while Sachs discussed myths as the ‘universal psychic material’ of art and poetry. To psychoanalysts, myth worlds were dream worlds and worlds of projection. To the Romantics, myth worlds were worlds of poetry, vision and aesthetics. In any case, they were pre-historic worlds of mankind that could be found in all cultures across the world. Myth worlds were worlds where man encountered their gods; they were the reality of the spirit world, worlds of the imagination and the irrational, and worlds of interior emotional realities. Myth in Greek originally means a ‘narrative’, ‘tale’, or ‘legend’ and is part of the oral tradition and folklore of a culture. It constitutes a pre-scientific explanation and description of the living environment and since it is opposed to logos, it is usually classed with the irrational and in contrast to the rational and scientific. However, the early Romantics already associated it with reason²¹ and since Ernst Cassirer’s work, a contemporary philosopher of Pool, “mythical thinking” has become accepted as a universally human given condition, just like rational-

 “We need a new mythology, this mythology however has to serve ideas, it has to become a mythology of reason” (Ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, quoted in Bohrer, “Schlegels Rede” , my translation). See also Vietta and Uerlings (eds.), Moderne und Mythos (München: Fink, ): –.

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ity (Borchmeyer 1994: 294). To Cassirer myth meant a specific symbolic form connected with the cultural evolution of man²² and was central to anthropological concerns. In his recent study Moderne und Mythos (2006), Silvio Vietta has renewed the call for an anthropology of man’s sensuous form of existence on earth, and has cautioned against understanding myth as a predefined narrative but as a potential form of human perception (20). Myths refer to creation or formation and hence become archetypal models for basic human activities, being concerned with such elemental forces as life, death or the all-mighty power of love and human struggle (cf. Borchmeyer 1994: 293). Based on Sachs’ preceding explanations, myths can be defined as universal narratives or universal patterns of significance, a basic definition that will be helpful in the context of looking at Pool’s works. Scholarly works, however, point out that there can be no clear definition of the term myth, due to its various usages in several academic disciplines.²³ Therefore, I want to distinguish more closely between three different definitions of myth concepts that are relevant here. Sachs obviously represents the psychoanalytical myth concept that finds an analogy between myth and dream. This concept understands myth as a collective wish fantasy that is comparable to an individual dream projected outward and that processes collective experiences of humanity. Yet unlike the dream “the myth is no individual product” and unlike the work of art it is not a fixed product but instead “the myth structure is constantly fluid, never completed, and […] adapted by successive generations” (Sachs, Significance 40). Sachs’ idea of myth at this point incorporates another concept, the narratological myth concept which ultimately dates from Aristotle’s Poetics. This concept defines myth either as narrative structure, narrative pattern, ‘plot’, the narrative and conceptional arrangement of a story, or a traditional ‘plot’, which is passed on and varied in doing so (Blumenberg). Sachs’ understanding of a fluid myth structure that is adapted by successive generations already anticipates Hans Blumenberg’s functionalistic myth term and a continuous Arbeit am Mythos (Work on Myth, 1979). Following the psychoanalytical myth concept, myth becomes in-

 Cassirer delineated his idea of man as a ‘symbolic animal’ in the three volumes of Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen (–). His conception of mythical thinking is explained in Das mythische Denken (), the second volume of Symbolische Formen.  See for example Aleida and Jan Assmann, “Mythos,” Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, eds. Hubert Cancik et al. (Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln: Kohlhammer, ): – , Dieter Borchmeyer, “Mythos,” Moderne Literatur in Grundbegriffen, eds. Dieter Borchmeyer and Viktor Žmegač (Tübingen: Niemeyer, ): –, Karl Heinz Bohrer (ed.), Mythos und Moderne: Begriff einer Rekonstruktion (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, ), and Silvio Vietta and Herbert Uerlings, Moderne und Mythos, which provides a short abstract of this discussion.

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teriorized and is now understood as a dramaturgy of the instinct; it forms an individual mythology (cf. Rutschky 1983: 221). Psychoanalysis has, in some respects, become part of the inheritance of Romanticism, because now there is a tendency for every human influenced by suffering to be seen as an author (Schneider 1983: 213). The other myth concept that exercised a great influence during the modernist period was the historically comprehended myth concept of religious history and ethnology. Religious history sees in myth the cult of gods and heroes and examines the triadic relation between the ‘archetypical incident’ in which the cult originates, its narrative fixation in a ‘cult legend’ and its ritual repetition. The ethnological myth concept works along similar lines but replaces the social ritual for the cultic one. These religious and ethnological myth concepts see in myths descriptions of processes of nature and accept external realities and phenomena as the origin of a myth. Sachs called this concept “natural mythological interpretation” (Significance 59, note 29) and distinguished it from the psychoanalytical understanding of myth. (There are further myth concepts, such as the ideological myth concept of later Cassirer or the semiotical concept of Roland Barthes, but they will not concern us in the present context.) The Romantic heritage ultimately contributed substantially to a psychologizing and aesthetising of myth as Sachs embraced it in his essays. It was in particular an aesthetic modernism in a ‘macro-periodic’ sense,²⁴ dating from 1800, and the early German Romantics revival of myth with its symbolic language and its aesthetic of integrative potential that retrieved myth, in its form as collective artefact, for succeeding generations.²⁵ The Romantics already claimed a universal essence of myth and attributed a cultural function to it. They furthermore related it to human nature and hence to anthropological prerequisites. To Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling myths described an experiencable world of phenomena in a sensuous language. In particular those which he classified as psychological myths expressed emotions which seem to anticipate a psychoanalytical understanding of myth: “Nowhere however is the entirely natural origin of mythical representation more easily comprehended than with psychological myths. If the sensuous [i. e. symbolically thinking] human wants to present thoughts, emotions, sensations he has as it were to present himself” (Schelling, “Über

 For a discussion on the Makroperiodisierung of modernism see Viktor Žmegač, “Moderne/ Modernität,” –.  For the role  aestheticism played in the reception of myth to modernism, see the works by Bohrer (Mythos und Moderne) and Vietta, Uerlings (Moderne und Mythos).

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Mythen” 235, my translation).²⁶ While psychoanalysis takes them to be manifestations of the unconscious, Schelling’s psychological myths are still more closely linked to a conscious act of poetic power. To the Romantics, myth was closely related to poetry, in fact “mythology and poetry are one and inseparable” (Schlegel, “Rede über die Mythologie” 313, my translation). It was the universal nature of myths that for Friedrich Schlegel made them congruent with his idea of a progressive Universalpoesie (universal poetry): Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. Its destination is not only to reunite all separated types of poetry […] It intends to and shall mix and unite poetry and prose, ingenuity and critical review, poetry of art and poetry of nature, make poetry lively and gregarious and life and society poetic, […] It encompasses all that is in some way poetic, from the greatest system of art, containing within itself again several systems, to the sigh, the kiss, which the poetizing child breathes in artless song.²⁷ (Schlegel, “Athenäum Fragemente” 182)

Schlegel advocated the idea of a ‘new mythology’,²⁸ by which he meant a universal synthesis of poetry and science. Following Herder’s earlier proposal of a ‘new usage of mythology,’ Schlegel provides a re-evaluation of traditional mythic moral and transforms mythic images into the philosophical scheme of an aesthetic theory (cf. Bohrer, “Schlegels Rede” passim). Bohrer describes Schlegel’s ‘new mythology’ as “the first myth-venture by means of aesthetics” (ibid. 52) and purely poetological (ibid. 58). It constitutes a singular aesthetic means of mediating between enlightened rationality and pre-logical approach, nature and art. Yet with the Romantics, in striking opposition to psychoanalysis, myths and poetry are still related to poetic imagination and (divine) vision that transcend the physical and are not eventually a product of baser animal instincts in man. This aspect of the Romantic aesthetic becomes important when looking at Pool, for their philosophy participates in and critically reflects on the various

 “Nirgends aber lässt sich der ganz natürliche Ursprung der mythischen Darstellung leichter begreifen, als bei psychologischen Mythen. Will der sinnliche [d. h. sinnbildlich denkende] Mensch Gedanken, Gefühle, Empfindungen darstellen, so muß er gleichsam sich selbst darstellen.”  “Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie. Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht bloß, alle getrennten Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen […] Sie will und soll auch Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen, die Poesie lebendig und gesellig und das Leben und die Gesellschaft poetisch machen, […] Sie umfaßt alles, was nur poetisch ist, vom größten wieder mehrere Systeme in sich enthaltenden Systeme der Kunst bis zu dem Seufzer, dem Kuß, den das dichtende Kind aushaucht in kunstlosem Gesang.”  Schlegel set forth his idea of a ‘new mythology’ in “Rede über die Mythologie” (), the section is incorporated into “Gespräch über die Poesie,” Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner, vol.  (Paderborn: Schönigh, ): –.

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myth concepts of psychoanalysis, ethnology, classical and religious studies, and the more visionary poetic myth concept of the Romantics.

4.2.1 The Myth of Narcissus and Its Transformation into Psychoanalytic Concept and ‘Aesthetic Instinct’ Psychoanalysis reverted for some of its nomenclature to Greek mythology and its heroic tragic figures: Eros, Thanatos, Oedipus, Electra, and Narcissus. Eros embodied the ‘pleasure principle’ and Thanatos respectively the ‘death drive.’ Oedipus became the namesake of a guilt-complex: the Oedipus complex, optionally Electra complex for the female child, and Narcissus to an exaggerated or even pathological form of self-love: narcissism. All of these concepts evolve around human universals such as love, hate, and jealousy. The concept of narcissism in particular will become important for the work of Pool, most obviously in Macpherson’s novel Poolreflection, and the analysis of the novel will reveal how Macpherson translates psychoanalytical theory and knowledge into the sphere of art. Narcissus was an adolescent who fell in love with his own mirror image, and thus completely absorbed with his own beauty he was insensible to all around him. His inability to reach his ideal love led to his death. More focus will be given to this topic later, but for the present purpose it is sufficient to note how psychoanalysis used the myth to symbolise the preoccupation of an individual with itself. The study of narcissism is one of Freud’s most important works,²⁹ and he originally took the term from Havelock Ellis and Paul Näcke, who had used it in their sexological studies on autoerotism and homosexuality. While with Ellis the term describes a “psychological attitude,” with Näcke narcissism is a rare phenomenon which he classified as a perversion (Freud, Standard Edition XIV 73, note 1). Proceeding from the clinical description of the term, Freud discovered that narcissism was not limited to a perversion or neurotic disorder but that instead it claimed a place in regular human sexual development. Henceforth he differentiated between primary and normal versus secondary narcissism. By primary narcissism he meant the narcissism which is part of the nature of every human being and which dates back to early childhood, the primal narcissism of the child. In the child’s narcissistic condition the psychical energies of ego-instincts and sexual energy are not yet differentiated but work unanimously and are both related to the instinct of self-preservation. The child is still completely self-interested and autoerotic, and only later will it develop what Freud terms a

 It is thus classified in the “Editor’s Note” of the Standard Edition (XIV ).

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libido object and transfer its self-interest onto another person. To the child this narcissism is pivotal; it is still small and weak, so it needs to be selfish in order to survive. The child’s primary narcissism is a healthy egoism, and to a certain extent even remains in existence in the adult. However, in the adult it is of necessity moderated and modified, so as not to interfere with the adult’s successful integration into society. In addition, the self-contentment of the child is a “blissful state of mind” (Standard Edition XIV 89) that the adult had to give up in the process of maturation and that he or she is still yearning for. Primary narcissism then continuous in the adult in a modified form; it manifests itself, for example, in the choice of a partner that resembles the self (ibid. 87–90) or in parental adoration of the offspring. The love of the parents, which strikes one as so moving, is in fact, according to Freud, nothing but the revival and reproduction of the parents’ own narcissism: Parents narcissistically overrate their child and ignore its shortcomings. Even all the cultural acquisitions that they have learned to approve of at a cost of their own narcissism are suspended in the child’s favour. The child shall fulfil the wishful dreams that the parents themselves were never allowed to accomplish (ibid. 90–91). Secondary narcissism in turn emerges superimposed upon the primary and is obscured by multiple different influences. It originates by including the objectcathexis: The individual’s (erotic) interest is withdrawn from the external world and instead is directed to the self and results in a behaviour known as narcissism (ibid. 75). Although it may terminate in a psychopathological condition, this secondary narcissism is not necessarily bound to a psychological disturbance but is also found in the egoism of the sick or in sleep and in the egoism of dreams (ibid. 82–83). Such a withdrawal from the world, as the preceding section on dreams has shown, can be a means by which the individual copes with the sufferings and pains of reality. Only if this withdrawal intensifies, if the interest in external things does not return and the individual remains preoccupied with its self and its subjective world, does narcissism become pathological. In addition to sexual development, Freud here touches upon the more profound problems of the relation between the ego and its surrounding world and people. His study on narcissism furthermore presents the idea of a triadic structure of the psyche and introduces the concept of “ego ideal,” with its associated agency of self observation that Freud was to discuss more extensively in “The Ego and the Id” (1923). The human psychical structure, according to Freud, is composed of the id, the ego, and the ego ideal (later super-ego), which operate in dynamic relations within the mind. The id is related to the unconscious and instincts, the ego to the reality principle, and the ego ideal to the conscience. In the ego ideal the individual raises an internal ideal of self that ultimately becomes the measure of all conduct. The impulse for the formation of this ego ideal is the censorial influence of the pa-

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rents and various other external social authorities. The individual’s conscience is essentially initially the embodiment of parental critical influence and secondly the critical influence of society (Standard Edition XIV 96). It is the self-observing and censoring agency that guards the ego ideal, watches the ego, and by comparing the ego with the ego ideal enforces demands upon the ego. It furthermore encourages the repression of instinctual impulses that are in conflict with the individual’s cultural and ethical believes. Freud believed that the ego ideal ultimately also originated from infantile narcissism. The self-love which the actual ego enjoyed in childhood is now directed to the ego ideal, so as to regain the narcissistic perfection of infancy. The ideal is hence, according to Freud, nothing but a substitute for the lost narcissism of childhood (ibid. 93–94). Freud’s triadic psychical structure of id, ego, and ego ideal, along with the concept of narcissism, will be relevant for the analysis of Macpherson’s early novels, where the psychological forces constitute different creative entities and work in analogy to the dynamic relation of popular and high art. There remains one final aspect to be briefly considered here. Freud distinguishes between the formation of the ideal from the process of sublimation. While “idealisation is a process that concerns the object,” that magnifies and elevates it in the mind, without any actual change in the nature of the object, sublimation describes something that is happening with the instinct. In sublimation the (libidinal) instinct is redirected to a different (non-sexual) objective (ibid. 94– 95). Whereas idealisation facilitates repression, sublimation provides an alternative, and to Freud this is a special process. Hanns Sachs observed such an idealisation of the object in the focus on the body in ancient Greek art and culture, which he described as “bodily narcissism” (Creative Unconscious 124). In his essay “The Delay of the Machine Age” he proposes that the Greeks’ striving towards “a perfect ideal of beauty” (ibid.), i. e. the physical beauty of the body, and their ‘ennobling’ the body to such aesthetic height, is nothing but a narcissistically motivated process of idealisation. To the ancient Greeks, the body and not the soul was the essential thing to be cared for, contrary to the Christians. Sachs reconnects the bodily narcissism of the Greeks to homosexuality in the ancient world: Even though homosexuality was never highly regarded for social reasons, since it defeated the purpose of procreation and family, it remained glorified. Sachs finds an explanation for this in the powerful instinctual force of narcissism: “The man loved the boy as the ideal of his own youth, the boy the man, who represented his imagined hopes of maturity” (ibid. 125 f). In contrast to the idealisation that Freud is talking about and which facilitates repression, Sachs notes that no such repression takes place in relation to the ancients’ idealisation of the body (ibid. 125). In the Greek idealisation of the body, Sachs furthermore discovers an aesthetic motiva-

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tion for homosexuality that differs significantly from the pathological concepts of Ellis and Näcke and that associates homosexuality to art and aesthetics. The Greek idealisation of the body is related to aesthetic form and therefore to the formal narcissism of the artist. I have already indicated in the discussion of his Community of Daydreams that Sachs related the wish-fulfilment in daydreams to narcissism and I want to return to this aspect here. According to Sachs, self-love or narcissism lies at the base of all daydreaming: it is the wish to elevate and glorify the self or to fulfil personal wishes which remain unfulfilled in reality and which the daydreamer develops through some kind of story. The function of the daydream is “to compensate [the dreamer] for the frustrations imposed by reality” (ibid. 18). The poet, who in contrast to the daydreamer creates an impersonal or supra-personal hero with whom all recipients can identify, sacrifices this narcissistic gratification for his own person. But the question arises, from where does the artist find narcissistic pleasure? The poet’s narcissism is transferred from the ego or person itself to the artwork, with which the creator identifies and which is, after all, part of this ego. The narcissism of the poet or artist is his or her striving for “higher perfection in beauty.” Thus the poet’s narcissism has been channelled to his or her “quest for beauty” (Creative Unconscious 48) and in an artwork this can be traced to the aesthetic form. Narcissism has thus become sublimated into aesthetic form. If this development progresses to the point whereby the ideal of perfection and beauty of a work is not content to be tolerated by the ego ideal but is consumed by it completely and puts itself in the place of the artwork, then, according to Sachs, we confront the concept of l’art pour l’art (Sachs, Creative Unconscious 49; Tagträume 34). The complementary component to form and beauty, according to Sachs, is the subject-matter, the one element by which dream and daydream can hardly be distinguished from each other. Sachs relates the subject-matter to the other psychological driving force, the Oedipus complex with its object-cathexis and guilt-feeling. Sachs believed that two psychological mechanisms work upon art or poetic production and that the differences between all literary schools and styles can be traced to the dominance of the one or the other: guilt-feeling and narcissism. He found guilt-feeling to be predominant in the movements known as Storm and Stress, Romanticism, and Naturalism.³⁰ Here the shared interest of paramount importance are the emotions and the liberation of affects. The emphasis falls on passion and lust, while subject-matter is valued over

 Almost twenty-years later, Sachs in his revised version would add “the modern ‘stream-ofconsciousness’ school” to this group as well (Creative Unconscious ).

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form, and the chosen material is violent, both ugly and torturing, exciting and suspenseful. The literary schools of guilt-feeling display “a spirit of rebellion” and their representatives are the young and revolutionary: the sons (Creative Unconscious 51 f). Narcissism by contrast is predominant in the “classical” or “idealistic” movements, as the schools and styles of this second group value beauty and form over subject-matter and emotion, and their representatives are the more mature, the middle-aged: the fathers (ibid. 52). Here the focus is less on excitement and surprising incidents but much rather on “perfection in treatment, in construction, in style, in lucidity, in psychology” (ibid.). Sachs relates these two groups of literary schools to human development, noting that “a natural development usually leads from the first period to the stage of maturity” while allowing for exceptions (ibid.). By grounding the conflict of the two psychological mechanisms within human nature and by making both part of the general human maturation process, Sachs presents an ‘internal’ and integrative dialectic alternative of organic growth and the individual’s coming of age to ‘external’ and dissociative/irreconcilable dualistic concepts such as, for example, the one by Hulme, Eliot, Pound and Lewis that split the literary schools into feminine or effeminate and weak (viz Romantic) in opposition to masculine, clear and strong (viz classic). Macpherson appears to have been inspired by Sachs’ human psychological concept of literary schools and their dialectics for his works, as he subsequently arranges his two novels Poolreflection and Gaunt Island around the dynamic relation of these two concepts and constructs the figures in his novels accordingly. Each of these two directions, Sachs argued, must contain at least some small quantity of the other otherwise they are in danger of defeating their own ends. Otherwise one grows too taken up with subject-matter, passionate emotions and sensational effects, while the other becomes too absorbed in form and beauty. By neglecting form and beauty, one would become too base and unrefined to attract and delight the audience and thus would fail to procure any forepleasure. The other by surrendering to form narcissism too completely and becoming too engrossed in perfection may “lose contact with the harsh realities of emotional life” (Creative Unconscious 53), and this absence of passion and interest would result in the work becoming boring and meaningless (Gemeinsame Tagträume 35).

4.2.2 Life, Death, and Rebirth: The Universal Myth of Fertility and the Cult of Regeneration The two great universal forces that determine all life forms on earth are life and death or creation and destruction, and their dynamic relation constitutes the

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cycle of life. This principle of life is captured symbolically in various mythic gods: In the Greek Demeter and Persephone, the Asian-Greek Dionysos, the Egyptian Osiris, and in Jesus Christ, to name only a few. In contrast to the older gods, who anthropomorphise harvest, spring, and the change of the seasons, the figure of Christ is no longer related to an agrarian cult but symbolises a spiritual passage from human suffering to rebirth and a higher state of being. The ancient gods were related to certain festivals and Mysteries, which involved ecstasy, vision and transcendental states. Demeter and Persephone were central figures to the initiation ceremonies of the Eleusian Mysteries and Dionysos naturally to the Dionysian Mysteries, a ritual that by using intoxicants removed inhibitions and social constraints and induced a return to the source of being.³¹ Together with Persephone, Dionysos and the Dionysian Mysteries were also related to the Orphic Mysteries – which again informed the body mysticism in H.D.’s poetics, as her Notes on Thought and Vision reveal. Anthropology demonstrated how certain symbols and narratives continued throughout different cultures and over centuries, how they were adapted and reintegrated by later generations and different cultures. Certain symbols and motives were found in a large number of cultures and throughout ages and their wide-spread continuity suggested a universality of some symbols and motives. (These symbols of general validity are very distinct from the private dream symbols of single individuals with which Freud was concerned.) In contrast to psychoanalysis, which concentrated on the inner, subjective world of the individual and its instincts, anthropology, predominantly ethnology at that time was concerned with the external, communal world of mankind, with the organization of social relations and the origins and developments of cultures. Anthropology did not understand myths as projections of the unconscious but examined myths, rites, and cults as practices and explanations of natural phenomena and events in the physical world. One of the leading figures of anthropology at the time and a major influence on the modernist mind and literary Modernism was James George Frazer.³² His voluminous study The Golden Bough (1890–1915) was the seminal text on myths and remains today “the most popular work of anthropology ever written” (Segal 1998: 37). In The Golden Bough Frazer examines the folkloristic, the magic and legends of ‘primitive’ peoples, and demonstrates universal archetypal pat-

 On ancient Mysteries see Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults in the Ancient World (Princeton: UP, ).  For a fuller examination of this influence, see John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough (Princeton: UP, ) and Robert Frazer (ed.), Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity and Influence (Houndsmills et al.: Macmillan, ).

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terns that continue beyond temporal and cultural boundaries. He showed that modern consciousness was only a surface and that its roots were found in ‘primitive’ thought. For Frazer “myth is part of primitive religion; primitive religion is part of philosophy, itself universal” (Segal 2007: 7). Within the scope of their preoccupation with myth at the time, anthropologists not only attended to myths of the ancients but also to myths of contemporary ‘primitive’ cultures. Both Freud and Ellis resorted to Frazer’s work³³ and T. S. Eliot’s prefatory note to his monumental poem The Waste Land about his indebtedness to Frazer’s Golden Bough has become a notorious commonplace in Modernism scholarship. Macpherson’s response to Eliot’s treatment of the vegetation myth will be examined in the chapter on his novel Gaunt Island. Pool, too, were familiar with Frazer’s work and Freud gave H.D. a symbolic bough of orange leaves with “a cluster of golden fruit” as a parting gift at the end of her analysis with him (Friedman 2002: 535), very likely because The Golden Bough had come up in conversation in one of the sessions.³⁴ Frazer was a classical scholar and at the centre of his anthropological study are the myths of Adonis, Attis, Osiris, and Dionysos, mythical figures that are, according to Frazer, gods of vegetation. All of them are first killed, some cut to pieces and reassembled, and then reborn; when dying they often produce a flower fed by their blood. Frazer traces how their similar stories of death and rebirth are related to the natural cycle of vegetation and to annual myth-rituals that intend to spur the rebirth of vegetation. The vegetation gods not only symbolise the natural cycle of all life but attest that death is an inevitable prerequisite for regeneration and new life. An associated version of this vegetation cult centres on the king, who plays the role of the vegetation god in the annual ritual. He is sacrificed and replaced in a seasonal ritual to secure the health of the vegetation god, who is believed to reside in him.³⁵ The death of the sacred king ends winter, a period of deprivation and suffering. Frazer was cautious in drawing parallels between the ancient myths and Christianity, but he suggested that the figure of Christ was just another, although more spiritualised, version of the vegetation god. The idea of the vegetation cult and divine sacrifice plays

 Freud especially relied on Frazer for his Totem and Taboo and Ellis, for example, in his “Conception of Narcissism” ().  H.D. writes in her account of her analysis with Freud that at one time “[she] started to hold forth on Frazer and the Golden Bough” (Tribute ). Also, during H.D.’s stay in Vienna, Bryher had sent her Dawson’s The Frazer Lectures (Friedman : ).  On the version of sacrificial kingship see the first two volumes of the third edition of The Golden Bough and on the version of the vegetation god the sixth volume, also Segal, The Myth and Ritual Theory, .

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into the Pool works and their notion of art. Pool adapted such an organic life concept to their understanding of a life art: the old aesthetic forms and standards needed to be replaced by new ones in order to keep the spirit of true art alive and secure the regeneration of art and culture. It is thus a concept that reflects the immortality of the spirit of art while the various aesthetic forms are bound to their time and transient. (This does not mean that they have to be eradicated from the cultural heritage, but that each age has to generate new forms, because simply mimicking the old forms would stifle the spirit of art.) Frazer’s vegetation cult was extended into the social domain by Jane Harrison, one of the Cambridge Ritualists. She construed the annual ritual of renewal as at the same time a ritual of initiation into society, thus introducing a sociological aspect to the rite. Adolescent members of society die symbolically, leaving their childhood behind, to be reborn as mature adults (Segal 1998: 58). Harrison, who was influenced by Bergson, Durkheim, and Nietzsche – in particular Nietzsche’s idea of the Apollonian and Dionysian forces – not only offered a sociological approach to ancient Greek myths and rituals, but also applied Frazer to ancient Greek religion. Eileen Gregory has worked out the “intellectual affinities” between Harrison and H.D., but at the same time she had to admit that “this likeness apparently cannot be explained as direct influence” (1997: 110). A direct influence of Harrison on Pool also cannot be verified and yet a ritual of initiation is not only present in H.D.’s Hedylus but the parallel of vegetation myth and initiation into society appears in Macpherson’s Poolreflection too. Harrison also pioneered the thought that all art derived from ritual and the clearest example of ritual turned art she found in drama.³⁶ Her theory again was taken up by Jessie Weston, who applied Harrison and Frazer to the grail legend in her book From Ritual to Romance (1920)³⁷ and extended the idea that ritual turned art from drama to medieval Romance. Weston, an expert on the Arthurian legends, argues that the origin of the Grail legend is primitive and shifts the focus from the questers to the wasting of the land. The fertility of the land depends on the vitality of the king. In her interpretation, the Grail king becomes a representative of the Vegetation Spirit and the romance traces back to nature ritual. But in contrast to Frazer, Weston’s Grail quest aims instead at the rejuvenation of the king rather than his sacrifice. What is more, Weston adds a spiritual dimension to the quest that is not found in Frazer’s fertility cult, because the aim of the quest is “mystical oneness with god” (Segal 1998: 209) and the quester’s

 Ancient Art and Ritual (New York: Holt, London: Williams and Norgate, ), especially the chapter “Ritual, Art, and Life.”  Weston gives Frazer and Harrison as sources for her study in her Preface.

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attainment of spiritual enlightenment. Thus, Frazerian (physical) vegetation rites are joined to (spiritual) mystery and initiatory rites and to self-realisation. This conjunction is an important one in relation to Pool, especially with regards to H.D. and Macpherson. Along with Frazer’s Golden Bough, Weston’s interpretation of the Grail legend provided T. S. Eliot with the other major source of inspiration for his epic poem. Bryher had devoured Weston’s grail stories when she was young (Heart 158–65 passim), and thus, unlike Harrison, Weston does constitute a direct and early influence. Bryher seems to have fostered an early fascination for Arthurian legend (as well as an early scepticism about Tennyson’s use of his sources (ibid. 160)). Weston, she claimed, had led her “straight to modern science” in demonstrating how residues of ancient myth remained in future cultures (ibid. 159), and showing how motifs of ancient cults were adapted into medieval Romance and transformed into Christian lore. Weston found “the Christian character of the Grail fully developed” in the quest and death of Arthur and believed that as of right this part should be separately classed as Mort Artus (Quest of the Holy Grail 15). Arthurian legend will become a reference point in Macpherson’s early novels, where it is closely associated with a spiritual principle. Macpherson clearly relates the subject-matter to medieval Romance, chivalric virtues, transcendence and, in Gaunt Island, to psychic qualities and nervous sensibility. Furthermore, Macpherson relies upon the Arthurian legend as a more saturnine Northern myth in Gaunt Island, along with other Northern tales and Wagner, to suggest a certain atmosphere and mental quality of doom and loss (not so much by explicit reference but by intimation). The Northern myths and legends here create a more tragic mood than the more mercurial classic ones in Poolreflection. A propelling antagonism of principles not only occurs in organic nature but by extension in human psychological nature too, through the dynamics of antagonistic psychical energies. As noted in the section on narcissism, psychoanalysis relied on the mythical figures of Eros and Thanatos to describe the dynamic relation of the ‘pleasure principle’ and the ‘death drive’ that worked in the psychology of the individual.³⁸ While the ‘pleasure principle’ or life instinct was bent on creation and individuation, the death drive was set on destruction and dissolution. But even before psychoanalysis, Friedrich Nietzsche already personified natural human psychological forces via the contrast between the mythic gods Apollo and Dionysos in his attempt to conceive a metaphysics of art.

 Freud discussed these two conflicting central instincts and their mechanisms in Beyond the Pleasure Principle () and in extension, relating to mood, in “Mourning and Melancholy” ().

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4.2.3 Nietzsche and the Artistic Drives of Nature: Greek Tragedy as Human Psychology Nietzsche is not only quoted twice but also referred to twice by name in Poolreflection ³⁹ and the passages on nihilism in Gaunt Island most likely go back to Nietzschean thought. David Thatcher has examined the influence of Nietzsche in England and on authors such as William Butler Yeats, Bernhard Shaw and also, significantly for Pool, Havelock Ellis, with his particular, spiritually tinged brand of moral and cultural socialism.⁴⁰ Ellis sought “to make Nietzsche harmonize with an adherence to socialist and democratic ideals” (Thatcher 1970: 97) and he wrote a series of essays on Nietzsche published in England (ibid. 100–105). The second of these essays deals with Nietzsche’s philosophy of art in The Birth of Tragedy and the two art impulses of the Apollonian and Dionysiac (ibid. 102). Ellis preferred Nietzsche’s earlier work and did not think much of his later ‘master-morality’ (ibid. 104). Thatcher also records that Nietzsche “was the philosopher à la mode in England between 1909 and 1913” and that by this time leading literary organs – here he names some of the most influential little magazines – began taking him seriously (ibid. 42). Consequently, an in-depth examination of Nietzsche’s thought in Pool’s and particularly Macpherson’s work might prove fertile, but it cannot be accomplished here, and a discussion of Nietzschean scholarship must be dispensed with too. For the moment and in the present context, only Nietzsche’s early work The Birth of Tragedy with its antagonistic yet interactive artistic principles or drives of the Apollonian and the Dionysian,⁴¹ and its delineation of an “artists’ metaphysics” shall be focused on briefly here since the two principles continue like an Ariadne thread throughout many Pool works. Nietzsche opens his Birth of Tragedy with the claim: “We will have achieved much for the discipline of aesthetics when we have arrived not only at the logical insight but also at the immediate certainty of the view that the continuing development of art is tied to the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian” (19). This sentence not only expresses Nietzsche’s concern with aesthetics, or rather with

 Nietzsche is quoted once at a moment of reflection on change and its acceptance (Poolreflection ) and another time in a passage from On the Genealogy of Morality in a debate on pity (Poolreflection ). Both times the quotes are related to the figure of Peter.  David S. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England – (Toronto, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, ).  Sometimes also translated as Apolline and Dionysiac, for example in the Birth of Tragedy edition by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) or in the translation by Shaun Whiteside (Penguin).

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an aesthetic phenomenon (ibid. 38), but moreover it conveys his strong belief in the knowing power of art. His Artisten-Metaphysik (artists’ metaphysics) and the conviction that “art is the highest task and the real metaphysical activity of this life” (ibid. 17 f) grants importance to art and pre-eminence to our aesthetic experience: “For only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified to eternity” (ibid. 38, 128) – a sentiment recaptured by the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement with its primacy of aesthetic over moral criteria (Smith 2008: viii). In Macpherson’s novel Poolreflection this sentiment is associated with the figure of Peter. The duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian is a focal point in Nietzsche’s treatise, with the Apollonian and Dionysian representing “artistic drives,” “which burst forth from nature itself, without the mediation of the human artist” and “wholly unconnected to the intellectual level of artistic education of the individual” (Birth 23). While the Apollonian artistic principle in nature operates in the form of the dream with its world of beautiful images and appearances (“image-world of the dream” ibid.), the Dionysian condition is associated with (sacred) intoxication and the wakening (procreative) impulses of spring (ibid. 22). These artistic drives of nature (ibid. 24) work in analogy to the “physiological phenomena” of dream and intoxication (ibid. 19) as “direct artistic states of nature” (ibid. 23). In dream, the universal significance of the images and the universal prudence of the dreamer distinguish the dream world from “the only partial comprehensibility of everyday reality” (ibid. 21) and give it superiority due to its “higher truth” (ibid.). Nietzsche sees this gratifying completeness of the nature of dream even in those works with darker images and reflecting sad or frightful aspects of life, due to the attending consciousness of illusion (ibid. 20–21). This illusion is symbolised by the figure of Apollo, the god of beautiful appearance. He is the god of light, dream, and prophecy and he is associated with visible form and moderation. He is “the transfiguring genius” (ibid. 86) of that external world of appearance and “the magnificent divine image of the principium individuationis (ibid. 21). Consequently, Apollonian art is the art of appearance and beautiful form, and at its most representative has extraordinary clarity. Since it introduces a distance to the essence of being, it also exemplifies the principium individuationis. Dionysos, on the contrary, is the god of intoxication, but he also represents the interior nature of the world, the meta-physical (ibid. 86). Therefore Dionysian art is the art of experience, of formless flux, of mysticism and excess. It is immediate to the essence of being. According to Nietzsche, nature addresses us “with her genuine, undisguised voice” (ibid. 90) in this art. In Dionysian art the principium individuationis is overcome, resulting in a merging of individualities (ibid. 22). Dionysian art enables man to perceive the truth of life in an unmitigated form, while Apollonian art helps man

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to cope with this truth; it is man’s salvation from the painful condition of life (ibid. 90). In the Dionysian state the subjective recedes into complete abandonment. In the sacred ecstasies, which are recorded throughout history and different nations (ibid. 22), the individual loses its sense of individuation and (re)immerses itself into the mighty and exuberant life of nature. In this context, Nietzsche however strictly distinguishes between the Dionysian festivals of the Greeks from the orgiastic revels of the rest of the ancient world, from the Babylonian Sacaea to the Roman Saturnalia, at the centre of which was an effusive transgression of the sexual order, whose waves swept away all family life and its venerable principles; none other than the wildest beasts of nature were unleashed here to the point of creating an abominable mixture of sensuality and cruelty which has always appeared to me as the true ‘witches’ brew’. (ibid. 24)

Nietzsche points here to the potential dangers inherent in unrestrained intoxication, to the affinity of immoderate sexuality and excessive violence as well as to the terrible potentials of cruelty in human nature. While the ancient barbarians are puppets on the strings of natural forces, with the Greeks only is the creative power of these natural forces elevated to Dionysian art. “Here nature first attains its artistic exultation, here the tearing asunder of the principium individuationis first becomes an artistic phenomenon” (ibid. 25). Thus the art impulses of nature stir in any human being as Apolloniandreaming or Dionysian-ecstatic artistic states of nature (ibid. 23). The artists are ‘imitators’ (ibid.), who copy these states in their art. Sculpture, painting, architecture and above all the epic give form to the Apollonian artistic state of nature, while the Dionysian becomes manifest in music or lyric,⁴² both Apollonian and Dionysian constitute tragedy: These two very different drives run in parallel with one another, for the most part diverging openly with one another and continually stimulating each other to ever new and more powerful births, in order to perpetuate in themselves the struggle of that opposition only appa-

 It may seem confusing that lyric in Nietzsche is counted as a Dionysian art, when it is usually thought to be regulated by form and image as well as to be highly subjective and thus, one would assume, related to individuation. Nietzsche thought that in the lyricist, inspiration first rises from a musical Dionysian mood or ‘tuning’ with the primordial Oneness before it forms into a lyric image by means of the influence of Apollonian dreaming (Birth  f). The passage on the Apollonian ‘objective’ artist versus the ‘subjective’ lyric poet and his distinction from the ‘subjectivity’ of the modern poet provides further clarification regarding Nietzsche’s notion on this point (ibid. –).

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rently bridged by the shared name of ‘art’; until finally […] they appear coupled with one another and through this coupling at last give birth to a work of art which is as Dionysian as it is Apollonian – Attic tragedy. (ibid. 19)

Nietzsche here offers a dialectic without the need for Hegel’s dialectical apparatus (Tanner 1994: 9); he works the two static antipodes into a dynamic natural cycle of the Apollonian and Dionysian principle. He identified the peaks of Greek tragedy with Aeschylus and Sophocles, in which the tragic chorus was predominant, while he saw the decline of tragedy with Euripides. The tragic chorus, to him, was the artistic imitation of the natural phenomenon of the Satyr chorus, which manifested the ecstasy of the Dionysian flock and men’s regaining of their natural state (Birth 48). Thus the chorus is primarily vision, the vision of a Dionysian crowd (ibid. 49), of an entity. Euripides introduced an interest in individuals, in psychology, and the beneficial effects of rationality, and, according to Nietzsche “the mediocrity of the citizen” (ibid. 64). He substituted the common spectator for the mythic hero and thus the profane ordinary for the sacred and great. Nietzsche’s stance towards Euripides is a point of obvious disagreement with the poetology of H.D., who it will be remembered prized Euripides for the passion she considered so vital to art, for exactly the fiery emotions Nietzsche thought so trivial (ibid. 70).⁴³ H.D. thus precisely appreciated the simple gesture and the trivial tirades and as such a definite disparity between Nietzsche and Pool becomes apparent; Pool did not share Nietzsche’s elitist thought or his contempt for the democratic and common, on the contrary Pool welcomed the democratic and popular. However, Nietzsche was concerned with the metaphysical comfort and the regenerative power of art and he “was intent on the regeneration of the spirit of community thanks to its members being united in a common ecstasy” (Tanner 1994: 13). His “artist’s metaphysics” expresses life-affirmation and the acceptance of pain in life. These were aspects that Pool did share with Nietzsche. Just as Nietzsche discovered in Wagnerian music drama a rebirth of Greek tragedy, with its successful union of the Dionysian with the Apollonian, then Pool were to find it once more in the cinema. (See for example the discussion of Macpherson’s Gaunt Island or H.D.’s poems in the chapter on Close Up.). Macpherson unfolds the complexity of the Apollonian and Dionysian, revealing a heterogeneous composition and an intricate mixing of the two principles in his two early novels. His novels again can be taken as the philosophical foundation of Pool’s artistic concept expressed in fiction. While Poolreflection places a stronger emphasis on the Apollonian state and on Apollonian art, Gaunt Island centres on  On H.D.’s digression from Nietzsche in this respect see also Gregory (: , ).

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the Dionysian state and on Dionysian art, as Nietzsche understood them. Poolreflection is dominated by visual appearance and images, by sculpture and painting, and it primarily radiates a bright mood. Gaunt Island is much darker with a tragic quality, and gives prominence to the mighty forces in nature. However, the dynamic natural cycle of these two principles consists not only on the level of the two novels and in their conjunction but already within each novel, as I will later show. Macpherson furthermore adds to Nietzsche’s duality a third artistic principle or spiritual agent, and it is this triadic constellation which enhances the dynamism of the natural cycle. In contrast to Nietzsche, who conceived of a linear historical development, or rather degeneration, from the Apollonian to the rational and scientific thinking of Socrates, Pool accepted the rational and analytic as an agent that worked simultaneously and in exchange with the other two principles. Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian and Dionysian is further loosely reminiscent of H.D.’s fusion of the Athenian and Alexandrian qualities that constituted her version of Hellenism. It also shows a certain affinity with the Freudian concept of consciousness and instinct, but Nietzsche presents an alternative, artistically creative or poetic psychology to the psychoanalytical method of Freud. To him men are works of art (Birth 38).

4.3 In Love with Life and Creation: Pool’s Biosophy and the Homo Artes Pool’s is a life-affirmative philosophy that fully embraces human nature and existence, its harmonies as well as its conflicts, its pleasures as well as its pains. Based on the idea of a universality of man grounded in emotions, dreaming, thinking in pictures, sensory perception, myths, story-telling, creative capacity and aesthetic expression, Pool devised a life and art philosophy of universal sympathy. Their philosophy acknowledges that life is conflict and the reconciliation of antagonistic principles, and many of their works end on the note of reconciliation. The heart, the principle of love, is essential to Pool – not for nothing does Bryher call her autobiography The Heart to Artemis. Their love for creation is already manifest in their personal life-styles. Love for nature expresses itself in their mode of living, while love for the animal world is documented by their numerous pets, which even featured prominently in their films (Monkey’s Moon), in their enthusiasm for wildlife and zoos, and last but not least in their own animal nicknames that were symbolic of their individual personalities. Pool found in the animal a primal happy disposition, an infantile ‘pleasure principle’; the animal liked to play. Accordingly they would remark that ‘their tails wagged’ when they were happy or excited about

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something.⁴⁴ Still, their love of creation acknowledges not only biological nature and psychological disposition, but also artistic and poetic nature in man, and is furthermore based on a love of creating and being creative. Just as an animal needs to play, mankind needed entertainment, poetry and art. Anthropology and classical studies showed that such a need could be traced back to antiquity and prehistoric times, that humanity had always created stories, figures and symbols, had needed festivals and dramatic performances. Art was deeply rooted in the human constitution, and Nietzsche’s early psychological ideas had found artistic drives in nature that worked upon man and had pointed to the human necessity of dream and Apollonian art for comfort. Freud’s more recent dream theory demonstrated the universal creative powers inherent in every single human being, to transform abstract thought into affective images and to visually capture and express emotions. Freud furthermore showed that human imagination fulfilled a definite function for the human organism because it helped to compensate for disappointments and pains that life inevitably inflicted upon the individual. Imagination and dreaming provided an outlet for the repressions and confinements that each of us has to submit to for the greater benefit of society; it was a means by which the dreams could be lived that were denied one in waking existence. In accordance with Freud, Pool believed in a ‘pleasure principle’, however they did not understand it in his rather restrictive sexual terms but more generally and simply as a cardinal philosophy to enjoy life. Freud’s psychological concept centres on the human ego and seems perceptibly influenced by the Darwinian reception of his time. The strong focus on the ‘ego-instincts’ strikes one almost as a psychological complement to the biological concept of a Darwinian red in tooth and claw self-preservation. Pool evidently took into consideration older philosophical and spiritual concepts as well, such as for example the Epicureanism that Bryher mentions as her life philosophy, or the happy ecstatic selftranscendence of the mysteries that H.D. cherished. Paradoxical as it may seem, by resorting to such older ideas Pool were in fact rather ahead of their time once more, as their conception of pleasure for recreation and mutual understanding is closer to more recent receptions of Darwin and his idea of the evolutionary importance of cooperation and stress-relief in nature. Despite a pronounced interest in the new science, Pool obviously did not blindly adopt Freudian ideas but reflected critically on psychoanalytical theory

 Macpherson, for example, uses the expression in his first editorial that launches their Close Up magazine (“As Is,” :, ). For further examples, see the correspondence between Macpherson, Bryher and H.D. in Friedman’s Analyzing Freud or Bryher’s autobiography (Heart ).

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and set it into the greater context of culture, art and humanist thought. They apparently sensed that an advanced concentration of the individual on its subjective inner world might easily entail self-absorption, egotism and a lack of consideration for others. Consequently, Macpherson has his main protagonist reach the following understanding in his novel Gaunt Island: “I realised I would be happier not thinking about myself than thinking about myself all the time” (177). In respect to art, Sachs already explained that a narcissistic absorption with the form of the artwork could easily result in the work growing boring and the reader or spectator losing interest. Since their life philosophy embraces joy and entertainment, and since art, to Pool, is life, as a consequence art has to be primarily pleasure and delight. But since life also means growing up and taking responsibility, art at the same time has to teach and advance humanity. It has to fulfil a social function and to benefit the public. At best it becomes a cultural accomplishment and promotes humanitarian thinking. Pool derived a democratic concept of art from anthropological and psychological insights into the universality of human nature that was directly related to human experience and the emotional world of humanity. Especially in the medium film they discovered a poetic means for the purpose of their universal art. One reason was that film was the new public entertainment and hence a medium that appealed to the multitude. The cinema was what the theatre had been to the ancients or Elizabethans. Another reason was that film worked in a manner analogous to human perception, thinking, and dreaming. Elliott outlines parallels between processes of human optical perception and human cognition and the film camera: “the camera is the vital agent between the picture drama and our eyes; and so from the eyes to our mind” and since it works similar to our eyes and our understanding, it can sensitize us to life and its deeper truths (Anatomy 73). The new technology was not hostile to human nature or the imagination, on the contrary, it worked according to human biology and aesthetic truths. From time immemorial, image and vision had inseparably been related to the evolution of man and human progress, and recognising this pointed to the great possibilities of the cinema (ibid. 144). As mechanical as it seemed, film technology was “based on the [very] operative processes of the human mind” (ibid. 145), and ignoring this meant grossly ignoring biological science (ibid. 144). Pool’s positive attitude to this new technology and their placing it alongside anthropological and humanist concerns is directly contrary to the anti-technological attitude of Modernism. Film technology was not only biological and organic, it was moreover poetic. It could condense lengthy verbal descriptions into a few symbolic images, and by means of montage technique create metaphors. By means of montage it could also at the same time work the sensation of a continuous flow of narrative

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more successfully even than the literary stream-of-consciousness technique, and have the spectator experience the narrative. The cinema was humanity’s new gateway to dreams and therefore a new possibility for coping with the realities of life. Pool thus discovered in film an anthropological medium, which, since it generated images and visions but was at the same time dynamic and immediate, united Apollonian and Dionysian art. It was furthermore a synthesis of poetry and science and thus a twentieth-century version of the Romantic’s all-encompassing ‘universal poetry’. What is more, the cinema provided a communal experience of dreams and visions, and was in this aspect similar to prehistoric myths and ancient Greek drama. I have already pointed to the significance of Delphi for Pool. The theatre at Delphi opens their photomontage scrapbook and for H.D., Delphi is closely linked with poetic ecstasy and epiphanic revelation. Delphi had been an important centre to the ancient world, and at its core was the temple of Apollo, god of poetry and prophecy. Close to Apollo’s temple was the theatre, with Dionysos’ sanctuary next to it. With its dramatic plays and athletic games in conjunction with Apollo’s temple, the oracle, and the maxim γνπϖθι σɛαυτον (gnōthi seautón meaning ‘know thyself’), Delphi symbolises the unity of popular entertainment and enlightenment. Considering Freud’s theory of a ‘pleasure principle’ in conjunction with ancient classical culture and poetics, Pool came to understand the ‘pleasure principle’ as an inherent human need for entertainment and art. Freud’s psychoanalysis provided a medical cure for the individual, but art had the potential to constitute a collective poetic cure for the public. Contrary to many other modernists, who wanted to revive ‘primitive’ forms or techniques in opposition to an increasingly technological culture, Pool wanted to revive the ancient spirit of art, which was principally a communal one, in keeping with modern technological possibilities. The avant-gardes of Modernism were often rather anti-avant-garde in their condemnation of civilised life and modern mass culture. (The avant-gardes applauding modern machines in turn often lapsed into prehistoric savagery in their glorification of dehumanised mechanic force.) Pool discovered in film technology a modern, anthropological means of experiencing the ecstasy and enthrallment and the visionary power that the ancients had experienced in their festivals and dramatic plays, and in this way to revive the ‘primitive’ spirit for modern man. They were truly avantgarde in openly accepting new media and employing them for educational and humanitarian purposes and to the advance of humanity. Next to Pool’s enthusiasm for film, Bryher for example was an ardent apologist for the typewriter. She freely distributed these machines to several young penniless authors and firmly believed that children should already have typewriters, because it improved their spelling skills (Heart 211, 305). She and Macpherson also enjoyed

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modern forms of travelling and shared a fascination for aeroplanes and automobiles.⁴⁵ In addition to its ontological and social function, film to Pool provided a chance for a new form of art, for ‘making it new’ (as the avant-gardist Ezra Pound had demanded), by employing a new medium. True to an avant-garde spirit, Pool believed in progress, and that humanity had to move forward. Returning to a less civilised, nostalgic primitive state would be childish and narcissistic, would mean resigning cultural and humanitarian accomplishments. Turning back the clock might work in mechanics, but not with the natural cycle of organic life and Pool’s humanism was modelled on natural life. Although Pool freely embraced new technology, they understood human progress not in terms of imperialistic European superiority but primarily in terms of mental and ethical growth. Humanity had to progress toward sensitivity and humaneness, and the avant-gardist had to lead the way. To this end, ‘civilised’ humanity had to be in touch with nature, including human nature, and must revive the ancient spirit of communal experience. But this did not mean returning to a ‘primitive’ life-style or forms of expression. Education was a crucial aspect of Pool’s artistic activity. I have mentioned the works of Elliott and Blakeston before, as their works provided guides to the film amateur and introduced the newcomer to the new art and to cinema culture. Other POOL publications in this line were Sachs’ Does Capital Punishment Exist? (1930), a pamphlet-length essay with a humanitarian concern, and Bryher and Gertrude Weiss’ German teaching textbook The Lighthearted Student (1930). Sachs examines in his essay the psychological cause and effect of the death penalty and “indicts society”, as Close Up put it in an announcement (June 1931), for inhumanity.⁴⁶ The title is chosen provocatively and Sachs answers the question right away in his first sentence with a definite “No!” The booklet sold at one shilling only. Bryher and Weiss’ full-sized teaching book sold at less than three shillings. (Bryher would later claim that “it was the most successful book” she worked on because “every copy sold” (Heart 306).) One of the central ideas of the book is to “learn grammar through phrases,” rather than just “repeat unconnected rules by heart” (ibid.) and to teach language using rhyme. Apparently

 Bryher writes about her and Macpherson’s fascination with flying and the new perspectives on landscape it opened, in her autobiography (Heart –, passim). Guest mentions the expensive cars and the chauffeur at Kenwin (: ). In this context another woman, who was most certainly avant-garde and from early on not only owned an automobile but even drove it herself, has to be mentioned, namely Gertrude Stein.  The POOL publication is an English translation of a German article that was published in the journal Die Psychoanalytische Bewegung  (): –. (accessed  July ).

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Bryher and her friend were attacked for their reformative teaching method at the time of the book’s publication, but Bryher felt later that time had given them credit since their unorthodox method became the general practice (ibid.). Their book demonstrates a teaching method that is more ‘organic’ and true to human psychology. It also encourages an early interest in the foreign culture by mediating language rules through spoken expressions. Moreover, it aims at teaching easily and learning playfully, as the title already emphasises, and by immersing the student into the verbal culture. On display here is the principle that sympathy is mandatory in order to succeed in entertaining and educating, and thus the artist has to sympathize with the public. Sachs explained it in his “Community of Daydreams” and Dorothy Richardson outlined the principle of sympathy in the first volume of her novel cycle: If you should fail to become more genial, more simple and natural as to your bearing, you will neither make yourself understood nor will you be loved by your pupils.” […] “To truly fulfil the most serious role of the teacher you must enter into the personality of each pupil and must sympathize with the struggles of each one upon the path on which our feet are set. Efforts to good kindliness and thought for others must be encouraged. The teacher shall be sunshine, human sunshine, encouraging all effort and all lovely things in the personality of the pupil. (Pointed Roofs 160, my emphasis)

Moreover, the principle of sympathy is also mandatory for understanding. When we sympathize, we identify with the emotions of another. We relate and therefore understand. Humane thinking is neither a prerogative nor a natural product of the ‘civilized’ world but derives solely from a laborious and continuous process of education, self-development and advanced understanding. Individuals and society have to work on themselves for continuous improvement towards humanitarian conduct. The primitive, to Pool, is not reliant on a particular simple life-style or pertaining to a foreign culture, but on acting without reflection or deeper understanding and upon unconsciously self-centred motivation.

Part IV Works of Love Pool’s Humane Art or: Their Artistic Body

5 POOL Novels According to Laura Marcus, “the circumstances of modernist publishing are now taken to be an essential dimension of our understanding of modernist and avantgarde literature and art (2010: 264). Therefore, before analysing the POOL novels, these works shall be briefly positioned in the literary field of Modernism by taking into account aspects of publishing. The first decades of the twentieth century saw a flourishing of small presses, among them Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, Robert McAlmond’s Contact Publishing Company, and the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. These small presses worked in opposition to commercial publishers and the market. They offered possibilities for niche marketing and limited editions; they circumvented censorship and freed authors from conventional editorial concerns and restrictions. They also exploited notions of cultural distinction (Armstrong 2005: 54) and the publishing history of Joyce’s first edition Ulysses (1922) has become a model showcase for such exploitation (Rainey 1998: 42– 76; Wexler 1997: 63 – 66; Buchholz 2006: 46 – 51). Sylvia Beach used her fight against censorship as a clever marketing strategy and, furthermore, decided to publish Ulysses in a limited ‘fine printing’ edition with three price categories: a ‘cheap’ one of ₤3.3s, a more expensive one of ₤5.5s, and a deluxe edition of ₤7.7s (Rainey 1998: 50; Buchholz 2006: 47).¹ For the task of printing Ulysses she engaged the Dijon master-printer Maurice Darantière, who printed many modernist avant-garde works in Paris and also McAlmond’s Contact Editions. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press was conceived in opposition to these small presses and from the beginning rejected ‘fine printing’ and endorsed low prices.² On the other hand, it was, at least at first, a non-commercial enterprise; ‘pecuniary’ considerations were decidedly secondary to ‘genuine merit,’ the Press announced (Marcus 2010: 265). Virginia Woolf had published her first works, Voy-

 Wexler mentions a second edition produced by Beach which sold at ₤.s a copy (: ).  A  pamphlet announcing the intentions of the Press stated: “[…] nor shall we sacrifice time or money to embellish our books beyond what is necessary for ease of reading and decency of appearance. […] Our experience in the past confirms us in our belief that it is essential to keep our prices at the ordinary level, and to aim rather at cheapness and adequacy than at high prices and typographical splendour” (quoted in Marcus : ). On the Hogarth Press see J.H. Willis, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press  –  (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ) and Laura Marcus, “Virginia Woolf as Publisher and Editor: The Hogarth Press,” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. Maggie Humm (Edinburgh: UP, ):  – , also Jessica Svendsen, “Hogarth Press,” The Modernism Lab at Yale University. (accessed  October ).

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age Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) with the publishing house Duckworth – the same firm that had published Dorothy Richardson’s novel cycle Pilgrimage. When the Woolfs started their press it was largely for recreation and as a form of therapy for Virginia Woolf (ibid. 265; Svendsen 2008: n.p.), and the Woolfs personally hand-printed their first editions. This, in addition to the accompanying woodcuts, distinguished their books from mechanistic industrial printing (Marcus 2010: 267) and made them unique copies and individual pieces of art. Meant as a mental therapy at first, the press became an “aesthetic therapy” for Virginia Woolf (Svendsen 2008: n.p.). It allowed her to experiment freely, without any concerns for the market or a public readership: “It is very amusing to try with these short things,³ and the greatest mercy to be able to do what one likes – no editors, no publishers, and only people to read who more or less like that sort of thing” (quoted in Marcus 2010: 274). The early recreational printing enterprise of the Woolfs’ is in nature somewhat related to the limited printings of H.D.’s shorter autobiographical fictions, which Bryher encouraged and were intended for a small circle of friends only (Friedman 1990: 216). In its function as “aesthetic therapy,” the recreational printing belongs to a similar category as the private creativity of Pool’s scrapbook. The POOL novels have to be situated in between these two poles of modernist small press productions: On the one hand, all POOL books were printed with the French master Darantière and were therefore ‘fine printing’ books. It was only natural that Bryher, who financed POOL and who had financed McAlmond’s Contact Press, would rely on a printer she already knew. This shows once more where in the literary field Bryher was before the commencement of Pool. On the other hand, as mentioned in the introduction, the firm logo presented on the title-page of each POOL book was a woodcut of a pool with a rippled surface, which stressed its ‘organic’ and non-mechanistic nature like the Woolfs’ books.⁴ POOL books came at the standard trade price. The novels Poolreflection, Gaunt Island, Civilians, and Extra Passenger cost 7s 6d, the non-fiction books Film Problems of Soviet Russia, Anatomy of Motion Picture Art, and John Ellerman’s autobiographical Why do They Like It? only 6s, and Bryher and Weiss’ Ger-

 The Woolfs started by printing short stories and poems before moving on to novels.  Furthermore, for an extra charge of s or $ above the fixed price, editions numbered and signed by the authors were available (see the POOL catalogue in the Bryher Papers). This positions POOL again in between the Woolfs’ and the Parisian ‘fine printing’ editions, since it stressed the non-mechanistic but also provided ‘fine printing’ collectors items and yet did so for a still reasonable price.

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man teaching book The Lighthearted Student a mere 2s 6d.⁵ In contrast to other small presses, Pool openly proclaimed on the back of the books that “Pool is a commercial enterprise” (my emphasis) and that it “will consider experimental and distinguished manuscripts on the usual terms.” Quite obviously, Pool’s publishing policy has to be seen in contrast to modernist publishing notions of cultural distinction and particularly the marketing strategies of Joyce’s first edition Ulysses. Further, POOL novels were published in hardcover as well as paperback. At that time, publishing conventions meant paperbacks were issued about six months after the publication of hardcover editions and came at a much cheaper price⁶ (Feather 1988: 209). In respect to their paperbacks, Pool seem to have digressed from commercial conventions. It is difficult to make any definite propositions for Poolreflection, published in spring, but Gaunt Island and Civilians were published in fall and both paperback and hardcover editions date to the year 1927, which suggests that at least in these cases both editions were issued simultaneously or in unusual approximation to each other. Again, the paperback form counters the elitist stance of many modernist authors and opposes the ‘traditional’ modernist form.⁷ The paperbacks also suggest that the readership aimed at were no distinguished elite and yet, despite the paperbacks, POOL novels were not conceived as easy mass entertainment either. Even though it is only possible to speculate about the readership of Macpherson’s novels, the price concurs with the public market price instead of deviating from it and suggests a ‘democratic’ readership policy. This shows that POOL has to be situated not only between the Paris avantgarde presses and the English Hogarth Press but also mediates between avantgarde non-commercial publishing and the commercial trade. It united the typographical artistry of Darantière and avant-garde experiment with commercial prices. It presented highly aesthetic form and quality for the price of the popular novel. The ‘fine printing’ POOL books cost slightly more than the Woolfs’ Uniform Editions, which the Hogarth Press issued in 1929 for 5s per copy (Willis 1992: 155). These Uniform Editions were trade editions. By 1929 the Hogarth Press was well on its way to becoming a commercial publishing house and

 For standard trade prices see Harold Orel, Popular Fiction in England  –  (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, ):  – .  The legendary Allen Lane mass-market paperbacks came at d but there were also the ‘trade paperbacks’, “sets of the printed sheets of the hardback editions bound in soft covers” that were sold at a cheaper price. See John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Croom Helm, ):  – .  For a comprehensive study of the paperback form in modernism see David M. Earle, Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (Farnham: Ashgate, ).

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had moved from hand-printing to employing professional printers. In their Uniform Editions the Woolfs substituted low-cost photo-offset for hand-printing (ibid.). POOL books cost only one to two shillings more than the Woolfs’ trade editions but supplied high-quality printed books instead of lower-quality industrial photo-offset. b Macpherson’s novels, like many modernist novels, explore the psychological and may be broadly classified as psychological novels. They can be read as Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman but also as literalised and psychologized literary history, where the various literary fashions, styles, and genres of different periods are embodied in diverse characters and interact through these characters’ relations and communications. Macpherson here follows Sachs’ notion of Romantic and Classic schools of art and relates artistic styles to human psychology. Furthermore, the novels present theoretical concerns about art and literature, ponder questions of aesthetic form versus popular culture and interest, reflect upon the literary field of modernism and its dynamics, and above all think about the essence of art and beauty and their relation to human life. Macpherson’s novels also constitute the theoretical and philosophical foundation for the film activities of Pool: Whereas Poolreflection delineates the descent of ‘pure’ art to the popular, Gaunt Island shows the ascent of ‘low’ popular culture to art, which is achieved by popular culture coming into contact with beauty and humane aesthetics. Thus they mediate between the opposite positions in the field as Bourdieu describes them, while also taking into consideration questions of aesthetics and the function of art for humanity as Eibl relates them. As to the state of research on Macpherson’s novels, there are no discrete publications on either Poolreflection or Gaunt Island (or the other POOL novels).⁸ There are also none on his later novel Rome 12 Noon (1964), even though it was translated into several languages and is, in contrast to the earlier novels, still available today in second-hand bookstores. Given that Macpherson’s early novels are intimately concerned with the question of modernist art and its autonomy versus its necessity, the following analyses probe different approaches to the works and open up points of departure to inspire further and more detailed explorations in the hope that these lost works will be rediscovered and restored to the field of literary studies.

 The recent study by Bovier () is the first ever to pay any attention at all to Poolreflection, attributing a total of about three pages to the work and giving it consideration only in comparison with H.D.’s HERmione and strictly as to film aesthetic aspects. See Bovier (:  – ).

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5.1 Poolreflection: The Mirror and the Self-Love of Art Macpherson’s first novel Poolreflection was published in spring 1927,⁹ about the same time that Havelock Ellis published his essay “Conceptions of Narcissism” in the Psychoanalytic Review. Macpherson’s novel, as H.D.’s biographer Barbara Guest summarises it, “is of a struggle between a woman and the father of her son for the love of the son. The son returns to the father, although warned by the mother […] that his father desired not only his soul […] but his body as well” (2003: 185). Guest is a little inaccurate here for the woman with whom the father struggles is his lover, not the mother of his son. Guest condemns the work as a “repugnant tale […] garnished with silver-tipped walking canes, expensive suits, and villas” that “[i]t would be wiser to ignore […] if it did not present a variation on H.D.’s Hedylus, which he [Macpherson] greatly admired” (ibid.). Apart from the fact that Macpherson’s novel was published one year prior to H.D.’s and thus cannot present a variation on her work but only an exchange of ideas, Guest’s harsh judgement is unjust and does not penetrate the surface of the work. In Poolreflection, Macpherson employs figures and motifs from ancient mythology to speak in a metaphorical language. Only on the surface is Poolreflection a novel about homosexuality and incestuous relationships and desires, as some have claimed (Marcus 2007: 326 f);¹⁰ in depth it is a work about art and

 Anne Friedberg, Close Up  – , “Appendix .” According to Barbara Guest, Macpherson wrote the novel in  (: ) but while Guest does not name her source of information, Friedberg refers to the publishing records from Darantière in the Bryher Papers at the Beinecke Library of Yale University.  This is not to deny that the theme of homosexuality is addressed in either of the two novels; on the contrary, there are passages that are unmistakable and outspoken on the topic. For example: The reference to Shakespeare and his young Mr. W. H. (Poolreflection ), yet there is the corresponding heterosexual reference to George Sand and the much younger Chopin. There are Moreen’s unmistakable intimations as to Peter’s sexuality and Peter’s furious response: “you have been trying to make of me a low-down streetwalking sodomite” (Poolreflection  – ). Or the passage in Gaunt Island: “This morning at lunch I spoke of a book where the love of two men was the motif, and to me it was extremely beautiful. […] Is there any reason why – say why I should not love Geoffrey if I want to? Is there any logical reason why it should be open to censure? Has anyone any possible right to judge it or forbid it? […] I’m not talking about myself and him but about any two men or women” ( – ). Especially the tone of the latter quote is much in the nature of early German enlightenment movies such as Different from the Others () by Richard Oswald and Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, and the theme of homosexuality in the quoted passages is most concerned with the issue of censorship, social taboo, and malicious defamation. This shows that the issue is addressed directly, yet it is not the essential theme of the novels but an inserted social criticism. And even considering any biographical

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such universals as love and life. The homoerotic tone of the novel is obvious and shall neither be denied nor played down, but it has to be considered in an aesthetic context and in conjunction with Sachs’ ideas of the ancient Greek’s narcissistic process of idealisation and striving for ‘a perfect ideal of beauty’. To catalogue it (as it most often is) as a ‘gay novel’ is reductive.¹¹ Such classification obscures its heart. It is also important to point out in this context that, in addition to the homoerotic aspect, the love constellation in Poolreflection is triangular, as in many other works by Pool. One must never forget that the language and metaphors of sexuality Macpherson uses in his novel are those of his time, a time of sexual emancipation and Freudian psychoanalysis. Yet this does not mean the novel should be reduced to “a commitment to psychoanalytical ideas” (Marcus 2007: 326). In reading Shakespeare, scholars would never forget differences in the vocabulary of Elizabethan English. In reading Macpherson this has apparently happened and his language has been restricted to either the autobiographical or psychoanalytic, without considering that the artist may artistically react to or play with the discourses of his time.

5.1.1 The Mythical Figures of Narcissus and the Faun 5.1.1.1 Narcissus, the Artist and the Mirror of Self-Reflection Although Narcissus is not explicitly named before the fourth chapter (23), the Narcissus motif is already implicitly introduced by the title, suggesting Ovid’s story of young Narcissus,¹² a most beautiful boy who, loved by many, rejects love until he falls in love with his own reflection in a pool. In despair at his unrequited love, he finally dies and is transformed into a flower, while his shadow

import upon the work, it has to be noted that Macpherson was bisexual not homosexual, as is often conveniently claimed.  In The Gay Book of Days Macpherson is mentioned in the entry on Bryher as “Macpherson, who had written a novel about male homosexuality” (Greif : ), but then Greif states in his foreword that “this is a book of gossip” (ibid. ). Cf. Martin Greif, The Gay Book of Days: An Evocatively Illustrated Who’s Who of Who Is, Was, May Have Been, Probably was, and Almost Certainly Seems to Have Been Gay During the Past , Years (New York: Carol Publishing Group, ). Online second-hand bookstores, when they supply a description, also specify it as a gay novel. When announced in Eugène Jolas modernist magazine Transition, it was not as a novel of homosexuality and incest but as one centring upon a psychological theme of personal struggle. Cf. Transition: An International Workshop for Orphic Creation (July ), repr. (New York: Kraus Reprint, ): n. p.  Even though the story of Narcissus is originally a Greek myth, the best known version is the one given by Ovid in his Metamorphoses.

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in the Underworld forever gazes upon his own reflection in the river Styx. The central concern of this ancient myth is love, self-love, and the culpable, haughty rejection of the love of another. But Narcissus also falls in love with “a hope unreal” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 63), with an idea/l, an illusion and, after all, a selfprojection.¹³ It is himself who Narcissus loves and he inflicts this cruel torture on his own person in a never ending cycle (ibid.). When he finally realizes that the loved image is himself, self-recognition leads to disillusion: his tears disturb the pool’s static reflective surface, i. e. the illusionary vision, and the image dissolves and vanishes (ibid. 64– 65). Narcissus has realized: “Oh, I am he!” (ibid. 64). Ovid’s myth of love is at the same time a myth of knowledge and self-recognition, and of coming of age. Narcissus is in “his sixteenth year” and “seemed both man and boy” (ibid. 61), and his initiation to manhood would be accomplished by falling in love. Thus the theme of love and the theme of (self‐)knowledge become intertwined in this myth.¹⁴ Initiation to manhood and maturity would also mean initiation and integration into society and communal life, but Narcissus remains isolated. Ovid’s is a story of a failed initiation whereas Macpherson’s Narcissus tale is a story of successful maturation. The opening scene of Poolreflection immediately presents the reader with an Ovidian figure of isolation and self-contemplation: His mind blotted out these people. The room dropped gauze in front of them, and they were less than mural decoration. He had laced fingers gradually together, and stooped forward. […] Peter had emptied himself of companionship; he was isolate, aloof, sheltered, dehumanised (1).

In this state of “sublimation” (2) Peter has a vision: Treading sanctified mental space of “dim lady-chapels […] shadowed marble and silent shadowed roof” he beholds “the object of his love, a fragment of glowing red from a stained glass saviour” in the halo of “a primrose candle flame” (ibid.). The lady-chapels – chapels dedicated to the virgin Mary – and Peter’s vision suggest an Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail and, a little further on, his quest for beauty is equalled to “profligate outpouring, − wine upon the desert” (3) and the passion of Christ. Peter is here introduced as a pure aesthete, the artist striving in “immaculate seclusion” (ibid.) for the beautiful; he is not the Ovidian pubescent youth but a

 “What you see is nowhere; / And what you love – but turn away – you lose / You see a phantom of a mirrored shape; / Nothing itself; with you it came and stays; / With you it too will go” (Ovid : ).  In this, Ovid’s myth presents an obvious parallel to another myth, the biblical story of Adam and Eve, where (self‐)knowledge is also intricately linked to the initiation of love and sexuality.

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middle-aged man. By means of the images, especially the crystal fragment of beauty and truth, he particularly embodies the Symbolist poet or Aestheticist. Macpherson melds the Symbolist images of the crystal fragment, Eucharist wine, and purifying the ideal into his own image of excavating the Praxitilean faun from alluvial mud. Peter is already presented in the posture of André Gide’s Narcisse in the outset of the novel, when he, fingers laced together, “stooped forward” (1) to see the symbols of truth. Later Macpherson explicitly mentions Gide’s¹⁵ Narcisse in his novel, when Peter contemplates: “Comme tu as dit Narcisse”¹⁶ (27). Peter is the celibate (5), “in him [there was] something pure and limpid” (1), but at the same time he is “set isolate by deliberate aloofness” (14) and “isolation was the very law of being” (15) to him. He is the poet striving for beauty by power of sublimation and symbolises the Apollonian principle of spiritual vision and beauty, and the son he idolises is his art. Like Gide’s Narcisse Peter embodies the idealistic artist of l’art pour l’art aesthetics who becomes completely absorbed in his own subjectivity: “Peter looked upon Lex and loved Peter, a mirrored sublimation of himself. Peter looked (Narcissus) into a pool and loved his watery image. Narcissus was the symbol of all human love, all human love was Narcissus struggling after the evasive beauty of pool reflection” (23 – 24). Macpherson, already by choice of words, here suggests the psychoanalytical concepts of Freud and Sachs, relating them at the same time to the sphere of art. Sachs here provides a missing link between the psychoanalytical Narcissus as the personification of self-love and the symbolist Narcissus as the personification of the artist. His reflections on the collective daydream translated fin de siècle aesthetics, related by the Symbolists to Narcissus, into the field of psychoanalysis, reading them as a sublimation of individual narcissism into aesthetic form. But Macpherson’s mythological figure of Narcissus encompasses a cultural, especially literary, evolution of motif beyond psychoanalysis. Almut-Barbara Renger, amongst others, has delineated the development of the myth from antiquity to the present.¹⁷ The figure of Narcissus went through an age-long history of

 André Gide was the uncle of Marc Allégret, the Paris correspondent of Close Up and a personal friend of Bryher, Macpherson, and H.D (Bryher, Heart ). In their first Close Up issues, Pool “beg to announce: André Gide,” among others, so they were familiar with and supportive of his works, and seem to have asked him for a contribution to their film journal. See Close Up : (August ): , Close Up : (September ): . However, Gide is not found in any of the Close Up issues, so he apparently never did contribute anything in the end.  Suggesting by this choice of words also Gide’s source, Paul Valéry’s “Narcisse parle.”  Narcissus: Ein Mythos von der Antike bis zum Cyberspace (Stuttgart: Metzler, ). Renger’s valuable study charts the subject-matter from the antique myth of self-love and rejection of love

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reception, culminating in its significant transformation to the field of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. By then the Narcissus theme had gained major importance due to the formation of the modern idea of subjectivity (Renger 2002: 3). Already in the eighteenth century there occurred a significant innovation related to the figure of Narcissus that appears to be particularly linked with Rousseau. Narcissus becomes a figure of secluded self-contemplation and happiness and as such is connected to aesthetics in Romanticism. About 1800 August Wilhelm Schlegel had already stated: “Dichter sind doch alle Narcisse”¹⁸ and his words were considered to take the Narcissus myth in a completely new direction.¹⁹ Originating with Schlegel, Narcissus becomes the epicure of the beautiful (Matuschek 2002: 95). The fin de siècle then conveyed the basic elements of Ovid’s narrative onto the theme of art or poetry and the artist or poet – and conveys pictures hither and yon from paternal structures. The artist’s soul becomes the mirror of the world and the problem of artistic self-reflec-

to the Middle Ages and its adaptation of the myth to Christian morals, presenting Narcissus as an allegory of vanitas, through to the early modern age that focused again on the aspect of love, albeit courtly love, and transformed the story into a didactic piece about learning to love suitably. Renger delineates a shift of interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to the contemplative and aesthetic aspect in Narcissus and a focus in the twentieth century once more on the aspect of love and eroticism of the myth. Although then the reception of Narcissus encounters a significant transformation when Sigmund Freud adapts the myth to his concept of psychoanalysis and ties the figure of Narcissus to human sexuality and identity. Other studies on Narcissus as a cultural phenomenon are Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early th Century (Lund: Gleerups, ); Ursula and Rebecca Orlowsky (eds.), Narziß und Narzißmus im Spiegel von Literatur, Bildender Kunst und Psychoanalyse (München: Fink, ); K. J. Knoespel, Narcissus and the Invention of Personal History (London ); Winfried Schindler, Ovid: Metamorphosen. Erkennungsmythen des Abendlandes. Europa und Narziss (Annweiler: Sonnenberg ).  Athenaeum : (), quoted in Renger (ed.), Mythos Narziß: Texte von Ovid bis Jacques Lacan (Leipzig, ): .  Matuschek, “’Was Du hier siehst, edler Geist, bist du selbst:’ Narziß-Mythos und ästhetische Theorie bei Friedrich Schlegel und Herbert Marcuse,” Narcissus,  – . According to Matuschek, the ancient myth met with an epochal new interpretation in Schlegel (: ). With Schlegel the solitary self-reflector still presents the flaw of a misdirected love of self-absorption but the moral of warning against vanity is absent (ibid. ). Narcissus now becomes an exemplary figure of self-reflection (ibid. ) and of contemplative happiness (ibid. ). His ‘beautiful egoism’ (Schlegel) is an idealistic aestheticism. His new interpretation is at the same time a summary of the contemporary debate about Rousseau, his autobiographic self-contemplation and self-portrayal, and his selfishness as presented in his Confessions (ibid.  – ).

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tion comes into play.²⁰ Narcissus, as the personification of beauty and contemplation of the purely aesthetic, finally becomes an established symbol for the poet per se. In Gide’s new mythology Narcissus is reborn as artist, an artist who reads the manifestation of the world as a ‘pretext’ (Erhart 2002: 107). With Gide, and also with Paul Valéry and others, the mirror becomes the medium that helps to discover true reality (Renger 2002: 4).²¹ Narcissus becomes the emblem of the Symbolist poet, thus Gide gave his Traité the subtitle Théorie du symbole to indicate its symbolist programme. “Narcissus dreams of paradise” (Gide “Traktat” 158) and paradise is a “garden of ideas,” where the ideas are manifested in perfect forms (ibid. 159) or symbols. These symbols enfold a truth that the poet has to divine and give expression to. Therefore the work of art is a crystal, a part of paradise, where the idea unfolds in its higher purity” (ibid. 165). Paradise has to be understood as ideal being (ibid.) and Narcissus personifies here the artistic ideal of a symbolic l’art pour l’art aesthetic that becomes entirely absorbed with itself. Paul Valéry’s poem “Narcisse parle” (1891)²² presents the figure of Narcissus as a symbol for the fascination of a self-reflection of consciousness, where the ego consumes itself in unfulfilled longing after its own pure, unreachable image. By the turn of the twentieth century, especially with the French Symbolist authors André Gide and Paul Valéry, Narcissus had become the personification of a purely self-involved art, and as such paved the way for Modernism. But Peter is also the ancient sculptor Pygmalion (17), the Bohemian poet (14), Oscar Wilde (ibid.) the Romantic poet à la Keats,²³ and the fictional but symbolic scientist Frankenstein (20). Macpherson’s Narcissus is a universal symbol for the master-artist striving for ideal beauty in his works. He embodies the principle of the aesthetic ideal and a sublimation of the base and ordinary. Such an

 On Narcissus and self-reflection in the fin de siécle see Walter Erhart, “’Wundervolle Augenblicke’ – Narziß um ,” Narcissus,  – . On the self-reflection of the modernist poet see Noriko Takeda, The Modernist Human (New York: Peter Lang, ).  Other authors of Aestheticism that have recurred to the Narcissus-mirror topic are Oscar Wilde, in The Picture of Dorian Gray () and “The Disciple” (), Rainer Maria Rilke, the Narcissus poems (), Joris-Karl Huysmans in A rebours (), Henri de Régnier in L’Allusion à Narcisse (), and Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Der Tor und der Tod (); a later example is Hermann Hesse, Narziß und Goldmund ().  Paul Valéry: Werke: Dichtung und Prosa, eds. Karl Alfred Blüher, Jürgen Schmidt-Radefeldt, vol.  (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, ): .  The recurring image of the fatal Naiads or water-women that come to deplete the poet of life are reminiscent of Keats and the death affiliation of the Romantics. But the Naiads are also an echo of Valéry’s Narcissus.

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artistic genius lives in “a world apart” (15) from the rest of humanity. In his fascination with classical sculpture and beauty, Peter is closely related to Nietzsche’s idea of the Apollonian and the principle of individuation. At the same time, since the end of the nineteenth century, Narcissus embodies a model of divergence and alternative narrative that rebels against an ancestral cultural order (Erhart 2002: 110). For Havelock Ellis and Paul Näcke narcissism describes a pathological masculinity of neurasthenia, the effeminate, and homosexuality. Accordingly, Peter is “Bohemian looking” and in his incarnation as the “aesthetic Evil One” (14) he echoes Oscar Wilde and the pure and refined aesthete’s ‘fall from grace.’²⁴ Macpherson furthermore incorporates the Pre-Raphaelites and the fin de siècle Decadents, by referring to Leighton’s “Bath of Psyche” (239), “the mirror of Shallot” (172), and Beardsley (142) to suggest Peter’s inclination to ornament and décor as well as a nervous quality of decay. Peter’s domain is the “harvest moon” by night and a “silvery mist by day” (39). He abhors “neat domestic relationships” (4), which in the novel symbolize art conventions, and reverses the conventional role of father and paterfamilias (10) by insisting that Lex see in him only “a kind of stupid big brother” (8) and by being “dangerously feminine” (16). These references rather obviously toy with Ellis’ and Näcke’s concepts of sexual inversion, applying this contemporary discourse however to the context of art: The artist abhorring ‘neat domestic relationships’ upsets the status quo of art conventions. At the same time, the homoeroticism here is the narcissism and self-love of the aloof artist. Macpherson obviously plays here with the pathological concepts of Ellis and Näcke, Freud’s idea of a universal primary narcissism, and Sachs’ reflections on a sublimated narcissism of aesthetic form. Additionally, the self-absorbed artist of beauty, whose figure previously had such positive connotations in the eighteenth century and with the Symbolists, becomes associated with the pathological condition of secondary narcissism in the novel. The artistic genius, who lives in ‘a world apart’ from humanity, withdraws from communal life and shows little to no interest in reality and exhibits psychological features similar to those of the individual who in developing secondary narcissism loses all interest in others and the external world and withdraws into the self. Engagement with others and with the external world is essential for psychological health and the functioning of communal life. Since

 On Wilde’s significance for the construction of ‘the homosexual’ in Britain and transgressive male possibilities see also Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since  (Houndmills: Macmillan, ):  – .

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art is life to Pool, Macpherson extends this understanding of contemporary psychology to the artist and art. ₪₪₪ The Narcissus-artist theme seems to have fascinated Macpherson well beyond Poolreflection and he came back to it twenty years later. During his New York years he co-produced a film that once more explored the artist as Narcissus, reflections on art, the mirror of the mind and dreaming, and film and commercial art – Hans Richter’s Dreams that Money Can Buy (1946). In this film, the protagonist Joe/Narcissus discovers at one point that he can visualise the contents of his mind whilst looking into a mirror and he starts to produce tailor-made dreams for customers who seek relief from the frustrations of reality. It is “dreams on the instalment plan” [04:36]. The film’s opening credits announce that: “Everybody Dreams, Everybody Travels, Sometimes into Countries Where Strange Beauty, Wisdom, Adventure, Love Expects Him.” The avant-garde experimental film consists of several sections by various well-known artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Darius Milhaud, and John Cage and the last part, written and directed by Richter, is titled “Narcissus”.

5.1.1.2 Narcissus, the Faun and the Fountain of Life In his son Lex, the aesthete and master artist dreams of recovering not only the ideal ancient form of the Greeks but also their pagan spirit: But in […] that deft modelling of spirit matter, he apprehended a royal adventure; an excursion through Pan-piped Arcadian playgrounds. “Evoe, Ah Evoe, ah Pan is dead.” And what of the faun and the centaur? Could not some master artist head them back to the world? … There was much of the faun in this shamble limbed worldling […] Praxitilean faun. The fulsome curve of cheek and chin and limb, the ecstatic paganism, glow of Tyrian colour under the skin. Such Dionysian exuberance would move life with a master hand. Praxitilean faun. By some combined trick of imagery and light he saw him as that very marble of Praxitiles, static, archaic masterpiece, his young, grave aloofness deepening the illusion of graven similitude. (6)

The classic Greek marble stature by Praxitiles is a symbol for the “golden faun” (15) of happy, paradisiacal Dionysian times of yore that have been lost to the world. “Depth upon depth of sheer alluvial mud” have obliterated the “Praxitilean masterpiece” (ibid.) that Peter, archaeologist-like, attempts to “excavate” (12) and restore to the world. To him Lex is “the congenital manifestation of classic reality,” he is “something more than a symbol,” he is “antiquity itself” (114, my emphasis). This classic masterpiece of marble then becomes animated: “His

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hand was not any longer marble. It glowed, warm health colour, supple and human, full of ligaments and nerves and human tremors. Now how unlike that golden faun of Atticus” (17). The classic but static form metamorphoses into the organic and dynamic. The passage implies the Pygmalion myth but at the same time reverses the myth of the sculptor whose ideal marble Galatea awakens to life. Come to life, Peter’s Praxitilean faun is no longer the golden faun or the ancient ideal marble but a “blatant, insolent, untrained puppy dog, smug, capricious braggart, cheap and unrefined” (8). Lex is the “animal” (59, passim) and becomes a “vulgarised image” (12) to Peter. He goes to the movies (105 f) and is thereby affiliated to the cinema and an artless low form of entertainment as opposed to Peter’s refined high culture. Lex, the faun, is the reverse of Peter/Narcissus, the pure, refined, and somewhat ‘dehumanised’ aesthete. Lex, however, is also simply young, just seventeen, and thus a complement to the middle-age Peter. Lex is vigorous, pubescent and reckless (51). He is also sensual, a young Sardanapalus (5, 116) and there is a “riotous joy in existence” (6) in him. At times he also appears somewhat rough and bawdy. Lex embodies “health, vitality, joy, exuberance” (49). He is Dionysos, with eyes of “reminiscental oriental lift” (19). He is Faun, the woodland deity of ecstatic paganism, and “young Bacchus” (156) snapping for grapes (59). Here ancient god becomes living human, re-born in a contemporary modern culture, a new symbol of the old image, the idea embodied: “spirit must be made flesh” (165), Peter reflects. Lex is the epicurean (51, 103, 127), who voluptuously feeds on chocolate while sitting in a cinema (103), and he is “some personal image of a pagan deity” (6). His music is the Lavender Cry²⁵ of the street vendors announcing spring (47– 48), a cry he repeats with his “young voice bawling in syncopated time” (50), and the barrelorgan playing a lascivious modern waltz (137). In addition to all this, Lex has a “wild Celtic streak” (101) in him. In short, Lex the faun is “Dionysian utterly” (49) and in this the exact opposite of the Apollonian Peter. The faun must have been a contemporary figure for Dionysian exuberance at the time of the novel. In 1912 the famous Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed the ballet L’aprés-midi d’un faune, which was inspired by Claude Debussy’s Prélude and Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous and name-giving poem.²⁶ He also performed the part of the title character and in the final scene mimed masturbation, which caused a scandal and Nijinsky was reprimanded for his obscenity by  The “Lavender Cry” is an old folksong and as such corresponds to the unsophisticated faun, and Lex “felt for the old world” ().  Twenty years after its first publication, in February , the poem caused Mallarmé to be presented as a faun on the cover of Les hommes d’aujourd’hui.

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half of Paris.²⁷ In the same year as Nijinsky’s performance, Auguste Rodin made a small bronze of Nijinsky dancing his faun and several other Rodin works are faun-like creatures.²⁸ Rodin apparently was as concerned with the relation between art, sensuality, and artistic inspiration as Macpherson. Earlier, in 1906, Igor Stravinsky had composed his sensual Le Faune et la Bergère; even before that E. M. Forster had written a story about an encounter with Pan that circled around an exuberant, sexually tinged animal joy,²⁹ and long before them all Nathaniel Hawthorne had emphasised the likeness of his naïve Italian protagonist Donatello to the Faun by Praxitiles in his allegorical art novel The Marble Faun. ³⁰ A couple of years after Macpherson’s Poolreflection a Pool associate, Charlotte Arthur, who plays the faun-like barmaid in Borderline, was to write a novel entitled Poor Faun (1930). The historical reception, particularly in the twentieth century, relates the faun to sexuality, sensuality, and primitivism, and thus to a vital force praised by modernism as something ‘civilised’ man lacked. Nijinsky’s ballet in particular, which the dancers performed barefooted, rejected classical formalism and lauded primitivism instead. Of course the faun is already etymologically associated to ‘fauna,’ and the mythic figure of a half man, half goat is emblematic for the sensual animal nature of man, his biology and instincts. The lower goat half of the mythic faun especially corresponds well with Freud’s all-impelling libidinal drives, which seem to have found their way into Nijinsky’s interpretation, but one must not forget that the faun was a mythic wood-spirit and as such represented a spiritual principle. More even than animal life, Lex the Faun embodies animal spirit, the psychological force of animal joy, happy ecstasy or joie de vivre. The puppy dog sportively snapping for grapes is only an actualised, less symbolist and more biologically true image of animal playfulness. The faun in his blithe happiness who freely roams Arcadian grounds is a mythic image of the Golden Age of childhood and that blissful psychological state of self-complacency. He does indeed symbolise the ‘pleasure principle’ but less in Freudian  Elizabeth M. Drake-Boyt, Dance as a Project of the Early Modern Avant-Garde (unpubl. Ph.D. thesis, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, ): ,  note . Only a couple years later, though, Nijinsky was credited with presenting in his Faune “a complex work combining images of archaic Greek pottery with starkly modern themes and movements” (Drake-Boyt : ).  Such faunesque works are, for example, Faun and Nymph (also Minotaurus or Jupiter Taurus) or the marble The Sin, presenting a female faun.  Macpherson may imply a reference to Forster’s “The Story of a Panic” () in that Lex “inspires panic” (, ) in Moreen, but it may just as well be a reference to Greek mythology, or both.  In England, Hawthorne’s novel was evocatively published as Transformation.

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terms of libidinal wish-fulfilment than in the philosophical sense of Epicureanism with its zest for life and happiness. Lex the Faun teaches Peter the poet joy and laughter. “Through watching him I came to understand gaiety and, too, − fantastically enough, − he taught me the gift of laughter,” Peter confesses (97). At the same time, Lex strikes Peter as vulgar and unrefined. He goes to the movies, listens to gramophone records (84), reads low French novels (223) and bawls street cries.³¹ Sitting in peaceful solitude in the mountains contemplating beauty, Peter imagines how Lex would barge in between the crocuses with golf links (242) disrupting quietude and how he would ask for dance palaces and movie theatres at night. Lex thirsts for the noisy, active life of entertainment; there is something “like a fever in his blood, like a drug” that impels him to constant excitement and unrest (97). He is representative of popular culture as well as communal experience and by name not only suggests the dynamic law of life but also lexis, the spoken word,³² and the oral tradition and dramatic arts. Paul Ricoeur joins lexis to metaphor and myth and to the ontological function of metaphoric speech and lively expression (Ricoeur 1986: 55). Thus, while Peter is associated with the pool-reflection of contemplation, Lex the Faun is related to the fountain of life, shouting out the Lavender Cry or splashing about in the cold, refreshing water of the shower (50 – 51), and while Peter is representative of a reflective calm, Lex represents a wilder mood of joy and light-hearted cheerfulness. The two mythological figures of Narcissus and Faun become symbols for different aesthetic categories as well as for different psychological states.³³

 Already art historian and cultural studies pioneer Aby Warburg had compared the subject of the Satyr and other Dionysian mythical creatures in Italian Renaissance art with the subject of the working peasant in Flemish tapestries and revealed a relation of art and every-day life, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture as well as an affective consensus of the two themes, although Warburg’s affective consensus agrees much rather with Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian as related to pain and struggle. See “Aby Warburg: Arbeitende Bauern auf burgundischen Teppichen,” Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Dieter Wuttke (Baden-Baden: Koerner, ):  – .  Greek lexis ‘speech, diction’ as opposed to Greek logos ‘thought, idea’, the latter being the more intellectual principle that signifies Peter.  Macpherson’s technique of using figures of myth and mythopoetic imagery to associate the characters with certain anthropological concerns, philosophical movements or historical periods is similar to the technique that Thomas Mann employs in his works. (On Mann’s mythopoetic technique see for example Michael Neumann, Thomas Mann: Romane (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, ). Especially in considering personal attitudes to life, Macpherson’s novel shows parallels to Der Zauberberg, published only two years before Macpherson started writing his own novel and first published in English in , the same year as Poolreflection. It cannot be said for certain if Macpherson indeed knew this work by the great German romancier as too little scholarly research exists on Macpherson, but it seems very likely. Death in Venice had been published in

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The relationship between Peter and Lex symbolises the dynamic relationship between Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian artistic drives. Lex is related to drama – the cinema is its modern version – and the chorus of the satyrs and to chaos (137), and as the young Bacchus eating grapes to ecstasy and intoxication. Peter, on the other hand, is the Apollonian poet associated with sculpture, dream, reflection and the intellect. Like Nietzsche’s Dionysos, Macpherson’s embodies a life-affirming principle; unlike Nietzsche’s, however, he is not related to tragedy and suffering but, by his boisterous gaiety, to comedy, festivals, and fertility pageants instead. Lex/Dionysos is closely connected to the regenerative principle in vegetation myth, but Macpherson’s version here is strikingly different from the dying god in the vegetation cults that dominated modernist mentality. Only once does Macpherson suggest the dismembered god, but then it is in a comic and non-scholarly way. The scene occurs after a quarrel with Peter, when Lex is sitting in the cinema to find comfort. There “orchestral augmented fifths fell into this scheme of things. He closed his eyes, unaware that minor harmonies were putting Humpty-Dumpty together again” (103). Macpherson’s fertility god is

English by then and Macpherson does mention Thomas Mann and translated editions in his editorial “As Is” in an early Close Up issue (: (December ): ). It is uncertain if Macpherson knew German at this time; later he was to translate the work of Dottoressa Elisabeth Moor from German into English. (Borys Surawicz and Beverly Jacobson, Doctors in Fiction: Lessons from Literature (Oxford, New York: Radcliffe, ): .) Bryher, however, already knew German and was at least familiar with the Mann family. In her autobiography she mentions meeting Heinrich Mann in Berlin one day, when walking into a café (Heart ), and in one of her Close Up articles Bryher emphasizes the “international reputation” of their books and lauds the work of the brothers Mann for its contribution in rehabilitating German intellectual life at the end of World War I (: (June ): ). Bryher would also in later years write reviews on the works of Thomas Mann’s son Klaus. In  she reviewed his literary journal Decision and in  his autobiography The Turning Point (see Martin Shelby, “Winifred Bryher: A Check List,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library  ():  and ). Even more explicit as to the group’s relation to the Mann’s is a letter from H.D. to Bryher ( June, ), in which H.D. writes: “Tell H-mann [Heinrich Mann], I am so happy he is to be ‘one of us,’ confirming his acceptance into their circle by instantly contemplating a possible animal nickname for him (quoted in Friedman : l). The deeply humane theme of Mann’s novel, circling around the universal human experiences of illness, death, and love surely would have appealed to Pool and considering their diverse interests in international art and literature, it seems almost safe to assume that the author of Poolreflection was familiar with Der Zauberberg. As Mann’s novel profoundly probes human nature, symbolized by the X-ray photographs of the patients, so does Macpherson, captured in the image of Narcissus’ self-reflection in the pool. Indeed, it even appears that the two authors proceeded somewhat along similar lines to achieve a poetic quality in their works: While the German novelist combined narrative and music, especially the music of Wagner, Macpherson wrote imagist prose, combining poetry and the visual arts.

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affiliated with naïve, boorish humour and popular folklore, and regeneration with the soothing powers of diversion. In the ‘natural’ symbols of father and son as well as the mythic symbols of Narcissus and Faun, Macpherson furthermore illustrates the two psychological projecting forces that, according to Hanns Sachs, constitute all schools of art. Following Sachs’s scheme, Peter stands for the maturity of classic aesthetic form and Lex the rebellious youth for passionate subject-matter. Macpherson, with Sachs, holds that the subject-matter is vital to an artwork. If the artist loses himself in narcissistic form aesthetics and fails to replace his personal interests with universal ones, his work will lack interest for the public when the function of art is to entertain and delight. Peter eventually comes to realise that his self-involved poem is all “preposterous self-pity” and means “just nothing” and is of no use to anyone (228). The aloof and detached artist has to descend from his ivory tower of aesthetic revelries and experience life and accept companionship. Unlike his German contemporary Gustav von Aschenbach,³⁴ with whom Peter shares quite some resemblance at the outset of the novel and who narcissus-like dies when his beloved ideal youth retreats into the water, Peter becomes the embodiment of a revitalised and life-affirming artist. By the end of the novel “Joy tossed him up in fragments” and he hears the grasshoppers and kisses the earth (243), thus revelling in the Dionysian disintegration of the principium individuationis and the artist’s participation in communal experience.

5.1.1.3 Mythology and Mysticism – The Faun and the Poetic Vision The third mythopoetic protagonist of the novel is Moreen, Peter’s lover and muse. Moreen is associated with myth worlds. She is Valkyrie (46) and Persephone, queen of the underworld and of the dead (40), and in association with the poppy drug (69, 139) related to Morpheus and the domain of sleep, dream and vision; but also to the unconscious. (The figure of Moreen seems to be inspired by H.D.’s concept of “womb consciousness” and “over-mind consciousness,” as she delineated it in her Notes on Thought and Vision, since the spiritual principle in the novel represents not only divine or poetic vision but also the subconscious.) Peter goes to Moreen to find rest and be comforted (38 – 40, 42, 46). Her room is a dark forest (39, 46) and an “Arthurian dungeon” (26). Peter thinks her “pure medieval” (32) and her moral values and virtues relate her to the ro-

 The first English edition of Thomas Mann’s artist novel Death in Venice was published in , in close chronological affinity to Macpherson’s work.

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mance and therefore, following Jessie Weston, to the transformation from cult and ritual to art. She is the brave knight who fights for honour, who excels in noble deed and who reaches for spiritual goals. But as the knight who is “breaking her lance against windmills” (26, 164) she is also Don Quixote, who fights a losing battle against the given condition. The figure of Don Quixote demonstrates Macpherson’s technique of capturing complex abstract conditions or mental states in a single metaphorical expression (lexis) or image, a technique modelled on the universal human process of dreaming that Freud had delineated.³⁵ The idiom shows at the same time how ‘high’ art informs popular culture and exemplifies how popular culture could again be reintegrated into art – here in the form of reviving a so-called dead metaphor. Moreen, whose name is Gaelic for ‘Great,’ is the personification of both the spiritual and moral principle, and of transcendental power. She is the Holy Ghost (38) and gives pure and virginal guidance. She is “lily Madonna” (67) and Dante’s Beatrice (77) and in more abstract or psychological terms ‘consciousness’. In Moreen all religions and cults seem to merge: she is high priestess (39, 69) and Virgin Mother, “druidical sacrifice” (44), Christian God and god of light (42), and cosmic entity (44). But she is also Aphrodite/Venus, goddess of love; Peter goes to her to find love and later Lex does too. She is also an irresistible seductress; Peter calls her teasingly a Homerian Circe (75), and she appears also as majestic Egyptian Cleopatra (87). Lex’s sexual encounter with Moreen is much more than merely the physical experience of erotic desire. On the contrary, it is clearly stated to be a spiritual experience: Lust was not his principal obsession. Lust was the past tense of what he now felt, a curious transfiguration, a retranslation of entity […] it would seem they were spread beneath an altar, and their act […] some kind of sacred tableau commemorating a festival day. Certainly there was nothing in Lex’s heart but purity. He wanted Moreen, no longer Moreen’s body, the woman body, any woman body, he wanted her for herself to manage this evocation of quickened spirit in him. (136)

Her hands on his eyes are the “hands of a healer, cold with spirituality,” and the experience of her bestows order upon his Dionysian “erstwhile chaos” (137). Her body is furthermore not the traditional Venus with her voluptuous curves but an androgynous, spiritualised body with “small breasts [and] narrow hips” (152).

 The passage shows how Macpherson first represents an abstract condition by drawing on a popular metaphorical phrase, then condenses it further by replacing the metaphorical phrase with a familiar figure (the source that originated the phrase).

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Sexual intercourse here signifies body mysticism; it is the unity of body and soul or spirit and matter – with Lex signifying the body. Moreen, always associated with light and with healing powers in this context, here also represents the sun god Apollo. Lex sleeping with Moreen is a holy conjunction or chymical wedding, two antagonistic forces joining together in harmony.³⁶ After their union, Lex contemplates if there might be a child (138, 156) and considering that Lex is also the young warrior Mars (8 f, 239), this child with Venus would then be Harmonia. A similar reconciliation of antagonistic forces by love can be found in Pabst’s films, especially in Macpherson’s favourite Jeanne Ney, in which the two lovers first meet under banners showing the Bolshevik motto: “Unite!” The union of two lovers from different social classes and opposite ends of the political conflict that unsettles their time becomes symbolic of social harmony and human sympathy. Although Moreen represents the light of spiritual vision and intellect usually associated with the ‘male’ principle, Macpherson embodies this principle in a female body, thereby reversing the cliché. He is further careful to stress her female body in this context, choosing the ancient and universal symbols of male and female body to present this chymical wedding, employing thus what Sachs with Dilthey defined as ‘natural’ symbols. By doing so he re-introduces the maternal life-giving principle – fertility symbolised by Persephone – that the Christian concept had so carefully and completely eradicated from the Holy Trinity – and, even more importantly, Freud from his paternally based psychoanalysis. Yet Macpherson’s female principle is not fertility goddess in the typical sense but above all divine spirit as well as intellect and consciousness, a combination of the old maternal principle of fertility with the Christian idea of the Holy Spirit and psychological awareness. It is symbolic fertility and birth as well as spiritual resurrection and rebirth or regeneration at once. At the same time, the all-human sensation of the biological sexual act is not denied, otherwise this symbol would result in a static and life-depleted allegory, but it must not be reduced to mere carnal desire. Love is more than physical copulation or sexual impulse; it is a divine means to transcend matter and to gain spiritual insight into life. Lex’s chymical wedding with Moreen, the harmonious conjunction of body and spirit, results in a feeling of “infinite peace” (138) in Lex. He experiences a “mystery of this new self,” he is changed, “retranslated” (139). The age-old mystical experience of love must not be reduced to modern scientific explanations of biology or sexology – it is poetic. Freud, when mentioned

 The chymical wedding is a term from alchemy that signifies the union of two opposing forces and is symbolic for a spiritual transformation; it is furthermore associated with mystery cults.

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in the novel (27, 44), is linked to exactly such a purely scientific perspective. At one point the novel even warns: “Keep Freud out of it” (44). It is the passage in which the ‘seduction’ of Lex is also contemplated as rape. Rape here must be understood neither in its literal sense of sexual violence nor in a Freudian sense of child seduction,³⁷ but in a mythological sense of initiation (60), as a painful experience and as a physical ritual of outgrowing innocence. Peter, the Apollonian poet, also has to ‘become one’ with Lex, the Dionysian life force. This is insinuated in the boxing fight, the physical exercise, i. e. the ritual by which Lex receives, although accidentally, some wound of initiation to his head (177).³⁸ At this moment Peter becomes a fatherly figure of protection and comfort to Lex. And the image of the ritual occurs again when Lex realises he “must do physical jerks, that was spiritual necessity. Very spiritual food. The holy communion of Praxitilean faun […] Ritual, ritual, ritual” (53). It repeats the idea of the ‘physical exercise’ of the high priestess with the faun. It is the body mysticism as given expression in pictures in ancient concepts of alchemy, religion, or myth. But while the boxing fight represents initiation to pain and discipline, the act of love with Moreen is an initiation to sympathy and humane knowledge. The love act with Moreen is an initiation that has led to maturity and consciousness: “He was personality. Individual. He now realised himself” (139). It is the old biblical ‘knowing’ that has occurred here; “Lex had lain with a woman. Moreen had lain with Lex” (140). The deliberate choice of the old phrasing emphasises the mysterium of the experience further; Lex has not simply slept with Moreen, he has “lain” with her. The act of love is an act of poetry (ibid.). Lex’s having achieved “new understanding” (153) results in humane recognition on his part. When later threatened by a beggar in the street, he at first furiously strikes the man but then immediately realises his cruelty as a projection of “ugliness in himself” (ibid.). In a kind of reverse narcissistic self-recognition, Lex sees himself in the other but the disillusion does not kill him. Rather, it enables him to sympathise with a fellow human being. He turns back to the beggar and asks him if he is hurt, gives him money, is ashamed of himself and feels with this “unknown sufferer […] desperate with defeat” (153). His chymical wedding with the Holy Spirit or poetic vision has induced a change in him and he now feels em-

 In his early seduction theory (“The Aetiology of Hysteria”), Freud postulated that repressed memory of an early childhood sexual abuse or molestation was often responsible for hysteria and neuroses.  This wounding is somewhat similar to H.D.’s Hedylus, who likewise received such a wound of initiation by hitting his head on a rock when young and ever since bore a scar on his forehead (Hedylus , , , , ). The accident is of course also strongly reminiscent of Apollo hurting Hyacinthus with a discus.

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pathy with the weak and stricken and wonders about the deplorable state of affairs in the world. Feeling love, Lex is able to transcend his fear and disgust of the ugly and see the pain at its roots. The experience of love has led the young unmindful faun to become responsible and humane. Unlike many modernists, who sometimes too readily idealised the exotic ‘primitivism’ of ancient or foreign cultures and endorsed a return to such ‘healthier’ ways of life as an alternative to the harmful repressions of ‘civilisation,’ Macpherson’s attitude is more complex. First, he does not picture topographically or chronologically exotic cultures as primitive in contrast to his own civilised culture but instead finds the primitive stage in every single human individual, in the ‘primary’ narcissism of childhood. In this Macpherson differs notably from the prevalent ethnological ideas of his time. At the same time, although seizing a Freudian concept, Macpherson does not like Freud compare ‘primitive’ man to the neurotic and therefore deviates from contemporary psychoanalytical ideas as well. In addition, his novel explicitly dissents from practices of violent ‘primitive’ ritual, such as the killing of the father or the king, and instead enthrones love as the driving transformative power. Attributing primitivism to the universal state of childhood allows Macpherson to assert the necessity of development without becoming guilty of cultural imperialism and to reveal the folly of returning to the primitive state: The ‘primary’ narcissism of early childhood has to be outgrown by the individual in order to develop into a thoughtful, caring and responsible adult and member of society. Macpherson even succeeds in extending childhood primitivism from human to animal life – both little child and “untrained puppy dog” need training – and thus to demonstrate a universality beyond humanity. Yet his conception of kinship between man and animal resists and transcends Darwinian material determinism in that human life includes poetic vision and the mystery of love.

5.1.1.4 Metamorphoses of the Great Works of Arts The triadic figure constellation manifests itself not only on a mythopoetic level but is repeated in drawing on the field of fine arts: “Patricia and Peter and Lex. […] A Michael Angelo,³⁹ a Rubens, and a Botticelli” (23). These three divergent artistic representatives are “extraordinary insoluble compounds” (ibid.) of a

 The separated spelling of the name here very likely is intended to suggest the archangel with the flaming sword in terms of a purifying principle. In Macpherson’s second novel Gaunt Island the name is given with a hyphen.

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greater whole. Patricia, Lex’s mother, is the Michelangelo, who represents the ‘classic’ Renaissance art of perfect and heroic form and the Roman style. The “gentian blue Patricia” (9) symbolises, as her name already implies, the Roman class of nobility, the elite, and figuratively the art conventions of ‘high’ culture. Michelangelo understood himself foremost as a sculptor and was fascinated with the human form. Known for colossal statues and marble monuments, his static art becomes in the novel aligned with rigidity and death, and with death’s devitalised and frozen form.⁴⁰ Patricia’s purely form-aesthetic but static art is counterpoised by the antagonistic, sensual and dynamic art of a Rubens that characterises Peter, the father. It seems confusing that the sensual art of Rubens, with its plastic depictions of human flesh, should inform the figure of the neurasthenic and aloof aesthete when it much better befits the Dionysian faun. But from early on it is mentioned that Peter had a weakness, a “sharp-toothed vampire lover − lust” (5). He is prone to Baroque pomp and profligacy, relishes décor, and wants to dress his son in weighty “ancient silk” (1). This image of the “vampire lover, lust” (22) is repeated shortly before the passage about the three art styles. Lex, on the other hand, who has just been emotionally hurt by his father before the cited passage, is now the Botticelli and embodies the early Renaissance art of sensitivity and susceptibility. Lex has become “humanised” by “a new hurt and a new intimacy” (25). He is at that moment the re-born form of the ancient Greek concept of art, and a rejuvenation of the sense of being alive. Similar to Botticelli’s famous allegorical painting of a naked Venus that came to symbolise the Renaissance, Lex figuratively rises Botticelli-like from the sea shell, like the ancient goddess rising from the Dark Ages to a new vitality and humanism.⁴¹ The passage shows that Macpherson’s allegories are never fixed but continuously alter and metamorphose into each other; were they ever to become static, they would be dead metaphors, just like the static allegories of Michelangelo. As antagonistic as Patricia-Michelangelo and Peter-Rubens seem, they are after all cousins in the narrative (41), and this is, once again, less important in terms

 In Bryher’s early novel Development, Michaelangelo represents the sanctified but cold and static art of the museum and his dead marble faun is contrasted with a live puppy, a living ‘faun’, playing outside in the sun ( f).  Ernst Hans Gombrich, examining the influence of Ficino’s Neo-Platonism, has found in Botticelli’s Venus a symbol for Humanitas. Beauty in the painting, Gombrich argues against older ‘pagan’ interpretations, is not so much sensual as representative of virtue. Gombrich has further discovered in Botticelli’s allegories the rise of emotional spheres in art. Cf. “Botticelli’s Mythologies,” Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, ):  – .

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of family relations than in terms of artistic principles. Fixed dualities are disrupted and the dualistic domestic pattern of social conventions that Peter so loathes is superseded by a more catholic (i. e. also triadic) one of love. Moreen then supersedes Patricia in this triangular pattern;⁴² Rembrandt (39) succeeds Michelangelo and oil painting marble. Rembrandt’s art is one of light and of religion; the paintings usually present biblical motifs and a dark room into which light falls illuminatingly.⁴³ It is a sacred art of vision and corresponds with the Holy Spirit attributed to Moreen. This art of the Holy Spirit is by no means restricted to Christian religion in the novel but symbolises divine vision and is also related to sibylline prophecy (3) and Delphic oracle (39). Rembrandt here becomes a cultural symbol for the principle of poetic vision and transcendence that Moreen embodies. At the same time, Rembrandt is also known for his paintings of anatomy⁴⁴ and thus is concurrently associated with science and a naturalistic art. Accordingly, Moreen displays some naturalistic tendencies, for example when she is gravelling in mud or tying her hair up with an ugly bootlace (64 f, 180) or when her “lips [are] rough and broken” (39). In the context of Pool, the medium of Rembrandt’s painting as it is symbolically used in the novel will later be superseded by the medium of film and its technique of projection as well as its documentary nature, perhaps most obviously in H.D.’s “Projector” poems. (See also the respective section in the chapter on Close Up.) These ‘museum’ pieces of art that the narrative quotes to suggest certain aesthetic qualities, these concrete forms of ideas and visual manifestations of different artistic spirits, are immediately counteracted again by organic dissolution: “There was no Caryatid upholding marble entablature, only poolreflection trembling in unfelt winds. There was no golden faun of Atticus, only poolreflection spiked with tangible rushes, cold water stems” (24). The cultural symbols disintegrate into nature and the sensation of nature, from which they once originated, to be re-born from these sensations again into symbolic form, constantly disin-

 Even though the alternating triangular love relationship does correspond with Macpherson’s autobiography – Macpherson (Lex), H.D. (Peter) and Moreen (Bryher), and with Frances Gregg (Patricia) preceding Moreen – it is much more likely that this relationship depicts different artistic influences and maybe literary historical figures of twentieth-century poetry; such as for example Ezra Pound and the influence of the French Symbolists upon Imagism. On Imagism’s influence on and distinction from Symbolism see Charles Chadwick, Symbolism (London: Methuen, ): .  Descent from the Cross (), Ascension (), The Raising of Lazarus (c.) or The Feast of Belshazzar (c.) to give a few examples of Rembrandt’s light infused painting technique.  For example, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman () and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp ().

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tegrating and regenerating in a never-ending cycle of all life. The symbols must never be fixed and static; they have to be dynamic to be true to life. The cited passage holds at the same time a brief but plastic definition of H.D.’s Imagism and recalls her poetry, which captured passionate states in natural images. In Macpherson’s cyclical arrangement, historical and cultural ages and schools appear not as secluded categories but infuse each other, since they are all subject to the universal dialectical principle of conflict and reconciliation of antagonistic forces. The vast multitude of images, symbols and cultural icons pregnant with meaning that move on through the narrative seems almost too much, too overdetermined. But in fact they present an almost eternal, regenerating repetition of the triangular pattern and the conflict and/or harmony of the sensual and spiritual principle. Thereby they successfully capture the dynamics and vitality of life by adopting the life-cycle and becoming organic. The novel attempts to translate the sensation of film into literary art by presenting a stream of symbolic images that comprise a body of meaning or emotion which generates ‘flashes’ of feeling and insight. In contrast to film, which runs at a set speed over which the spectator has no influence and which frequently leads to the spectator missing details, the book allows the reader to decide on the pace and to stop or even go back.⁴⁵ The drawbacks are that such a sensation of repetition might either drop off into monotony, provoking a sensation of boredom, or be perceived as too heavily laden with meaning. Macpherson’s firework of cultural and mythic icons borders at times on the overwhelming, especially when scrutinized, and consequently a certain intellectual effort is required to recognise this structure as dynamic and organic; yet rather than a work requiring close scrutiny Macpherson more likely designed his narrative for a swift and diverting flow of reading. He aimed at communicating an immediate affect with each image or symbol that was to work without any conscious effort, as in dreaming, and if one was missed another would succeed. The reader simply needs to translate the descriptive words into the image, which then affects. Film acts even more directly in that the optical sensation of the moving picture-sequence works immediately upon the senses and achieves an impression of dynamism and vitality without any intellectual effort. Film, similar to dream, immediately presents the image and works the affect. This brings us back once more to the title of the novel and its symbolic significance for Pool and their understanding of art. The pool reflection is the static

 Elliott too mentions this circumstance in the introduction to his Anatomy of Motion Picture Art.

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surface of the water reflecting the mirror image of Narcissus, which is representative for ideal artistic form. Pool, however, decided on a pool with a rippled surface, caused by a stone thrown in, to symbolise their artistic enterprise of helping expand new ideas and modern thought. (In Ovid’s myth, the moment when the surface is disturbed induces knowledge.) The rippled aquatic surface moreover signifies Pool’s organic and dynamic art philosophy of regeneration and life art that opposes static aesthetic forms and an understanding of art as a fixed authority. Ultimately Peter, the aestheticist and protagonist of Macpherson’s programmatic novel, realises that “there was no golden faun of Atticus, only poolreflection;” he has to wake up from his aesthetic reveries to life and nature.”⁴⁶ The image of the disturbed pool surface echoes through the novel (24, 25, 242) and recurs in the closing image of the “heliography of parabolic water mirrors” (244). The water no longer mirrors the static beauty of Narcissus but light in motion. Peter, biting on grass and kissing the earth, suggests the transformation of Narcissus into a flower but this time as an image of utmost vitality and life energy. This final scene of Nature worship is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and a poetry that openly embraces all life, the spiritual as well as the physical. At the same time, Macpherson’s Narcissus becomes a figure associated with a regenerative principle and with vegetation myth. It is, however, primarily a vegetation or regeneration myth of poetry that Macpherson resorts to in his novel and that he relates to the American Bard Whitman and the English Bard Shakespeare (6), who will be further examined in the ensuing section. It is a vegetation myth that is related to love and a poetic “mystery of unity” (ibid.). In the end, Peter gains poetic cognition and now “receiv’st gladly” not only his own biological nature but all nature and all life therein. His poetry now is inspired by the language of Nature, by “the morse code of grasshoppers, and the heliography of parabolic water mirrors” (244). L’art pour l’art has become l’art pour la vie. b Parallel to the cyclical arrangement of the visual images runs a cyclical structure on the auditory level and the poolreflection and its disruption become associated with words: words that fall “like weighty stone” and that in sinking corrugate the undisturbed pool surface (44) or “layer upon layer of reverberation [that is like]

 Barbara Guest claims that the title of the book was taken as namesake for the new company POOL Productions (: ). However this is imprecise, since the poolreflection of the title symbolises static aesthetic form and therefore the exact opposite of the new company’s intention. The title, however, certainly is related to the artistic programme and the objectives of POOL to disrupt such a static surface.

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circle upon circle of poolreflection churned by a fallen acorn” (24). In Ovid’s myth the figure of Narcissus and his visual mirroring are complemented by the figure of Echo and her acoustic repetitions; in Macpherson’s novel the figure of Echo is missing in its autonomous form. However, the element of the echo is, albeit at first imperceptible, integrated into the story: It appears as a repetitive verbal structure within the narrative; phrases or parts of sentences recur throughout the novel. In their form as snippets of interior monologue or stream of consciousness, they signal a reflective mental process and often correspond with recurring metaphorical images. When Peter “reflected” (44), words echo in his mind. Several times they refer to words spoken by Moreen and therefore align the echo to the inner voice of conscience and parental or institutional authority and to the psychological agency of self-observation and the censor (ibid., passim). But the echoes are not limited to one of the characters alone and on many occasions appear as a mental hammering of vulnerable words and thus again mark a psychological process. What is more, the verbal repetitions are not simply linked to conscience and conscious self-reflection alone but form a ‘stream of unconscious’ too. At one point, Peter the poet becomes “a mere vocal register for odd, strayed scrapends of lost thoughts” that disrupt the beautiful appearance of the poolreflection (24). In his function as a vocal register for lost thoughts the poet is more closely aligned to myth and the verbal repetitions arrange the narrative according to a mythical and cyclical structure. In this the repetitions become aligned with the disintegrating and fluid Dionysian principle and Nietzsche’s notion of music as opposed to the visual image. The musical and therefore more lyric structure equips the novel with a certain poetic quality that prose narrative is usually lacking. Herein can be found some similarity to James Joyce, but (unlike Joyce) Macpherson is in his first novel not influenced by Wagnerian music drama⁴⁷ – the Wagnerian leitmotif as well as the darker Wagnerian mood of the twilight of the gods will only become significant for Gaunt Island. The fluid and cyclical structure of verbal repetition in Poolreflection is furthermore complemented by the frequent use of ellipses in the novel. In his Anatomy of Motion Picture Art, Eric Elliott compares ellipses in literature to the dynamics of film; they guarantee a continuous narrative flow, marking the associative act of the mind (111). One will be reminded of Pabst’s ‘invisible cut’ in this context. Macpherson’s revolving

 Joyce is said to have been inspired to his interior monologue in Ulysses by Wagner via Édouard Dujardin. See Michael Niehaus, “Die Vorgeschichte des ‘inneren Monologs’,” Arcadia : ():  – , also Édouard Dujardin, Le monoloque intérieur, son apparition, ses origins, sa place dans l’oevre de James Joyce et dans le roman contemporain (Paris: Albert Messein, ).

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visual images and verbal repetitions not only call for a continuous regeneration of art but in addition are modelled on the technique of dream-work as well as the motion of the film reel.

5.1.2 Bildungsroman, Künstlerroman and Love Poetry 5.1.2.1 Shakespeare’s Two Loves and the Tradition of Love Poetry Macpherson chooses one of humanity’s oldest subjects for his avant-garde novel. He selects for an epigraph lines from a Shakespeare sonnet, thus deliberately placing himself within the tradition of Shakespeare and also within the great literary tradition of love poetry, instead of severing his work from the past. He ties in with what Harold Bloom calls Shakespeare’s universality. Bloom, as discussed earlier, believes in the representative nature of some literary works that influence later works and constitute “the authentic foundation of cultural thinking.” Shakespeare’s sonnets themselves continue in the tradition of the lyric humanist Petrarch, whose sonnets sing of the poet’s unrequited love for the idealised Laura and became a cultural phenomenon. In choosing love for a theme, Macpherson decides upon what the psychologist Viktor Frankl thought to be a first-rate anthropological phenomenon and one of the aspects that constitute “the self-transcendence of human existence” (1997: 84).⁴⁸ Macpherson’s epigraph “why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly?” is taken from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 8 and therefore from the part of the cycle that addresses, presumably, a young male aristocrat. This young man is described as most beautiful and is adored and venerated by the bard, who wants to immortalise this youth through his sonnets. The idolising of this young man has led to manifold speculations as to his identity, as has the dedication of the sonnets to a certain Mr. W. H. By his reference to Shakespeare and the mysterious Mr. W. H. (35), Macpherson purposely integrates this speculation as to Shakespeare’s supposed homosexuality into his novel. In doing so, he explicitly warns the reader against reducing such homoeroticism or artistic narcissism to issues of private biography⁴⁹ and implicitly warns us not to misunderstand Peter’s idolisa-

 “Thus, human existence – at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted – is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfil or another human being to encounter lovingly. I have termed this constitutive characteristic of human existence ‘self-transcendence’.”  For a historical classification of the homoeroticism in the sonnets see Stephen Orgel, “Introduction,” The Sonnets, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: UP, ):  – .

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tion of Lex in these terms. ‘Proving’ art by scientific means will bar the reader from perceiving deeper truths of life in an art work. There is even more to the Mr. W. H. reference. It is an inter-textual reference to Oscar Wilde, who in his “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” had already presented a fine, witty satire on scholarly speculations. Wilde’s short story debates the perfection of art versus the truthfulness of art and also warns against mistaking art for biographical fact.⁵⁰ Wilde’s portrait in the story also functions as a mirror revealing deeper truths and a tool for self-revelation; at the same time, his story reveals how projective in nature scholarly theory can often be. A similar character type to Wilde’s protagonist, who wants to prove art by biographic fact, reappears again five years before the publication of Macpherson’s novel in Joyce’s Ulysses as Stephen, who “proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father” (Joyce, Ulysses 18). The portrait in Wilde becomes, in Macpherson’s work, the pool, a mirror of self-reflection. Shakespeare’s Platonic ‘idolisation’ of the young male addressee in his sonnets is thus more revealing if seen within the context of art. The young aristocrat or man of higher rank, who is so fair and refined, is ideal beauty, or the artist himself dreaming of ideal aesthetic form. The aristocratic status signifies the artist’s loftiness and love of beauty, as well as his symbolic capital, rather than any actual social rank. Thomas Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach is of the nobility⁵¹ and so is Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Des Esseintes or, in a somewhat different sense, Wilde’s Happy Prince. Peter is in a similar way associated with wealth and the English upper classes. He lives luxuriously, does not appear to follow

 Wilde’s witty fiction of Willie Hughes is based on actual scholarly theories (T. Tyrwhitt, E. Malone) and thus reflects and criticizes academic approaches to literature. Wilde’s story mentions also the nineteenth-century German scholar D. Barnstorff’s theory that Mr. W.H. is “William [Shakespeare] Himself” but, in accordance with the actual non-resonance this theory found, satirically discards it as unlikely since uninteresting. Later, Alfred Lord Douglas was to publish an edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets in whose preface he comes to speak of these speculations as to the young man and expresses his regret about Wilde’s never turning his fictional account into a scholarly one. Cf. Lord Alfred Douglas, The True History of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Secker, ).  Aschenbach’s nobility is even inseparably linked to his art, since a prince bestows it to him on his fiftieth birthday as a token for his exclusive literary stand. Cf. Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig, Grosse Kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe: Frühe Erzählungen,  – , ed Terence J. Reed (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, ):  – . Bourdieu points out Aschenbach’s title as well in his “Champ intellectuel et projet créateur,” Les temps modernes  (): . (I cite the French original since the Mann passage is missing from Sian France’s English translation.)

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any regular profession and is apparently only writing sporadically.⁵² Nobility becomes a symbol for the artist, especially the Aestheticist artist – and with Bourdieu’s theory also for the consecrated artist. The homoeroticism of the artist towards a ‘noble’ youth signifies the artist’s Narcissistic adoration of his own artistic means of expression and of ‘high’ art forms: this is narcissism in the form of sublimation. The homoerotic tone of Macpherson’s novel is therefore not only obvious but intentionally and distinctly important in its cultural significance, for it illustrates an element essential to the production of all art. The theme of homoeroticism and the love of ‘noble’ youth can also be understood as a comment on censorship. Pool rejected the censorship of art and actively campaigned against it (see also the chapter on Close Up). Macpherson reveals the projection involved in censuring artists for their private conduct, transferring the theme of pool-reflection to his implicit critical meta-discourse.⁵³ The recurring phrase “ugliness that you see is in you” here pertains to the censor, who imposes a morality on art that is nothing but “these worn out uses of man” (35) that do not correspond to nature and life. Nature and life are too complex for “absolute concepts of good and evil” (34) or of “beauty and ugliness” (ibid.). Macpherson here introduces a Whitmanesque note of all-embracing contradiction: “You are all monstrous, if you choose to think that way, or you are lovely” (ibid.). Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle also consists of a part addressed to a mysterious Dark Lady, presumably some woman Shakespeare was enamoured with. This lady is described in terms exactly opposite to the fair noble youth. She is ‘dark’ in colour as opposed to the boy’s ‘fairness’. She is physical and sensual and stirs a darker and wilder passion in the poet. She also corrupts the ideal youth and the poet reprimands his idol for betraying him with this woman. The sonnet cycle consists of both parts and the two antagonistic forces obviously

 Although there is an indication that he does publish ().  “Take your George Sands, and their Chopins and de Mussets, take your Shakespeares and their Mr. W. H.’s, pour vitriolic censure on their heads […] And I am not going to have you blaming Shakespeare unless you are going to blame the squire’s son too for desiring the vicar’s daughter in holy matrimony. Or George Sand for loving her young men. Ugliness that you see is in you. Poolreflection” ( – ). And the story of Wilde and Alfred Lord Douglas seems here implied as well, although Wilde is not mentioned by name in this passage, maybe because, due to the scandalous trial, it had left the region of speculation and become a public issue. However, there are several references in this direction as, for example, the aunts’ perception of Peter as the “aesthetic Evil One” (). In the Wilde trial art, indeed, had been used to ‘prove’ Wilde guilty: Douglas’ poem “Two Loves” and its line “the love that dares not speak its name.” Cf. H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, ): .

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interact with each other.⁵⁴ Considering the subjective quality of lyric poetry and the general assumption that the author is identical with the speaking poet of the sonnet cycle, plus the uncertainty about the date of its creation, it may well be an autobiographically stimulated reflection of the young poet Shakespeare who, considering marriage with his early passion and later wife Anne Hathaway, is deliberating between his artistic and his biological and social needs, his immortalisation through artistic fame and his personal continuance of lineage in his children, the isolation of the artist and family companionship.⁵⁵ But in a less biographical and more abstract conception, it is the artist’s reflection upon art and the principles of art. In an even more universal comprehension, it symbolises the human conflict between peaceful seclusion and social communion, personal ambition and conviviality, personal desire and contribution to the common benefit, or, in terms of love, self-love versus selfless love. The truly great artist will not reduce his art to the petty “domestic fetish” (5) of his autobiographical life that likely inspired him but abstract and project it onto greater human concerns.⁵⁶ He will expand his personal wishful thinking into what Sachs termed ‘the community of daydreams’. Shakespeare’s sonnets also reflect upon philosophies of his time, particularly the concept of friendship and Platonic love connected to the humanism of Montaigne. They further address older ideas such as the conflict of man being torn between angel and devil that Shakespeare knew from the psychomachia of the old morality plays. The reflection on art in the sonnets may equally be a reflection on different art forms: the more refined lyrical form versus the more physical but more ordinary form of the public theatre; the classic but solitary form of the sonnet versus the pulsating and interactive form of the play; and the intersection of the two. Shakespeare’s seemingly ungainly and even vulgar but more true and passionate Dark Lady may therefore symbolise his dramatic art with its open form in contrast to his lyric sonnets.⁵⁷ Furthermore, just as

 For detailed accounts of the sonnets, their history, form, concerns, and reception see Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford: UP, ), also Stephen Orgel’s introduction in The Sonnets,  – .  This would also provide a simple explanation for the many references to judicial and administrative language, which would be much more characteristic for such a practical man of affairs and business as Shakespeare had been than for the lyric persona of the young aristocrat.  To quote Keats on Shakespeare: “Shakespeare lived a life of Allegory. His works are the comments on it” (quoted in Levin : ).  One arrives at this conclusion when cross-reading Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field with the corresponding research on the figure of the young aristocrat and art-reflection, as well as examinations of drama in Shakespeare’s sonnet. Cf. Philip Martin, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Self, Love and Art (Cambridge: UP, ), especially the chapter “Art as a Mode of

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the Dark Lady and the young aristocrat have a love affair, the sonnets contain dramatic moments and the plays include sonnets. Shakespeare’s ‘romantic’ plays could also be contrasted to the classical school of academic play-writers à la Jonson, who reprimanded his colleagues for knowing little Latin and less Greek. Even the sonnets digress from the sanctioned form in that they are not cast in the classic language but are infused with contemporary judicial and business terms. Shakespeare’s art, though maybe not as polished as the classic forms, is more vivid, more dynamic and true to his time, to man and to life. This constitutes his originality and it corresponds with Macpherson’s art philosophy. By drawing parallels with Shakespeare and the Bard’s positioning towards the concept of courtly love, Macpherson draws attention to a type of art that is idealised and in its conventional representation utterly removed from the reality of human life. Did Shakespeare reflect in his sonnets upon exchanging poetry for the more contemporary but less respected art of drama? Is Macpherson in his novel reflecting on exchanging poetry and prose for the new popular medium film, which was not yet accepted as an art form? Lex is associated with film, he goes to the cinema and thoroughly enjoys it (103 ff) and Peter, finally accepting Lex the faun as symbolized by his kissing the earth and biting on grass, embraces the new art medium. Just as Shakespeare in his dedication addresses “The onlie begetter of these sonnets,” i. e. imagines poetry through the metaphor of paternity, so Peter, the poet, is the begetter of his son Lex, i. e. the spoken word. All the wild speculations that have been written about the sonnets arise from a failure to apprehend their complex metaphorical language, and Macpherson’s works have been misunderstood in a similar way, by Guest, for example, but also by all those who prematurely pack his works into the category ‘gay’ or merely speak of incestuous family relationships. What Hallett Smith concluded about the sonnets may equally apply to the works by Macpherson: “[They] are not allegories to be translated or puzzled out; they are explorations of the human spirit in confrontation with time, death, change, love, lust, and beauty – remembrance of things past and the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come” (1974: 1747). Macpherson, inspired by Shakespeare, creates in his novel his own ‘lyric cycle’ of love and, in contrast to previous efforts to arrange Shakespeare’s

Love.” Here the speaker to the youth is the lover as well as the poet. Also Edmondson and Wells () on the sonnets and drama also Orgel (:  – ). Orgel states that “the object of love and celebration is the poet’s own craft – the beloved is the poem” (: ) and points out that sonnet  “seems to allude obliquely to the poet’s career as a playwright” (ibid. ).

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work,⁵⁸ does not neatly organise according to fixed categories of ‘white’ (the young man of beauty) and ‘black’ (the Dark Lady) but arranges a more confusing, true-to-life mixture of antagonistic forces. In the beautiful young man he recognises the poet’s longing for beauty and giving birth to beauty through art. In the Dark Lady he recognises an allegory of sensual passion. Following in the tradition of Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura, Shakespeare’s originality exists in altering the dual relationship of the poet and his ideal love Laura into a triangular relationship of the poet, his ideal, and his sensual passion. Such a triadic constellation not only corresponded to the Elizabethan’s world picture of the ‘Great Chain of Being,’ with its triad of animal, human, and spirit, but presented the poet as a microcosm. Macpherson continues Shakespeare’s triadic constellation and his triad in turn corresponds to twentieth-century ideas of the dynamics of human psychology. Macpherson, however, reverses and reforms Shakespeare’s model in that the female component signifies the intellectual and spiritual principle and the young man the sensual ‘animal’ one.

5.1.2.2 ‘Grand Love’ and ‘Human Love’ – from Narcissism to Compassion Parallel to the tradition of love poetry and its idealised concept of courtly love, the novel introduces two alternative kinds of love: ‘grand love’ and ‘human love’ into which the leitmotif of love, introduced by the sonnet epigraph, immediately branches. ‘Grand love’ is a selfless love, a love of “immaculate seclusion” and a “mystery of pain” (3), while ‘human love’ is a selfish love, a love that is “subject to human limitation. Thwarted it must become dust” (11). Peter’s grand love for his son Lex is even compared to martyrdom: Always the blind, profligate outpouring, – wine upon the desert […] that was the only way, the grand way. … So then, loving needed recklessness, fanaticism almost. Constant profli-

 The arrangement of the sonnets in the cycle as they are usually presented was originally not by Shakespeare and was never authorised by the poet. They may be less neatly divided into neoplatonic love and passionately sensual love. The construction of these clear categories seems to be an innate need for scholars. Karl Bernhard, for example, praises his more accessible edition of the sonnets because he arranges chronologically (the emphasis by Bernhard in the German) and by the categories lust, love, and sorrow, in order to present a psychological development, a process of “sublimation” in Shakespeare. “Wir lernen zuerst die geschlechtliche Liebe Shakespeares zur Frau kennen. Dann die Abkehr von der irdischen Aphrodite. Himmel und Inferno einer Freundschaft ohne Satisfaktion folgen.” Cf. Die Sonette des William Shakespeare (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, ): . This more ‘lucid’ arrangement chops up the humane genius of Shakespeare and partly robs his work of its profound insight into the complexity of life and love.

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gate outpouring of vintage wine, – well upon the desert if need be. It was not in the nature of grand love to withhold itself, fearing hurt or waste or loss. (3 – 4)

The metaphor of the profligate outpouring of costly wine occurs throughout the narrative (3, 4, 11, 31, 223), an obvious symbol for the Eucharist wine and the passion of Christ. Grand love means selfless suffering: “Grand love was in simple terms, a martyrdom, triumphant because invincible; an unique Gethsemane, in the end, a rationalism unshaken by fear or anguish or physical obliteration itself” (11). Grand love is the love of the gods and Peter is Hercules who sought for Hylas in vain (57, 82, 234), Apollon who mourned for Hyacinth (233) or Hermes who stooped down and gathered his son Daphnis up into heaven (115). However this grand spiritual love “must be essentially, first and last, loneliness” (11), as to the immaculate and celibate “isolation was the very law of being.” (15). Coming in contact with the human object of love results in disappointment, since the human cannot live up to the sublimated expectations of the divine. Consequently Peter comes to the conclusion: “I can’t accept you, but I love you” (21), paraphrasing the novel’s Shakespeare epigraph. “That is why we should part. I don’t want to long and fret because of you, to be hurt and baffled and tormented” (ibid.). At this point the concept of grand love loses its “unselfconsciousness” (11) with Peter and turns into selfish love and into a love-depleted form or formula of love: “Love that made tradesmen of us all; behind its heroic posturing carping, grasping, avid. How silly!” (11– 12). Here the concept of grand love actually becomes a barrier to love and “the very frustration of its own need” (15). The heroic suffering for a sublimated idea of love is revealed to be rather a perversion of love. Simultaneously, such self-love in Peter’s grand love ties back to the symbol of Narcissus: Peter looked upon Lex and loved Peter, a mirrored sublimation of himself. Peter looked (Narcissus) into a pool and loved his watery image. Narcissus was the symbol of all human love, all human love was Narcissus struggling after the evasive beauty of pool reflection. All love was a figment, a stimulus of apprehension, a new angle, a new possibility of self, a new gesture, a new pathway to self, therefore not grand love but tradesmens’ love […] What isolation! What strata upon strata of solitariness. (23 – 24)

In this passage grand love and human love fall into each other. Narcissus as the symbol of all human love evidently refers to Freud’s then recent idea of narcissism as an anthropological constanta (the term after Orlowsky). As explained in chapter four, Freud (who extracted the concept of narcissism from a merely pathological context) believed all humans experience a state of primary and normal narcissism in their childhood and later strive to regain this original self-har-

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mony by loving narcissistically and choosing their partner accordingly. Furthermore, primary narcissism continues in the parent who loves the child as an extension of the self. Another continuance of primary narcissism finds an outlet in its transference from the actual ego of childhood to the projected construct of an ideal-ego. Narcissism therefore is egoism, the egoism of the child. Grand love, on the other hand, is parental love (5), the love of the father raising the son up to heaven, as Hermes his Daphnis and Zeus his Ganymede. Again this sublimation can rebound, if parental love in the form of parental idolatry (ibid.) becomes all too lofty expectations and a fixed abstract idea detached from the actual living son: “Parental idolatry, Peter decided, was inclined to become more redundant than a rosary. Parental idolatry was a white peacock with spread tail. Parental idolatry was self watching […] was an imposition” (85). In parental idolatry, grand love can easily result in narcissistic vanity, ideal projection of the self, and the imposition of the paterfamilias. At this point the true grand love of Christ’s altruistic passion has degenerated into the automated empty form of the rosary. However, parental idolatry, as opposed to fatherly love, can also mean “mother love” and as such is “patient and remorseless” (3). It is the love of the mother that finds beauty even in the deformed child. Moreen describes such love in a letter to Peter: There is actually down here a woman with a horrible dwarf who is a hopeless idiot, and about whom she will talk for hours, telling you of horrible things he has done in moments of glimmering intelligence, but that were to her, because they had the germ of coherence, beautiful. (29)

This kind of grand love is unselfconscious and unconditional; it enables one to see beauty in what by common standards might be perceived as ugly. This is a love that inspires, not depresses (ibid.). This is the human ability to sublimate at its best for it is the transcendental power that perceives beyond the merely physical and divines the spiritual essence. It is the power to make sense, to find “the germ of coherence” or the true crystal within chaos by means of sympathy and compassion. The idolatry of the loving mother, with Macpherson, is the principle of the heart and grand love now becomes truly humane love. It is the exact opposite of ideal love or the love for the young aristocrat in Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is the love that ‘receiv’st gladly what it lov’st’ and thus the answer to the question raised by the Shakespearean epigraph. Such humane love is neither exclusively tied to the mother nor to women alone; Peter finds such ‘motherly’ love when he realises the parallel between the idiot mentioned in the letter and his ideal image of his son: “There is here a horrible dwarf who is a hopeless idiot. ….. But he is loved. My Praxitilean

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faun!” (36). And the novel extents this idea of humane grand love to a broader sense of reconsidering prejudiced concepts of aesthetics and of accepting nature and life in its complex variety: “Beauty and ugliness mean precisely nothing. Savages with distended lower lips are beautiful” (35). One should note that this is not the typical modern fascination with primitivism here, but that the last name of Peter as well as Lex is also Savage. Once again, the unfamiliar Other is beautiful too while the most familiar self, being Savage or Caliban⁵⁹, is also ugly. Macpherson is careful to retain the idea of Christ’s selfless love, but substitutes a more universal life image, the image of motherly or self-less parental love, and thus secures the divine love of compassion in all-human nature. The mother loving her deformed child or Lex laying with Moreen are symbolic images true to common experience, which Macpherson substitutes for the ‘old’ symbols of Christ and the chymical wedding. They become modern symbols, reviving the essential meaning of the old ones and grounding them in human biology and human necessity. It is now obvious that Macpherson does not merely apply Freud’s concept of narcissism and human love unreflectively in his novel but modifies it prominently. For one, Freud’s neatly divided primary and secondary narcissism become inextricably intertwined and circular. The simplifying scientific concept is retranslated into the complexity of art. Macpherson furthermore complicates the subject-matter by blending Freud’s (narcissistic) mother love and Freudian ideas of the formation of an ego ideal and sublimation of instincts with more popular (because mythic and thus universal) perceptions of unconditional mother love and spiritual concepts of divine sacrifice and compassion. Thus the artist reclaims from psychoanalytical science, with its idea of a narcissistically motivated mother love, the symbol of the mother for altruistic compassion and (divine) self-sacrifice, a symbol that unlike Freud’s concept is independent of biological gender and free from all instincts of self-interest. Freud’s concept of a love that eventually always traces back to an individual’s ‘ego-instincts’ is redeemed again by a love concept that truly transcends the ego. Grand love has to be sympathetic and compassionate. It is the mythic descent of the gods to mortality, the divine sacrifice of self. It signifies self-transcendence and compassion with another and constitutes a leitmotif that continues throughout the narrative: Peter comforting the injured Lex, Lex feeling pity for the beggar, the mother loving her idiot child. Macpherson’s novel can be read

 Macpherson, continuing the issue of art, beauty, and self-reflection, in his subsequent novel uses Shakespeare’s iconic savage to symbolise the savagery and ugliness of the narcissistically self-absorbed self (Gaunt Island ).

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as a Bildungsroman that delineates a universal maturing process from selfish to compassionate human individual, as well as the protagonist’s growing into society. At the same time, the novel delineates the maturing process of the artist and thus may also be read as a Künstlerroman and compared to other modernist artist novels of the time.

5.1.2.3 Poolreflection – Modernist Künstlerroman in Dialogue with Joyce and Woolf Like Poolreflection, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is a Künstlerroman concerned with the personal development of an artist and the maturing of his aesthetics. Joyce’s work is considered one of the great modernist artist novels and it seems worthwhile in examining Macpherson’s Poolreflection to take a look at Joyce’s early work. The two artist protagonists, Peter Savage and Stephen Dedalus, have a considerable degree in common. Both prefer the refined art of the aesthetic Symbolists and feel removed from the ‘ordinary’ world and the popular taste. Theirs is an ‘inner’ world of art, as opposed to an art dealing with worldly social concerns. Stephen, it is said, “drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose” (Portrait of the Artist 166 f). Furthermore, both artists attempt the ideal in art. Just as Peter initially intends to “excavate Praxitelean Faun from alluvial mud,” Stephen too strives to purify matter into sublime art. His ancient namesake, the flying Daedalus, becomes “a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being” (ibid. 169). The two artists molding from earth are associated with the figure of the divine or promethean creator. In their attempts to improve art to perfection and detach it from Darwinian “mud,” both artists nevertheless sever their art from biological human life. Congruent to his art, the artist of ‘pure’ aesthetics lives more or less removed from social life. Stephen is a solitary creature; little seems harder to him than “to merge his life in the common tide of other lives” (Portrait of the Artist 151). The young artist in Joyce’s autobiographical novel progresses into an inner emigration, distancing himself from everything that is related to the habits and expectations of a typical middle-class life and detaching himself from family, nation and church to become the completely autonomous aesthetic artist. Peter, too, is introduced as the meditative aesthete, withdrawn into his inner world of crystal fragments. Like Stephen, who first enters on the path to priesthood, Peter is said to be of virginal purity, their sacerdotal chastity being representative for the

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purity of their art and aesthetics. Stephen’s art philosophy is a result of his preoccupation with the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (ibid. 186 – 187) and Peter, when first contemplating his art, is enclosed by an aura of holy hushes in chapels. Yet, despite these striking resemblances, the two artist novels are decidedly different in their message. Macpherson’s novel, and here a digression from Joyce’s novel is already adumbrated, opens about where Joyce’s ends. Joyce delineates the development of the artist from adolescent to adult and his novel closes on the mature artist setting off into exile, leaving his family and all social ties behind. “A Portrait of the Artist, it would seem, is the locus classicus among novels of artistic egoism” (Goodheart 1968: 186).⁶⁰ In contrast to the young Stephen, Peter is already middle-aged and has just reconnected with his family in that, after sixteen years, he has just come for his son to live with him. This adolescent son again, as has been demonstrated, is a symbol for the young and still unrefined, for popular art and human biological life. One additional difference is that whereas the exile Joyce relates his artist novel directly to an ancient classic author by choosing an epigraph from the Daedalus myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Macpherson decides upon Shakespeare and thereby relates his artist novel especially to the ‘communal memory’ (Bloom) of Britain and to a popular national poet. Macpherson’s Poolreflection, published about a decade after Joyce’s book, can be read as a response to Joyce’s high modernist novel and the art conception it promotes. Joyce’s narrative consists solely of the subjective perspective of Stephen, whereas Poolreflection shifts back and forth between the perspectives of Peter, Lex and Moreen. By incorporating three different subjective perspectives, Macpherson introduces ‘objectivity’ to the art of inner subjectivity. Stephen favours an intellectual art of aesthetic stasis and resents a ‘biologically’ stimulating and responsive art of passion: the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. […] These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them […] are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. (Portrait of the Artist 205)

Stephen’s concept of an aesthetic stasis echoes Pound’s article on kinema and kinesis and defines a ‘proper’ art in distinction from ‘improper’ popular culture.

 For a more expanded account of the artist-hero Stephen’s career and on his egoism see Eugene Goodheart, The Cult of the Ego: The Self in Modern Literature (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, ):  – .

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To this aesthetic stasis, Macpherson opposes the organic dissolution and regeneration of cultural art forms, the dynamic art of organic life, and the popular culture of yellow-back novels and cinema as represented by Lex in Poolreflection. Although Joyce’s Stephen does recognize “the rhythm of beauty,” he maintains that true art cannot effect a merely physical sensation: Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty. (ibid. 206)

Stephen’s aesthetic is thus antipodal to a popular aesthetic of what Bourdieu describes as ‘first degree’ perception, as well as to a film art of sensing and experiencing as promoted by Pool. In the end, Stephen, who takes off from Ireland, becomes Dedalus the soaring artist. Daedalus, similar to Narcissus, is a mythological figure from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but he belongs to the transformation myths that describe an ascending process from human to divine and ideal state. Narcissus, on the contrary, belongs to the transformation myths that describe a descending process from human idealization to organic beauty and natural life; or with Nietzsche from the seclusion of the Apollonian principium individuationis to Dionysian immersion in a communal experience. (In his second novel, Gaunt Island, Macpherson continues the issue of art and change by drawing upon transformation myths and folktales that delineate a metamorphosis from animal or more earthen state to human.) Like the mythological counterparts they employ, Macpherson’s novel ends in diametrical opposition to Joyce’s. In contrast to Stephen Dedalus soaring to lofty heights beyond humankind, ‘changing nature’s law,’⁶¹ Peter, by stripping off coat and shirt, biting grass and kissing the earth, becomes a symbol for the artist who fully embraces nature, biology, and the ‘ordinary’ of humanity. Peter personifies the artist who descends from the elite aesthetics of the Parnassians and he realizes that “the descent from Parnassus is never easy” (162). Macpherson adapts the frequently invoked vegetation myth of his time to the sphere of modernist art. Peter’s descent from Parnassus is the mythic descent of the god to mortality, symbolizing the sacrifice of artistic narcissism for the common benefit and the regeneration and vitality of art. In the Whitmanesque symbol of the grass this poet further embraces a democratic principle of art. To the highly intellectualized art in Portrait of the Artist Macpherson holds up a humane art of

 Joyce chooses the line “et ignotas animum dimittit in artes” for his epigraph, which closes “naturamque novat” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, ).

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feeling and sympathy, to Stephen’s solipsistic isolation he opposes Peter’s final acceptance of Lex’s companionship, and to the “proud sovereignty” (Portrait of the Artist 168) of Stephen and his non serviam principle of a self-sufficient art Macpherson juxtaposes the unpretentious but democratic artist whose art has the social purpose of benefiting the public while yet aspiring to a high aesthetic standard. Joyce’s novel describes the rise to modernist aesthetics and has become iconic for High Modernism; Macpherson develops Modernism beyond its severance from popular culture and calls for a reconnection of modernist aesthetic forms to public and human life. Another prominent modernist Künstlerroman, which moreover was published in the same year as Macpherson’s, is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Woolf’s artist Lily Briscoe is another visionary whose ‘pure’ art is associated with the sanctuary of cathedrals (Lighthouse 48, 171). Her first-name is already symbolic for her artistic ‘purity,’ and her chastity (ibid. 50) and aesthetic ‘priesthood’ is further indicated by her unmarried, rather simple or even poor life-style. Her last name (Mrs. Ramsay calls her endearingly “little Brisk”) suggests the modern aesthetic of ‘making it new.’ Similar to her literary male counterparts who mould earth into sublime art like divine creators, Lily has the power to animate “clods [of blue and green] with no life in them” (Lighthouse 49). Just like Stephen and the early Peter, she too is an independent artist (ibid. 17), “cold and aloof and rather self-sufficing” (ibid. 104) and, also congruent to them, a solitary figure (ibid. 18, 153), who is “drawn out of community with people” (ibid. 158) and prefers to be alone (ibid. 50). In contrast to Stephen’s ‘masculine’ art of the intellect, however, Lily Briscoe’s is an alternative ‘feminine’ art of emotion. Hers is an art of physical sensation (ibid. 157, 178), of the feeling body and not of the feeling mind (ibid. 178). In direct opposition to Stephen’s ‘proper’ art of aesthetic stasis, Lily finally comes to the understanding that “beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty – it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life – froze it” (ibid. 177). Lily’s art is of the fleeting moment and fluid (ibid. 158). In this respect, Woolf’s Künstlerroman accords with Macpherson’s and both together present an alternative aesthetic to Joyce’s, and also Pound’s, earlier ‘masculine’ modernism. Unlike Macpherson’s Peter, Woolf’s Lily not only starts out alone but remains so to the end, her single state meaning “exemption from the universal law” (ibid. 50). This is of course owing to the gender issue in Woolf’s novel. As a woman artist Lily has to defend her autonomy twice as hard since wedlock would bear the risk of male dominance. As a woman artist Lily is further twice marginalized; not only is her modernist work not understood but she is also not taken seriously as an artist, as Mrs. Ramsay silently thinks (ibid. 17) and Mr. Tansley voices aloud (ibid.

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86). Lily’s artistic vision signifies female self-awareness and self-fulfillment, as has been emphasized by feminist criticism.⁶² Separate from this historical gender dimension, though, Lily’s art is a highly subjective, ‘internal’ art of reflection and memory that is not intended for the public. Moreover, it is not even intended for the few; it is an art that is not at all supposed to be looked at (Lighthouse 17, 52). It constitutes a purely self-sufficient art that, in being the manifestation of the artist’s personal vision, is the artist’s personal triumph (ibid. 208 – 209). In addition to this, it is not representative of human shape and experience but is an abstract art, which has to be explained even to such a personal friend as William Bankes and can only be appreciated by an impersonal, scientific mind (ibid. 52– 53). In this respect, Lily’s art is as narcissistic as the ‘purely’ aesthetic art of Stephen Dedalus and Peter Savage and equally withdrawn from the exterior world and its public concerns.⁶³ Her art is also equally an art of sublimation (ibid. 51). Thus, while Woolf’s To the Lighthouse still persists in classical ‘high’ modernist aesthetics that are exclusive and distinguished from popular culture, Macpherson’s artist novel of the same year promotes a rapprochement of modernist aesthetics and popular taste and culture. Macpherson also, to my mind, dissolves traditional gender categories

 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,” Women and Language in Literature and Society, eds. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker and Nelly Furman (New York, Praeger, ):  – ; Jane Marcus, New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (London: Macmillan, ); Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, ); Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writing in the Major Novels (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, ); Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ); Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: UP, ):  – .  Feminist approaches usually associate a rebellious attitude and a development to an existence outside of society with the typical male/masculine novel of development, whereas the typical female/feminine counterpart presents a development towards an existence within society. Also, while the male protagonist is usually adolescent, the female protagonist is usually already of middle-age. See Elizabeth Abel (ed.), The Voyage Out: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover: University Press of New England, ²):  – . However, since the artist novels by Joyce and Woolf are strongly autobiographical, it seems only logical that Stephen leaves Ireland while Lily stays. Joyce turned his back on Irish nationalism, emigrated, and wrote from without; Woolf, writing in England, simply had to deal and come to terms with a society and culture still much influenced by the Victorian times, as personified in Mrs. Ramsay. What usually has been related to categories of gender may, in this context, just as well be attributed to the national versus the international. (Peter, again, unites the two, he leaves England for France but he asks Lex to join him there.)

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more successfully than Woolf,⁶⁴ achieving greater dialectic dynamism of antagonistic forces. His always triadic constellations and their dynamics successfully disrupt social gender conventions by consistently presenting an equal influence and conjunction of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, or let us rather say opposite forces. His shifting and regenerative organic triad construction opposes conventional binaries and in this resists ideological constructions and discourses of power structures. Consequently, Macpherson could not be utilised as easily as Woolf by feminist and gender studies. Woolf wrote another shorter piece that corresponds better with Macpherson’s novel. Two years after Poolreflection and the commencement of Pool, Woolf wrote “The Fascination of the Pool” (1929) – at the time of the Uniform Editions when the Hogarth Press had changed from exclusive hand-printing to photo-offset. Her piece opens with the typical mythological locus amoenus of a pool in idyllic surroundings, and the speaker by the side of the pool looking at the reflections on the water clearly suggests Narcissus, the mythic figure as well as the contemplative Romantic poet.⁶⁵ Woolf’s speaker seems to be exactly like Peter, a “Narcissus struggling after the evasive beauty of pool reflection” (Poolreflection 24) and similarly to Poolreflection, where art pieces and cultural symbols disintegrate into nature, the forms in Woolf’s piece too dissolve, the surface of the pool is disturbed by the wind and the reflections of the forms ripple. The surface of this pool is not static and illustrates once more an aesthetic fluidity. This “liquid state” (“Fascination” 220) of things, that is directly contrary to the concrete, precise image of a Pound, constitutes one of the fascinations of the pool. Woolf’s pool also has the mythological dimension of Ovid’s pool, which mirrors Narcissus’ beauty as well as his consciousness. In fact, Woolf’s pool, with its dark and deep waters, its fathomless bottom, and the secure thick “fringe of rushes” (ibid.) round its edge, represents human psychology: Beneath the visible surface “went on some profound under-water life like […] the ruminating of a mind” (ibid.). Only it does not represent the psychology of one particular person but is something akin to a universal mind that contains multiple thoughts and memories throughout time. This mind echoes multiple voices from various historical periods.

 Woolf has been criticized most prominently for her failure to present strong women figures by feminist critic Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: UP, ).  Woolf’s prose piece recalls the Romantic mode and contemplative poet figure of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” – which would translate into “Narcissi.”

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Many, many people must have come there alone, from time to time, from age to age, dropping their thoughts into the water, asking some question […] The charm of the pool was that thoughts had been left there by people who had gone away and without their bodies their thoughts wandered in and out freely, friendly and communicative, in the common pool. (ibid.)

This pool has an oracle-like quality, a source of human consciousness that provides answers to questions of life, but it is also a reservoir of human emotional experience. It recalls the memories of love, despair, excitement and sorrow. The metaphor of the pool appears already in the last third of To the Lighthouse, as the mirror of “the minds of men” (132), the “pool of Time” (139) and the “pool of thought” (179). Rather extraordinary is the fact that Narcissus, the mythological icon for self and subjectivity, becomes in Woolf’s piece an anonymous speaker, an impersonal voice of “one” whose identity seems to be annihilated in the act of looking into the universal mind of the pool. In contrast to the subjectivist artist Lily Briscoe, this later artist – artist, since Narcissus is the symbol for the artist – participates in the consciousness of multiple selves and thereby transcends mere artistic subjectivism. In contrast to Lily’s inaccessible abstract painting, this artist of the pool attempts a more collective experience of art; the visions of the pool are accessible not exclusively to the artist but to many people. Woolf’s pool, with its stream of associations, its insubstantial images of reflection and projection, and its thoughts sliding one over the other, provides a cinematic experience. Such a collective cinematic experience, which annihilates the identity of the spectator while participating in the vision, is remarkably similar to what Pool expounded particularly in their first issues of Close Up, as will be further discussed in the chapter on the film magazine. Woolf, although she had been asked, never submitted anything to Close Up, but evidently she was thinking along similar lines.⁶⁶ Woolf’s “friendly and communicative” pool with its dropped in thoughts, this ‘think tank’ or rather ‘thought tank,’ in many respects provides a fitting description of Pool and their concept of art, with the exception that Woolf imagines

 Macpherson requested to reprint Woolf’s “Movies and Reality” () in Close Up but The Nation, where it had been published, refused a reprint, and Woolf excused herself as being too busy to write something new. Cf. Letter from Virginia Woolf to Kenneth Macpherson,  July , Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, quoted in Donald et al. (: , note ). “Movies and Reality” had first been published under the better known title “The Cinema” in The Arts (June ) and The Nation ( July ), and as “Movies and Reality” in The New Republic ( August ). On Woolf and the cinema see also Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: UP, ):  – .

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a pool of memories and voices and ghosts of the past, while Pool accumulate voices and thoughts from the present and looks ahead. In conclusion one can say that Macpherson’s novel ranks alongside the Künstlerromane of Modernism, even though it presents a positive inclusive stance that is diametrically opposed to their notion of modernist distinction. His key concern is not so much with developing a particular style or aesthetic form and securing its autonomy but rather with sharing aesthetic forms with the public. Macpherson appears to develop his considerations about modernist art with respect to Sachs’ theory of the collective daydream and the artist’s special ability to translate the narcissistic dream into an aesthetic experience that delights the community. Modernist aesthetics, according to Macpherson, are too exclusive; they have to become inclusive again to benefit the public. The artist figures of Joyce and Woolf, in withdrawing from their social environment to develop an art incomprehensible to others, are essentially narcissistic and selfsufficient, which implies that their art is egoistic.⁶⁷ Macpherson’s artist figure, by contrast, undergoes a development from narcissistic fixation on form to social function and collaborative effort and hence embodies an art that intends to delight and benefit many. His novel closes with the reconciliation of the artist to popular entertainment.

5.2 Gaunt Island: Cinematographic Fiction of Celtic Sensitivity In his second novel Macpherson continues the primeval theme of love, but now he turns to another great concern of humanity: death. Thus while his first novel explores love and life, his second novel circles around love and death, and although love continues to be the central theme the mood now is a much darker and more tragic one. Just like Poolreflection, Gaunt Island continues the triadic character constellation of two male and one female character, only this time the two male figures are not father and son but elder and younger brother. Both novels set in dynamic relation with each other embody the dialectic art philosophy of Pool. Gaunt Island is in many ways the complementary novel to Poolreflection, artistically, psychologically, and philosophically. Psychologically, it completes the ecstatic happiness from Poolreflection with melancholy and de-

 I herein argue directly against Robert Kiely, who claims that Joyce’s and Woolf’s artist figures “can mean the very opposite” of egotism (). Cf. Beyond Egotism: The Fiction of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard UP, ).

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pression, and where the first novel features the creative force of the ‘pleasure principle’, the second presents the destructive force of the ‘death instinct’. To the final note on fertility, which endows his first novel with an ending of classical comedy, Macpherson now opposes the fatal ending of classical tragedy. Furthermore, Poolreflection stresses classic beauty and aestheticism, and its spirit is mostly Apollonian in nature, while Gaunt Island places an emphasis on the romantic sublime and human passion and suffering, and is more Dionysian in a Nietzschean sense. Macpherson’s first novel relates its characters to specific classical mythic figures and its language is more metaphorical, while Gaunt Island relates its characters instead to expressive gestures and dramatic performance, and is characterised by a pattern of continuity. The first novel puts an emphasis on ‘classic’ form, while the second shifts the emphasis to ‘romantic’ subject-matter, and correspondingly a focus on sculpture, painting, and lyric form is succeeded by a focus on more romantic popular forms such as the fairy tale, ballad, legend, and detective novel. Thus Poolreflection, with its emphasis on form and symbolism and its references to sculpture and painting, may be classified as an Imagist novel, whereas Pool specified Gaunt Island as “cinematographic fiction” (together with Bryher’s Civilians and Blakeston’s Extra Passenger). Moreover, Close Up specifically related Gaunt Island to Pabst’s film The Love of Jeanne Ney and announced that “[i]f you liked Jeanne Ney you will probably like Gaunt Island” (8:3, 254). Certainly the theme of love in times of doom that both works share accounts for this, but it was particularly the kind gesture and the potential of human love and compassion that characterised Pabst’s film and that are also of primary importance to Macpherson’s novel. Furthermore, his protagonist is characterised by the same “rare Nordic quality” that Macpherson found in Uno Henning, who played the young, sensitive lover in Jeanne Ney, and both film and novel are informed by a similar gloom, a suggestive language, and expressionist elements. Jeanne Ney was also Pabst’s most dynamic film up to then and Macpherson, who was fascinated with its swift, dynamic action, attempts to translate such cinematographic dynamism into writing. In contrast to Poolreflection, which is closer to the lyric genre, Gaunt Island was published shortly after the commencement of Pool’s film magazine Close Up in July and coincides with the beginning of Pool’s film activism.

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5.2.1 Opposing “A New Sensitivity” to Modernist Objectivity 5.2.1.1 Robin and the Artistic Principle of Love and Compassion Gaunt Island opens somewhat similarly to Poolreflection with the novel’s protagonist Robin sitting in contemplation and experiencing a visionary moment. But while Peter in Poolreflection withdraws from the world and people around him, is “isolate, aloof, sheltered, dehumanised” (1), Robin is receptive to his surroundings, “tormented” and exposed to the wild forces of nature that are “crashing upon him” (ibid.). Peter sits enveloped in silence; Robin is engulfed by a roaring sea, clouds, and screaming seagulls and crashing waves. Peter is detached, whereas Robin is involved and drawn in. Peter sits inside a room; Robin is outside and exposed to the elements, and while Peter’s vision arises from “his consciousness of sublimation” (2), Robin’s “semi vision” is an ominous premonition of the senses and “in affiliation with Celtic weather” (ibid.). Moreover Robin, in contrast to Peter’s aloofness, feels that “one belonged to it all [seas and lands and people], it was part of one, it went on, in and round one, continuing, continuing, continuing a pattern” (ibid.), and whereas Peter is explicitly related to the mythic figure of Narcissus, Robin instead is associated with an emotional stress or a psychological constitution that corresponds to nature or is expressed by it. Robin Mannering, eldest son of a Scottish Highland clan family, embodies the poet of sensitivity, who is at one with the wildly raging nature around him in which he senses human agitation. He is responsive to his natural surroundings, on which his mood and nature are even mutually dependent: “It began inside him, but came with dishevelled weather” (1). The storm outside becomes the emotional stress within: “Gloom wailed and boomed in his father’s home, splashed in mind-spaces with grey and dark grey, and a sense of waiting” (1– 2). Nature outside even becomes human physiological nature when Robin “sensed a pulse and cardiac tremors” in the noise and “down-drench” (2) of the sea. In the opening passage of his novel, Macpherson visually captures the storm and stress for which the eighteenth-century German movement was named. Right from the beginning Macpherson establishes a link between his protagonist and the eighteenth-century concept of sensibility that stressed sympathy and feeling and was interested in the mood of the individual. Highly sensitive literary figures such as Mackenzie’s Scottish ‘man of feeling’ or Goethe’s German Werther represent this culture that often affiliated human emotion and personal mood with weather, and inner turmoil with outer storms. Like Macpherson’s novel, the Storm and Stress movement had proclaimed a new conception of art. Rejecting conventional poetic norms, it praised instead the creative power of the poet and the concept of poetic truth and set subjectivism against the objectivism of Enlightenment. The cult of sensibility that

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emerged from the age of Enlightenment, actually a new phase of Enlightenment, was a reaction to the cult of reason. To objective but detached reason it opposed subjective passion and sentiment, which was intended to instil sympathy and compassion. Janet Todd, who finds the sentimental impulse also in the Greek drama of Euripides and other works of earlier periods, still holds that the “centrality of sentiment” and “the alliance in interests of eighteenth-century literature and moral philosophy” as well as “a popular demand for a new set of ideas with which to account for human nature” (1986: 3) are particular to the age of sensibility. Storm and Stress also maintained a didactic purpose in art and it wanted art to be for the people and not for the educated few (G.A. Bürger). Therefore, drama as an art form that addressed a collective audience occupied an advanced position in the art philosophy of Storm and Stress, and the theatre was its chief medium. In Die Entstehung der Poesie, Eibl has shown how this led to the formation of the national theatre and how the national theatre functioned in stabilising the still young bourgeois community. In the national theatre, art was a communal experience for the citizens and their shared experience of distress and intense personal emotions was intended to foster sympathy and thus communal security. Eibl ties the need for the communal in and through art, which he finds in the national theatre of Storm and Stress, back to an inherent human necessity and a biological disposition to socialise and empathise. Sensibility, although it paved the way for Romanticism, was at the same time still strongly influenced by the ideas of Enlightenment, although it promoted enlightenment not of reason but of compassion. Robin also calls for such enlightenment and for an understanding of life throughout the novel. “Ultimately there will be enlightenment” (41, emphasis in the original), he reassures himself and asserts that “we must try and see truth” (52), not doubting “that stupidity could be rectified” (53), and upon being confronted with the desolate condition of modern humanity his heart cries out “is there no hope, is there no compassion?” (52). This Enlightenment of sentiment is particularly rooted in Scottish culture for the “concept of the sentimental […] lay at the very heart of the Scottish Enlightenment” (Dwyer 1991: 171). It is not without significance that Macpherson’s novel is set on an island of the Hebrides, amidst harsh Nordic nature and a rough Celtic climate. Macpherson ties the cult of sensibility, which inspired the movement of Storm and Stress as well as Romanticism, back to its historical and cultural Celtic roots in his novel.⁶⁸ It was Macpherson’s eighteenth-century namesake who, with the cycle

 On the influence of Ossian in this context see Howard Gaskill (ed.), Ossian Revisited (Edin-

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of poems he attributed to the Celtic hero Ossian, instigated a revival of interest in Celtic folklore that inspired in particular German artists of Storm and Stress and the Romantics.⁶⁹ Probably most famous is the influence of Ossian on Goethe, who in a climactic scene in his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther inserts an extensive quotation from Ossian to express the mood and emotional turmoil of the two lovers. (In the respective scene Werther reads to Lotte and by the end of the passage they are both overcome with emotion; united in their misery they cry together and Werther finally kisses Lotte passionately (143 – 151).) As noted earlier, Goethe’s novel was intended to comfort by way of compassion all those who suffered unrequited love. Several poses and gestures in the novel align Robin with Werther et cie and the culture of sensibility, for instance when he is crying (87, 111, 116 passim) or when he is throwing himself down on the divan (4, 10, 63, 85) or on his knees (97, 106) or at another’s feet (111, 116) or when he is weak and fainting (130). Moreover, Robin embodies the “humanity” of Ossian which, James Macpherson claimed, “would grace a hero of our own polished age” (quoted in Dwyer 1991: 170). With ‘the melancholy savage’ Ossian⁷⁰ and his fellow Celtic heroes, James Macpherson created alternative humane heroes of sentiment to the more courageous but indifferent classical Greek heroes of Homer or Virgil (ibid.). Contemporaries of James Macpherson understood the poetry of Ossian as an art that was “calculated to create not only brave and generous heroes but also humane citizens, tender lovers [and] affectionate friends” (ibid. 180). The poetry was to stir the emotions of the readers into “sympathetic sorrow” and what Ossian calls the “joy of grief” (quoted ibid.). Again, this melancholic sentiment and sympathy with the sorrow of others was seen as a particularly Celtic characteristic. In line with Scottish literary history and similar to James Macpherson, who set against the Greek warrior heroes of old a novel kind of hero “who is sociable rather than independent, genuine rather than merely hospitable, humane rather than hard” (ibid. 196), Kenneth Macpherson sets his poet of new sensitivity against the objective and detached modern artist. Robin becomes the represenburgh: UP, ) and Fiona J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: UP, ).  It inspired, for example, Johann Gottfried Herder to write an essay on a correspondence about “Ossian and the songs of Ancient People” () and Franz Schubert to set Ossian’s poems to music. For the reception of Ossian in German Romanticism see Wolf Gerhard Schmidt, “Homer des Nordens” und “Mutter der Romantik”: James Macphersons “Ossian” und seine Rezeption in der deutschsprachigen Literatur,  vols. (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, ), also Howard Gaskill (ed.), The Reception of Ossian in Europe (London et al.: Thoemmes, ).  This phrase after Dwyer’s title “The Melancholy Savage: Text and Context in the Poems of Ossian,” Ossian Revisited, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: UP, ):  – .

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tative of a new age of sensitivity and of a revival of the earlier historical sentiment. Consequently he realises at the outset of the narrative that “a new sensitivity was in him” (2). Cultural history is repeating or rather re-cycling itself; the modern poet of a post-WWI culture has to return to sensitivity in order to comfort humanity with art and inspire compassion in a climate of political and social hostility. The modern poet has to become once again a ‘man of feeling’ and has to rely on his nerves and senses. At the same time Robin is also striving to revive the art of the Italian Renaissance, which stood for ideal beauty and elegant proportions. Robin is herein very similar to Peter, the aestheticist in Poolreflection, and his desire to revive in Lex the Faun of Praxiteles. Robin also wants to “immortalise somehow” the “beauty” of his younger brother Geoffrey, who to him is “like Michaelangelo’s David” (13) or “the virgin by Giovanni della Robbia” above the door of San Jacopo di Ripoli in Florence (34).⁷¹ He wants to “sculpture” (13) Geoffrey and thereby capture and cast beauty in form. Robin is trying to find a “formula” (34, passim) for beauty but he realises finally the futility of such an attempt, since beauty is life and life is neither fixed nor objective and “[i]t’s no good making a Golden Fleece out of it” (176). His concern with beauty and sculpture associates him with classical form and, like Peter, he represents a highly refined, delicate and decorative art, characterised by Mozart’s harpsichord music (53) and French phrases (63, 69). But it is just this delicacy of beauty that, as in Poolreflection, has to be sacrificed at the end of the novel. Robin is also son to a Scottish clan and thus not only authentic to the setting of the novel but also more ‘folkloric’ than the urbane, upper-class Peter in Poolreflecion. (At the same time the Mannering family of Quhele are residing in an old castle and are set off from the servants and peasants.) This also agrees with the notion of Storm and Stress, which called for an art of the people that accepted the genuineness of folk song and folk tale, and such dramas usually presented a common character, particular from the bourgeoisie, as a hero, rather than an aristocrat. Furthermore, Robin is much younger than Peter and thus a more ‘romantic’ rebel, in accordance with Sachs’s theory of art, than Peter the more ‘classic’ adult. Even more folkloric is his first name: Robin is a small native songbird. Instead of presenting heroic features or a mythic hero, the novel uses a natural image to characterise its protagonist. This echoes the principles of Imagism and

 San Jacopo di Ripoli is a former convent. Its inconspicuous façade consists of plain brick stone, while the della Robbia pietà above its door is made of terracotta. The figures are white on a blue background. The pietà lunette appears like a modest jewel set into plain brick stone and to someone knowing the piece it immediately characterises the ‘pure’ and visionary nature of Geoffrey with his appreciation of simple form but sublime content.

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also fits in with the more folkloric mode of the narrative, since the robin is a bird of British folk tale and legend that explain the bird’s red breast in relation to suffering. One legend has it that when Christ was dying on the cross, the Robin flew to him and sang in his ear to comfort him and ease his pain and in doing so the blood of the dying Christ stained the bird’s breast (Symbolic and Mythological Animals 194). Another legend records that the robin’s breast was scorched while fetching water for the lost souls in Purgatory (Dictionary of Symbols 388 – 389).⁷² Robin accordingly is also ‘singing’ to the ill-treated Elmo, who remembers “the mellifluous soft syllables shaped by golden throat, a throat that lived, delicate, swift in apprehensions” (127). The Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery further records that the robin, probably inspired by Roman Faunus, can also mean Robin Goodfellow, a mischievous nature sprite like Shakespeare’s Puck (388). Robin as well has mischievous moments when he is teasing or fighting his little brother, moments that let him also appear more human since they bestow certain human weaknesses on the otherwise pure and noble figure. In comparison to the boisterous young Faun Lex in Poolreflection, though, the bird-Faun Robin in Gaunt Island is more spiritualised because sensitised. He is not so much joyous life principle as spiritual love and passion. In both legends the robin becomes a symbol of compassion and the passion of Christ,⁷³ and this association with Christ also runs through Gaunt Island. “He [Robin] seemed so ‘more than man and less than the angels’” (154),⁷⁴ asserts Elmo and there are several passages linking Robin explicitly to the figure of Christ (49, 50, 54, 73, 85, passim). Christ here becomes another symbol for the principle of compassion with humanity and personal passion, in the sense of sufferance. Robin is an imago Christi of the modern poet, whose artistic principle of passion and pain should also work to inspire compassion with humanity. Humanity itself has to become Christ-like in order to overcome the injuries and spiritual destruction of post-war times: “We must all be Christs, and then look round, and go on from there” (49). Modern poetry or art must not be like a despairing Christ, though, “no pharisaical, fostered thing, and no Eloi! Eloi! lama

 One may furthermore find parallels to Robin Hood, particularly by means of the old folksong “Who Killed Cock Robin,” where all the little folk pay tribute to their dead hero. This in turn would tie in with Robin Mannering’s artist role in the literary field since he is the one who gives art to the deprived (see the respective section). Robert Segal has defines Robin Hood as a class hero. Cf. Robert Segal, Hero Myths: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, ).  The Robin is also a favourite motif for Christmas cards and therein again associated with the coming of Christ and a sense of advent.  The quoted phrase here gives the gist of the biblical idea of Christ’s human nature (cf. Hebrews, , ) and man’s divine part (cf. Psalm , ).

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sabachthani,” Robin decides, “but rather a voice crying in the wilderness… Nihilism, and rebirth” (54). Robin himself, upon being humiliated, realises that “Christ was the symbol of liberators, the scourged Christ carrying his cross,” and yet “the resurrected Christ showing his wounds was what mattered” (85) in the end. The symbol of the resurrected Christ reappears once again in the phoenix rising from the ashes (73) and the symbols for rebirth become emblematic for a regeneration of humanity in the context of the novel. It is the promise of a new chance that emerges from the nihilism caused by destruction. Christ and the phoenix are also signs for a renaissance of the arts in modernist times, for a new spirit in art. Christ as the symbol of love and compassion occurred already in Poolreflection, where he was associated with selfless motherly love. Like the mother who loves her idiot child, Robin loves Elmo despite her ‘madness’ and criminal past. The suffering Christ is the humanized god and Elmo calls Robin also her god Eros (127, 132). Like Peter, Robin symbolises the artist that has to descend from the sphere of beauty to accept the public, but unlike Peter, who learns to embrace life and nature with its fertility, Robin learns to embrace death and the darker, destructive forces of life. Peter is the artist that comes to accept entertainment in art, while Robin in turn is the artist who becomes sensitised to the misery of the poor and disadvantaged. He discontinues his goal to recover Renaissance beauty and instead realises that the artist must sympathise and that his art has to provide comfort to those who suffer: “We have to understand pain. It matters more that the masses, (so much hardier and so infinitely much less hardy, and lost and unhappy than we could ever be) should be made to know faith in Some thing” than that the artist find personal fulfilment in his art (177). His death in the end is the sacrifice of the artist that implants faith in Elmo, who has finally come to know beauty in life. Like Peter, Robin symbolises the artist that transcends the self and becomes communal.

5.2.1.2 Geoffrey – the Poetic Principle of Divine Vision and the Sublime While Robin is related to early Romantic sensitivity, his younger brother Geoffrey personifies Romantic idealism and a Romantic sentiment of greatness. Geoffrey embodies the principle of artistic vision and poetic imagination. He is “a visionary” (22), associated with sacral spaces such as Quhele’s Gothic chapel (96 – 97), the Cathedral (54), church bells (34, 42) and sacred songs of praise, such as Sunday matinsong (34) and the magnificat (21), and with dawn and light (92, 180). Geoffrey with his “‘prognostications,’ and his nocturnal fears” is “the authentic prophet” (23). Similar to his elder brother, whom he is “so a replica of” (27), he is a Highlander and has “an odd quality, essentially Celtic” (22) and the same far-

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sighted sense of impending doom. But unlike his brother he is not a representative of sensitivity. His Celtic sentiment is instead more aligned with the supernatural, religion, magic (48, 92), witchcraft (48), superstition (36) and the occult (18). Geoffrey does not sense human agitation in nature but a grand divine force and correspondingly he stands for the idea of the sublime. Accordingly, Geoffrey’s characteristic gesture is not throwing himself down on the divan, like his brother, but the kneeling pose by the window (66) that symbolises his worship of wild Celtic nature. An early scene shows him leaning out of the window into a raging storm: Wind burst in and got behind tapestries like fugitives. Geoffrey leaned out, and his spirit leapt up a staircase. He tingled and almost cried out. Storm cooled him. The rain whips whistled. Land set its teeth to the gale and bellowed. The sky rushed past like hedges from a train. […] His eyes had drunk up elemental raging, and dilated now at the room. (13)

Geoffrey’s affinity with the sublime in nature here strongly recalls Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and the concept that came to be so influential for Romanticism. Only shortly after the passage just quoted, the “mane of rain” that blew in through Geoffrey’s window and “swept over the floor” (14) is reminiscent of Shelley’s tempestuous West Wind with its “locks of the approaching storm” (“Ode” l.23) and like this fierce spirit that becomes the poet’s own, Geoffrey imbibes the ‘elemental raging’ that then infuses his soul, which is expressed by his dilating eyes. Neither Burke nor Shelley are explicitly mentioned in Gaunt Island – as neither Werther nor Ossian are explicitly mentioned in relation to Robin – but while his brother is aligned with sensibility, Geoffrey, who is only a couple of years younger, is here associated with Romantic poetry. When he is running into the night and storm “to be free” and to “go and peep at Little House” (17), this “sinister hob goblin of the island” (6), a line of Robert Burns’ ballad “Tam o’Shanter” echoes in his mind,⁷⁵ appropriately so, since Tam, on his nightly ride and upon passing the haunted grounds of Alloway Kirk, encounters the supernatural force of witches. The ballad line, reintroduced into a haunted setting, functions as a carrier of mood here and is not used as a cultural icon. Geoffrey is also addressed by his brother in the Scottish vernacular, which Burns, the Bard and arch-Romantic Scottish poet, employed so prominently in his poetry. The vernacular appears, for example, when Geoffrey leans out into the storm through the window and Robin calls to him: “Enough, enough my muckle clootie. Come awa’ ben”  “And sic a night he taks the road in / As ne’er poor sinner was abroad in” (l.  – ).

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(13), and another time when he calls out: “come awa’ ma wean” (34), and once when he exclaims exasperatedly: “By Gott, whad a fuddy ban you are!” (36), and again when Geoffrey is wondering to himself “whence the whigmeleeries” (17) of his mind arise.⁷⁶ It is the Romantic poet’s appreciation of the common man’s regional and spoken language. In comparison with his elder brother, Geoffrey is more reckless (15), “hardier and more of the world altogether” (197). There is more of the ancient wild Celt in the younger brother, who also “has the clan spirit” and is “one of the real old Highlanders” (48). Whereas the sensitive Robin senses “fundamental hysteria in nature” (2), the romantic Geoffrey experiences fierce but heroic natural forces (17). While Robin rides through a moonlit night through “mist [that] was silver fire” (58), with his horse treading “in psychic emanations” (53) and his own feet trailing in ectoplasm (54), Geoffrey “plodded like a cart-horse, giddy and amazed” through the dark and rain and “braced himself as against a battering ram” (17) to meet the violence of the storm. Similar to Henry Mackenzie, the author of ‘the man of feeling’ who termed Burns ‘a Heaven-taught ploughman’,⁷⁷ Robin also finds an “odd naiveté” (22) and sometimes even a “heavy bovine quality of consciousness” (48) in his brother, while his mother reprimands her younger son for his coarse language (47). This is not to say that such correspondence in biography identifies Robin as Mackenzie or Geoffrey as Burns, after all form is never static with Macpherson and character perspectives change. In accordance with literary history, Robin, whose first name is actually Robert (134), has also much of Burns, the more lyrical love poet, whose favourite book was Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling and who was much influenced by the concept of sensibility. The two brothers Robin and Geoffrey have to be understood as two different but closely related and interacting artistic strains that may well unite in one single artist.⁷⁸

 Whigmeleeries are whims and the expression can be found in Burns’ poem “The Brigs of Ayr”. “Muckle clootie” has most likely to be translated as “big dumpling” and “come awa’ ben” is an inviting greeting asking a person to ‘come into the cozy room’. See the respective entries in The Scottish National Dictionary, ed. William Grant and David D. Marison (Edinburgh: The Scottish National Dictionary Association,  – ).  Nigel Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: UP, ): . Leask also titles his introduction “The ‘Heaven-Taught Ploughman’.”  Harold Bloom also considers the two strains in conjunction with each other. See his collection of critical essays Poets of Sensibility and the Sublime (New York: Chelsea House, ). In the same collection Carol McGuirk has examined Burns more particularly in this context (:  – ).

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Contrary to his elder brother, the sixteen-year old Geoffrey still has to go to school, although school here may not only suggest education and sophistication but artistic movement as well. There is an appealing freshness to Geoffrey, whose storm-rainy face makes Robin think “of lawns in the early morning with intricate dew” (13). He is more local and simple than Robin, but pristine and of spring: “Geoffrey was primroses in peacock blue moss, and the crocus” (92). The flower imagery symbolising Geoffrey repeats the della Robbia pietà, the white figural group on brilliant blue background, and translates the piece of art into organic nature. At the same time, the peacock blue colour suggests the Romantic imagination and Novalis’ blue flower of transcendental dreaming. It signifies Geoffrey’s vision, magic and poetic spirituality, as the narrative context in which this image is mentioned also confirms. Robin, in contrast, is characterised by more exotic and delicate flowers such as the orchid (71, 76) and the tulip (112), which are more endangered by the snow and wintry climate of a reality that finally destroys him. Geoffrey is more indigenous to Quhele but none the less exquisite. Geoffrey, who is more rustic and uses the vernacular at times, is associated with older literary forms such as the epic, ballad, legend, and fairy or folk tale, and thus to oral and folkloric traditions that were revived by the Romantics. But just like the Romantics, who adopted these more common and popular forms for their own highly refined art, Geoffrey too is busy with artistic sublimation. Moreover, he is associated with the “Auld Wives’ Tales” (36) that signify his superstition. “Tam o’Shanter” was mentioned before, but whereas the line from this ballad simply echoes in Geoffrey’s mind as a thought, without any specification as to work or author, it is different with the fairy tales. Grimm and Andersen are explicitly mentioned by name in the novel, as are certain fairy tales or fairy tale motifs associated with them. But the tales or motifs are again employed to evoke a specific notion or mood that is attributed to Geoffrey. He feels “like the man in Grimm who had never learnt to shudder” (18)⁷⁹ when he is about to courageously face the haunted grounds of Little House. At another time, when he glorifies “the mere brother” into “an archangel,” this becomes “a Hans Anderson business. The usual frog into the usual prince” (19).⁸⁰ While

 “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was” is a parody on superstition, in which the youth is confronted with all kinds of frightening ghostly appearances without ever experiencing the sensation of fear. Only when he is finally doused with a bucketful of cold water does he shudder.  In English editions Andersen is often spelt Anderson and the second name often omitted. (Hans Anderson’s Fairy Tales (London: Nisbet, ), to cite an example that Macpherson might have known). The somewhat confusing affiliation of Andersen with the popular Grimm

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the first tale characterises the bravery of a heroic nature, the latter fairy tale signifies artistic sublimation. Although it is unlikely that Macpherson was familiar with Antti Aarne’s 1910 classification system for folktales,⁸¹ both tales that Macpherson mentions here are tales of magic and fall into Aarne’s category of the supernatural. Nonetheless, the supernatural is not only tied to folkloric form but to a particular frame of mind. Geoffrey belongs “to another dimension” (92), he is living “in two worlds, the one human, the other transcendental” and believes in some “universal-will” (99). To Geoffrey, spirit is more important than body: “Spirit controlled. […] Spirit was the greater force. Spirit was right. Body and spirit were one” (100). While Robin with his ambition to recover the Renaissance wants “to make spirit flesh” (37), Geoffrey feels that “Robin must learn not to deny the spirit for the sake of the body” (100). Geoffrey not only represents the notion of the sublime but also the artistic concept of sublimation, the process of transforming, by means of poetic imagination, the common into the extraordinary, turning fairy tale-like “the usual frog into the usual prince,”⁸² or, in reverse, demonising by transforming the common into the supernaturally demonic. Robin therefore attributes an “early-medieval mind” (47) to his younger brother and finds him even “archaic” (35). Consequently, Geoffrey tells his brother: “I’m older than you really” (12) and Robin admits: “It’s quite true, you are older than me” (14). Just like the Romantics who revived an interest in the medieval period, Geoffrey with his medieval mind is ‘older’ than his pre-romantic brother who is bound to the Enlightenment of sentiment. Already by name Geoffrey suggests the Middle Ages and authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote a legendary history of the kings of Britain. Young Geoffrey is “hero-worshipping” (71) his brother, sees him as “royal” (102) and is obsessed with his brother’s heroic depiction in “the Mannering epic” (19), and his “furor poeticus” tends to “grandiloquences” (21). He is hence the artistic principle that renders heroic and idealises, and he represents a purity and autonomy of art that is sternly adverse to any “cheapness of the lapsed artist” (32) and to any corruption of art.

fairy tale “The Frog-Prince” is probably due to finding the most popular image for Andersen’s typical transmutations and sublimations in this tale.  It is unlikely because it was only translated into English by Stith Thompson in  and thus after Gaunt Island had been published – unless Macpherson had come across the earlier German translation of .  María Cecilia Barbetta, in Poetik des Neo-Phantastischen (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, ), links the fairy tale of the transformation of the frog to Lavater’s drawing “From Frog to Apollo” () and thus to poetic sublimation.

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While Robin is similar to Peter in his attempt to recover Renaissance beauty, Geoffrey is more akin to Moreen, who was also “pure medieval” and visionary, but without her darker mythic quality and also without her tinge of naturalism, traits now attributed to Elmo. Geoffrey is hostile to this quality of the instinct and unconscious and instead exhibits much of the boisterous youthful vitality of Lex. In the end, however, he too has to descend from his lofty visionary sphere to the squalid quarters of life, and his last kneeling pose is not an act of worship but the ordinary act of stoking Elmo’s smoky and sallow fire into brighter flames (195).

5.2.1.3 Elmo, the Mythic Unconscious, and the Psychology of Fear The third artistic principle in the novel appears in the figure of the stranger from Little House, who personifies the tradition of horror and the literature of dark Romanticism. Little House is “the pet ghoul” of the island; a shabby, deserted and utterly ruinous small cottage that makes “people instinctively shudder when they pass it on the road” above (7). Some believe that only madmen or criminals would ever go near it (6). It is located down in a glen, in between trees, with an overgrown small garden whose tiny gate creaks on its hinges (18 – 19). During Robin’s childhood, “Little House had fed his imagination with the macabre half visions” (9), while to Geoffrey it is a “desolate little mausoleum” but with “a queer, chilling power” (20). The stranger from Little House materialises on Quhele all of a sudden and like an “apparition” (7) with a quite “uncanny” (6) quality. This phantom is introduced as genderless, and for some time it remains undetermined if it is “he she or it” (6, 35). For two-thirds of the narrative she is simply ‘the person’ from Little House before she finally becomes accredited with a name and thus transformed into an individual, due to her acquaintanceship with Robin. In line with the tradition of horror and crime ‘the person’ is mad, “a poor lunatic” (141) who has been “certified insane” (135, 155) by some “horrible conspiracy” (155) of her former villainous husband for reasons of money, courtship, and divorce (ibid.). Her family has sent her to Quhele, where she is being held captive by an uncouth nurse, and her story of madness and banishment is reminiscent of the personal fate of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre but also suggests other popular stories of horror and crime fiction.⁸³ Elmo Gauvain is the exact opposite of Lex in Poolreflection. While Lex is the Faun who represents the Dionysian life principle of joie de vivre, Elmo is “a dead

 For characteristic aspects of dark Romanticism see Mario Praz’s now classic study Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (Oxford: UP, ).

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satyr” (40), with eyes “exhausted and mothlike” (59), and represents a joie de macabre or douleur de vivre. To Geoffrey, with his strong inclination to the sublime and supernatural, she becomes “a diabolically inspired messenger” and Abaddon, “the angel of the bottomless pit,” or “Abaddon, the destroyer” (45). For a moment Geoffrey even considers if “Gabriel, as a name, was better” (ibid.) but then settles on the demonic angel of the abyss rather than the divine angel of Annunciation. His folkloric “goblins, ghosts, and ghouls, and gnomes” (19) turn into the mythic where the person from Little House is concerned. In her relation to myth worlds, Elmo echoes Moreen, but she is lacking her visionary power and thus presents a much darker force. Elmo is furthermore “a vamp,” ancient Salome, and mythic Circe (47). As Salome, “carrying her charger,” she is a destroyer of life, while as Circe, “changing men into hogs” (ibid.), she is not only a witch but, by her power of inverted sublimation, the natural antagonist to the magician Geoffrey. From the beginning he fears that this demon will be destructive to his brother and, indeed, she becomes involved in his fatal downfall, with ‘royal’ Robin “breaking his crown” (161) on the basaltic rocks (119). She is the agent that works this ‘fall’, this “wild erotic suicide” (120) that has little to do with sexual lust but is the godhead’s experience of passion and passionate suffering. Like Christ, the god who turned human and experienced fear in the garden of Gethsemane and pain though his tortures, Robin, the artist, becomes humanised in this painfully intense encounter with death or the darker forces of the human unconscious. Elmo, similar to Moreen once more, is here associated with an act of initiation. Robin sees in Elmo the ancient Greek goddess Hecate (118, 122, 126), “who wandered about with the souls of the dead” (134). Together with her he is “in a world of ghosts” and “doom” and she inspires fear and “some psychic horror” (118) in him. She is the unconscious, subterranean and “with subliminal passions” (41). Unlike his brother, in whom Robin finds the “spirit of Italian Renaissance” (22), the person from Little House is “not of the Renaissance” but of a “different kind of beauty” (54). She is associated with Arthurian myth and the grail legend, and her Arthurian spirituality relates her to the Lady of Shallott, to “a knight errant,” to “Galahad, or a wicked abbess” (ibid.). To her is ascribed an aura of doom and loss and apocalypse, and Wagnerian music drama with its twilight of the gods is also associated with Elmo (136, 195). It is, however, not the Arthurian romance of the Middle Ages but the Arthurian quality of Alfred Tennyson,⁸⁴ whose “The Passing of Arthur” and “Lady of Shallott” are quoted

 Usually classified as the leading Victorian poet, Tennyson is included by Duncan Wu in his

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with popular but significant lines in the narrative. Elmo herself gives Gauvain for her last name when Robin asks her, although she admits that it is not her true name (134). Gauvain is the French version of Gawain, one of the Arthurian knights, and Elmo thereby adapts herself to the grail myth.⁸⁵ Elmo is a “thing of mists” (61), of the “psychic emanations” and the ectoplasm which envelop Robin on his nightly ride. She is spiritual, frail, and beautiful, and this frailty is not a weakness but “a thing of inwardness […] a chivalry, a beauty, a madness, something pitted against the world” (67). In this chivalry she is once more alike to Moreen, but she is more frail, nervous and agonised. Elmo’s spiritual quality is also of the nerves and related to the unconscious. She herself confesses that she is suffering from phobias (119). Robin, upon leaving her once, is reminded of “a dream, Freudian, recurrent, intensely baffling” and she becomes a projection of himself (61). Throughout the narrative Elmo undergoes a transformation from a figure of Gothic horror that inspires fear to a modern one of phobia and trauma that inspires sympathy. Even psychologically she is the negative complement to Lex; whereas the faun symbolised happy ecstasy the “dead satyr” embodies melancholy and depression, and while Lex represents the ‘pleasure principle’ Elmo instead is the ‘death drive” and related to a nihilistic yearning in human nature (which Freud first discussed in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”). But she embodies also the “ascetic principle” (60), in contrast to the epicurean principle that characterises Lex. “Learn first of all to discriminate. […] Learn to choose, not in the epicurean, but in the ascetic sense” (ibid.), she advises Robin. While Lex is associated with Dionysos, the god of wine and revelry, Elmo is related to Dionysos Zagreus and the bruised and harsher quality of H.D.’s Imagist flowers. She is the “broken reed” (61). In contrast to the materialist epicurean principle, the ascetic principle is spiritual and “of the mist” (60, 61), yet at the same time it is naturalistic, of “a curious energy” (44) and ‘athletic’. Even Geoffrey, despite his dislike, is fascinated by her movements because “she walked like a Greek athlete or an antelope” (43 f). Elmo is earthbound, she is animal nature yet of a spiritual quality and represents instinct. Her nervous sensitivity, her naturalistic character and her fascinating motion furthermore associate her with film, which is another reason for Geoffrey, the artist of ‘high’ and visionary art, to despise her. Her rather baffling male first name

anthology of Romanticism as ‘the last of his race’. See Romanticism: An Anthology (Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, ).  Elmo is the one who finds her personal grail in the end and by her love for Robin is raised to a higher spiritual level. Her choice of Gauvain/Gawain for a name might suggest a reference to Jessie Weston’s Legend of Sir Gawain, where the knight succeeds in finding the grail, which in Weston’s version is also an issue of the soul.

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becomes also more comprehensible when read in this context. The “electro-plated sky” with its lightning or St. Elmo’s fire⁸⁶ is the lyrical image that expresses Elmo’s nervous but ascetic quality, and in its photo negative of the “black branches zig-zagging an electro-plated sky” and in “a silver quality that isn’t silver” (76) this lyrical image is related to film stock and the medium film. Film, with its documentary quality on the one hand and the immateriality of its projections with their flickering nervousness on the other, is naturalistic and spiritual at the same time.

5.2.1.4 “Because of nerves, a face coming suddenly to the window was Grand Guignol” Compared to Poolreflection, the symbolic references to works or icons of art throughout Gaunt Island impress one as less numerous and striking. Maybe this is the result of a change of emphasis; while Poolreflection with its Shakespearean sonnet epigraph and Peter’s poem “Reason for a Bonfire” is more related to the lyric genre, Gaunt Island is closer to drama. Poolreflection furthermore circles around the art of Greek Antiquity and classic beauty and form, whereas Macpherson’s second novel relies more notably on Nordic Nature and Celtic wilderness for the purpose of expressing primarily darker human moods and passions. In contrast to the ‘classic’ Poolreflection, Gaunt Island evolves around romantic art and emotional intensity. Nevertheless, some of the cultural references from Poolreflection are continued, such as Michelangelo, Botticelli, and della Robbia, who are symbolic for the Italian Renaissance and Robin’s aesthetic attempt, while others are new and utterly distinctive to the latter work. A prime example is the “Grand Guignol” (20) that is closely associated with the figure of Elmo and in turn relates her to the literary and cultural tradition of horror and fear and to a specific popular yet avant-garde artistic medium. Although it is only “because of nerves” (ibid.) that the face Geoffrey sees in the misty window suggests Grand Guignol to him, this reference is most significant in explaining the figure and function of ‘the person from Little House’ in the context of the novel. The Grand Guignol was a special theatre in late nineteenth-century Paris, a product of fin-de-siécle France.⁸⁷ It was also known as the ‘Theatre of Horror’ and

 This natural electric phenomenon is also linked to human mood by literary history, since Robert Burton mentions St. Elmo’s fire in his Anatomy of Melancholy (), in the chapter on “A Digression on the nature of Spirits, bad Angels, or Devils, and how they cause Melancholy.”  The ensuing discussion of Grand Guignol is based on Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson’s Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, ) and Mel

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became synonymous with terror, fear and violence.⁸⁸ Opening in 1897 (the same year Bram Stoker published Dracula), the Grand Guignol was closely affiliated with André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre and Naturalism, but melodrama as well as Symbolism also influenced this form of theatre (Hand and Wilson 2002: 8; Gordon 1988: 8 – 13),⁸⁹ which above all seems to have been notably eclectic. Furthermore, it was successful from the beginning; it was popular and soon became commercial, and, as a product of the Parisian avant-garde, it was a modern theatre (Hands and Wilson, ibid. ix-x). Bourdieu does not mention the Grand Guignol in his analysis of the literary field at the end of the nineteenth century, but in his diagram of this field the Grand Guignol would have to be located somewhere below the Théâtre-Libre, since its grade of consecration was lower, and more to the right, since its economic profits were higher. Tucked away in a dark alleyway on Montmartre, close by Pigalle, and housed in a little former chapel, it presented a mixture of horror show and comedy. Yet the cruel and terrifying fait divers plots of crime, murder and phobias were taken from life, often the newspapers, and “not from the pens of fantasymad playwrights” (Gordon 1988: 8). This theatre explored deviant desires and abnormal behaviour, aesthetic vulgarity and contemporary trends in psychology and criminology, and in short it challenged moral orthodoxy. Grand Guignol’s naturalistic and illusionistic performance style transgressed theatrical conventions. The small and intimate theatre space helped with such violations (for example an actor speaking with his back to the audience) and enhanced the horror effects of an elaborate set of special effects and stage trickery.⁹⁰ The performances were so naturalistic and physically terrifying that members of the audience Gordon’s The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (New York: Amok Press, ). For decades the Grand Guignol theatre had disappeared from the field of academics and even now scholarly criticism on the ‘Theatre of Fear’ is rare. Next to the two studies just mentioned there are only two more monographs (Karin Kerston and Caroline Neubar, Grand Guignol: Das Vergnügen Tausend Tode zu sterben (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, ) and Agnés Pierron, Le Grand Guignol: Le theatre des peurs de la belle époque (Paris: Robert Laffont, )) and about four to five articles.  Richard Hand and Michael Wilson open their study by informing the reader that “grand-guignol has entered the language as a general term for the display of grotesque violence within performance media” (ix).  Notably the Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck and his plays imprinted Symbolism upon the Grand Guignol. His play Intérieur introduced the journalistic fait divers to the stage and his theatre is said to have been “a theatre of fear and a theatre of waiting – not the coward’s obscene fear which expresses itself in histrionics, but hidden, internal and unutterable fear, which gnaws away at the soul” (Schumacher quoted in Hand and Wilson : ).  For more details on performing in the Grand Guignol see especially chapter three in Hand and Wilson’s Grand Guignol and Gordon (:  – ).

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were said to have fainted on a regular basis and a house-doctor was added to the permanent staff of the theatre (Hand and Wilson 2002: 3, 8; Gordon 1988: 19). As one theatre critic summed it up in 1923: The work of the Grand Guignol is like nothing else in the world of theatre. It is devoted to the visualization of a pitiless analysis and dissection of the elemental human emotions, but it mainly concerns itself with the psychology of fear, terror, horror […] working in and through certain suggestive atmospheric environments and upon the retina of imagination. It absorbs the attention of the beholder utterly. (quoted in Gordon 1988: 35)

Kenneth Macpherson, commenting on early films of action and suspense, once noted a similar power of being absorbed in relation to the medium of film: “I got the mesmerism of the thing” (“As Is” 1:1, 5) and Oswell Blakeston remarked on film that “it goes directly to the mind [and] becomes the retina of the brain” (Extra Passenger 130). In fact, Grand Guignol and film were closely related, and especially German Expressionist film was strongly influenced by the theatre of terror and fear (Gordon 1988: 40 – 41) and vice versa (Hand and Wilson 2002: 38). Consequently, the notorious German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was adapted for stage performance in the Grand Guignol five years after its premiere and revived many times in its programme (Hand and Wilson 2002: 17). In analysing as well as evoking elemental human emotions, such as fear and terror, this art form built upon universals and not surprisingly appealed to Macpherson. Furthermore, as Macpherson also noted in relation to film, this theatre of fear worked upon the senses directly. Gordon reports that supporters of the Grand Guignol play called it “the most Aristotelian of twentieth-century dramatic forms since it was passionately devoted to the purgation of fear and pity” (1988: 2). Thus it belongs to a recuperative art of stress relief that for centuries and by philosophers of various ages and nationalities has been linked to human emotion and human necessity, and that Karl Eibl finds rooted in human evolutionary nature. In Macpherson’s novel, Grand Guignol is affiliated with ‘Little House’ and ‘the person’ who lives there. Little House is described as a small and shabby place that has been vacant for years before strangers move in one day, and that has been completely neglected, with dirty windows and a tiny door-gate that bangs annoyingly. It is situated in a steep glen, tucked away in between trees, and with a small garden that looks “like a forsaken mortuary where weeds sprang up amongst thorns, and died, impaled” (18 f). The naturalistic symbolism of the garden, which translates Gothic supernatural horror into images of genuine nature, is an obvious allusion to the Grand Guignol and its plays. The scary apparition of the face in the window which is “like a faded

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out daguerreotype” (20) also points to a documentary quality. As Geoffrey realises, the supernatural would be out of place in such a context (18). The tin lamp on the mantle-piece inside suggests peasants to the observing Geoffrey, and thus simplicity and lower working-class culture (20). Nevertheless, “the house had a quality certainly, a queer, chilling power” (ibid.) and any reader, without further knowledge, will sense the eeriness attached to this place due to the suggestive natural imagery. The Little House in the novel is yet even more explicitly related to the cultural history of Grand Guignol. Even though the Grand Guignol always remained distinctly French, a Grand Guignol theatre was opened in London’s West End in 1920 and continued to put on numerous plays for two years.⁹¹ This was the introduction of an essentially French, or more specifically Montmartrean art form, to English theatre and was a radical challenge to the conventional form of theatre at the time. In the words of a contemporary critic, it presented “sections of life as it is, gay sometimes, frequently sad, occasionally very horrible, but as it is, without the sugar coating, or saccharine centre of the so-called ‘popular’ play” (quoted in Hand and Wilson 2007: 24).⁹² In accordance with the history of the Grand Guignol, the Person from Little House immigrates from abroad and gives a French last name when asked (134). Little House moreover works an association name-wise to Little Theatre, which was the name of the London Grand Guignol house. The London experiment was a commercial and critical success, due especially to the fine performances of first-rate actors (Hand and Wilson 2007: 16), who, like Lewis Casson, were already established and acclaimed actors or were to become so, like Casson’s wife Sybil Thorndike⁹³ and her brother. The Little Theatre was also known for its confrontational theatre and constant disputes with the Lord Chamberlain for licences for its plays, many of which were refused. But not only were the actors first-rate, the authors writing for the London Grand Guignol were also fairly established – even Joseph Conrad once submitted a short play.⁹⁴ London’s Grand Guignol was less ‘splatter play’, less sexually drastic

 For the only study on London’s Grand Guignol to date see Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, London’s Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, ).  Mervyn McPherson, The Grand Guignol Annual Review  (London, ).  Who was known by this time as “the young emotional actress of Euripedes and Shakespeare” (Trewin quoted in Hand and Wilson : ).  Conrad’s play was, however, rejected on the grounds that it would have been “very difficult to stage [it] with convincing effect” (Conrad in a letter to Thomas J. Wise, quoted in Hand and Wilson : , note ). Other writers were H.F. Maltby, Eliot Crawshay-Williams, Gladys Unger, Richard Hughes, and Noël Coward (Hand and Wilson :  f).

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than its French original and more of the nerves, and the plays were more artistic. Sybil Thorndike defended a controversial play once by comparing it in beauty to the music of Mozart, emphasising that “the fear inspired by it […] should be more than counterbalanced by the perfection of the play” (quoted in Hand and Wilson 2007: 29). The contemporary critic James Agate also came to the conclusion that “these little plays are really spiritual affairs like Shakespeare’s or Ibsen’s or Maeterlinck’s” (quoted ibid. 88).⁹⁵ ‘The Person’, which is at first Elmo Gauvain’s soubriquet before she becomes personalised by her acquaintance with Robin Mannering, is also a reference to the history of London’s Grand Guignol. Suggestively, the early descriptive noun ‘the person’ changes later in the novel to the anonymous ‘the Person’ (67, 86, 90, passim) before it terminates in the name Elmo. ‘The Person’ was one of the two main characters in the one-act horror play “The Person Unknown,” which was “one of the masterpieces of the British Grand Guignol repertoire” (Hand and Wilson 2007: 148). In this play a hideously disfigured war veteran, whose face has been blown away in battle, returns home to confront the woman whose jingoistic appeal once made him enlist. When he loosens the bandages to reveal his destroyed face to the woman he once loved, the woman, looking upon the horrid sight, dies of fright. The piece stands representative for the ‘Theatre of Nerves’ that London’s Grand Guignol had become in a traumatised post-war society⁹⁶ and the anonymity of ‘the Person’ “makes the figure even more universal – ostensibly genderless and maybe even representative of all the victims of an atrocious war” (ibid. 149, my emphasis). Likewise Elmo, in her initial anonymity, is a universal figure of human suffering and misery, an ancient Greek dramatic ‘mask’, who then becomes personalised to inspire sympathy. Almost two decades after Macpherson, Louis-Ferdinand Céline would also use the Grand Guignol to suggest nihilism, the cruelties in life and to look at life as a ‘thing of gutters’. His novel Guignol’s Band (1944) is set amid the crime and red-light milieu of First World War London and the theatre of horror here, too, is used as a reference point to suggest panic, fear and a sense of doom in times of war and dissolution, and the characters in the novel move like puppets on a string, passively driven by irresistible forces. Céline’s famous rhythmic, dynamic and dream-like style looks even curiously similar to Macpherson’s in

 Agate’s quote is originally from the Saturday Review ( October ).  Hand and Wilson point out the play’s connection to the First Word War, relating the play due to its title to the ‘Unknown Soldier’ who a few weeks before the play’s performance had been interred in Westminster Abbey (:  f).

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printing, due to its numerous ellipses.⁹⁷ Céline also unites ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms by joining classic French language to slang and vulgar speech, and by combining lyrical moments with sickeningly realistic descriptions of social misery. But his works are misanthropic and nihilistic, and powerfully express rage, disgust and hatred of the world and human society, while Macpherson’s radiate love and want to stimulate compassion and reconciliation. However, Céline’s shocking language could be seen as an artistically developed echo of the nerve-grating clang of the door-gate of Little House that steadily bangs throughout Gaunt Island. In Macpherson’s novel, the Grand Guignol is related to Naturalism, to the ugly, and to unaesthetic form. Situated down in a glen, hidden within trees, and related to terrifying tales from childhood, it belongs to the domain of the unconscious and the (animal) instincts in human nature. It is akin to the alluvial mud in Poolreflection, from which Peter wanted to excavate his Praxitilean faun. But it also signifies the absurdity of life that mocks human existence: The Person from Little House. Quhele. It was beyond all excesses, in the domain of burlesque. We are even cheated of tragedy. Dance puppet. Puppet dance! See what your arrogance is, see where your pride has taken you! The thing is insult to reason, to madness. Life, thing of gutters, divine gutters, infinite, ugly puerility! This is where we are all landed. This is what we all must learn. (190)

Geoffrey, who strives for the heroic and magnificent in life (ibid.), has to realise the helplessness of man before the external forces of life. The puppet string as an image of deterministic Darwinian forces and automatic behaviour recurs in the novel (194, 167) and echoes the symbolic function of the Grand Guignol in the narrative.

5.2.1.5 The Corruption of Art and the Interaction of Macpherson’s Figures as Agents in the Literary and Artistic Field The preceding sections make evident that the characters of the novel, like the ones in Poolreflection, represent different artistic principles, literary schools, and art forms or media. Geoffrey, the visionary poet, embodies the principle of poetic imagination and sublimation, and his hero worship and aspiration to

 Merlin Thomas, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (London, Boston: Faber & Faber, ):  – , see also Allen Thiher, Céline: The Novel as Delirium (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, ). Both authors linked their style to modern media; Macpherson described his novel as “cinematographic fiction” and Céline as “telegraphic” (Guignol’s ). Cf. Céline’s Guignol’s Band (New York: New Directions, ).

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higher spheres position him in the vicinity of the charismatic consecration of art. Yet he is of a specific robustness and vitality which, in addition to his youth, closely relates him to Lex (Geoffrey too is sixteen) and more popular or folkloric cultural heritage, such as the fairy tale, ballad or folktale. His concerns about Quhele and the Mannering epic, together with his preference for traditional folkloric forms, also disclose national ambitions as was typical of the Romantics. Robin, the poet of sensitivity, represents love and compassion, and his desire to recover the Renaissance aligns him with beauty, classical form and sculpture, which in turn relates him to Peter and positions him towards the top of the literary field. But his name also affiliates him with more popular legend and myth, and in conjunction with his ‘golden throat’ and the song of the bird with lyric poetry and oral tradition.⁹⁸ Taking furthermore into consideration that his thoughts circle largely around love and he becomes involved in love relationships, he may even suggest the genre love poetry. As the bird he embodies also a more tender nature spirit than the faun and the orchid defines him as exquisite and rare. Elmo, in contrast, is related to poverty and symbolises the ascetic artistic principle, the gaunt island of the title, as well as the Dionysian principle of human pain and suffering. She furthermore represents low culture and vulgar taste, and except for Robin the Mannerings and Scotts look down upon her. Like Lex she is associated with mass media, but contrary to the cheap frivolous French novels that the young faun reads, Elmo is affiliated with crime and detective novels and with the tradition of horror. Whereas the brothers relate to the notions of Romanticism and early Romanticism, Elmo belongs to dark Romanticism and Naturalism with its scientific influences. These three artistic principles of poetic vision and sublimation, love and compassion, and nature and instinctual forces, which are embodied in the triadic character constellation of Elmo, Robin, and Geoffrey, constitute once more the dynamic art conception of Pool. The fictional characters and their positions regarding ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture furthermore illustrate different agents of the artistic field of modernism in dynamic interaction with each other. Even more strongly than in Poolreflection, the antagonistic forces of refined and popular art, of human emotion and aesthetic form become intermingled already from the beginning and within each figure in Macpherson’s second novel. The romantic Geoffrey unites poetic enthusiasm and sublime conception with folklore and simple language, the sensitive Robin integrates compassion for the miserable and suffering ones with the beauty ideal of the Renaissance, and the naturalistic

 On the bird as a symbol for poetry in Romanticism see also Frank Doggett, “Romanticism’s Singing Bird,” Studies in English Literature  –  : (Autumn ):  – .

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Elmo unifies Arthurian doom and tragic fate with the common crime and horror story. Yet Geoffrey and Robin are modern poets (76), related to consecrated art, and range at the top of the literary field, while Elmo with her working-class status and her proximity to mass culture has to be positioned at the bottom of the field. These two antagonistic poles and different media interact throughout the narrative, approach each other, and finally become reconciled in the end. Just as in Poolreflection, the modernist artist has to accept and embrace popular culture to secure the beneficial and communal function of art. But while Peter has to learn to welcome popular entertainment for the sake of art’s vitality, Robin has to sacrifice aesthetic form and artistic medium to reach out and comfort with art. When looking at the characters in the context of the literary and artistic field, attention has to be given to a character that is not exactly part of the triadic relationship of Geoffrey, Robin, and Elmo but that presents nevertheless an influential force in the field: Mrs. Agnes Scott or Aggie Scott, as the brothers mockingly call her. She is befriended by Robin and Geoffrey’s mother, who represents Victorian conventions and is associated with gossip (8 f) and sensationalism (93), and from the outset of the narrative is after Robin with seductive and corruptive intentions. The most striking thing about her appearance is her “awful Burne Jones mane of scarlet hair” (23) that marks her as a Pre-Raphaelite femme fatale of this “fleshly school of poetry,” as Burne-Jones’ contemporary Robert Buchanan called it.⁹⁹ Aggie Scott thus signifies the sensual principle in art, aggressive and violent and “male” at their first love encounter, when she smears Robin’s face with her lipstick kisses and he feels rather disgusted, but warm and fascinating and “completely feminine” on their second intimate encounter (108). At this time of their love act, Robin glows “to the fascination of life” that is in her lust and upon this novel meeting of a more spiritually erotic quality “her eyes had beheld love” (110) in return. Aggie Scott at this point symbolises the epicurean principle and bears some resemblance to Lex the faun, who by his laying with Moreen experiences some new mystic dimension, although in her married middle age Aggie never has Lex’s pristine sensuality. On the other hand Robin, like Lex, is initiated to a new dimension of life by the love act, except Lex is introduced to a more spiritual sphere while Robin is introduced to a sensual dimension; the process is reversed in the second novel. In this context Aggie’s advances are of a more positive sensuality that is “healthily Rubenesque”

 In his review of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s fifth edition of Poems (The Contemporary Review  (August-November ):  – ), Buchanan aligns the Pre-Raphaelites with Rosencranz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s play and opposes Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite brothers to Tennyson, whom he aligns with Hamlet; thus similarly opposing sensual principle with melancholic spirit.

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(123) and gives the “too pure” (112) Robin “a body, to paw and snort and roll on moss and flowers” (148). This animal image that illustrates Robin’s initiation to sensuality is reminiscent of the closing image in Poolreflection, when Peter strips off his shirt and enjoys the sun, burying his fingers in the grass. In contrast to this “healthily Rubenesque” sensual quality, Aggie displays a more vulgar and brutal nature in their first love encounter, when she is associated with industry. Robin is riding on horseback, like a chivalric knight, when Aggie Scott drives up to him in a motorcar, blowing the horn and her “headlights shatter[ing] the ectoplasm” (54) of the spiritual dimension in which Robin was moving up to this moment, dragging him down into her car. In this passage, her presence is described as industrial and material in character and her sensuality is accordingly mechanical and “ticking away like units on a gas meter” (55). Now she bears a notable resemblance to the aptronymic Bill with her big honking motorcar and her bossy and pushy manners. Contrary to Aggie’s mechanical sensuality, Robin is organic and in unison with natural life, as expressed by his rubbing his face on his horse’s side. In this anti-technical gesture of Robin resonates something of Modernism’s fondness of primitivism. He is furthermore described as “awe-inspired and virginal” (ibid.) and has much of his younger brother at this moment, and Aggie Scott is “the enemy of his type” (61), who corrupts the spiritual in art. She is corruption personified, the mildew (90) and mud (104) and baseness (105) that degrades refined art to commercial entertainment and cheap cliché, but at the same time, Robin comes to realise, she promises easy success and profit (ibid.). In her association with industry, she further represents a fixed standard and conventions and is not much more than “a piece of island furniture” with shallow “urbanities” (25). Taken to extremes she terminates in kitsch, as her final melodramatic entrance illustrates. When she appears on the scene, where Robin lies severely wounded by his fatal encounter with death and destruction, she is “a prima donna” (161) dressed in a primrose gauze gown with medieval sleeves and tailed furs (160). Hers is a neo-Gothic appearance, in which the spirit of Geoffrey’s numinous primrose and early-medievalism has become mere materialistic décor. Her nasturtium-coloured flaming hair and the orange beads of her medieval gown as well as her affiliation with an overripe, crushed fruit (171) once more suggest the Pre-Raphaelite femme fatale. What is more, the “curious bruise” (162) on her throat, which she is anxious to hide with furs, strongly suggests the vampire bite and relates her to the lust and violence of this decadent Gothic genre. She has a hypnotic quality (161) and her aggressive sensuality is associated with the medium film (108), or perhaps more with the destruction of this art

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form by the film industry.¹⁰⁰ As a representative of conventional cliché and kitsch, she strikes the final blow that kills Robin by re-cutting his stitched head wound with her fingernail, somewhat mockingly symbolising the crucifixion of art and beauty. Within the artistic field Geoffrey, with his close affinity to virginity, purity, and idealism, is the apologist for ‘pure’ and autonomous art. He utterly rejects the corruption of art by capitalism and the art industry, reproaching Robin for the “awful cheapness of the lapsed artist, or the fallen angel” (32), who is tempted and seduced by the “filthy old whore” (64), the “Corruption” (67) that Aggie Scott embodies to him. He furthermore scorns Robin as “that spineless poet” who “would succumb” (44) to the disenchanted nature of Elmo. In her association with movement and electricity, Elmo personifies the popular medium film with its power of recording life-in-motion and its documentary and naturalistic character. Even Geoffrey, despite his will, watching her go by “like a Greek athlete or an antelope” is “caught in the rhythm of her tread” (43 – 44). But even though Elmo is related to the popular medium, she must not be confused with Aggie. In contrast to Aggie, who stands representative for the (film) industry, Elmo with her ascetic spirituality, her mists, and her “large distraught eyes” that “might have been sightless” (40) instead is the medium itself. Due to the ascetic principle, this ‘low’ popular form of film becomes also affiliated with the ‘high’ art of H.D.’s poetry and its simple Hellenic style as well as with the clear hard image of Imagism, by which the ‘low’ popular form rises to the level of ‘high’ avant-garde (film) art within the artistic field of modernism. There are passages in the narrative that openly address the issue and temporary condition of modern art, most explicitly in discussions among parents and sons (45 – 52, 74– 80), and even point out that “these dear people are representative” (49, emphasis in the original). Both Robin and Geoffrey are outright classified as modern poets by their mother, who is worried by her sons’ “modernism” (51), which she finds brutal and destructive: I feel more and more that you are alien to me, that I cannot hope to understand you, and the things you represent. And wherever one looks for reassurance a fresh shock and a fresh chaos awaits one. You do not know how wrong you all are. You are only destroying. You are creating nothing. (52)

While the sons embody the rebellious and progressive modernist avant-garde and their aesthetic attempts to initiate a regeneration of art, the parents are rep-

 Since her red hair, which is symbolic of her sensuality, is related to the burning of film material: “her head received firelight and flared like celluloid” ().

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resentatives of the Victorian age and values, and epitomise art conventions. Upon Robin’s declaration that “beauty began with black branches zig-zagging an electro-plated sky,” Mr. Mannering retorts tauntingly that “you modern poets all talk in terms of metal and the scullery” (76). To which Geoffrey in turn replies defiantly: “Yes, pop. We’re so tired of nightingales. Nightingales make us uncomfortable, we prefer pigs” (ibid.). The nightingale in poetry is, of course, an arch poetic convention. Particularly the Romantics used the nightingale as a symbol for the idealised poet, for example Keats in his “Ode to a Nightingale”, but even Tennyson, “one of those plaster gargoyles” (193) of the Victorian age, still draws on the nightingale in In Memoriam. Robin in turn is the new, more natural image succeeding the old conventional bird of poetry. In harmony with Macpherson’s characteristic flippancy, the whole discussion of modern art and the dynamic forces in the literary field occurs in the form of family bickering. Even for his reflections on the state of art Macpherson relies on the ‘natural symbol’ of family relationships, and his figures, which represent different historical periods and their artistic schools, become actors in a generational conflict: “we are all in the period” (54), muses Robin. The young brothers belong to a ‘lost generation’ who want to ‘make it new’ and effect a moral revolution: “We’re poor little rats without a home, because you Victorians have filled the hold with water” (77), answers Robin reproachfully to his mother when she reprimands him for disregarding the conventions of politeness and inquires whence derives his dreadful mind. His father, meanwhile, observes in a Tennysonian tenor of doom: “We are on a Gardarene path, no doubt. […] The older order changeth” (52). Robin, the poet of ‘a new sensitivity’, acts as the mediator between the various forces in the field, striving to reconcile consecrated art and popular film, documentary objectivism and poetic subjectivity and emotion, and artistic vision and ‘scientific’ naturalism. Like Peter he ‘descends’ from the artist’s Parnassian heights and becomes involved with popular culture, only this time the modernist artist does not have to learn to embrace entertainment but must learn to sympathise with the misery and suffering of the masses in order to comfort them with beauty. In reverse, the encounter with the spirit of beauty transforms the popular medium into an art form.

5.2.1.6 Music and Mood: The Song of Life and the Bang of Survival Music is an important medium in the context of emotion and mood. Robin’s mood, as has been pointed out, is closely related to weather and is also affiliated with music. The ocean spray crashes upon him “like timpani drums” (1) and the “song and string of notes rising out of clamour […] was in affiliation with Celtic

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weather” (2). In this premonition of doom, “fear struck a note in him, – a treble clang” (3). Robin is emotionally ‘attuned’, is ‘in tone’ or ‘in tune’ with the weather and resonates to nature. Mood and music are already related semantically¹⁰¹ and this relation of mood and sound echoes like a leitmotif throughout the narrative: “Perplexities danced a new fandango in him” (41) and “silence jangled like a Mozart piece on a harpsichord” (53). At another time “a window rattled with castanets, almost in tango time” (10) and “need pounded chromatic scales in him” (22– 23). The music associated with Robin is characterised by its delicate and harmonious quality and by its exotic and lively form. But music as a carrier of mood not only occurs with Robin but also with the figures of Geoffrey and Elmo. Geoffrey is associated with the far-away sound of the church bells and the matin song (34) that suggest a sacrosanct mood of veneration. This sacred atmosphere that is attributed to him even resonates in the room after he has left and can be experienced by his brother Robin: “He had left behind in the room back-wash or reverberation of himself, a kind of chime. As though he had gone round tinkling on musical cylinders. The room echoed him” (22). It is a soft mood of holy enchantment that Robin, and with him the reader, encounters at this moment. But there are also times when Geoffrey’s Celtic nature and the wild, heroic mood associated with it are musically suggested, for example, by the more robust and ear-splitting military sound of a Scottish Highland bagpipe, when “wind made a pibroch in the eaves” (19), or when he imitates “the sea-birds’ unsyncopation” (34). Yet there is at the same time something of the refined and artistic in this apparently folkloric bagpipe music and the “unsyncopated” gulls’ screech, which sets him distinctly apart from the natural primitivism of Lex’s syncopated bawl.¹⁰² Macpherson generates here once more, in musical terms, the heroic aura and the mood of the brave warrior that is also suggested by the line of “Tam o’Shanter” and the Grimm fairy tale of the fearless youth.

 “Tone,” noun: etymology: Gr. tónos ‘stretching, tension, musical mode or key, exertion of physical or mental energy;’ “tone,” I..a: “A particular quality […] expressing or indicating […] some feeling or emotion”, II.: “a state or temper of mind; mood, disposition, II.: “a special or characteristic style or tendency of thought, feeling, behaviour, etc.; spirit, character, tenor. The physiological meaning of “tone” (II. .), by way of an additional note, further indicates a relation of tone and nerves (The Oxford English Dictionary).  Pibroch, the classical music piece for the traditional Highland bagpipe, is also the ‘Great Music’ (Ceol Mor), a complex art music genre that is more stylised than the common kinds of popular Scottish music, and as such corresponds with Geoffrey’s striving for magnificence and his Romantic artistic endeavour of refined folklore. See Alexander John Haddow, The History and Structure of Ceol Mor – A Guide to Piobaireachd: The Classical Music of the Great Highland Bagpipe (Glasgow: The Piobairched Society, ).

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In contrast to the classical harmony of Robin and the highly refined native sounds that define Geoffrey, the afflicted Elmo is in turn related to dissonance and a painful acoustic experience that evokes emotional discomfort and pain. It is the banging of the small garden gate of Little House that, of all the sounds, reverberates most prominently and constantly throughout the narrative and closes it literally with a bang – or, to be more correct, with three bangs. The music associated with Elmo is at first less music than simply noise, and when Geoffrey first meets with the noise of the enervating banging of the gate, it hits him full force by “banging in semibreves” (19). The cacophony of this non-music “mewling on […] hinges” positively grates on the nerves and conveys a sense of madness, suggesting the “mutterings of an idiot child” (19). Robin realises that “this woman’s note was on a broken reed” (58), signifying her personal disharmony and ‘broken’ psychological condition. Later in the narrative Elmo becomes associated with the perpetually grinding sound of a hurdy gurdy (35, 58), which, similar to the barrel organ associated with Lex, epitomises popular low culture. But, different from the waltz played by the barrel organ, the grinding of the hurdy gurdy does not evoke a happy mood of indulgent life but instead suggests a careworn atmosphere and the lament of poverty and need. By means of music Macpherson succeeds in making the mood of a character or scene palpable to the reader. Even when they are not directly related to the characters, music and sound in nature express and generate mood in the novel. Thus upon the shock of a nihilistic realisation “[e]arth and sky were cymbals meeting in a crash, and tambourines carried on the jangle” (35), or upon the break of day “dawn [is] raising its baton” (90). When Robin has just met with his tragic accident and the sensitive ‘hero’ lies wounded, “a song of the Hebrides […] ancient runic fragment” (120) is heard from somewhere above and suggests Ossian. Musical airs and certain tunes pervade the narrative and compose its Dionysian principle. In antiquity music was linked to Dionysos, who was particularly associated with timpani drums, cymbals, tambourines, pipes, drums, jingling brass and clashing bronze, due to the instruments accompanying his festive procession.¹⁰³ Gaunt Island opens accordingly with the booming timpani drums of the sea and thus announces the commencement of the tragic and suffering god Dionysos, and the oceanic “uproar in an auditorium” (1) suggests ancient drama. In contrast to Poolreflec-

 Ovid speaks of the noise of tambourines, sound of clashing bronze and long pipes; crash of drums, fifes and jingling brass (Metamorphoses, IV,  and  – ), Aeschylus of flutes, cymbals, lyre and timpani drums (Lykurgie, fr. ), Euripides of flutes and timpani drums (Bacchae vs.  – ,  – , , ), Philostratos reports flutes and cymbals (Imagines I, . and ), and Nonnos flutes and drums (Dionysiaca ,  f).

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tion, which presents a Dionysian principle of joy, Macpherson’s second novel introduces a more Nietzschean Dionysian principle, and consequently the Dionysian music becomes immediately associated with a wilder, apocalyptic mood in Robin. Although music plays a much more prominent role in this ‘romantic’ novel than in the more ‘classical’ Poolreflection, there is a moment in the beginning when Peter, residing in the “hush of the sanctity [which] enclosed him,” experiences “taut, pizzicato music in his consciousness” (2) that right from the beginning suggests his nervous sensibility. The moment is somewhat similar to Robin musically sensing the sacrosanct atmosphere of the absent Geoffrey, but it is a moment the reader is unlikely to notice, due to the predominantly visual symbols in the passage. It is instead the representative of the Dionysian principle, the adolescent faun, whose moods are linked to the sense-related experience of music and who will make a more lasting impression in association with sound. His “young voice bawling the lavender cry in syncopated time” (50), reviving in the style of jazz the “old, old cry” (47) of London street vendors, gives expression to his “youth and health and Dionysian recklessness” (51) and a mood of high spiritedness and effervescent joy of life. It is this mood, associated with Lex, which largely dominates the narrative. The music of the barrel organ that sets in with Lex and Moreen’s love act, playing a waltz that is “quite lovely, full of gush, lascivious” (137), as noted, transports the Dionysian quality and joyous happiness of this glorious moment. Both lavender cry and barrel organ are, similar to the hurdy gurdy, ‘low’ instruments of street culture, but the quality of Lex’s lavender cry or the waltz and consequently the mood they express are more similar to the exuberant vitality of Geoffrey’s wild Celtic nature and symbolise the song of life. However, Lex also encounters different moods and when he feels hurt or dejected and is sensitised to pain, his surroundings echo with the crescendo of concert instruments. Then doorsteps become “a pianoforte keyboard […] hammering some blare of vulgar music, din, din, din, upon the shocked air” and the pavement stones turn into “a clanking cornet, brasseous and loud” (102) and he aches “because of a muted violin’s minor harmonies” (105). Here Lex’s mood, which is no longer the boisterous mood of joie de vivre but a mood of heartache and a “mystery pain of adolescence” (103), is closer to Robin’s melancholy and sensitivity. Music sets the tone to the narratives. While Poolreflection resounds with the music of the faun and radiates a brighter atmosphere, its complement Gaunt Island echoes the sound of the dead satyr and is characterised by a much darker mood of melancholy and doom. Music and sound furthermore shape the structure of the second narrative by association and leitmotif, by which Macpherson’s

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work may very likely pay tribute to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, although his wilder instinctual stream-of-unconscious (like hers closely related to music and resulting in flashes of consciousness) is much darker and closer to the instinctual forces in nature than her narrative stream. It is this darker mood and more painful cognition that move Gaunt Island closer to Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle in The Birth of Tragedy. In this work Nietzsche relates his Dionysian principle also to ‘the spirit of music’, as opposed to the concrete form and symbolism of the Apollonian principle, and to a wilder, intoxicated mood, as well as to ancient tragedy and human suffering. Especially in Wagnerian music drama he found ancient Greek tragedy reborn, and Macpherson seems to allude to Nietzsche’s notion in mentioning Die Valküre towards the end of his narrative. By giving the title of the opera in German¹⁰⁴ and italics, and by having Elmo stir the coals with a poker into “the yellow chiffon ring of fire” (195), Macpherson unmistakably indicates Wagnerian music drama through allusion to The Ring cycle and, by extension, indicates his own mythical cyclical narrative with its musical structure of association and leitmotif. In addition, Elmo in this scene transforms into a mythical figure and suggests a heroic mood of accepting fate and braving pain. Actually Elmo and Geoffrey in unison spark the fire: First Geoffrey goes down on his knees and makes adjustments to the “smoky fire” (195), that so far is giving no warmth and then Elmo stirs it into the flaming ring of fire. Eventually their two antagonistic qualities and moods unite in a new mood and aesthetic form, into “bright flames upon smoke” (200). Elmo, who in the end is permeated by the dead Robin’s spirit of beauty and compassion, has gone through a process of sublimation. She has developed from the enervating bang of the gate, which was idiocy and madness, to first the broken reed, which was painful dissonance, then the hurdy gurdy, through to the mythic figure of Wagnerian opera and orchestral sounds, which associate her with Robin at the novel’s beginning. By getting into contact and ultimately becoming united with Apollonian form, Elmo, who personifies the Dionysian spirit of myth, is transformed into an art form. Like Nietzsche, Macpherson links Wagner’s music drama to ancient Greek tragedy in his narrative and the suggestion of the Wagnerian opera towards the end ties in with the novel’s beginning, when the noisy sea is like the “uproar in an auditorium” and the spray crashes “like timpani drums,” and the narrative comes full circle. Natural spirit has become transformed into art. Macpherson’s novel is also a cycle circulating within itself and presenting a continuous cycle of

 The misspelling is typical for English speakers to whose ears the German ‘w’ sounds like the English ‘v’.

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art, similar to the reverberations of sound that continue and vary from the sound of wild Celtic nature, which becomes aestheticised in the Scottish pibroch, to the classical Mozart harpsichord piece through to Wagnerian opera and back to sounds in nature. In a logical continuation and circulation of historical art periods and art media and forms, Wagnerian opera eventually is replaced by cinema, which carries on the unity of dramatic narrative, visual form and musical performance, while at the same time growing more natural again due to its life recording character. Greek tragedy is once more reborn in the film art of “a new sensitivity”. Whereas Elmo goes through a process of sublimation, Robin and Geoffrey experience the reverse of sublimation. Robin, the songbird, who is associated with the highly artistic and classical music of Mozart and the harmony of a golden throat,¹⁰⁵ dies and is entombed. Upon returning from the family vault, where Robin now lies, the weather outside “was of pure metal, zinc and aluminium” (188) and the sea no longer sounds “like timpani drums” but instead clangs “in terms of metal and the scullery”: The sea made scullery noises; taps running off water into sinks, buckets banged down on brick floors, knives and forks tossed into an enamel wash-up basin, plates hung up to drain and dry-rinsing, soap-suddy noises, full of clatter and routine. (188)

In his suffering and dejection, Geoffrey’s mood is no longer grand and heroic or associated with the tinkling of musical cylinders but instead is assimilated to the banal sounds of common lower life. His brother even undergoes a reversed progress of evolution from cultivated human to “purely animal [being] in its struggle for existence” (173), after his fatal accident, to “that oozing, slimy blackness” (191) of primordial organic matter after his death. Robin has been transformed from beautiful form into the formless obliteration that is reminiscent of the alluvial mud in Poolreflection, from which Peter wants to excavate his marble faun. Yet despite his dissolution Robin still echoes on: “This was Mannering, all this, hammering and thrusting and clamouring ‘I live, I live, I live!’” (196 f). The spirit of survival already occurs earlier in the “Darwinian birds of survival” (91, 98), an image which unites Darwinian biology and naturalism with the bird as a symbol for the spirit. Animal instinct comes together with the soul. This image is also combined with mood and sound: When Robin, after his fatal fall, is lying on the rocks bleeding, Elmo sees “terror as a corkscrew twisting

 There is no saying if Macpherson was aware that one of Mozart’s first names was Chrysostomus and if the “mellifluous syllables” of the golden throat () are an allusion in this direction, but it certainly would tie in nicely with the symbolism.

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accurately” (129), which visually echoes “the perigrinating [sic], Darwinian birds” that earlier had “made corkscrews and mainsprings, trampling polished air” (98). Simultaneously “someone passed above singing a song of the Hebrides […] ancient runic fragment, sonorous and quelling” (120), continuing the visual association of the flying birds into an aural one. Early in the narrative Robin, musing upon departure, “longed […] to lift up wings and fly with the gulls” (39). Later, when he is watching the rise of dawn, he witnesses how “[b]irds woke and remembered Darwinian theories of survival” and “[w]ings reaped the air near him” (91). The Darwinian birds are related to awakening and resurrection, they are the new, modern image that continues the idea of the phoenix rising from the ashes and the resurrected Christ. The Darwinian birds of survival, with their beating wings, visually express the beat of life which is synonymous for the spirit of art. Robin disintegrates into sound and air and becomes transformed into the natural spirit of trees and wind, like the marble caryatides from Macpherson’s first novel that dissolve into poolreflection. (With the small difference that the art forms are still more closely related to a calmer visual reflection and the tragic hero to the spirit of music.) Elmo senses him in the trees and it gives her comfort and freedom (185 – 186). Geoffrey sees him in the light of day (191) and he is suggested in the delicate whine of the wind at the end. The dissolution of form is the dismemberment of the god Dionysos, whose spirit continues as sound and assumes new form. At the end of the novel all three individual sound and mood qualities unite, and they have become completely triple-mixed by their dialectic interaction: “As she listened, the front door (with shaking) slammed. […] Wind’s faintest azure treble whined at the window, while, neatly, the gate (is-now-and-ever shall-be) bang. Bang. Bang” (200). Now the pain-stricken Geoffrey is associated with the violent bang, whereas the once thunderous wind now whines with the delicacy of azure and the formerly mewling gate drums with a more arranged and doxological musical bang, vaguely reminiscent of church bells now. The miserable banging of the gate, sounding destruction and death, has been transformed into a signal of life and hope, since the suffering Christ is not a despairing one but rather “a voice crying in the wilderness” (57). Robin lives on; first he echoes in the clamouring triple cry ‘I live!’ and then in the eternal triple bang of the gate that now has become the beat of life, and thus although his form has been annihilated his spirit survives and assumes new form.

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5.2.2 “Universal Regeneration”: K. Macpherson’s Gaunt Island versus T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land Poolreflection was a dialogue with the modernist artist novels by Joyce and Woolf and opposed the sociable artist that accepts popular culture to the solitary and self-absorbed artist that is narcissistically preoccupied with aesthetic form. Gaunt Island is in a sense Macpherson’s modernist Celtic version of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and can be read as a direct response to Eliot’s acclaimed work (the title already is an allusion to and a variation of Eliot’s). In his second novel Macpherson sets the sympathy and (com)passion of Robin against Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’ of an impersonal poetry. Similar to Eliot’s work, Gaunt Island presents archetypal elements such as harsh nature, death and rebirth, loss and the issue of the grail quest, but right from the beginning the novel clearly presents a contrast to Eliot’s epic poem. Eliot, whose work one contemporary critic called “The Poetry of Drought,”¹⁰⁶ describes an arid land: If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water And water A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock […] But there is no water. (ll. 331 ff)

Macpherson, on the contrary, opens with the roaring sea around an island of the Hebrides: In February he watched the noisy sea and thought of uproar in an auditorium. Clouds tore and screamed from the sea, while under, the habited afternoon spray drove past, crashing upon him like timpani drums. Wind threw wet hair across his eyes. He saw full tide and seagulls. He sat on a rock, hand sliding over wet stones. (Gaunt Island 1)

 Edmund Wilson, “The Poetry of Drought,” The Dial  (December ):  – .

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In response to Eliot’s stony desert and the lament for the sound of water, Gaunt Island provides exactly the watery sound that the speaker in the Waste Land so desperately longs for; it even presents a full tide. Moreover, in striking contrast to Eliot’s life-depleted and static desert, Macpherson’s landscape is one of powerful and energetic forces of nature. The novel quite literally starts off with a bang. It is a natural spectacle, a dramatic performance that presents itself to the reader and consequently the uproar of the sea is compared to that in an auditorium. The crashing spray is like timpani drums, suggesting the rousing crescendo of orchestra music stimulating intense human mood. Macpherson’s setting calls to mind the theatre of Delphi that inaugurates Pool’s scrapbook; this is strikingly different from Eliot’s inert environment with its monotonous insect sound of cicadas, and the novel continues in this divergent strain. From the very beginning, nature in Gaunt Island is associated with a wild, Dionysian force and music that appeals to the emotions and involves the figures. Music and continuity furthermore align the novel to the narrative experience of Richardson’s literary life-cycle Pilgrimage. Macpherson’s novel not only opens but also closes with a bang, thus closing the narrative cyclically, symbolising even by its structure an organic regeneration, except by the end of the novel nature’s booming sublime has become transformed into the banging of an old garden gate symbolising hope. Macpherson opposes his Dionysian narrative, much of whose mood is transported by the sound of nature, the Scottish pibroch, Sunday matinsong, and Mozart’s harpsichord music but also the disharmonious screeching of rusty door hinges or the banging of an old garden door, to Eliot’s sophisticated cadences of various traditional poetic metres. Furthermore, in contrast to Eliot, who relies heavily and assertively on the classical Western canon and academically consecrated cultural capital, Macpherson draws primarily on his own more romantic and folkloric Celtic heritage, and without specifying the references but instead incorporating them as self-expressive within the narrative. Against Eliot’s enigmatic classical references to Dante, Milton, the Elizabethans, and the original quotations in Greek, Italian, German, or Sanskrit (to which Eliot supplied an academic apparatus in the footnotes), Macpherson sets popular references to Scott, Burns, the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grand Guignol. He includes unspecified quotes from ballads and folktales that become part of the character’s words or thoughts and are thus revived, instead of being merely inserted museum pieces of literature. He animates archetypal characters by personalising and ‘modernising’ them. The characters in his novel live and feel, love, suffer, and have weaknesses, in contrast to Eliot’s assemblage of cultural references. Thus to Eliot’s “heap of broken images” Macpherson opposes his organic, cinematographic ‘stream-of-narrative’.

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To show how Macpherson responds to his famous contemporary and how their aesthetics differ, I want to compare two of their poetic images: Macpherson’s image of Robin, who, dreading his mother’s inquisitive stare, “wriggled, very much on the end of a Satanic pitchfork” (124), openly echoes Eliot’s image of Prufrock “formulated, sprawling on a pin” (l. 57) upon being fixed by impersonal eyes. At the same time, the image of the devil’s pitchfork ties back to more folkloric and emotionally charged pictures of human torture than Eliot’s scientific image of a lepidopterological specimen. Macpherson’s image is less sterile and more collectively symbolic than Eliot’s private symbol. Furthermore, in the context of the novel with its symbolism of Christ as the compassionate and suffering liberator, the symbol of the Satanic pitchfork continues the stream of associations of pain and suffering, as well as the dark, irrational Gothic mood. In drawing upon popular and folkloric culture, Macpherson is decidedly anti-elitist but nevertheless artistic and experimental. He chooses the genre novel instead of the long poem, and thus a form that is already traditionally less elitist than Eliot’s lyric form. In contrast to Eliot, he also does not supply an academic apparatus of notes to his references, by which to turn his creative piece into a scholarly work. Instead the quotes remain unspecified, unfold their meaning in their new context and organically grow into the new work. Rather than remaining consecrated but static formulas, the references have to function as echoes from the past reaching into the present context, signalling organic recycling. The allusions have to suggest mood and thus stir the reader. Against Eliot’s lethargic pessimism and his endless images of death-in-life and decrepit old age, Macpherson sets “organic grief” (187) and an energetic optimism of regeneration and rejuvenation; against Eliot’s disconsolate vision of a culture in ruins, he opposes the sanguine prospect of a renaissance of the arts. Instead of presenting a sophisticated apocalyptic view of modern times by relying on a catalogue of academically consecrated cultural capital, Macpherson portrays darker irrational but human moods and passions by creating living individual characters that love and suffer and feel like humans do but are universal in their archetypal emotions. Macpherson’s emphasis on ‘a new sensitivity’ and his poet figure of sympathetic feeling in Gaunt Island are diametrically opposed to Eliot’s idea of an ‘impersonal poetry’ and ‘objective correlatives’ in The Waste Land. ¹⁰⁷ Eliot developed his concept of objectivity by examining Shakespeare’s Hamlet and  Eliot had already introduced this idea of ‘impersonal’ poetry in his earlier essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” () and expanded it in his theory of the ‘objective correlative’. See further Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Harvard UP, ).

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faulting this figure’s credibility (“Hamlet” 145). In fact, Eliot also wanted to express certain human feelings and generate mood, but his concept of an ‘objective correlative’, as the term already implies, means precisely to detach feeling from the subjective emotion of the poet. Eliot substituted instead an intellectually generated surrogate for the subjective emotion. Thereby, however, the feeling that is thus detached from the individual and attached to an object becomes dehumanised (Friedrich 2006: 198 f, 262). If, however, as with Macpherson, the poet’s subjective emotion is found to be a universally human one, then there is no need to detach it from human nature and find an objective correlative but instead the recipient will be able to relate to the subjective emotion based on sympathy. Thus, while Eliot with his ‘objective correlative’ tried to find an objective image or phrase that would exactly capture but abstract a specific subjective feeling of his own and communicate this feeling to the reader, Macpherson extended Eliot’s two-step model by an additional third step. Instead of communicating a subjective feeling by finding an objective substitute, he first abstracted the subjective feeling itself into a universal human emotion and then bound this universal to iconic stimulants that would work as ‘subjective correlatives’ for the reader and enable them to sympathise. To achieve this, he had to create sympathetic characters that the readers could relate to, just like Hanns Sachs also proposed in his “Community of Daydreams”. To this end, he did not simply rely on consecrated cultural symbols per se (in fact the grail knights Percival and Gawain are even satirised) but worked them into his characters and their adventures. Thus, while Eliot refers to the Fisher King merely as a symbol for the vegetation cult, Geoffrey, for example, is the first-name of the younger brother in the novel, who, due to his visions and sublimations, represents the ‘medieval’ mind. According to his own notes to the Waste Land, Eliot, in composing his poem, relied partly on Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) as to the poem’s title, plan, and symbolism. Weston, to recapitulate, had traced pagan elements of vegetation cults in the Arthurian grail legends and demonstrated how these elements became transformed through Christian influences in the medieval Romances. She also shifted the emphasis from the knightly questers to the waste land and the figure of the Fisher King, a line that Eliot obviously follows in his poem and that suggested its title. While Eliot freely resorts to the symbolism in Weston’s academic book to achieve timelessness through archaic symbols and pre-modern figures, Macpherson seems to translate the idea of older cultural remnants that have changed in form and become adapted to later cultures from Weston’s folklorist study. He translates the idea of regeneration into contemporary images and a contemporary context, thus the knights of old become contemporary characters in the novel, just like Dionysos is transformed into Dar-

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winian birds of survival rising in a Hebridean sky, and the grail or sangreal becomes communal human compassion. Although Macpherson’s narrative alludes to vegetation myth by the symbols of the water, the flowers that are associated with Robin and Geoffrey, the snow, and Robin’s death, it is at the same time related to a romantic death instinct and romantic foreboding of or yearning for dissolution. (This, however, probably has to be ascribed in the first place to the function of Gaunt Island as the romantic complement to the ‘classical’ Poolreflection rather than to an intended opposition to Eliot’s Waste Land, especially since Eliot’s poem also contains romantic weltschmerz.) Furthermore, the Arthurian quest is closely related to Tennyson and his poetry of doom, while especially the figure of Christ becomes symbolic for a spiritual transformation and resurrection. This spiritual resurrection symbolises, on the one hand, a renaissance of the spirit of art and, on the other hand, in a more psychological sense, a regeneration of the afflicted and suffering individual. (In the twentieth century, the quest is for a spiritual regeneration of a traumatised humanity after the disaster of the First World War.) Both Macpherson’s Gaunt Island and Eliot’s Waste Land share a mood of doom and the essential idea of death and regeneration, but they also reveal striking differences. Among the most notable is the optimistic tenor that characterises Macpherson’s work, despite all the doom and suffering, while Eliot’s overtone, in contrast, is pessimistic and does not really reach beyond the spirit of Tennyson. In fact, Paul Goetsch has shown how much Eliot still continues in “the Victorian tradition of doubt and despair” and the Victorian wastelands as depicted by Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and James Thomson (2002: 187), even though he successfully overcomes their subjectivism in substituting his ‘objective correlative’. The modern poet Robin in Gaunt Island comes to the realisation that it should not be the lamenting and doubting Christ but the phoenix that rises from the ashes and the resurrected Christ showing his wounds that matter and that should be representative for the modernist artist. In Tennyson’s prophecy of doom and destruction he furthermore finds at once the chance for a new beginning and “universal regeneration” (81): “Out flew the web and floated wide,”¹⁰⁸ Robin thinks in musing upon the consistency of old forms and patterns and has to admit that the ‘plaster gargoyle’ Tennyson “Had had things occasionally” (193).

 This line, from Tennyson’s ballad “The Lady of Shalott,” indicates the moment when the fatal curse takes effect, upon the lady’s setting eyes on Sir Lancelot, and she dies. The web, into which she has been weaving the visions she saw in the mirror, unravels, the forms disintegrate, upon her beholding reality.

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While in Eliot’s Waste Land ‘high’ culture and art fall to pieces in the end and lie all scattered and dead in dusty fragments and ruins (symbolised by the falling towers of great European cities), in Macpherson’s Gaunt Island the old images and symbols transform into new forms in an eternal and organic cycle of regeneration of culture and art. And whereas Eliot finds the sole shimmer of salvation in Eastern religion, and thus in yet another idealisation, Macpherson rests his hope in life and nature and the transcendental powers of love and human compassion. What is more, Eliot, in expressing a personal and subjective feeling,¹⁰⁹ uses archaic motifs and symbols to achieve timeless form, whereas Macpherson expresses universal and timeless human emotions in new, modern and human forms that are subject to change. Eliot successfully expresses disgust with modern life and modern Western culture and humanity in his Waste Land, but Macpherson, without idealising, perceives amid all the misery, sorrow, and death of the modern conditio humana beauty in the form of compassion and kindness. By transforming the human experience of misery and sorrow into an aesthetic one, according to Aristotelian tragedy, his work stimulates pity and compassion, and draws the reader in instead of distancing him and setting him apart by presenting this miserable condition ‘objectively’ and evoking nothing but unsympathetic disgust. As already before in Poolreflection, Macpherson opposes an artistic principle of compassion and empathy to withdrawn impersonal detachment, and an art that provides comfort and hope to mere lament and self-pity.

5.3 Reconciling the Opposites of Dream and Reality: A Conclusion to Macpherson’s Novels 5.3.1 Poolreflection and Gaunt Island: Macpherson’s Dialectics of Art and of Human Emotion In concluding the examination of Macpherson’s two novels one can summarise that both novels promote an essential concern with the reconciliation of ‘high’ art and popular culture. They furthermore propose that only a continuous metamorphosis of aesthetic forms and their adaptation to the change of time will secure a veritable regeneration of art. In accordance with the natural cycle of all life, the concrete art forms periodically have to dissolve and return to their nat-

 Eliot would later say that his Waste Land “was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life” (The Waste Land ).

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ural origin to form anew from the spirit of nature and life, otherwise they will fossilise into stony conventions. Apart from this common denominator and although the second novel continues threads from the first, the two works present contrary aesthetic categories. I have already outlined at the beginning of the chapter to Gaunt Island that the second novel has to be understood as complementary to the first: It adds romantic popular narrative forms and folklore to the classical art, sculpture, and poetry of the first novel and fairy tales, ballads, tales of horror, and crime and detective fiction to classical myths and Shakespearean sonnets. (Of course the preliminary discussion of the two works has already shown that the different individual genres and styles appear in each work and can only be assorted here according to emphasis.) Whereas Poolreflection relates its protagonists to the classical figures of Narcissus and the Faun, Gaunt Island presents two Highland brothers and associates their characters more directly to the wild and harsh nature of the Hebrides. The tone of the first novel is, in compliance with its figures, more ‘classical’, brighter and calmer, more of a ‘Mediterranean’ climate than the second novel, which is dominated by more ‘romantic’ tempestuous forces of Nordic nature and a darker, more agitating mood. While Poolreflection presents the strife between the idyll (with its ideal tranquillity and contemplation) and metropolitan life (with its noisy active life), Gaunt Island introduces the wilder and more destructive elements of nature and man’s struggle with these forces. However, the novels with their respective figures not only symbolise different aesthetic categories but also different psychological states and human emotions; aesthetic becomes joined to aesthesis. Poolreflection expresses a happy emotional state, symbolised primarily by the Faun’s joy of life but also by the tranquillity of Peter’s contemplative mood. Peter’s mood is related to the aesthetic principle of Apollo, to dream and beauty, while Lex’s is related to Dionysian exhilaration and entertainment. In order to contemplate and dream the individual has to retire from the commotion of the external world and withdraw into the self. This is a detached state that shields the individual from disturbing influences and the conflicts of human interaction but also isolates it from companionship. While it grants compensation for dejection in the happy wish-fulfilment of dream and secures room for reflection, it also involves the danger of obsessive self-absorption. The aesthetic principle of Dionysos, on the other hand, is closely linked to socialising and a participation in communal life. This is a state that involves the individual in turbulent life and social interaction but prevents it from reflecting. It is a simple and playful mood of happy animal nature, carefree and pleasure seeking, but taken to extremes it may result in intoxication, feverish compulsion to amusement, and unrest. The Apollonian and Dionysian have to be reconciled and balanced, just like Narcissus has to learn to laugh and socialise,

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and the Faun has to learn to rest and reflect. Both constituents are mixed up in human nature as well as in art, which has to give aesthetic shape and meaning to popular entertainment and yet must amuse and delight. Art has to keep a balance between feverish excitement or mere intoxication and a formal aestheticism that is detached from communal interests. In contrast to Macpherson’s first novel, which circles around happiness and pleasure, Gaunt Island, as the name already indicates, shifts the emphasis from the epicurean to the ascetic principle and from the comic to the more tragic moments of life, to misery, suffering, and loss. “It is not joy that waits for you here” (3, emphasis in the original), Robin realises at the outset of the narrative, and symbolically the gate bangs throughout the novel announcing grief. Gloomy premonitions and an apocalyptic mood dominate this narrative, along with emotions of fear, sadness, dejection, and psychological states of madness, morbidity, phobias, and rage. In contrast to Peter’s serene contemplative state, Robin’s is one of melancholic brooding and his sensitivity to the environment and his compassion for Elmo, in contrast to Peter’s detachment, exposes him to external influences and deeply involves him. Gaunt Island describes intensely troubled moods and this barren island in the noisy sea symbolises feelings of utter solitude and an emotional emptiness that are symptomatic for grief and depression. Both Geoffrey and Elmo feel an ‘impossible emptiness’ (185 f, 199) after Robin’s death and Robin experiences emptiness already at the very opening of the narrative, which foreshadows death (1). Macpherson’s second novel examines human grief and the “island of solitariness” (175) that the individual perforce becomes in this mood. To the dream in Poolreflection, Gaunt Island opposes disillusion and thwarted visions, to exhilaration and joy the suffering and pain that life is too. In both novels the human individual has to accept the Dionysian principle in the end, but while Peter, in Poolreflection, comes to accept the happy bliss of life and joy finally “tossed him up in fragments,” Geoffrey, in Gaunt Island, has to accept loss and life’s cruelty: You fool, cries life, you are none of these things, you have none of these things. You think you may tell me what you will have, I say to you, I give you this and this, and you will take it against all your nature, you will take it, it will be thrust thus upon you. And all this which you have claimed I sweep away, I hold, I confiscate. I snap my fingers in your face. I teach you loss, I teach you degradation. And you will learn to laugh and love me. There will be strength in you retaliate, “Take, and be damned!” There is your lesson. There is your path. Now tread it, angry, impotent, undefeated. My insults are around you. Spurn them. (190)

Geoffrey, the visionary, is confronted with the harsh reality of defeat. He is humbled by life. But Gaunt Island is a battle cry, a challenge not to give in to defeat

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and depression but to “master this mood” (191) and laugh defiantly at life. The human individual has to learn to “[o]pen one’s soul to pain” (192) and bravely embrace suffering, instead of evading it. While the artist in Poolreflection has to exchange his tranquil seclusion for company and learn to laugh and enjoy life in order for his art to amuse and entertain, the artist in Gaunt Island has to be lonely to understand pain (177) and sympathise with the miserable in order for his art to comfort and inspire hope. Just as in the first novel, the artist in the second novel has to move from a selfish to a selfless art. The sensitive Robin, who is given to melancholy and morbidity and brooding, has realised that he “would be happier not thinking about [himself] than thinking about [himself] all the time” (ibid.). He symbolises the involved artist that gives himself utterly and epitomises self-sacrifice. In the first novel Apollonian art has to come into contact with Dionysian life force, in the second novel Dionysian suffering has to be amended by art and beauty. The dynamism of Macpherson’s novels is closely intertwined with human psychology. In accordance with the brighter mood of Poolreflection and the darker one of Gaunt Island, human nature and life experience oscillates between the two poles of ecstasy and agony. In the dynamic relationship of his two novels, Macpherson translates the vegetation myth with its regenerative principle into the domain of human psychology. The novels align fertility with a psychological state of exhilaration and with emotions of joy and happiness, while destruction and death are associated with feelings of pain and grief, with melancholy and depression, and with emotional emptiness. In harmony with the natural cycle, with its generative and destructive forces, human moods and emotions change from happy and sanguine to sad and desperate. They can be creative but they can also be destructive. The individual has to become reconciled to life and its ups and downs, just like art has to make people laugh but also take account of human suffering. Life and art are conflict and harmony. Both novels close on an act of reconciliation and on the tenor of love: Peter makes up with Lex and forgives Moreen, while Geoffrey makes his peace with the once hated Elmo, whom he blamed before for his brother’s death. He comes to realise that beauty is related to love and forgiving: “My love shall need no revenge … that is great, that is beautiful” (192). Beauty is “the noble gesture” (192 f) and an “attitude to life” (199). It is the transcendental power of ‘grand love’, free of all egotistical ambitions, which Geoffrey describes here: His victory over life would be not to destroy, to slay, but Accept. No malice, no revenge, no bitterness. My love […] will triumph over everything, no circumstance or human accident

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can trample it down or thwart it. […] No blame, no hatred, my love demands that I be above all that. (192)

Geoffrey’s love, his “victory over life”, stands also for a sublimation of primitive instincts and emotions, such as hate and revenge, into wisdom and generosity. The novels end with a deeper understanding into life and on the note of universal sympathy.

5.3.2 Amore: Macpherson’s Last Novel Rome 12 Noon Almost two decades after his first novels, Macpherson wrote one last work of fiction. Rome 12 Noon (1964) finally seems to have been a noted success, judging from the eight editions published between 1964 and 1966 and translations into French, German,¹¹⁰ Swedish, Danish and Finnish.¹¹¹ In concluding this chapter, I want to take a glance at Macpherson’s last novel, which was not published by POOL Productions and therefore is not actually a POOL book but is nevertheless of interest here due to its position in the literary field. Contrary to the early modernist experimental novels, which were published independently, this late novel is a trade publication and thus has to be situated towards the end of the literary field that is marked by high economic profit but weak specific consecration. Moreover, it is also exemplary for how avant-garde innovation became accepted over the years, because despite making some concessions Macpherson kept his elliptical style. In this late work Macpherson continues the theme of love that had already been his primary concern in the earlier novels. “Roma backwards is Amor” (139) gets to the heart of the narrative, which takes place in Rome and tells of the love of rich upper-class Adriana, from the princely house of Farnegiani, and simple policeman Paolo Falconieri. Place, as with Gaunt Island, once more becomes symbolic for mood and spirit: “Amor [i. e. Roma] is the Eternal City” (ibid.), a labyrinth of emotion and a blissful state as well. Certain motifs and ideas of the earlier two works recur. The narrative opens with an accident in the rain at noon and thus continues the rain and water metaphor of sufferance and rebirth from Gaunt Island as well as, in a less obvious way, the Faun metaphor of sen-

 The German translation, published by Winkler, was even reviewed in Der Spiegel  (): .  See the international library network WorldCat: (accessed  December ). Editions in English, French, and German are also easily available as used books.

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sual life by means of the time of noon. The Collins & Harvill Press editions of 1964 also had the image of a fountain on the dust wrapper, symbolic of life and love, together with a face with tears that are the extension of the fountain splashes, symbolising pain, sorrow and acute emotion. There are further aspects from the earlier novels continued in this later work, such as the presentiments of doom (Gaunt Island) and an apocalyptic flood (the rain and sea from Gaunt Island, the ‘drowning’ in Poolreflection), and a triangular constellation of characters as well as an interaction of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. However, the triangular constellation of father, prospective son-in-law, and daughter is not a love triangle this time but rather one of power, class, and different generations. Furthermore, the triadic constellation in this later work is mirrored. One triangle sets social classes in a dynamic relationship: nobility (the Farnegianis), middle-class (Falconieri), and working-class (Peppino). Another triangle is constituted by the central couples: the old Farnegiani and his much younger wife, the rich and aristocratic Adriana and the socially lower ranking Falconieri, and lower class Peppino and criminal Cossu. The two ‘dialectical’ heterosexual love relationships unite the antagonistic principles of age or generation in the one case and of class in the other. Only the dualistic all male relationship forcefully ties by class what is antagonistic in nature or moral character, honesty and crime, and eventually results in the murder of one by the other. Thus different classes are harmoniously united, different ages are finally separated by the death of the older party, and the milieu-bound struggle of criminal versus honest nature results in violence and in the ‘bad’ murdering the ‘good’. As a brief précis on the fly-page preceding the story states: “three worlds, all very different and all thoroughly Roman, are brought together with dramatic consequences.” New to Macpherson’s late work are plot elements of crime, action and suspense. Whereas Gaunt Island, in contrast to Poolreflection, included already a tragic accident resulting eventually in the death of one of the three protagonists, Rome 12 Noon comes up with a natural catastrophe that endangers the lives of the lovers Paolo and Adriana and ultimately causes the dramatic death of a sympathetic peasant youth, family intrigue, the crime plot of an attempted burglary and a murder. This mixture of love, tragedy and crime may somewhat answer for the novel’s greater success. If the joie de vivre in Poolreflection, as the animating principle to classic form, is affiliated with the adolescent Lex and the popular form of joie de macabre in Gaunt Island with the outcast Elmo Gauvain, then crime and suspense in the late novel are introduced by the lower-class characters. The late work thus implicitly continues Macpherson’s art theoretical ideas, albeit without apparent self-reflection on the issue within the narrative. Although there are some cultural references (for example Byron, to whom Adriana inclines, or Minotauros, who suggestively connects old Farnegiani or Pirane-

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si with Roman labyrinths, or Delacroix), Macpherson relies predominantly on landmarks and icons of the city of Rome, the streets, buildings, and monuments. Places become closely associated with the predominant love topic; as already mentioned, Roma symbolises Amor and Torreamare becomes torre amare. After returning from film to writing, this late work is also a praise of literary art. The preceding précis claims that the story is: “evoking the teeming life of the most fascinating of cities to a depth beyond the reach of social study, film or guidebook: beyond the reach of anything but a work of literary art.” Social study or guidebook could never be as emotionally engaging and consequently the reader would never sympathise as much. Film involves several ‘external’ influences. In film the figure of a narrative depends much on the star who acts the part. The star playing a fictive character codes this figure already by means of his star persona and all that he or she symbolises to the audience. The literary work of art, more than any other medium, is capable of creating figures that work on the recipient’s imagination and emotion in special ways. Perhaps, since the act of reading a novel takes longer than, for example, watching a film, the reader grows more intimately familiar with the figure and thus becomes emotionally more attached,¹¹² or maybe the absence of external codifications (as in film) renders the experience more internal, allowing the subjective imagination more freedom to form the experience. But Rome 12 Noon, with its pronounced tribute to the art of writing, was published more than three decades after Pool’s film activities and long after the group had separated, so let us now return to the moment when their interest in and experimenting with the medium of film was at its peak.

5.4 The Other Fictional Works by POOL Other fictional works by Pool that can unfortunately only briefly be examined here are Bryher’s Civilians (1927), Oswald Blakeston’s Extra Passenger (1929),¹¹³ and Black’s [John Ellerman’s], Why Do They Like It? (1927). These three works notably demonstrate the heterogeneousness and striking variety of themes and styles that constituted Pool’s output. While Bryher’s Civilians is an example of the objective and impersonal recording in an Isherwoodian sense, Black’s auto-

 Although Eder, Jannidis and Schneider in turn claim this for long-running TV series and would object to my literary bias here. See their compendious study on Characters in Fictional Worlds (Berlin: de Gruyter, ): .  Blakeston also wrote Death While Swimming (), a book of poems, during his time with Pool but since this book was not published by POOL it shall be no further examined here.

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biographical Why Do They Like It? is highly subjective and judgemental and the exact opposite to Bryher’s. Both works, however, are concerned with the social establishment and with social institutions and conventions. Blakeston’s Extra Passenger again is mostly concerned with the antipodes of art and film industry, and is closest in its topics to Macpherson’s novels.

5.4.1 Bryher, Civilians (1927) – “If you liked The End of St. Petersburg why not try Civilians?” Bryher’s novel is an account of the sufferings of civilians in London during the First World War. As noted before, Bryher was greatly interested in sociological topics and had a particular interest in war and its effects upon society. Her Close Up article on Pabst’s Westfront has been noted in the chapter on Pabst’s films, and on the dawn of the Second World War she was to write another contribution, “What shall I do in the War?,” in which she once again returned to the question of the civilians’ role in wartime. Although very typical in subject-matter, Civilians is rather unusual for Bryher with regards to the decidedly feminist and feminine perspective. Her sociological study of female experience in wartime London follows to some extent the literary tradition of Richardson’s Pilgrimage. However, there are also clear differences to Richardson’s work, as Civilians includes several perspectives instead of staying with one single female protagonist, and instead of encompassing several life decades over an extensive novel cycle Bryher’s small novel spans exactly the four years of the war, from its beginning to its end. Civilians presents a set of very different perspectives, from that of the conservative old maid to the modern New Woman. Its characters include Alice, a delicate woman who has given birth to two rather weak and sickly children and whose husband, a major, is using the war as an excuse to withdraw from his fatherly responsibilities and amuse himself with other women. Matilda, the old maid, resigns her post in a girl’s school to take on war work in an office, and she becomes increasingly lost and alienated in a changing world. The naïve, sexually uneducated young Louise gets herself involved with a pleasure-seeking soldier on-leave who seduces her and leaves her pregnant never to return. Mrs. Potts, landlady to several of the other protagonists, is desperately hoping for her soldier son to return safely from the war. However, when he finally does her dear and helpful son has become a rude, uncaring brute and drunkard who takes her money from her. Although focusing primarily on the feminine experience, Civilians also includes the perspective of Mr. Stubbs, the war shirker, who lives in constant fear of being drafted and is constantly on guard to display

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his ill health. Finally, Sylvia is the modern and autonomous young woman who due to her pragmatism manages to get herself married to an American officer, a tie which offers her the opportunity to leave postwar England. Bryher, who had not much been in favour of race memory when Ellis first suggested it, nevertheless thought that it did offer “possibilities for use in a novel” because it could provide an explanation as to why some people belonged to a particular historical epoch and not to another (Heart 229). She seems to employ that idea in this novel and particularly through the two figures of Matilda and Sylvia. Matilda with her norms of conduct, fixed gender roles, and family values definitely remains attached to the mentality of the Victorian age, whereas Sylvia with her rationality, adaptability and self-determinism clearly belongs to modern times. As already mentioned, Civilians together with Extra Passenger and Gaunt Island was considered by Pool to be “cinematographic fiction.” While Close Up associated Gaunt Island with Pabst’s Jeanne Ney, Bryher’s Civilians was related to the Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin’s famous The End of St. Petersburg (1927). Close Up suggested to its readers: “If you liked The End of St. Petersburg why not try Civilians?” (8:3, 254). Pudovkin was known for his revolutionary trilogy of which St. Peterburg formed a part, the other two being Mother (1926) and Storm over Asia (1928),¹¹⁴ and for his montage technique. In contrast to Eisenstein, Pudovkin concentrated on individuals, their courage and their resilience. St. Petersburg is a film of sociological concern on the October revolution, about the people’s struggle in social upheavals of the revolutionary period and the First World War, and the film presents ordinary people, an old order preoccupied with wrong values, and shows the horrors of war. Its cutting is high-paced and dynamic and it works to gain the viewers’ sympathy and understanding of the characters. Bryher’s editing of multiple personal perspectives in her novel can be compared to a film montage method. Furthermore, her writing is similar to Pudovkin as it is also high-paced and dynamic. Her ‘cinematic style’ is achieved through the use of short sentences, generally main clauses, and by employing an economic style of writing with quick changes of scene. As noted, Bryher herself once remarked of film that it “taught [her] speed, not to hang about looking at [her] characters in a novel but to get them moving and to try to fix a landscape in a sentence as if it were a few feet of film” (Heart 290). Although she presents different personal experiences, her technique and style are quite different from the experimental modernist stream-of-consciousness technique. Instead of being

 Both films were given much attention in Close Up.

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‘subjective’ her style follows along the lines of New Objectivity, by being sober, factual and realistic. Her writing is also straightforward, simple, and easy to read, and the message is voiced clearly in the end: There was a lot of ruin in between. Where did the old code lead? Be a good wife, be a good mother, be a good citizen led to this – drunken men cheering in a war, drunken women cheering out a war. Nobody caring, nobody responsible. People dying, even civilians dying. Whole lives for whom there would never be anything more. Now they would begin to build up the code and the illusion again. Armistice. How funny. And they would not teach children facts or to think for themselves because if they did there might be no more wars. (151)

A didactic purpose of teaching the futility of war is clearly discernible here. Bryher’s style also resists pity in favour of objectivity and sobriety and it seems that the subject of war is better approached using logic and rationality to unmask the “stray emotion” (146) of the dangerous hysteria of war. It was exactly the exposure of this war hysteria that Bryher treasured most in Pudovkin’s St. Petersburg, and his scientific, minute reporting (Film Problems 45). She was to maintain that “in no other film has war hysteria been portrayed so devastatingly and so well” and would add in parenthesis “(Just as it happened in London in 1914.)” (ibid. 58). These parenthesis are at the centre of her own account and her novel starts with “a joyous air of carnival”¹¹⁵ when England goes to war and ends with the mob hysteria of Armistice. In contrast to other Pool works, the cyclical structure in Civilians does not represent a regenerative life-cycle but instead the absurdity of war and a mentality seen going round in circles, not learning but irrationally building up to the old destructive code once again. Consequently, the Armistice does not herald bright new times but shows the full destruction of war: “Peace and the killed were killed, the crippled crippled, there was no fair new world opening, only the relics of an old world to be mended” (148). In addition, the war has by no means improved people but on the contrary, the sentiment of the drunken crowd is one of hatred (148) and fear (150). There is no atmosphere of peace or rejoicing in this Armistice but a dangerous and vengeful air caused by the radical and criminal potential of the mob (148 – 151). Bryher in these last pages reverts to the image of the raging and cruel Bacchantes. In Civilians Bryher presents a sociological historical account of war and an alternative version of historiography which focuses on the ‘ordinary’ and mostly female civilian instead of the ‘heroic’ male soldier. Like Euripides Bryher puts

 This quote is taken from a subtitle to a still of The End of St. Petersburg in Bryher’s book Film Problems of Russia, in her chapter on Pudovkin.

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the spectator and common individual on the stage of her tragedy and she also found Euripides in the director of St. Petersburg, where she saw Eisenstein as the Aeschylus of the screen (Film Problems 60). Bryher’s comparison of Euripides and Aeschylus automatically reminds one of Nietzsche, and by associating her own work with Pudovkin and thus Euripides she demonstrates the way in which Pool applauded the democratic and included the rational and scientific that Nietzsche so much despised. Bryher was anxious to stress the documentary quality of her novel and announced on the front page that: “The characters and incidents in this story are NOT fictitious.” She composes her novel from real, factual material, as if working with the recorded impressions of a documentary film negative.

5.4.2 E.L. Black, [John Ellerman] Why Do They Like It? (1927) – An Adolescent Anti-Establishment Novel It is actually questionable if Black’s novel really is a POOL book in the strict sense. Friedberg states that it is because she found Why do They Like It? listed among the publishing records from Darantière in the Bryher papers at Yale (1998: 318). But similar to H.D.’s private editions of her autobiographical fictions, which are not considered POOL books, Black’s book was not published by POOL but by Darantière and was sold by Shakespeare and Company.¹¹⁶ Nevertheless, when announced at the time, for example in The Psychoanalytical Review or the magazine Transition, the publication reference given was “Territet, Switzerland: POOL.” Different from H.D.’s autobiographical fictions, Black’s book was obviously not intended for a limited circle of friends alone, and due its announcement as a POOL book it seems safe to assume that it was received as one in its day. Furthermore, Why Do They Like It? was Black’s only novel and it clearly originated from his association with the Pool group and their creative activity at the time. Therefore I side with Friedberg and count Black’s novel as a POOL book. Black’s work is a fictional autobiographical account of John Ellerman’s time at a public school and a reflection of British public school education. In a prefatory “Note” to the book, Bryher called it “a psychological picture” (xi). The work contrasts the conventional methods of education, the inflexible hierarchical structures and the personal confinement at school with the liberty of the term

 The World Catalogue gives: Dijon: [printed by] Mauriece Darantière,  and in one instance the addition: Paris, This book can be obtained from Shakespeare et Co.

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breaks and alternative ways of acquiring less institutionally sanctified knowledge by spending time with a tutor and friend and enjoying life and the popular arts. As in so many of Pool’s works the contrast of form versus life is also at the centre of this narrative, only here it is the restrictive form of an educational system hostile to liberty and life. The public schools are very specifically British educational institutions. Contrary to the nomination of the term, they are not state institutions but traditional independent schools of the upper-class and are known for cultivating an antiaesthetic ethos. Instead they propagated an ‘athletic’ ethos of duty and discipline that is historically connected to the demands of the British Empire in the nineteenth-century. One of the functions of public schools was to prepare their students for the ancient universities Oxford and Cambridge and for public service. Even though these institutions were only for the chosen few who had the financial means, their influence on the national ethos, a class-conscious one, was immense.¹¹⁷ Here Bourdieu’s habitus concept provides a means for a closer, more sociological examination of Black’s work. Due to the striking differences between France and England in the field of education, his theory evidently needs to be adapted to the British context in this respect, especially as in exact opposition to the French institutions, privileged British education propagated an anti-aesthetic habitus. Black’s personal account of his time at a public school describes a culture of the dominant and the dominated, and its practices and mechanisms, and thus offers an example for what Ralf Schneider terms the macro-, mirco- and meso-analysis of a society.¹¹⁸ In the social structures of the public school the older and more educated and/or more prestigious students dominate the younger less educated and inferior ones. By the time of graduation each student has attained a prestigious status and the majority of these students on leaving the school will have acquired a habitus of class distinction. The British public schools as such are already the educational institutions of the ruling classes of British society and they impose as well as generate the dominating habitus of these classes. It becomes obvious that Black’s work is located more in the social and educational field and less in the artistic one. The conventions at the centre of his

 On the English public schools see for example Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Public School Phenomenon (London: Hodder & Stoughton, ).  Schneider has already provided an adaptation of Bourdieu’s habitus concept to the Victorian English middle-class, looking at Victorian advertising. See “Sociology: The Private and the Public Life of Societies,” Teaching Cultural Studies: Matters – Methods – Models, ed. Gabriele Linke (Heidelberg: Winter, ):  – .

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book are social conventions of a particular class, not the conventions of art. Art functions in this context as an opposition in that Black’s interest in drama constitutes a creative outlet to the strict rules and confining teaching methods of the school. The work also shows how a subjective agent who is hostile to this educational institution and its ethos can use strategies to move in this field and react against a certain class habitus. In particular he opposes art to a habitus that appraises sports as ‘masculine’ and individual intelligence to habitual teaching conventions. Consequently, even more important than Black’s reports about the public school system, is what he sets against it: art, and drama in particular, act as a creative regenerative means to balance social constraint, while art is also a corrective for the shortcomings of the social system. Black’s narrative was promoted by Pool as well as by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare Company, applauded for its dauntless vindication of avant-garde nonconformism, and acknowledged with a foreword by Dorothy Richardson. Richardson, the famous creator of the governess protagonist Miriam, points out that Black’s personal account of the public school is only one perspective on the educational system, and it is the perspective of “one who should never have been sent to a public school” (“Foreword” x) in the first place, due to his personality. But she applauds it as an isochronic account, since its author was a teenager when he wrote it, and with a somewhat Romantic poetic sense as “the spontaneous work of a child” (ibid. ix). However, she most emphatically praises the book for its “quality […] as a piece of writing” (ibid.). Richardson’s commendation for the book’s novelty of subject was attenuated by the wellknown psychoanalyst Barbara Low, who wrote a review of the book.¹¹⁹ She placed Black’s account within a series of such accounts of the public school system and shifted the focus of interest from its literary quality to the author’s reactions to this ‘system’. Along with Richardson, Low also pointed to the subjectivity of the work and found Black’s record to be “that of a highly intelligent introspective” and “deeply-inhibited narcissistic type” (Low 1927: 443) – and, very much the psychoanalyst, at once diagnosed “an over-powerful attachment to his mother,” a strong guilt-complex, and homosexuality (ibid.). Ellermann junior, who was destined to succeed his father in business, would later oppose the class habitus once again by marrying a theatre actress, apparently continuing to find in art and the entertainment culture a balance for the social confinements imposed upon him.

 The International Journal of Psychoanalysis: IJP  ():  – .

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5.4.3 Oswald Blakeston, Extra Passenger (1929) – Another of the Cinematographic Novels Blakeston’s novel describes the milieu of British studio life. It delineates the path of young Donald Firbank from school to working as an assistant director in the film industry. The protagonist’s name seems to be a play on the famous Hollywood actor and swashbuckling hero Douglas Fairbanks, and together with the author’s spoof disclaimer that “the author will take action against those who try to identify themselves with his imaginary characters” sets a humorous satiric tone that seems to have been characteristic for Blakeston. The novel is roughly divided into three parts and opens in medias res upon a scene in school that will eventually get Donald expelled. The first part portrays the miserable conditions of the English education system and the inhibitions it inflicts upon healthy individual development. Blakeston’s novel here continues some of the aspects previously addressed in Black’s account, only it is not concerned with a privileged upper-class public school but with a fourth-rate institution, and ties in with Pool’s interest in education. Similar to Black, Blakeston presents art and entertainment as a remedy to institutional constraints: Education at a fourth-rate school is INTOLERANCE, a stamping out of individuality, talent, and any trait that may threaten the position of the boy as a future good citizen, owning suburban villa and runabout car. Solitary redeeming factor in such a school is the chance given to the pupils to go often to the cinema. There they can find what has been denied to them in books, music or painting. Beauty lives vibrantly in the cinema, release and wishfulfilment to thousands of beauty-starved children. […] the cinema can only saves those, who, under better conditions, would appreciate other art forms; education has taken care that the rest shall find no salvation … (16 – 17, my italics)

The passage exposes the problem of the difference in choice of media in relation to the social strata, for while the privileged few appreciate the higher arts of literature, music, and the fine arts the neglected many need a more popular art form. Blakeston’s novel is obviously sensitive to the question of cultural capital, aesthetic dispositions and social distinction, anticipating Bourdieu in its criticism of education and the function of educational institutions as well as their role in society’s reception of the arts. The novel argues that aesthetic comprehension and appreciation is intricately tied to education and it gives voice to the aesthetic educational possibilities of film. Blakeston’s novel, set in an English context, seems to blame the entire educational system for inhibiting individual emotional and creative development, as well as criticising this system’s division according to economic means. Blakeston’s lines on the “beauty-starved children” clearly echo a passage from Macpherson’s Gaunt Island, in which Elmo’s brute of

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a nurse is said to be “exactly like some poor little hungry-for-beauty slum child” (155), and it also echoes more generally the idea of Pool’s philosophy of art as a means to entertain and educate the many. As such Blakeston discovers an alternative to refined culture, from which the unprivileged are barred, in the popular entertainment of film. Different from other artistic media, film offers an immediate, ‘first degree’ experience by appealing directly to the senses: The most dynamic art medium; it goes directly to the mind, it becomes the retina of the brain. A play requires a thought process to translate it into a sensation, like an experience, you must put yourself on the stage but you put the screen in your mind. Infinite possibilities. If I produced a film … Amateur experiments. The Avenue Pavilion. Visits to Paris. The Ursulines Studio, the Vingt-huit, or better still, Berlin. Talk of Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Olga Preobrashenskaya, Asta Nielson. (130, my emphasis)

Donald, who starts out an aspiring author of novels, has moved for a while in intellectual and more refined circles before he comes to film. The protagonist clearly embodies Pool’s art philosophy here, for he positions himself in between amateur film experiment, avant-garde film (Avenue Pavilion, Ursulines Studio) and popular Russian and German film. Before Donald comes to work in the film business however, the novel presents the reader with a section that describes the death of the protagonist’s grandmother. In the logical coherence of the story this is necessary because it provides Donald with the much needed pecuniary means to support himself until he has worked his way into the studio. But what is more, the focus on the grandmother’s death from the perspective of her nurse reveals the hypocrisy of Victorian moral conduct and class prejudices, which still determined English society in the early twentieth-century. After scrutinising the institution of the school the novel now exposes corruption within the institution of the family. The third part then presents British film studio life. Donald, who initially wanted to be a professional writer who could make a living from his publications, was told that film “is the medium of the future, the only art medium that pays” (129). When he finally comes into contact with the film industry his dream of artistic expression and film as art is confronted with the realities of the British film industry. Even some of those who work in this business consider studio life and film work to be disreputable: Paul arrived early at the studio. He had drifted into the film world through the influence of an uncle, who was one of the principal shareholders in the Milky-Way Film Company. He hated it, he would have preferred to be an accountant in the city and wear neat black

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clothes so that he could talk slowly, say nothing and be respected. Such was Paul Finly. He despised the peculiar world into which he had been thrown, […]. (123)

Blakeston could rely on first-hand experience for his description of British studio life in the novel, as prior to joining Pool he had worked as a cinema organist and studio clapperboy, and for a time as an assistant cameraman (Friedberg 1998: 315). Donald had dreamt of the “power to create, in dynamic and vital medium, to sweep crowds into ballet-like groups, to tell stories in dramatic rhythm, to create with subtleties of light and space” (35, my emphasis). In short, he dreamt of using film to create beauty and poetry. Now he is faced with a corrupt system that in recruiting the staff favours personal affiliations over talent and with the presets of an industry that goes for low-quality productions, including poor and insufficient material and setting, incompetent technicians, and unreasonable and even dangerous working conditions. All this makes it impossible to produce a film of artistic quality. Extra Passenger thus presents a rather derisory view of the British film industry and contrasts this industry and British film as it then was with film as it could and should be. The novel gives Pool’s idea of film as an art in narrative and presents the fate of the reception of this idea within the film industry. In an introspective reflection in the novel the two sides of film art versus film industry are argued out in the protagonist’s mind: Never would I choose this (the black-coat complex) but it is bread and butter. Why don’t you go into a sensible business, with regular hours? I wouldn’t let any son of mine start in this. But didn’t you believe once, has it meant nothing from the start? […] Is this an art medium, a channel for self-expression, that’s what I want to discover? Oh! can that nancy stuff. (129)

The novel presents a momentum of disillusion: […] my art … WHAT? ART, A…R…T. Say, you want to go to the Royal Academy or the British Museum; good morning. Men who had planned a canvas of living men and women found consolation in a sketch-book, slipped into backwaters, spoke less and less about the possibilities, the infinite possibilities, of the screen (130 – 131).

Some of the same art philosophy that is expressed in Macpherson’s novels can be found in Blakeston’s narrative as well, although always linked to film. Donald realises that he “ought to be like a sensitive recording machine, splitting up moments into their possibilities. One must be made sensitized by events” (178, my emphasis). Just like Macpherson’s poet of ‘a new sensitivity’ Blakeston’s filmmaker also has to feel and sympathise with the world around him. Blakeston’s human camera eye is different from Christopher Isherwood’s later “merely recording” and objective camera narrator in his Berlin Diaries (1930 – 1933).

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The novel, “dedicated with considerable presumption” to Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson, presents multiple perspectives in a manner similar to their novels. Blakeston’s novel can be positioned in between Bryher’s Civilians and Black’s Why Do They Like It? and thus is a combination of the subjective and the objective. Like Black, Blakeston features one main protagonist and naturally the largest part of the novel is concerned with Donald. However, in style Blakeston here is close to Bryher’s factual, sober, realistic mode of objectivity. The nurse Helen’s perspective, on the other hand, is more subjective and closer to Black’s, very likely because it is judgemental. Then there are further brief reflections of the school’s head-master, another film director’s assistant and the film director himself. The style of the novel is ‘cinematographic’ like Bryher’s, with short sentences made up mostly of main clauses. There are often incomplete sentences that describe a scene or an action in a manner reminiscent of camera shots or movements, or directions in a film script: “Down the hill. Running. Grey, symbolical, a church. Lamp post. A passage; short cut. Inhabited by a charming grey squirrel. Out of coldness […]; into the warmth of the room. Where his mother sat; […]” (24). This style evokes speed and dynamism and so reflects the medium of film. Similar to Bryher, Blakeston’s style is straightforward, simple and easy to read, not difficult and incomprehensibly experimental. Blakeston published copiously and several of his novels were crime and mystery stories, but he was also a poet. Consequently, there are passages in Extra Passenger that capture film aesthetics by playing with light and shadow: “Out in the air the ground was divided into shadows, checks that spangled the face with futurist make-up. […] A shadow detached itself from the pattern and moved towards them” (24). And even moments of lyrical beauty that clearly link film and poetry by associating a camera shot with imagist poetry, as for example when the “tram that slid by like a golden fruit on a swaying branch of metal” (26), which echoes Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.”

6 Films by POOL Productions In 1927 Pool founded their own film company POOL Productions which made five films in the following years up to 1930. According to Bryher, “it became the fashion for the avant-garde cinema groups to make films as it had been the custom in Paris to bring out two issues of a magazine” (Heart 308). Amateur film enthusiasts bought a camera and started experimenting, and so did Pool. Kenneth Macpherson in particular was at the centre of Pool’s filmmaking activities, being the first one to get a camera and to set out to film. Bryher remembers that “Kenneth hired an attic and began to experiment. He bought a Debrie with six lenses, a professional number at that time” (ibid.). Bryher herself encouraged Macpherson to start experimenting, because she found that he had a visual perceptiveness that was predisposed for working with the camera (ibid.), and Guest even claims that Bryher had given the camera to him (Guest 2003: 184). Macpherson started out with Wing Beat (1927), “a personal little film” H.D. called it (quoted in Scott 1990: 120). He then continued with Foothills (1928), which received some positive criticism, but he was not satisfied with this film. He decided to work on a smaller and less difficult task and the result was the documentary Monkey’s Moon (1929), a piece that seems to have enjoyed some success. Apparently Blakeston, who was actually the one with film-making experience, shot a film in the same year but this has since been lost. After Monkey’s Moon there followed the ambitious project Borderline (1930), a full-length avantgarde film with a star, Paul Robeson, cast in the leading role. Macpherson furthermore filmed the construction of Kenwin (1929/1930?), which may very well have been a shorter film in the nature of a documentary, but only fragments of this film now remain. In addition to the POOL films, the Film Archive of the MoMA holds one more film reel with some take out material, including cuts from the POOL films and the construction of Kenwin.¹ Véronique Goël has inserted some archive material into her film Kenwin (1996), including scenes from Wing Beat and Foothills, as well as moments from the construction of Kenwin, so that this material is easily available now. In addition she includes fragments from what appear to be home movies.

 The film role is labelled “Macpherson Outtake mat.” and contains about  minutes of film material. The cuts from the films are apparently taken from Borderline and Foothills.

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6.1 Film Fragments and Lost Films Of all the POOL-films for a long time only Borderline survived completely intact, Wing Beat and Foothills to this day only exist as fragments, while Monkey’s Moon was reported lost for a long period. Until recently only reports had remained about this documentary film in letters of the group or in Close Up contributions, as well as stills from the film in several Close Up issues. Then, in 2008, the Beinecke Library in Yale, that holds the H.D. and Bryher papers, acquired a copy of Monkey’s Moon. They then fully restored and digitized it, and made it available on the internet. The film, which is about six minutes long, is now easily accessible both as part of the Digital Image Collection of Beinecke and via the public on Youtube.² According to Blakeston’s own testimony (quoted in Dusinberre 1980: 68), the only copy of his I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside, a movie in which H.D. seems to have had a leading part, was destroyed in the Second World War.³ Something that strikes one about the POOL films and that becomes notable even from the remaining short film fragments is the economy of intertitles in these films. The film Monkey’s Moon has no intertitles at all and the fragment that exists of Foothills also shows no intertitles. The fragment of Wing Beat presents two intertitles, or rather one and a half, and even the complete ninety minute film Borderline presents no more than 30 intertitles, most of which consist of one short sentence or half-sentence only or often just a single word or name. This strong economic use of titles already indicates that Pool understood film not primarily as a verbal narrative but very much as visual poetry. Man is predominantly a visual being who uses optical perception as a central means of cognition. Psychoanalysis had furthermore demonstrated that there occurred a process of moving from abstract thought to visual object and image in dream-work.

6.1.1 Wing Beat – Transforming the Poetics of Imagism into Film Considering that it was Macpherson’s first advance into the terrain of the new medium film, Wing Beat was quite an ambitious virginal project, attempting

 See and also (accessed  January ).  Photographic stills from the film are in the Oswell Blakeston Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. An inventory of the papers is accessible on the internet. (accessed  May ).

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nothing less than to use the camera as a poetic device and to translate Imagism into film. The film fragment contains two references to its title Wing Beat, twice a sea gull in flight is shown, and maybe the title already suggests the poems by H.D., which often capture a vision or an abstract within an image. Indeed, the film has even been ascribed to her in an early study (Dusinberre 1980: 79, note 18, 82). The film was H.D.’s first ever appearance on the screen. The sole surviving fragments of Wing Beat that are known to exist are located in the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.⁴ In 1979 Anne Friedberg reassembled the fragments after the discovery of a box of nitrate film among H.D.’s papers at Yale (1998: 332, note 1). The film was in an unknown condition; after Friedberg’s restoration work the fragments now run to a total of seventeen minutes. What is particularly striking about this film is the film technique of out-of-focus shots⁵ that contrast with clearly defined pictures and very likely signify a shifting forth and back between reality or the present (in focus) and dream, memory or time past or time to come (out of focus). In her posthumously published Notes on Thought and Vision H.D. connects such a blurred vision to a certain visionary perception: “Sometimes when I am in that state of consciousness, things about me appear slightly blurred as if seen under water” (18). It will be remembered that H.D. also called this the vision of the “over-mind” (ibid.) and the “vision of the womb” (ibid.), and thereby associated it with hysteria⁶ and the perception of hypersensitive nerves. Close Up furthermore described Wing Beat in one of the captions to a film still as “[a] Film of telepathy” (July 1927). In a manner similar to the out-of-focus shots the superimposition of images and scenes also seems to symbolise an altered state of consciousness or dream. Later in Borderline, a shot of a face in closeup that is very slightly out of focus is used to evoke the softened, toned-down quality that is perceived by the lover’s eye, and which the spectator shares at this moment. Another film aesthetic feature that can be identified in the fragment is that this film tries to capture and visually transform sound or, more explicitly, music − for example by showing a close-up of a human ear or movements of dancing that indicate the rhythms of modern music such as swing or jazz. (A device that

 On POOL’s Wing Beat and its recovery see also Anne Friedberg’s “Fragements de Films ‘Pool’ –,” Travelling –, Documents Cinematheque Suisse: Le cinema independent et davant-garde a la fin du muet . Printemps  and her pioneering PhD thesis Writing About Cinema: “Close Up”, – (New York: New York University, ): –.  Upon showing the film, the film curator of the MoMA at first vainly tried to get the respective passages in focus until realizing that they were shot out-of-focus on purpose.  The womb being the uterus and in Greek hystera.

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later will reappear in Borderline.) In one scene the camera zooms onto the record player and the fast spinning record on the turntable thus transforming the fast to wild rhythms of the music into image, visualising sound. At the same time, the spinning record with its rotating black-and-white label reminds of Marcel Duchamp’s “Rotoreliefs” or “Rotary Demisphere” (1925) or the rotating black-andwhite spirals or word discs in his film Anémic Cinéma (1926)⁷ − thus constituting a link to modern art and to other avant-garde films. Here there is also a connection to surrealist art, through its use of dreams, suggestion, vision and trance, and some influence of this contemporary art form on Macpherson. Again, the geometrical forms of the dropped white cigarettes upon the dark floor could refer specifically to Man Ray and the aesthetic experiments in his photographs and abstract films, such as Emak-Bakia, photos of which were published in the very first Close Up issue. Man Ray had wanted his experimental film to be understood as ‘cine poems’, which is how a film title introduces it. Yet Macpherson wanted to go beyond the aestheticism of the pure object or geometric form and beyond ‘artsy’ avant-garde film that was of interest to the specialist only (Macpherson, “As Is” 2:2, 11 and 6:4, 252). Therefore the rotating record and the white cigarettes upon the dark floor are ‘gestures’ of or symbols for a certain emotional condition and state of mind – somewhat reminiscent of early expressionist films – for a growing aggravation and emotional irritation. Macpherson here applies avant-garde forms to the ‘narrative’ of his film and transformed them into representative symbols. Friedberg, referring to H.D.’s essay on the film, realised that they were part of a sequence of purely visual terms that expressed one of the characters’ “growing irritation with the disturbance of the music’s volume and the vibrations of the dance” (1998: 212). Macpherson here used visual, symbolic language to express human psychology and thought, to show the ‘inside’ and psychological condition of a character.⁸

 Later the Geneva correspondent Freddy Chevalley was to mention Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma, together with Dulac’s Disque , in his Close Up contribution “Ciné Club de Geneve”: “Le disque en mouvement apparaît partiellement, se dédouble … puis se fond en jets lumineux extrément précipités, pour enfin céder la place aux signes naturels dont l’émotion a tiré sa substance musicale: oscillation monotone des rouages d’une pendule, alternant avec certains détails de l’atmosphère extérieure […] L’Anemic Cinéma de Duchamps est plus récréatif, sans doute, où par une rotation fixe analogue à celle des toupies, un ensemble de spirales se meut, donnant l’illusion, presque, de la perspective. Beaucoup moins esthétiques cependant sont les textes circulaires rédigés pour rappeler automatiquement certains sons identiques” (Close Up :, ).  Macpherson himself would later state in his editorial on Borderline in Close Up that instead of “dealing with objects” he was taking his “film into the minds of the people in it” (“As Is,” :, ).

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6.1.1.1 H.D.’s Unpublished Essay “Wing Beat” or the Bird-Stuffers versus the Beat of Art Along with the film fragment of Wing Beat an unpublished essay on the film by H.D. also survived⁹ which, along with the announcements in the first Close Up issues, helps to reconstruct the intention behind this early film by the group. Although it needs to be noted at the same time that H.D. was probably the most ‘aloof’ of the group and readily stressed the ‘high’ art of their productions, (this is a factor that characterises her pamphlet on Borderline as well) H.D. explicitly states that Wing Beat is an art film, “to all intents and purposes” (5) without action, in the sense of plot, and points out its “lyric quality” (2). It is especially this “lyric quality” of Wing Beat, which was different from the later featurelength Borderline and intentionally a short film, that bears a resemblance to H.D.’s Imagist poetry. Close Up (July 1927) claimed that it was the first film in free verse and H.D. writes of its “simple setting” (5), the importance of desert, sun-light, trees, hills, and woods (6), and of “a world of reality” (5). Free verse is the lyric form of the Imagist poets, and even H.D.’s acting and her gestures echo the characteristic clarity of her poetry. A still of the film in Close Up showing H.D. is subtitled: “This is H.D.’s debut in films […]. The same clear genius is in her acting that sets her so high among contemporary poets and authors” (July 1927, my emphasis). It is the simplicity and clarity of image that H.D. here stresses as one of the characteristics of Macpherson’s lyric film, which Pound had announced was to be fundamental to Imagism (see the chapter on A Language of Images). As Imagism defied traditional lyric conventions by setting verse libre against rhyme and a more musical rhythm against formal metre, so Wing Beat defied all conventions – or so H.D. at least claims. In contrast to commercial films it deliberately avoids action, or rather its action “is the action of subtle ‘stills’” (5). The technique to which H.D. seems to be referring here, a technique of shots, very often close-ups that are of such duration that they appear to be stills, is a technique that would also be used later in Borderline and will be considered again in the respective context. It was intended to bestow a statuary quality to the image and thus to transform the medium of film into the art of sculpture.¹⁰ H.D. describes it furthermore as “an action of thought etched in fine distinguished line on the fine distinguished features of Mr Macpherson and of H.D.” (ibid.).

 “Wing Beat,” unpublished manuscript, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. I here quote from a copy of this manuscript which exists in the file “Macpherson” at the MoMA Film Library.  See also H.D.’s Borderline pamphlet (reprinted in Scott : ).

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These sculptural ‘stills’ often alternate with scenes of great rapidity, scenes that suggest agitation or emotional turmoil, and which H.D. finds best expressed in the previously mentioned gramophone scene:¹¹ The excellent nervous quality could hardly be bettered in the gramaphone [sic] scene, when young Mr. E.L. Black works up Colin […] to a frenzy of nervous irritation over – nothing. A gramaphone, a box of spilled cigarettes, an ordinary London weekly and shadows working back and forth across the pages of the paper that Colin has snatched up in a moment of mental turmoil in order to find some half moment’s distraction from his inner seething vision, and you have it. You have it all in subtle over-tones,¹² in subtle under-tones, in certain hints and nervous crises that have nothing to do with cabarets, with underworlds. (ibid.)

This nervousness is a prominent feature of what H.D. refers to as ‘a world of reality’. It is the “world as lived by the nervous post-war thinker, artist, intellectual; nerve-wrought, hysterical if you will but vibrant, pulsing with life and with rarefied emotion” (ibid.). Herein, Wing Beat also most likely showed an influence of expressionistic film and may have been modelled on the German silents of the post-war Weimar Republic and strongly influenced by the psychological realism of G. W. Pabst. Pool’s idea of reality was a psychological reality echoing human mental conditions, the turmoil of emotions, the joys and the pains of living in their many facets and nuances. Here Pool’s humanitarian attitude and idea of a humane art surfaces. As H.D. states, the concern of Macpherson “is with the living” (4). This connects back to their idea of art, as stated in the introductory chapter, as an ointment to heal the wounds inflicted on humanity by war, be it the Great War or the struggle of life, by being truthful and without denying these wounds. Theirs is not an angry, aggressive art but a sensitive, lyrical, and life-affirming one. As such it is art and not anti-art; H.D. emphatically stresses that the filmmakers of Wing Beat were not “rebels or reds” who “burst into museums, political or otherwise and smash up excellent replicas of men and customs nor do they wish to break into churches and destroy what is divine in any image of the arts or of religion” because “[t]hey are far too subtle, far to sensitive […] to waste their lives or their minds in any such rubbish” (ibid.). The art of Macpherson and

 Part of this gramophone scene is available on DVD, it is part of Veronique Goël’s documentary Kenwin ().  Later, in , Eisenstein was to publish his method of the ‘overtone montage’ in his “Fourth Dimension of the Kino” – printed in Close Up in its English translation in . Macpherson claimed later that he had used this method in his latest film Borderline, not being aware at that time of Eisenstein’s concept of the ‘overtone’ montage (“As Is” :, ). H.D. here already appears to imply such a concept, albeit in Wing Beat this concept of suggestion is one appealing to the emotions while Eisenstein’s was to appeal to the intellect.

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his kind is concerned with life, with the “beat and pulse of living creatures” (ibid.). It is ‘organic’, and aims to express “the beat and pulse of the waters, of the seas, of the trees and of the sunlight across desert spaces and of the hearts of men” (ibid.). But since it is concerned with life it has to be dynamic, and this dynamic, vibrating quality is best expressed by the medium of film. H.D. placed this “new art” in opposition to the art of “the bird-stuffers” (3), as she calls them, a conventional, “devitalized”, “varnished” and inorganic art. H.D. claims “Mr. Macpherson” to be “one of the young pioneers of the cinema as an art” (2) and credits Macpherson, together with Marc Allégret, as filmmakers who “won’t accept the standardization for the film” (3–4). Being pioneers in their art and defying conventions they are naturally defined as avant-garde artists.¹³ H.D. aligns Macpherson to the Renaissance artist and his work, thus claiming his artistic genius and indexing his cinema art as “high art” (2). By holding up this idea of the master-artist, H.D. echoes in part the futile endeavour of Peter in Poolreflection or Robin in Gaunt Island, and the novels could be taken here as subtlely ironic comment on H.D.’s position. I have already remarked that Man Ray understood his abstract films as ‘cinépoèms’, so in view of this there might be ground to argue that Wing Beat was not the first poem in film after all as Pool claimed. Nevertheless, Man Ray’s ‘cinépoèms’ probably placed a stronger emphasis on inorganic objects – although organic ones were included –, such as parts of musical instruments, nails, cubes and cones, which become animated by means of film technique. Obvious references to Cubism in his ‘cinépoèms’, especially the dices, shift the focus to geometrical shapes and planes, although some of these objects go beyond a mere display of shape, such as spinning city-lights or a hand rapidly playing the strings of a banjo that suggest modern urban life. Man Ray’s ‘cinépoèms’ are no free verse poems of Imagism and its artistic credo. Instead they take his photographic works into the new medium of film and are no “study in thought,” as Pool claimed Wing Beat to be (Close Up, July 1927).¹⁴ In this, however, Man Ray’s ‘cinépoèms’ were similar in kind, having decidedly no plot and being non-commercial, and as examples of film art they were naturally applauded by Pool and in Close Up. But while Man Ray does not transgress the genre of the visual arts, Wing Beat on the contrary attempts to translate poetry, in its contemporary and avant-garde form as Imagism, into film and thereby to transfer or adapt a literary

 The July  issue of Close Up included next to stills of a film by Allégret an article by Jean Prévost on “André Gide and Marc Allégret’s Voyage to the Congo” and thus called attention to this filmmaker’s work.  Man Ray scholars may disagree and point to Man Ray’s close affinity to surrealism and the establishment through this of intersections between different art disciplines.

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genre to the genre of the visual arts. That Macpherson was indeed deliberately attempting to transfer or adapt a literary genre to film becomes obvious in the announcement of the film in Close Up where it is explicitly stated that: the screen has had all these equivalents: the epic, the novel, the chronicle, the fantasy, the play. But no free verse poem. (July 1927)

Thus Macpherson’s Wing Beat, although standing by its denomination as a free verse poem closer to Man Ray’s ‘cinépoèms’, should in fact be more accurately compared to Gertrude Stein’s literary portraits of Picasso, Matisse, and Cezanne in its artistic intent and its innovative avant-gardism. It was the no less than ambitious attempt to translate the Imagist poetry of the accomplished and renowned poet H.D. into film. However, whereas Stein’s multi-perspectivism is restricted to form, to experimenting with syntax and the repetition of a grammatical nature detached from its logocentric meaning, Macpherson’s multi-perspectivism is an emotional and emotive change of perspective by which one understands and relates to another individual and thus becomes capable of compassion. Octavio Paz has shown that the modern novel wanted to reverse the historical progress of narrative and wanted to become a poem again (1973: 210–211); Macpherson (and filmmakers like Man Ray) wanted film to become poetry. In Wing Beats, it appears that Pool wanted to redeem film from the standardized form of narrative film, which the film industry had established as it best suited their economical purposes, and turn it into poetry. They thus sought to disrupt coherent plot and logical syntax and to substitute association and the short visual impression so as to open film to poetry, employing lyrical rather than narrative devices. Despite H.D.’s laudatory essay of Wing Beat, Macpherson seems to soon have grown dissatisfied with his first film. In her Borderline pamphlet of 1930, H.D. mentions that “Kenneth Macpherson turned a personal little film in 1927. It is carefully packed away and he shows it to no one” (in Scott 1990: 120). Perhaps Macpherson had come to the realization that the film was on the whole too ‘static’ due to the sculptural ‘stills’, after all he became a great admirer of Pabst’s film Jeanne Ney of the same year, due to its high-pace and immense dynamism, something which can now only be guessed at on the basis of the existing fragment.

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6.1.1.2 Advertising the Film in Close Up Further traces of the film remain in the form of two stills in the first Close Up issue (July 1927, in between pages 54–55). The stills introduce the protagonists of the film and, it is safe to assume, present key incidents. The first still shows H.D. in profile, with closely cropped hair and an expressive hand gesture typical of her acting style, and an open door is visible in the background. Above the still is written: “From ‘Wing Beat’,” and below: A portrait of H.D. illustrating an incident from Wing Beat, a POOL film now in preparation. This is H.D.’s debut in films, and her many admirers will welcome the opportunity to see her. The same clear genius is in her acting that sets her so high among contemporary poets and authors. Works by H.D. appear in this issue.

The second still shows Kenneth Macpherson from the front, wearing a suit and tie and white facial make-up, there is a closed door in the background and a full bookshelf. The two images present a contrast. Above the still it reads: “From ‘Wing Beat’” and below: “A film of telepathy. The feeling of ‘something about to happen’ pervades the whole, reaching a climax at the point from which this ‘still’ is taken.” Especially in combination with the white facial make-up, the caption suggests an affinity with expressionist film. To those familiar with Macpherson’s novel Gaunt Island this caption is also reminiscent of the novel’s opening scene in which the protagonist Robin has a similar sense of ‘something about to happen’ (3), while the novel is also concerned with evoking “a new sensitivity” and Celtic visionary powers. The two stills in Close Up record scenes from the film that are missing in the remaining fragment and are thus otherwise lost to posterity. Here the advertisement of the film in the magazine documents and helps to reconstruct it. Following the two stills from Wing Beat are two stills from Voyage to the Congo, an early documentary about Africans that was applauded by Close Up. But the stills from Voyage to the Congo do more than simply applaud a new film. By coming immediately after those stills from Wing Beat, Close Up suggests some affinity between the two films by Macpherson and Allégret. Here the advertisement goes hand in hand with the affinity that H.D. mentions in her essay. Inserting stills from their own movies among other avant-garde films seems to have been Pool’s way of advertising their own productions. They rarely reviewed their own films but instead favoured a more subtle and at the same time more suggestive method. By including their productions among those of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Eppstein and other successful experimental filmmakers, Pool ‘quoted’ them as reference and thereby helped their readers to discover the avant-garde ideas and techniques that had influenced the Pool films and so understand them. Along with this, Pool

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thus enhanced the status of their productions because they included themselves among the successful pioneers of film as art. Yet their advertisements, as I will continue to demonstrate in the following chapters, were at the same time explanatory and instructed the readers as to ways of discerning film aesthetics and film technique. By being so carefully considered and illustrative of film technique and aesthetics, they exist as more than just archival advertising material and provide a helpful means of contributing to the process of reconstruction.

6.1.2 Foothills – A Joint Venture The one existing fragment of Foothills is also located in the Film Library of the MoMA in New York. This fragment is only nine minutes long, too short to reveal much about the film as a whole. However, individual scenes demonstrate Macpherson’s film technique, especially if considered within the context of his other films. For example, such features as his concentration on gestures, hands, feet, faces and face profiles constantly reappear in Macpherson’s films and are obviously intended to stress emotions. A further recurrent feature are changes from indoor to outdoor settings, with the action in closed spaces contrasting with that of the outside scenery. Certain techniques such as over-blending, the blurred or out-of-focus picture and photos within the film (the picture within the picture), which can be found in Wing Beat and traced throughout Borderline, can be found in the fragments from Foothills as well. The gesture of smoking also recurs in Macpherson’s movies as well as the symbolism of an ashtray brimming with stubs, often signalling an atmosphere of irritation and nervousness. What is more, even in this short fragment of a film an emphasis on human relationships is evident. Foothills is usually listed as a short film but, according to H.D., the film was originally “a full length five reel feel film” (quoted in Scott 1990: 120), which makes it almost as long as Borderline. ¹⁵ It cast several of the later Borderline crew: H.D., Macpherson, Bryher, Robert Herring, and Blanche Lewin. Oswell Blakeston was to call Foothills “probably the most notable of Macpherson’s earlier film experiments (“Foreign Notes” 12), but although generously commented on at the time by German, French, and English critics Macpherson was not satisfied with his second film either (ibid.).

 Five reels amounted approximately to  minutes at  feet per second (Cosandey : ). One reel was , ft, thus Foothills with five reels and about , ft was almost as long as Borderline.

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Similar to Wing Beat, the fragment of the second Pool film is supplemented by four stills that were printed in Close Up (July 1929, in between pages 48–49). The first still shows H.D. with Dietrich-style eyebrows, her hand and that of another’s, most likely male, in a gesture of affability or comfort are at the centre of the picture, which is subtitled: “From Foothills, a film by Kenneth Macpherson.” The second still presents Kenneth Macpherson facing the camera, with a tied neckerchief and slits of eyes, and the third shows H.D. with her head bent and a wall with what may be a banister, behind her. The fourth still shows an old woman, one Blance Lewin of the later Borderline cast, her face in close-up biting her index finger. The last three stills are captioned: “From Foothills.” Again the stills are included among other films such as Man Ray’s Le Mystère du Château du Dé, Michail Kaufmann’s Spring,¹⁶ Abram Room’s The Ghost That Never Returns and Pits, and a photograph of film director Alberto Cavalcanti and French actress Catherine Hessling. In addition, some film stills from The Lady of the Lake and The Arcadians, The Wrecker, and Paradise, all film industry movies, are also included. All of the stills are inserted in between an article on “Some British Films” by Hugh Castle (41–51), which does not mention the Pool films depicted. Although the film itself now only exists as a small fragment, an account of its production along with a brief story-line was fortunately supplied by Macpherson himself in a German film magazine.¹⁷ Foothills featured a lady from the city who visits the country because she wants to leave her former life behind, but due to her inner restlessness is never able to adapt to life in the village. As Macpherson points out, the figure of the ‘lady from the city’ had been a frequently used motive by this time but his film was an attempt to present a completely new characterisation of this type. It offered a psychological character study of the female protagonist, who was depressed, disappointed, unhappy, and who had left her lover and her former life behind her due to an inner restlessness. The motif of the ‘lady from the city’ had previously been used by the famous German film-director F. W. Murnau one year prior to Foothills. His Sunrise (1927) also features both a city woman who has come to the country but does not really fit into farm life, and a simple farmer. But whereas Murnau’s film tells the melodramatic love story of the farmer’s affair with the city girl, in which he nearly murders his wife to run off with the chichi woman of a femme fatale, his eventual recognition of his mistake, the wife’s almost tragic death, and the final happy reunion of

 Kaufmann was the cameraman of Vertov’s acclaimed Man With a Movie Camera.  Macpherson recounted the production of Foothills in “Wie ein Meisterstück entstand,” Film für Alle  (): –.

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husband and wife, Macpherson’s film appears to have concentrated more on the city woman’s inner conflicts. Robert Herring in his comment on Sunrise had already made the following complaint in Close Up (March 1928): “There is no psychology, no insight, nothing we have been waiting for” (44). Foothills seems to have been Pool’s motivation to give a psychologically more true and complex version of Murnau’s stereotypical figure of the woman.¹⁸ Macpherson’s article provides a minutely documented genesis of the film, from the conception of the idea to the final art product, paying heed to aspects of financing, costumes, electricity for lighting, setting, acting, and filming equipment and technique. The article was published in Film für Alle, a magazine that as the title already claims was addressed to all those interested in film and which aimed to encourage amateurs to make their own films. Macpherson presents the individual stages of his filmmaking as an example of an amateur succeeding despite all manner of discouragement and ridicule on the way. By delineating the manner of production, including the problems encountered, he offers a helpful guide to any film amateur and by presenting himself as a complete newcomer to the field he sides with all non-professionals. In his article Macpherson claims that an alternative to conventional film production is possible and that films by amateurs are “the best films” (6), because they do not have to consent to the requests of some production company that has to please the public.¹⁹ He shows that a film need not be vastly expensive but, on the contrary, that modest means may still produce rewarding results. He furthermore describes the fun of such an enterprise: Aside from working together with friends, the production of his film acquainted Macpherson with at least half of the village population of Veytaux, whose carpenter was recruited for the set, whose village youths pulled the wooden movable camera platform and whose natives were extras or agreed to having their windows used for filming. It shows too how Macpherson brought art to the people and literally out into the street. He did not have a studio or an enclosed film set but shot his film in the midst of village life and with the cooperation of half its populace. His film was indeed a truly communal experience. Macpherson also emphasises the importance of real and authentic representation in the film. To illustrate his point he reports how he bought a local farmer’s outfit in some back alley store, since he was to act the part of a farmer in his

 From what remains of Macpherson’s film Foothills, there seem to be references to Murnau’s film not only as to the types of character and the theme of love but even as to some visual arrangements.  The “Meisterstück” (masterpiece) from the title has to be understood in this context and as encouraging amateur film work, and is not meant presumptuously on Macpherson’s part as Friedberg finds (: ).

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film. But in order to look authentic the outfit had to look worn, so he walked around in the mountains for hours in snow and scree to provide his recently bought heavy shoes with the necessary patina, only to find them on finally coming home looking just as new as before. The often humorously recounted history of the film stresses the recreational factor of creative work, as entertainment was obviously as important as experiment in the production of this film. Macpherson’s account of his films’ production was preceded by a comment by Edwin Redslob, the Reichskunstwart (national arts secretary) of the Weimar Republic, which positions Macpherson’s enterprise within the larger context of enlightening popular cultural activities in the Weimar Republic,²⁰ and points to its respective influence on Pool’s films.

6.1.3 Monkey’s Moon – Happy Animal Nature 6.1.3.1 The Art of Biosophy Monkey’s Moon, as stated, was thought to be lost and all that remained of it where the comments, references and the stills in Close Up. Then, eighty years after its making, the film was rediscovered and announced as fully restored by the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library Yale.²¹ Although always classified as a documentary, Monkey’s Moon displays the same lyric quality as the other Pool films, which makes it a lyrical documentary.²² Most certainly it was inspired by such documentaries as Marc Allégret’s Voyage au Congo 1927²³ and Joris Ivens’ works. Allegrét, a young French filmmaker whom H.D. mentions fa-

 There were for example the German Kulturfilme, educational films for the public, films promoting liberal and democratic attitudes to life, associations like the Volksverband für Filmkunst, the Bund der Filmamateure and magazines like Film für Alle.  The Beinecke claims that “this six minute film has been fully restored.” See Monkey’s Moon, Pool Productions. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University. (accessed  January ). Richard Deming speaks of “a nine-minute masterpiece.” See (accessed  January ). H.D., on the other hand, talks in her Borderline pamphlet of “a document of commercial length” (quoted in Scott : ), which again suggests that the restored film is still only a fragment.  Bryher for instance speaks of Macpherson’s “first documentary, Monkey’s Moon, starring his pet dourocoulis (tiny owl-faced monkeys from South America)” (Heart ).  André Gide, who was a collaborator in the enterprise, remarked that the film captured especially a desire to escape and thirst for adventure (quoted in Film-Kurier  ( July, ), my emphasis): n.p. (accessed  May ).

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vourably in her essay on Wing Beat, was a personal friend of Pool²⁴ and became their Paris correspondent for Close Up. Guest notes in her H.D. biography that it was Allegrét who first got Macpherson started on film (184). His Voyage au Congo, in cooperation with his uncle André Gide, had a similar lyrical quality and stills of this film accompany stills from Monkey’s Moon in Close Up, accentuating an association between the two works. Joris Ivens is mentioned appreciatively by Macpherson in his editorial to the Close Up issue of June 1928, where he speaks of his “remarkable ‘absolute’,”²⁵ and the references to Joris Ivens’ Rain (1929), a poetic short film, in Monkey’s Moon can hardly be missed.²⁶ As early as 1927, Bryher’s brother John had already pleaded for animals as protagonists in a story film, in his contribution to the very first issue of Close Up. ²⁷. John Ellermann Jr. was a dedicated scholar of natural history and would later contribute several academic papers on this subject under the pseudonym E.L. Black. His early Close Up article called for the presentation of “animal psychology” in order to educate as well as entertain (42). He warned against anthropomorphising animals, criticising that so far animals had only been “represented as blown out with a kind of pompous human attitude, and that their very often superior qualities [had been] softened and blurred in human imitation” (ibid.). The only exceptions to such a distortion, according to Black, were films of actual wild life. “Much could be done,” he was convinced, “if facial expressions were studied. The donkey, the camel, the monkey, each of these registers definite moods” (ibid. 44). Black was convinced that a close and sympathetic study of any one of them would reveal rich possibilities, both in the way of education and entertainment. Someone may get the idea in time and if he studies animal psychology and allows the animal to be itself instead of himself, the screen will have been enriched, and the public needfully instructed. (ibid. 45–46)

 Allégret had been Bryher’s younger brother’s French tutor once. See her autobiography The Heart to Artemis, .  Close Up : (June ): . Macpherson refers here to Ivens’ ‘absolute’ The Bridge (– ), which was reviewed by Jean Lenauer in the same magazine issue. Stills of this film were also included and one of the captions emphasized that the film was “made on an Ica Kinamo” film-camera, which Macpherson mentions in his editorial as well (this camera also appears in the film itself). The term ‘absolute’ is another term for the abstract film that concentrates on the purely visual and on form, and is separated from the narrative.  Monkey’s Moon was shot in the summer of  (Cosandey : ) and already in January of the same year Close Up had printed a photograph of Joris Ivens that showed the filmmaker shooting a scene for his new film Rain. Cf. Close Up : (January ): in between –.  See “Animals on the Films,” Close Up : (July ): –.

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Monkey’s Moon seems to intend exactly this: to portray animal psychology. After his first two films Wing Beat and Foothills, which concentrated on human psychology and mood, and which Macpherson had somehow felt to be failures, he decided to settle on a ‘simpler theme’, the psychology and mood of animals.²⁸ The film portrays a moment from the life of his two pet monkeys and begins with close-ups of outside scenery − lyrical montages softened by dissolves that smoothly fade from one picture to the next − and with sun rays breaking through some clouds, before shifting to an artificially lighted domestic, indoor scenery.

Figure 11: Sunrays breaking through clouds

Here again a contrast between out-of-doors and indoors is established – a contrast that becomes most obvious in the full length Borderline. But despite the recurrence of the outdoor-indoor contrast, its connotations vary throughout the Pool films. Different in emphasis from Borderline, indoor scenes in Monkey’s Moon are associated with solemnity and restraint, while outdoor scenes evoke vivacity. The confines of ‘civilised’ life are symbolised by the monkey cage.

 H.D. speaks of “a less ambitious film” (Borderline pamphlet, quoted in Scott : ).

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(Once again, H.D.’s ornithological metaphor of the cage and the bird-stuffers in her essay on Wing Beat comes to mind.²⁹) Fingers playing a saxophone and part of a person reading a book seem to imply cultured and modern life. More likely though, given Pool’s other productions, the visual sounds of the saxophone intend to express a mood of stirring life and energy, or joie de vivre that intrudes upon the calm mood expressed by the act of reading, similar to the gramophone scene in Wing Beat. In Poolreflection, Lex’s happy synchopated bawl had signified his Dionysian life force that contrasted with Peter’s reflective mood.

Figure 12: The sunny mood expressed by the saxophone

Here, since it is the psychology of the monkeys that is to be captured, the saxophone, by sensation, has to be related to their Dionysian animal mood. Pool’s visual language is often more subtle – more ‘psychological’ and suggestive – than a mere presentation of symbols. Thus the valves of the saxophone visually

 As the bird flying in Wing Beat that for H.D. symbolised free art versus a devitalized art of the bird-stuffers, the exotic monkeys are life animals, not stuffed artefacts and may once more embody Pool’s artistic credo.

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echo the ‘introductory’ image of petals on a branch moving in the wind and are therefore associated with the outside, with nature and life, and thereby with a mood of freedom. Parallels in technique to Pound’s notion of Imagism and Eisenstein’s idea of montage become obvious here. Haiku-like the petals on a branch, suggesting spring, in conjunction with the saxophone playing express an abstraction, a life-affirmative mood. Next, the two monkeys escape from the confines of the room and house and freely roam outside in the vegetation, scampering about, climbing trees and enjoying life in the sun.

Figure 13: The monkey’s joy of life

As John Ellerman alias Black predicted, these moments are truly entertaining. At the same time, an animal joy of life is effectively expressed. Then the saxophone is thrown upon a bed − an act foreshadowing the termination of animal joy − and shortly after, gigantic human feet appear upon the happy wild-life scenery outside. These feet, shoed and stockinged, approach, walking partly on a path partly on a sidewalk, giving them an aura of heavy clumsiness or monstrosity. Next, two hands clapping harshly, then pointing or sign-shooting at the monkeys

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are cut in. A similar, symbolic gesture of reprimand will reappear in Borderline, the shadow of a finger pointing at the guilty Thorne. Another cut, clouds in the sky superseding the sun. Then a shot of the two monkeys in the concrete corner of a barrier. All these images are precursors of a termination of the animals’ carefree happiness and their unrestrained animal joy. The gigantic feet are shown coming closer until they fill the entire frame and present the audience with the perspective of the little douracoulis and their feeling of threat. Another shot of the sky, the clouds darkening until they are almost entirely black, expresses a psychological landscape of doom. Finally, the horror of captivity looms in the shape of a large shadow, resembling such of the German expressionistic films as, for example, Murnau’s famous Nosferatu.

Figure 14: The looming shadow of doom

And the sensation of fear is expressed in the hasty scuttling and cornered crouching of the monkeys. In the end, rain has superseded the sun and signifies a mood of tristesse. A darker and more serious mood has succeeded happiness and joy. The monkeys are re-captured and put into the cage. By presenting the monkey as a pre-human life form, the film offers an obvious reference to biology, Darwin and his idea of the origins of species. Monkey’s

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Moon however does not, as one may erroneously conclude, present a biological determinism and a hierarchical structure of life. The human forms that appear are not superior but are images of threat and captivity. Since they appear either in the form of large shadows or as human parts, legs, feet, hands, they seem gigantic. They evoke an idea of confinement and may also be seen as images of more abstract symbols for authority, consciousness and a call to work and duty. The monstrous limping figure, the shadow of horror might as well be Everyday clumsily and dreadfully approaching, terminating a time of recreation and entertainment. Most of all however, natural sensations such as joy, recklessness, fear and anger are expressed in the film. Yet, beyond this ‘naturalism’ a distinct symbolism of paradise and paradise lost is also perceptible: The introductory shot of the garden and its gate with the sign “Passage interdit” followed by a shot of the sky and the sun, the carefree gambolling monkeys in the garden and the gigantic feet and shadow approaching in this garden, frightening and reprimanding the monkeys and finally transferring them from their freedom in the garden into the domestic cage, all these are ancient if altered images of an old story. By substituting images from nature and biology for the old Christian figures and symbols, however, the old symbols are not only adapted to a more modern artistic expression but the biblical story, freed from its Christian context, becomes even more universal. It is thus the universal story of the loss of innocence and harmony and the expulsion from a blissful state, symbolising growing up or personal restraint for the sake of the community. Here, though, the archaic universal story becomes psychologized in the film in that the ‘fall from grace’ is affiliated with psychological mood. The story of old thus is no longer limited to a process of maturity here but designates a changing of moods that is part of daily life, a changing that is cyclical and not linear. Moreover, the biology in the film must not be read in stereotypical terms of Darwinist evolution but can rather be approached using Eibl’s idea of an evolutionary anti-stress factor. The film is concerned with the ‘spirit’ of adventure and freedom and a certain playfulness in the monkey which is a spirit man still has and shares with his biological relative. Monkey’s Moon presents the mythological figure of the faun in its natural, biological manifestation – that is the fauna in general and the monkeys in particular. In Macpherson’s film, biology becomes what might be called biosophy, for in animal psychology he finds the life-affirmative principle of Dionysos. This film was a ‘simpler’ task for Macpherson because in the animal psychology of the monkeys, the Dionysian and Apollonian are not as confusingly intertwined as in human psychology. Thus he had to concentrate on fewer emotions and moods: the mood of freedom and animal joy, the monkeys’ simple desire to escape and their thirst for adventure, their fear of captivity, and their rebellious mood and resistance against restraint in the end, when

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they have been recaptured, expressed in a lashing out at the closing cage-door. Nevertheless, there is also the human hand with the book that becomes an affective symbol for contemplation and rest. Snuggling up to this figure the monkey shares in this mood as well. Monkey’s Moon can be considered a success; it was listed among the avantgarde films that were distributed world wide by the Paris firm Studio Film³⁰ and Bryher records that the film “was shown a number of times and greeted with enthusiasm” (Heart 308). It seems that even Macpherson was content with this film,³¹ as the monkeys’ presence made sure there was enough high-paced motion to satisfy him. Rachel Low actually mentions Monkey’s Moon in her compendious The History of the British Film, in the sixth volume Films of Comment and Persuasion of the 1930s, together with Borderline and Blakeston’s I Do Love to be Beside the Seaside. However, as Anne Friedberg has pointed out, Low mistakenly calls it Monkey’s Man (Low 2001: 108; Friedberg 1998: 333, note 1). Due to its documentary nature it probably complied best with the expectations people had of a British avant-garde film and perhaps that counts partly for its success. The film is to some extent a preliminary study to the more complex Borderline that was to follow, and which takes the spectator from the animal’s psychology into the human mind.

6.1.3.2 The History and Advertisement of the Film Before its recent discovery and restoration, the only pictorial records that remained of the film were the stills in several Close Up issues.³² Thus, different from Wing Beat and Foothills, the film magazine was indeed the sole source here, but Monkey’s Moon was also more copiously advertised. The July issue presents a still from Monkey’s Moon on the magazine cover and an additional four pictures inside: One of them shows a single monkey filmed from a high-angle shot and the subtitle announces that Monkey’s Moon is “a film now nearing completion by Kenneth Macpherson.” A second still again shows a single monkey, filmed slightly out of focus, and informs the reader that “the Douracouli, or Devil Monkey as he is called by the Amazonian Indians, is nocturnal in his

 Cosandey notes that Monkey’s Moon was on the Studio Film list of December  (: ).  A conclusion supported by the fact that Bryher, who is silent on Wing Beat and Foothills, does mention Monkey’s Moon in her autobiography.  Close Up : (July ), in between pages –, Close Up : (September ), in between pages –, Close Up : (October ), in between pages – and Close Up : (December ), in between pages –.

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habit” and that “the two monkeys in this film are pets of the director.” This second caption already suggests to the reader that Monkey’s Moon is a documentary. The third still presents a monkey’s face in close-up, with large, wide-open eyes that portray their owl-like appearance. A subtitle gives a detailed description of the colouring of these animals, complementing the black-and-white of the pictures and accordingly of the film: “The faces are white and black, the back grey, and the breast orange.” It further informs the reader, in a more familiar way, that the monkey in the picture is “‘Sister’, who adored being taken in lingering close-ups” and that she is “one of Nature’s film-stars.” This close-up was the one chosen for the magazine cover. The fourth still presents ‘Sister’ and Bill, the second douracouli, “who hated the camera as much as she loved it,” among the shadows of leaves. Next to the last two stills are stills from Foothills. The September issue includes two pictures, one showing a monkey in a wicker chair and a second one showing two monkeys somewhere outside in a corner. The stills suggest captivity, the sensation of being cornered and the mood of fear. A caption supplies the information that “Monkey’s Moon [is] an adventure of two douracoulis, or nocturnal Devil monkeys. Special interest is added in that these owl-faced beasts are extremely rare in captivity. A ‘Studio Film.’” Next to the first monkey picture is a still from the Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov’s Buldi, announcing “a new film […] dealing with circus life” and presenting “Komarov as a clown.” The arrangement of the clown next to the monkey suggests the entertaining tone of the animal film. What is more, the clown’s make-up actually resembles the facial colouring of the monkeys, characterising them as natural comic stars. The October issue presents two pictures of the film: One picture displays some kind of puppet standing on a disk of light, in the left-hand foreground the top part of a saxophone is seen, very likely an example of the film’s avantgarde aesthetics. The second picture shows a monkey’s tail and twigs or leaves, an impression of escape. A caption in between the pictures announces: “Monkey’s Moon, a POOL film in the Studio Films series by Kenneth Macpherson, which will be seen in England during the winter.” Next to the stills from Monkey’s Moon are pictures from Lachman’s Under the Greenwood Tree (a British International Sound film) and the new Sovkino film The Rails are Sounding. Then follow pictures of such avant-garde films as Gussy Lawson’s Ombres et Lumiers, Charles Dekeukeleire’s Impatience and Combat de Boxe, and some photos of the Wufku studios at Kiev. The last record of Monkey’s Moon in Close Up appears in the December issue and depicts a monkey from a bird’s eye camera perspective somewhere indoors. The still is included among other film stills from Metzner’s Achtung, Liebe − Lebensgefahr, from a rediscovered Bernhardt film, a British Instructional Film of Af-

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rican life, and Sovkino film pictures. Additionally, a still from a film by a young Russian director, who, the caption explains, had just graduated from the State School of Cinematography, and Oswell Blakeston’s I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside, the second POOL film of the year.

6.1.4 I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside – A Satire on ‘Intellectual’ Film Criticism Blakeston’s I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside, as I stated before, was destroyed in the Second World War. The Close Up issue of June 1929 supplies two stills from the film with the caption: “From I Do Love to be Beside the Seaside, a new POOL Satire by Oswell Blakeston, with music by Meisel. Editions Pierre Braunberger” (in between pages 48–49). Pierre Braunberger, who produced many avantgarde films, among them the first ones by René Clair, Luis Buñuel and Jean Renoir, was also the driving force behind Studio Film, which had distributed Monkey’s Moon on an international scale. Edmund Meisel was a film composer of some renown at the time, and had written the scores to Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October, Ruttmann’s Symphony of the City, and for other experimental film-makers.³³ The March issue of 1930 mentions that Blakeston’s Seaside was shown in Paris, in the French film club le Club de l’Ecran, together with other experimental films.³⁴ The first still from Blakeston’s film, in the June issue, is shot through bars and shows some rock formation in the back, which may be a mountain. The bars in front are out-of-focus and their shadows are displayed on the stone sill outside, while the rock formation in the back is clear. The second picture shows an indoor scenery: the back of a chair, what appears to be part of a ladder, and a little table or stool with a dotted cloth in front, and on top of it some child’s toy or maybe old iron in a horse-like shape, and a closed hand in the lower-right front. Here now the focal situation is reversed, the objects in the background are obscured and the ones in front clear, and the second shot by contrast stresses the technical device of clear and out-of-focus photography. An-

 See for example Werner Sudendorf (ed.), Der Stummfilmmusiker Edmund Meisel (Frankfurt a. M.: Dt. Filmmuseum, ).  Blakeston’s film was shown in the context of “une séance spéciale de critique parlée avec projections, sur ‘l’Avant-Garde’: ‘Divers films furent projetés et discutés avec passion, à savoir: La Maison Ensorcelée, […] Au Bord de la Mer de O. Blakeston, Marche des Machines de Deslaw, Entr’acte de René Clair, Rhythmes d’une Cathedral, par Landau!’” (Close Up : (March ): ).

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other still, in the December issue of 1929, is very similar to the earlier indoor one, displaying the same objects, only from a different angle and with the addition of some light coloured cloth or canvas in the background. The title of Blakeston’s film is taken from a famous Edwardian music hall song, written and composed in 1907, and the ditty already pits frothy popular entertainment against avant-garde experimental art. Usually Edwardian culture was very much what modernists wanted to distance themselves from, but Blakeston apparently did not share this bias, and he even wrote a cookbook on Edwardian cuisine which he dedicated to Bryher.³⁵ The title appears to be satiric in the humorous line of P.G. Wodehouse. Blakeston himself said about his film that it was “something of a spoof on the pretentiousness of ‘intellectual’ film criticism” (quoted in Dusinberre 1980: 68). A contemporary reviewer described Seaside as “a brilliant and amusing commentary on the technical devices of many wellknown producers of films” such as Dulac, Man Ray, Leni, Dreyer and Eisenstein and records “an airy thread of story” involving a typist (Mercurius 1930: 341; also quoted in Dusinberre 1980: 68). Using the examples of stills, the same review explains the various film technical devices and demonstrates how Blakeston satirises them. Among these stills is the second one from the June Close Up issue, on which Mercurius comments: Fig. 5. – This scene, in the manner of Man Ray, the producer of Emak Bakia, Etoile de Mer, etc., illustrates the use of partial obscuration to give interest to ordinary objects. Mr. Man Ray alternates clear and obscure photography to maintain a level of interest in a sequence of scenes of alternating interest in prosaicness. (1930: 341)

The choice of banal objects in an arrangement of no perceptible aesthetic merit whatsoever reduces the technical device to absurdity. Mercurius includes another still that further demonstrates Blakeston’s satirical yet good-humoured jollity in exaggerating avant-garde film technical devices. The still shows a human backside and a plain stool on which the backside seems about to sit down, along with part of a plain wall and a segment of banister. The right buttock falls into the very centre of the shot. Mercurius explains: Fig. 1. – The danger of the unintelligent use of the well-known technical device of isolating a part of a figure to give emphasis to a significant movement, to raise a mundane action to an epic plane, is illustrated here by what the producer of the film has called an “epic posterior shot” (1930: 341).

 Edwardian Glamour Cooking: Without Tears (London: Hugh Evelyn, ).

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Blakeston’s film superbly documents how Pool were anything but zealotic purists of avant-garde aesthetics. They did welcome avant-garde experiment, but they were just as anxious to examine it critically, point to its lack of function, and reveal what happened when it deteriorated into non-sensical ‘art’ convention. Most of all, they could and make fun of it, which testifies to the priority given to amusement and entertainment in their concept of art. After Seaside, Blakeston continued to make a film together with Francis Brugière. Their Light Rhythms, an experimental abstract film of rhythmic design, was shown 17 February, 1930 at the Avenue Pavilion in London. Close Up advertised the film using illustrations in its issues and presented an article by Blakeston on the film.³⁶ The film was an experiment in light and movement and “consisted of static designs in cut paper over which various intensities of light were moved” (Dusinberre 1980: 68). Brugière and Blakeston’s abstract was reminiscent of Richter’s Rhythmus (1921–1925) series and Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1924), but “stills suggest a more complex surface of light and shadow” than do the earlier experiments (ibid.). The avant-garde innovation of Blakeston and Brugière’s film, in contrast to the absolutes by Richter and Eggeling whose avant-gardism consisted of their abstractness, was that it was not the abstract objects that moved, but rather that their ‘motion’ was created by the movement of light only.

6.2 Borderline: Happy Dream and Violent Passions or “Two Loves I Have of Comfort and Despair” 6.2.1 History and Historical Context of Borderline 6.2.1.1 The History and Reception of Borderline Borderline was composed about June 1929 and finished a year later, in June 1930 (Macpherson, “As Is” 7:5, 293). It was shot in 1930, from March/April until June, at Lake Geneva in Switzerland, on the premises of Maison Riant Château (Pool’s residency prior to the completion of Kenwin) and Aigle Station.³⁷ Until the recent

 Four illustrations of Light Rhythms appeared in Close Up (March ) and two pictures in the following April issue, while Blakeston’s article appeared in the March issue (–).  According to Anne Friedberg, Borderline was shot – March,  (: ). Cosandey offers even more extensive information on the shooting location, listing Lutry at Lake Geneva, Montreux-Territet, the region of Chaux, the surrounding of Les Avants and the Rhône-plane, here in particular the train station of Aigle, the waterfall of the Pissevache, and the bridge and castle of St. Maurice (: ).

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discovery of Monkey’s Moon, it was the only Pool film to have survived complete. Three copies have been recovered so far, one lies in the British Film Institute in London, one in the George Eastman House in Rochester, close to New York, and one in the Cinémathèque Suisse in Lausanne, near Zurich.³⁸ In 2004 the Cinémathèque Suisse released the film on DVD and the BFI followed shortly after, adding a newly composed Jazz score to the film, so that it is now easily available.³⁹ Borderline was first shown on 13 October 1930, at the Academy Cinema in London, then on 27 November 1930 in Brussels, at the “2. Congrès International du cinéma indépendant,” at a ciné-club in Catalonia in January 1931, and on 25 April 1931 in Berlin at the Rote Mühle.⁴⁰ While Friedberg limits the screenings to these four (1998: 220), Debo documents, based on research in the archives at the Beinecke Library that holds the collection of the Bryher and H.D. papers, that Borderline was presented in art houses and independent cinemas or film societies all over Europe: in England, France, Germany, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Spain, Holland, and Denmark. Bryher even claimed, in a letter to film critic Thomas Cripps in 1968, that it was shown “in thirty or four[ty] cinemas” (Bryher Papers, quoted in Debo 2001: 380); however, this claim can no longer be verified since Bryher herself burnt the evidence during World War II as a means of protection (ibid.). Pool’s film against racism was never shown in the United States, probably, as Friedberg and others have suggested, due to American miscegenation policies at the time. Pool did, however, attempt to confound these policies but Borderline was seized by US customs in October 1931 (Friedberg 1998: 220; Debo 2001: 380). In the late 1970s prints of the film were rediscovered in Switzerland and America, while in the 1980s, according to Michael O’Pray, there was “a flurry of interest” in the film.⁴¹ In the February of 2007 Borderline was shown again in the Retrospective section at the Berlinale. Macpherson’s long underrated film is

 The London copy differs in that the credits present the title “Borderline” with a triangle painted white on black, thus depicting the triangular relationship from the film; also the London copy is  min., the Rochester copy only  min., the Suisse copy even  min.  Interestingly, the BFI DVD restoration is based on the Rochester copy. More recently Borderline has also been included in a DVD collection of Robeson’s films: Paul Robeson: Portrait of the Artist (New York: The Criterion Collection, ).  Borderline was presented in Germany by the “Deutsche Liga für unabhängigen Film” in a double feature with the experimental film La Coquille et le Clergyman by Germaine Dulac (France, ), an experiment in psychoanalytical film and a film that had been reviewed in Close Up. Bryher mentions the first German showing of Borderline at the Rote Mühle and the double feature with Dulac in her article “Berlin, April ” in Close Up : (June ): .  O’Pray accounts for this “flurry of interest” pointing to the articles of Friedberg, Dusinberre and Cosandey. Cf. “Borderline,” Art Monthly  (May ): .

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now regarded by some as “the one outstanding British avant-garde film of the period” (Wollen 1993: 39; also quoted in Street 2009: 154). After its initially unsuccessful reception, Close Up had once predicted: Do you give critics three or four years to catch up with Borderline? The Filmligia of Holland has presented Borderline. After London, Glasgow. Even if they don’t like Borderline they seem to want to see it. Borderline promotes Discussion Thought AND (among the initiated) ADMIRATION.⁴²

It has taken half a century, instead of three to four years, for critics to catch up with the film and recognise its avant-garde quality and historic significance. Friedberg acknowledges that “the cinematic alliance of Eisenstein’s theories of the intellectual montage of overtones and Sachs’s Freud-derived theories of the figurational processes of the unconscious” (1980–1981: 136) shows an impressive ambition on Macpherson’s part. She comes to the conclusion that the film is “the product of a rare synthesis [capturing] the integration of two seemingly separate theoretical traditions, the montage theories of Eisenstein and the speculations on the cinema spectator initiated by Hanns Sachs” (ibid. 137–138). In its time, the German magazine Lichtbild-Bühne was among the few to grasp the essence of the film when it stated that “Macpherson does not present the action of the melodrama caused by jealousy as a real event” but points to its symbolic expressionism.⁴³ Macpherson himself had emphasized the importance of suggestion in his film, explaining in one of his Close Up editorials that “suggestion dominated Borderline. Borderline’s suggestion […] was of conflict, of

 Inserted in the section “Comment and Review,” Close Up : (March ): .  “Macpherson gibt die Handlung des Eifersuchtsdramas nicht als reales Geschehnis […] sondern er setzt minutiös aus Einzelstudien von Gesten den Ausdruck seelischer Zustände.” The review of Borderline is included in the column “Psychologische Experimente im Film,” which comments the screening at the “Rote Mühle” in Berlin (no. , Berlin, . . ): n. p.

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mental wars, of hate and enmity” (“As Is” 7:5, 294). In the same editorial he defended his film against the charge of obscurity, claiming that “the film […] is life, and breathes with the breath of life.” Furthermore, Borderline was itself life and as life was never simple and completely comprehensible nor was his film (ibid. 296). Borderline is a full-length avant-garde movie of about 61–81 minutes.⁴⁴ Kenneth Macpherson wrote the script, was cameraman, and directed the film. Like his earlier films, it was shot with a Debrie camera, a hand-cranked camera that allowed for great flexibility, on 35 mm film.⁴⁵ A length of more than sixty minutes was unusual for an avant-garde film at this time as such films were often only six to ten minutes long. Also, Macpherson’s emphasis on the dramatic element was atypical for an avant-garde film; at the time when Borderline was produced, many avant-garde films were abstract films that concentrated on moving geometrical forms. While some elements of the movie appear outdated, such as the focus on the dramatic and the preference for silent film, other elements, such as the fragmentation of the story and the avant-garde aesthetic are characteristically experimental and modern, not to mention Macpherson’s own “clatter montage,” and the issue of racism as a subject matter for the medium film which was considered very avant-garde at the time. As to film technique, Borderline was and is considered strongly influenced by Eisenstein’s montage and Pabst’s psychological realism.

6.2.1.2 State of Research Anne Friedberg has probably written most extensively on Pool’s film productions and Borderline,⁴⁶ but there are also the early studies by Deke Dusinberre (1980)

 Cosandey talks of  minutes (: ), on the varying lengths of the different copies compare footnote . Reportedly, Borderline was originally , ft. See Close Up : (September ): .  H.D. mentions the camera in her “Borderline Pamphlet” (quoted in Scott : ). Macpherson’s camera was a Model ‘L’ for studio work (Macpherson, “Meisterstück” , see also the photographs of Borderline in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection). This model was still hand-cranked, with a cranking speed indicator. The Debrie was at one time the most popular European made camera, famous users include Murnau, Eisenstein, and Riefenstahl. Cf. “Film Cameras,” Internet Encyclopedia of Cinematographers (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Albert Steeman, –). (accessed  August ).  “Fragments De Films Pool –” (); “Approaching Borderline,” Millennium Film Journal // (Autumn/Winter –): –; “The Pool Films,” H.D. Newsletter :

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and Roland Cosandey (1985), while Thomas Cripps (1977) mentions the film in his book on Blacks in American film.⁴⁷ The aspect of race and psychoanalysis has been scrutinised by Jean Walton (1997, 1998).⁴⁸ On the performance and person of the film’s lead performer, Paul Robeson, see Richard Dyer (1986), Martin Duberman (1989), and Scott Allen Nollen (2010).⁴⁹ Andrea Weiss (1992) paid attention to the visual representation of lesbianism and the figure of the manageress in the film.⁵⁰ The most recent studies are by Kimberly Bernstein (1999), Annette Debo (2001), Susan McCabe (2002), Keiko Nida (2002), Susan Friedman (2004), Tirza True Latimer (2007), and Judith Brown (2007). Brown’s study, which concentrates on the importance of hands in the film, is the only one that is more concerned with expression and dramatic aesthetics of the film than with race and/or the figure of Robeson.⁵¹

(Spring ): –; co-edited with James Donald and Laura Marcus, Close Up – ().  Dusinberre, “The Avant-Garde Attitude in the Thirties,” Traditions of the Independence: British Cinema in the Thirties, ed. Don Macpherson (London: BFI, ): –, repr. in Michael O’Pray (ed.), The British Avant-Garde Film  to : An Anthology of Writings (Luton: University of Luton Press, ): –; Cosandey, “On Borderline,” Afterimage  (Autumn ): –, repr. The British Avant-Garde Film, –; and Cripps, Slow Fade to Black (New York: Oxford UP, ): –.  “Nightmare of the Uncoordinated White-folk: Race, Psychoanalysis and H.D.’s Borderline,” Discourse : (Autumn ): –, repr. in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia UP, ): –, and “White Neurotics, Black Primitives and the Queer Matrix of Borderline,” in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham: Duke UP, ): –.  Dyer, “Paul Robeson: Crossing Over,” Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: Routledge, ): –; Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York, London: The New Press, ): –, , , note  and ; Nollen, Paul Robeson: Film Pioneer (Jefferson, London: McFarland, ): –. Nollen’s account is largely an extensive summary of Borderline with some historical background information.  Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema (London: Jonathan Cape, ): –.  Bernstein, Modernism Goes to the Movies: T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and H.D. (Diss. Temple University, , Anne Arbor: UMI, . A), this study includes a section on H.D.’s involvement in Borderline; Debo, “Interracial Modernism in Avant-Garde Film: Paul Robeson and H.D. in the  Borderline,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video: QRFV : (): –; McCabe, “Borderline Modernism: Paul Robeson and the Femme Fatale,” Callaloo : (): –; Nida, “Ekkyo no yuwaku to shinpan no kyofu: Modanisuto kan’no seijigaku/erotikkusu no kiken na kamihitoe, Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation : (September ): –; Friedman, “Border Forms, Border Identities in Borderline: Contemporary Cultural Theory and Cinematic Modernity,” Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe/ American –, ed. Marina Camboni (Rome: Edizioni di Storiae Letteratura, ): –; Latimer, “Queer Situations: Behind the Scenes of Borderline,” English Language

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6.2.1.3 Confusing Sensations in Black and White The title, Borderline, is already an avant-garde programme, capturing, on the one hand, the problem of racism or social marginalization and, on the other hand, the petty jealousies and emotional injuries of a triangular love relationship. In addition it suggests the importance of the ideas of psychology and their influence on the movie, although in 1930 “borderline” was not yet an explicit technical term of psychoanalysis but, as Friedberg has pointed out, was “attractive for its metaphoric potential” (1980–1981: 135). However, Bryher had already applied the term in her autobiography in relation to psychological disturbances.⁵² The story is about two couples, a mulatto woman (Adah) and a black man (Pete), and a white woman (Astrid) and white man (Throne), and the psychology of human (love) relationships. The woman in the black couple has an affair with the man in the white couple, this causes the white woman’s jealousy and who then makes sure the black man appears on the scene. This again causes friction between the two men and the two women. In the further development of the story, the increasing tensions between the white man and the white woman eventually lead up to a fight and the accidental death of the white woman. Her death results in the incrimination of the white man, who is eventually cleared and makes his peace with his black antagonist. The reconciliation is symbolised by the black and white handshake of the two rivals in love. Thus the film presents a moment of unity between black and white, which is only transitory though as in the end the black man has to leave town. It is not only interesting but important to note that every summary of what happens in the film differs somewhat from each other.⁵³ Is the reason for this, as most British critics claimed when it was first exhibited in England, because the film is too unclear, too incoherent and thus simply bad?⁵⁴ I will argue that it is symptomatic of the art of film, as Pool understood it, and that such differences in perception were intended by Pool. To them, film was to present bits and scenes of life, of true life-experiences, of human interaction in images, and, most important, of human emotion. Macpherson intended to visualise an individual’s emotional processing of these experiences. Film, to Pool, was thus not

Notes: ELN : (): –, and Brown, “Borderline, Sensation, and the Machinery of Expression,” Modernism/modernity : (): –.  Bryher speaks of people “who had gone temporarily over the borderline” and whom she was able to help “during and after the war” due to her being an amateur analysand (Heart ).  Compare the summaries in Debo (: ), Walton (: ), Latimer (: ), Brown (: ), Duberman (: ), Dyer (: ) and Cripps (:  f).  Macpherson reports that some of his English friends would avoid him after he had made the film (“As Is” :, ).

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a means of presenting images that lulled the spectator into some coherent makebelieve fiction and thus eradicate any creative self-participation on the spectator’s part − as they found to be the case in Hollywood productions − but, on the contrary, the image was to stimulate the spectator’s imagination, intellect and what is more emotional response, and to start their individual associations and thought-processes. Therefore, since each mind and soul may react to some degree differently to an image, the perception and idea of a film could, or most likely would, vary somewhat. Borderline thus presents a strongly fragmented, confusing narrative because it is composed of the individual emotions and mentalities of the different characters and their various perspectives. Intertitles are employed in a strikingly economic way in this film, as only twenty-eight title frames are inserted, some of them presenting only half an intertitle which is then continued in a following second frame, or completed by a film shot or scene. The film is reliant on expressive gestures, especially by focusing on hands, or by using cuts and montage, with quickly succeeding picture sequences alternating with long duration picture shots, inside and outside contrasts, shadows, light, and symbolism to depict the story. Through these means Macpherson is striving for a visual language that is internationally and universally comprehensible; therefore he limits intertitles that are reduced to one language to a minimum and falls back on the silent movie at a time when sound film, or rather talkies,⁵⁵ were already dominant and were, from a technical point of view, the more progressive form. Furthermore, the light and dark contrasts of the black and white film function symbolically. The white characters correspond with hectic pictures and scenes, and fast cuts, while the black characters are often depicted in long-lasting frames, that almost seem like stills, in a calm and serene manner – or so it appears at first. Yet, no such definite distinction holds throughout the film. While the Whites are predominantly connected with indoor scenes, the black man Pete in particular is often shown outside, in correlation with landscape and nature. Macpherson here draws on the medium of photogénie. Thus the Whites are associated with decadence (the bar room, alcoholic drinks) and hysteria, while the black man is associated with liberty, harmony, and due to his ostensibly natureloving disposition maybe also to a certain extent be related to a particular, romanticised primitivism. It is however a particular affinity to sublime nature,

 Macpherson, and Eisenstein too, differentiates between sound film and talkies, because the silent movies strictly speaking were not silent since they incorporated musical accompaniment and musical effects. Unfortunately there are no musical scores to Borderline or the other Poolfilm fragments, and it is uncertain if there ever were any, so that these films survive as truly silent movies only.

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the same as Robin’s affinity to the Celtic weather, which affects his compassionate sensitivity for mankind, or maybe even still more Peter’s love for the pristine idyll. It is by no means the racially coded primitivism of the black savage, usually mentioned by critical studies of the film, but instead the ‘noble savage’ within the nature of all humanity. The inside-outside, nature versus domestic space dichotomy has already been noted as a characteristic feature of the earlier Pool films, where it was completely devoid of any racial connotations whatsoever. Most of the nature shots in Borderline capture something sublime, and the montage of Pete’s black profile in the white clouds in fact presents a holy icon, and significantly this icon is black.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, this black man, despite the film’s superior visual presentation of him, in the end cannot prevail against the racism of the Whites and is ordered to leave the town. Numerous scholars have criticised the film’s presentation of blackness and its director’s and producers’ biased stereotypical ideas of black people as primitive, uncivilized and pre-human.⁵⁷ One of them has even maintained that the Robesons themselves found the film and “its racial dichotomy […] ridiculous and offensive” (Walton 1998: 412). It seems however highly improbable to me that Paul Robeson, a celebrated star by the time of the film’s production, would have participated in this enterprise, unpaid, if he had felt insulted. Eslanda Robeson does mention in a diary entry: “Kenneth and H.D. used to make us so shriek with laughter with their naïve ideas of Negroes that Paul and I often completely ruined our make-up with tears of laughter” (quoted in Duberman 1989: 131) and this quote has been constantly relied upon to ‘prove’ Pool’s limited success in the representation of race or even to suggest subtle racism on their part. What scholars omit is Eslanda Robeson’s prompt addition: “We never once felt we were colored with them” (ibid.) – which rather accentuates the laughter and puts a different spin on the meaning.⁵⁸ In fact, the Robesons seem to have felt quite comfortable and among friends with the Pool group and to have truly enjoyed their time at the set (ibid. 130 f). What is more, they actively contributed to the film, as Annette Debo has shown, and Borderline can be considered a collaboration of the Robesons and Pool, and thus of white avant-garde

 Michael O’Pray remarked something similar when he stated that Robeson “had a central almost iconic role in the film” (: ).  Cripps (: ), Dyer (: –), Latimer (: ), O’Pray (: ), Walton ( and : –) and Susan Stanford Friedman, “Border Forms, Border Identities in Borderline: Contemporary Cultural Theory and Cinematic Modernity,” Networking Women, – .  For two examples of such omission see Latimer (: ) and McCabe (: ).

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modernist and Harlem Renaissance artists. Therefore, when I speak of the filmmakers from now on this will include the Robesons too. Furthermore, even though I attribute the presentation of the mythic and heroic Pete largely to Paul Robeson’s shaping of the role⁵⁹ and the psychological ideas mostly to Pool in the analysis that is to follow, I want to emphatically stress that it is impossible to determine exactly who contributed what to this collaborative work of art. I would agree that a certain heroic primitivism, or maybe rather romantic idealism, is associated with the figure of Pete – not so with Adah though – and I will return to this shortly when looking at his myth-like quality. The problem may be that black and white, on the one hand, do have a symbolic, dialectic function, while, on the other hand, the black and white characters in the film simultaneously are humans of complex psychological depths and emotions, independent of their colour. Similar to Pabst’s film Jeanne Ney, which is not limited to the political issue of the Bolshevik revolution but centres primarily on the universal issue of human love and explores “the casual villainy” of humans (Macpherson, “As Is” 5:2, 86), Macpherson’s film is not limited to the political issue of race but, like Pabst’s films, is primarily concerned with the more general motivations of human passions. The four protagonists are thus not limited to their race but are shown in their psychological complexity. They are human individuals, given an identity by means of their names, and they present universal human psychological issues and human emotions. In contrast to most studies which argue that the black characters remain passive, deactivated and merely antithetical to the white characters or remain black stereotypes (Dyer 2004: 111–30; Cripps 1977: 211; O’Pray 1988: 36; Latimer 2007: 41.), I would claim that, on the contrary, the film develops individual black characters that move beyond their emblematic function. Despite their symbolic oppositions, Black and White are shown following the same human psychology and are dominated by the same instincts and passions. Here Pool’s understanding of an anthropological universality comes to the fore. Studies arguing that the black man Pete is reduced to a stereotypical passive and sexually “feminized racial other” (McCabe 2002: 648 and 2005: 174) completely ignore the role of the black woman. Adah has an affair with the white man Thorne and thus actively disrupts her conventional male/female relationship and becomes part of a triangular constellation, along with Thorne. Their psychology works vice versa and transgresses racial, as well as gender, boundaries. Re-

 Macpherson believed that Blacks should make their own films, since they alone could truly present blackness (“As Is” :), so it is very likely that he allowed Robeson to shape his role by himself.

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spectively, the black Pete and the white Astrid are ‘cheated’ on similarly by their partners and are drawn into a triangular relationship constellation. Here the filmmakers’ use of a black and white antagonistic symbolism stops, Blacks and Whites leave their ascribed symbolic level and become authentic human beings, confirming that in a moral sense Blacks and Whites do not differ from each other. As to film aesthetic aspects, this shows Macpherson’s combination of symbolic and psychological realistic elements. In his psychological realism he is close to Pabst and his film is also concerned with the ‘casual villainy’ and corruptive passions of normal human beings.

6.2.1.4 An International Interracial Artistic Collaboration – Pool and Paul Robeson, the Black Apollo of the Harlem Renaissance It has to be stressed, particularly considering the charge of primitivism associated with the figure of Pete that is so often raised, that Paul Robeson’s status as a powerful intellectual plays a vital role. He had joined the Harlem scene, with its race-conscious, sophisticated intelligentsia, early on, during his student days, and became acquainted with several musicians, writers and poets of the Harlem Renaissance, joining gatherings at their homes, and befriending the poet Claude McKay. Among the artists Robeson became acquainted with were such acclaimed personalities as James Weldon Johnson, his brother and musician Rosamond Johnson, and the black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois, whom Robeson admired immensely. J.W. Johnson and DuBois are said to have had the greatest influence on Robeson’s thinking (Robeson, Jr. 2001: 44 f). He had also met with the avantgarde expatriate community in Paris (ibid. 96). Art, to Robeson, just as for Pool, should work for the benefit of humanity and to improve the human condition (ibid. 174), which did not mean that it was to “serve primarily as a tool” to advance some particular political or social cause (ibid. 177). The choice of Paul and Eslanda Robeson for the black characters in the movie was to a certain extent already a choice that associated the film with black activism. For Robeson was not only a renowned singer and actor of the Harlem Renaissance but also a black Civil Rights activist and thus pointed to the problem of racism by the public persona he had already established. The choice of the Robesons at the same time reveals once more the artistic network connections of Pool to the international avant-garde, in this case to AfricanAmerican modernity. Macpherson had been interested in the Harlem Renaissance for some time prior to Borderline, and had travelled several times to New York, together with Bryher, before, years later, moving there “to be part

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of the Harlem scene” (Debo 2001: 373).⁶⁰ Moreover, aside from writing on black film in Close Up, he contributed an essay endorsing a black film union in Nancy Cunard’s landmark anthology Negro (1934)⁶¹ and he had tried to win critical support for Close Up from Langston Hughes, Walt White, an influential member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), and Elmer Carter, editor of the acclaimed African-American magazine Opportunity. ⁶² He was at least successful with Elmer Carter, who did contribute an essay on “Negro Motion Pictures” for the August 1929 issue. Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, whom Macpherson had contacted for cooperation, some years later wrote a poem on the struggle and pain of life, and the annihilation of borders in human existence, which he titled “Border Line.”⁶³ In his poetry, the black poet articulated the issue of racism and human pain and suffering, and was concerned with human emotions. To Macpherson, Black American culture apparently meant energy and joy. It emphasised a power of endurance and survival, of love and laughter, and a will to live, as the only efficient response to the painful condition of life (as maybe most explicitly expressed in jazz) – an attitude that Macpherson could relate to. In this, black modernism was contrary to the white Modernism of, for example, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. ⁶⁴ Love as a solution for surviving the pains of life also corresponds with Macpherson’s own emphasis on greater love and reconciliation, and with the acceptance of pain and loss as presented in his earlier novels Gaunt Island and Poolreflection. Annette Debo was the first to recognise in Borderline a collaboration of black and white modernity. She has successfully challenged orthodox concepts of modernism with its canonized accounts that “create monolithic modernisms as either exclusively white or black” (2001: 371) by looking at the collaboration

 Eslanda Robeson recorded in , in notes on a brief stay in New York, that she had had a visit with Macpherson. Cf. Paul Robeson, Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey, – (New York et al.: John Wiley, ): .  “A Negro Film Union – Why Not?,” Negro: Anthology Made by Nancy Cunard –, ed. Nancy Cunard (New York: Negro UP, , repr. ): –.  According to Cripps, Pool Films had “attempted to enlist the American Negroes Langston Hughes, Walter White, and Elmer Carter” in , but Hughes had stalled (: ).  “I used to wonder / About living and dying− / I think the difference lies / Between tears and crying. // I used to wonder / About here and there− / I think the distance / Is nowhere.” Cf. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The Poems –, ed. Arnold Rampersad, vol.  (Columbia, London: University of Missouri Press, ): .  Judith Brown has contrasted the ‘numbness’ of Eliot’s “Prufrock” and its ‘bleak conclusion’ with Pool’s “alternative response to the losses occasioned by modern life through sensation” (:  f).

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of Macpherson and the Robesons in Borderline, and defining it as an interracial production. Macpherson’s aim, in line with Pool’s general attitude, was to give a presentation of the African-American that stood in direct opposition to those of Hollywood productions, winning Paul Robeson and his wife for the project to aid this ambition. In 1929 Macpherson had written: “Now take (since everybody else does) the negro film and decide whether you think international cinema is here going to mean a thing when a white man directs, no matter how charmingly, blacks so that they must always seem to be direfully dependent on white man’s wisdom” (“As Is” 5:2, 87). He and the other Pool members were eager to include the Robesons in the process of the filmmaking, corresponding back and forth before their arrival in Territet and after they had left, to discuss the scenario, acting, shooting, etc. (Debo 2001: 377 f). Close Up’s issue of August 1930 even states: “Borderline, the first film made by Paul Robeson” (130–131) – and Pool surely knew of his first film part in Body and Soul, so it seems safe to assume that this referred to his role in the production of the film, and not his appearance in it. Furthermore, in his Robeson biography Duberman includes a photograph of Robeson on the set and behind the camera, another demonstration of his active participation in the making of the film. Although Macpherson stressed that Borderline was an English film and H.D. insisted on Macpherson’s ‘authorship’ throughout her Borderline pamphlet, the film can be seen as a mutual work of avant-garde film art by African-American and white European artists – and an international and interracial production. Robeson already had a reputation as a black actor, having played Othello – in fact he was in between performing Othello in London⁶⁵ and O’Neil’s The Emperor Jones in Berlin when taking the short stay at Territet. His first part in a film, as mentioned, had been in Oscar Micheaux’s all-black production Body and Soul (1925), “a film that aimed at exposing corruption within the African-American community” (Debo 2001: 376). He had also played popular stereotypical white images of ‘the negro’ in Voodoo (1922) and Plantation Revue (1923). Other roles to follow were in the musical Show Boat (1928) and in the film Sanders of the River (1935)⁶⁶ – roles that Robeson himself declared to be caricatures of Blacks of which he was sick (Robeson, Jr. 283). Borderline gave him a chance to form

 In London, he was to be the first black man portraying Othello on the English stage since the mid-s (Robeson, Jr. : ).  For a detailed account of how Robeson was tricked into the production of Sanders of the River, whose message was changed while editing the film to justify imperialism, see Duberman (: –). Robeson reported: “It is the only one of my films that can be shown in Italy and Germany, for it shows the Negro as Fascist States desire him – savage and childish” (quoted in Duberman : ).

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the character he played and to exercise some control over the production, since it was no commercial arrangement, and Macpherson felt congenial about his contribution. Apparently Robeson even had a considerable voice in the production viz. its preliminary plans, since Macpherson acknowledged a few years later that he had originally planned a film about the lynching mentality and black sharecroppers in the South, but that Robeson had been strongly adverse to this idea: Paul Roberson, who later made a film with me, and at that time was discussing a theme, said firmly, “Nothing in the nature of cotton-picking!” And I was – rather sorry! For Robeson was seeing something like a darky version of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer glee-singing ‘shorts,’ […] while I was visioning the captivating ways of lynch-made farmers and their victims. (“A Negro Film Union” 336; also quoted in Debo 2001: 379).

Many of the academic studies analysing the presentation of race in the film seem, ironically, to reduce Pete as well as Robeson to his ‘blackness,’ ignoring that the latter was an artist of international repute. Robeson, on the other hand, understood himself first and foremost as an artist, and his son’s biography of him consequently begins with a sentence on the soul of the artist.⁶⁷ Robeson himself declared: “I found that on the stage, whether singing or acting, race and colour prejudices are forgotten. Art is the one form against which such barriers do not stand. And I think it is through art we are going to come into our own. […] The art form is the one in which I am myself” (quoted in Robeson, Jr. 2001: 88). According to his definition, Robeson himself was an art form and that is also what he represents in the film. Reading his biographies, one learns that he wished to use his art and his power as an artist to better the condition of his people, to change the perception of Blacks by Whites and to present them in such a way that people, prejudiced Whites included, felt the humane and fascinating qualities of Blacks: [I]f the audience, moved by […] his [the Negro’s] struggles, his fate, by his emotions – a Negro’s emotion – admire and then pity this Negro – they [the audience] must know that he is human, that they are human, that we are all human beings together. If I can make them […] weeping because a Negro has suffered – I will have done something to make them realise, even though subconsciously and for a few moments, that Negroes are the same kind of people they themselves are, suffer as they suffer, weep as they weep; all this arbitrary separation because of colour is unimportant – that we are all human beings. (quoted in E. Robeson 1930: 96)

Robeson’s words sound like a blueprint for the figure of Pete in Borderline.

 “Paul Leroy Robeson’s soul as an artist was formed in a journey through life that began on April , ” (Robeson, Jr. : ).

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By means of his art Robeson hoped to capture and express universal, allhuman emotions, to bridge race differences, and to advance humanitarian understanding by means of exactly these unanimous emotions. He hoped to unite mankind into a universal brotherhood and much of this aspiration may have been influenced by his leftist predisposition and the idea of internationalism.⁶⁸ Probably even more so, Robeson’s dream of human brotherhood was rooted in his religious upbringing and in his personal history, being the son of a preacher and ex-slave. Looking at his artistic statement cited above, one will detect an echo of Frederick Douglass and an anticipation of Martin Luther King. Apart from religious or any leftist political concepts, Robeson’s emphasis on a conciliation of man and his ideas of a connection of art with humanitarian concerns, as well as his belief in the humane potential of art, seem perfectly in line with Pool’s. They will sense that we are moved by the same emotions, have the same beliefs, the same longings – that we are all human together. […] Now, if I can teach my audiences who know almost nothing about the Negro, to know him through my songs and through my roles […] then I will feel that I am an artist, and that I am using my art for myself, for my race, for the world. (ibid. 97–98)

I suggest that that is a need for Robeson’s artistic goal to be taken into account when studying the figure of Pete, who also has to be understood in terms of a black artist’s creative realisation of his idea. Many scholars writing on Borderline have criticised Macpherson’s valorising but racially stereotyped presentation of his black character, and Jeffrey C. Steward has criticised Robeson for his own racially complicit stylisation (1997: 90– 101). I cannot and do not want to go into a discussion of these racial discourses here. However, I find it striking that, to this day, such a valorising representation as of Pete in Borderline when embodied by a white man will be linked to his gender but when embodied by a black man will ultimately be linked to his ethnicity – and thus will be discussed in terms of the respective discourses. I am here interested in the way Pool and the Robesons counterpoised representations of Blacks in popular culture and commercial film, especially those by Hollywood, and in what way Borderline is a collaboration of a group of artists, rather than the work of one. Since the figure of Pete was designed to change popular white perceptions of ‘the Negro’ at that time, Pete needed to fascinate and impress. The filmmakers

 Even though Paul Robeson, Jr. emphasizes, right at the beginning of his biography of his father, that he “was never a communist” (: xiii).

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wanted to present a hero and to fashion a black icon; Pete was their film version of the Harlem Renaissance’s ‘New Negro.’ In a time when Paul Robeson, a celebrated star, having been invited to a white man’s party, was told by the doorkeeper to use the servants’ entrance or had to be escorted by his host,⁶⁹ Borderline must have been explosively progressive and the act in the film of a black man knocking down a white man must have been outrageous at the time. One of the film’s most effective devices was to reverse common stereotypes, presenting Whites as self-indulgent and instinct-driven, and Blacks as upright, serene, and full of integrity.⁷⁰ The violent act of the black Pete against the white racist must have agreed very well with Robeson, maybe it was his idea, for he stated once to his son, referring to a remark he had once made about his attack on a white halfback in a football game, that he believed “[i]t’s good and healthy in today’s America for white people who view me as their favourite Negro to understand that I might deliberately kill a lyncher” (quoted in Robeson, Jr. 2001: 23).

6.2.2 The Symbolic Language of Borderline 6.2.2.1 Dream Symbols and Key Figures of the Imagination: The Mythic Hero Pete and the Witch The character of Pete in Borderline is an impressive figure at first sight: He is introduced to the viewer in profile, broad muscular shoulders and back, slightly turned away, a powerful physique, yet with a calm and friendly demeanour. Throughout the film, he is often presented in low-angle shots, which make him appear gigantic, and in harmony with nature and great natural forces such as mountains, rocks, and waterfalls, reflecting the terms “giant negro” and “earth-god” H.D. uses to refer to him in her Borderline pamphlet (quoted in Scott 1990: 112 and 111). In combination with the high, white clouds this imbues him with a divine quality. Pete is a symbol, embodying virtue while Astrid personifies sin.⁷¹

 In  in Wisconsin, when on a concert tour, he and Essie had been told in a hotel to use the side staircase instead of the elevator and to eat in their room (Duberman : ), in  Ida Diamond had escorted Paul up in the elevator personally because the doorman wanted him to use the service elevator (ibid. ), and in  he had been refused to enter the Savoy grill room in London (ibid. ).  See also Dyer, who states that “in Borderline racially black equals morally white and vice versa” (: ), and Cripps, who claims that “black [becomes] the symbol of virtue and white the incarnation of evil” (ibid. ).  Caption to one of the stills in Close Up : (August ): –.

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Figure 15: Giant Pete

However, as stated before, the persona of Robeson contributed its part to the production and particularly to the character of Pete. For one, Robeson was not only famous for being an artist but also for being an outstanding athlete. He had been a professional football-player before he became an actor. This, at least to some extent, accounts for the emphasis and camera focus on Pete’s physical strength, because the audience would see Pete and think Robeson. On the other hand, he was a celebrated theatre actor. In any case, he was a star, which was the modern version of a mythic hero or god.⁷² Robeson had not liked his role in Body and Soul, a split personality, part criminal, alcoholic, and dissipated preacher, and later he would be annoyed with the representation of the black man in Show Boat and Sanders of the River. Now, for the first time, he was given the chance to form a black character to his own liking, a strong, upright and heroic figure.

 Robert Segal, who has written extensively on myth and theories of myth, has shown how the modern star is a mythic hero or god. Cf. Segal, Myth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: UP, ): –. The thought is in this particular form only delineated in his Short Introduction, in his Hero Myths Segal examines exclusively the star Elvis Presley. On Roberson as a black star see Dyer ().

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It may very well be that it was, after all, Robeson himself who valorised his athletic black body in such an aesthetic manner. In 1925 the renowned photographer Nickolas Muray took pictures of Robeson, showing his nude body in the classic pose of athletes, there Robeson aligned his body to the aesthetics of the ancient Greeks and to classic art.⁷³

Figure 16: Robeson the Athlete

Moreover, Robeson dreamed of portraying black historic heroes and mythic kings. According to Debo, he wanted to play the part of the Haitian Emperor King Christophe and of the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II, as well as impersonate Toussaint L’Ouverture in Eisenstein’s production of C.L.R. James’s play, which was to be titled Black Majesty ⁷⁴ (2001: 376, 381). Some of the chapter headings of the biography written by his son tell their own story of Robeson’s longings:

 The photographs are in the Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, (accessed  January ), and some are also included in Paul Robeson, Jr.’s biography (: ).  The film never came about but several talks on the matter took place between Robeson and Eisenstein.

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“In His Glory,” “Seeker of Grace,” “The Power to Create Beauty,” “Giver of Grace.”⁷⁵ Then again, it was not Robeson alone who glorified blackness and strove to establish a link back to older and ancient black cultures, but this was a strategy found among various artists of the Harlem Renaissance, of whom Robeson was one. Many modern African-American artists joined their black culture to ancient black civilizations to transcend the image of the unrefined negro-slave descendant without history or lineage, and to thus bestow eminent pedigrees of sometimes mythic distinction to common African-Americans. Some such examples may be found in the earlier poems of Langston Hughes, who reconnects the black man not only to ancient history but to a legendary pre-historical age and a mythic unison with nature.⁷⁶ Perhaps H.D. is echoing her contemporary Hughes when she writes in her pamphlet that Pete is “like a personal dream, gone further into the race dream” and that “we see (with Pete) hill and cloud as, on that first day, created” (in Scott 1990: 122). Pete becomes representative of an early universal dream of all humanity. But Robeson did not appear in Borderline as a mythic king or hero, at least not regarding his apparel. Pete combined the ordinary with the mythic. He is a simple, common man, dressed in a tweed suit, white shirt, and a newsboy cap; it is his personal quality and his charisma that are mythic and heroic, and this is achieved by means of film technique and the association with sublime nature and its forces. Pete is also Paul Robeson for he is identically dressed; the Robesons provided their own clothes (Debo 2001: 378). Macpherson did send descriptions and sketches, but archive photographs of the Robesons show that the clothes they wore in the film are clothes that they wore also on other occasions. Paul would show up in London pretty much as in Borderline (Duberman 1989: illus. 35., with the addition of a tie in London), and wear his suit and cap when walking among the barricades in Republican Spain and singing to the Loyalist troops in 1938, as family pictures show (Robeson, Jr. 2001: 266–267 and Du “The Power to Create Beauty” actually is taken from a quote by Robeson, Sr. himself (quoted in Robeson, Jr. : ) and “Giver of Grace” rephrases one of his ideas.  In “Jazzonia” () a Harlem dancing girl is compared to the famous Ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra and in “When Sue Wears Red” () a common girl becomes “a queen from some time-dead Egyptian night,” and in his famous “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” () the speaker is associated to the Ancient rivers Euphrates and Nile and having witnessed times mythic as well as great moments in history becomes a symbol for black history and the collective psychology of the African-American. In “The Negro speaks of Rivers” Hughes writes: “I’ve known the rivers ancient as the world and older than the / flow of human blood in human veins / […] My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” Cf. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. , .

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berman 1989: illus. 55., 56.). Paul Robeson’s son confirms that his father “always did pursue his artistic career ‘as himself’; this was his secret weapon” (2001: 89), and H.D. uses Paul for Pete interchangeably in her Borderline pamphlet. Other than Jean Walton claims, H.D. does not “readily confuse […] him with the character he plays” due to being “unable to keep her focus on Robeson’s professional status as a conscious performer” (Walton 1999: 251) but exactly because of it. Last but not least, the strong association of Paul with his music, the spirituals, which he came to personify, must not be ignored – an association that is taken up in the film by Pete’s/Robeson’s photograph on the piano. That it was very much Robeson himself who fashioned the heroic image of the divine Pete can also be assumed from a caption to one of the film stills in Close Up (August 1930) showing Pete in profile, with a white rose behind his ear, and reads: “Paul Robeson enjoying his self-ordained canonization.”⁷⁷ Furthermore, some of the strategies revealing the black man to be morally or psychologically superior to the white man are reminiscent of Frederick Douglass’ famous Narrative. It would need supplementary analysis though to establish a connection between Robeson’s modelling of Pete and Douglass’ work in presenting the black man to a predominantly white audience. The hero figure in Borderline seems not unjustified, as Robeson himself did have a heroic personality, considering his life-long active engagement in civil and human rights activism and his commitment to international peace, which together with his leftist ideas got him blacklisted in McCarthy times and provided him with one of the largest and most unique FBI files (Duberman 1989: 564). A couple of years after Borderline, C.R.L. James found Robeson to be a powerful symbol of “the worldwide unity of progressive humanity” against fascism (Robeson, Jr. 2001: 312), and in 1926 Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant had written in the New Republic (March 3): “Paul Robeson is not merely an actor and a singer of Negro Spirituals but a symbol. A sort of sublimation of what the Negro may be in the Golden Age that hangs about him” (quoted in Robeson, Jr. 2001: 98). It is such a sublimation or symbol of the Golden Age ‘Negro’ that is employed in the film. Of course Pete’s mythic and divine quality is furthermore associated with a particular psychological quality, with harmony and serenity: Dream merges with myth and Pete, regarding a fair heaven far from the uncreated turmoil of that small-town café, says quite logically, ‘let there be light.’ Light has been, it is obvious, created by that dark daemon, conversant with all nature since before the time of white man’s beginning.” (H.D. quoted in Scott 1990: 122)

 Cripps even claims that “Paul Robeson […] would spend the rest of his decade-long career […] attempting to recapture the dense integrity of Borderline” (: ).

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“Daemon” must not be understood in its contemporary sense here but in its original ancient and pre-Christian meaning as a god’s activity (Homer) or ‘the voice of conscience’ (Socrates).⁷⁸ Pete as the creator of light becomes the personification of consciousness, while “the uncreated turmoil” stands for the chaos of unconsciousness. In this Pete is very far from any primitivism, in fact, the film reverses the conventional colour code of black and white. It is the Whites that are “shadows of white, are dark, neurotic” (H.D. quoted ibid. 112) while the Black is the “radiant figure” (ibid. 122). Pete is the beautiful appearance, the dream and as such ‘metaphysical comfort’ to man (Nietzsche). But Pete represents very physical human comfort as well. When Adah is feeling cold, drawing her jacket tighter around her shoulders, Pete enters the room with a can of petrol and lights the stove. Pete’s act not only suggests domestic warmth and comfort but himself becomes a symbol for human compassion and love, and by extension the dream of harmony and peace. In turn, Thorne, nomen est omen, and Astrid represent the nightmare of pain, violence, emotional turmoil and loss. In a technique similar to Pabst’s mood-enhancing colouration in Joyless Street, Pete radiates an atmosphere and feeling of comfort and warmth in this scene. Having a Black embodying this comfort to all mankind allows the spectator to intuitively side with the black man. By working on the audience’s natural feelings the film powerfully draws their sympathy and longing for the black man, and does so without relying on any intrusive dogmatic pronouncements. This natural feeling of sympathy and longing again contradicts the preconceived social concepts about Blacks and operates in opposition to it. Similar to “daemon,” H.D. uses her “earth-god” reference to Robeson to invoke a classical Greek sense that means a natural force or nature spirit in her Borderline pamphlet. Pete embodies the Apollonian principle, while the Whites in their Bacchanalian ecstasy, on the contrary, represent wild Dionysian lust and chaos. The Whites are associated with archaic rites, the brutal practices of the Bacchanal, while the black Pete is associated with a more ‘enlightened’ nature, not a cold rational but a warm and sympathetic emotional enlightenment, a consciousness of his self that provides him with self-security and stability. Pete embodies the Delphic gnothi seauton, he is “the Pythian,” whom H.D. reveres in her early poem on the medium film “Projector” in the first Close Up issue – which will be more closely discussed in the chapter on the magazine. He represents  That H.D. was familiar with this original meaning and here used it in this sense becomes obvious when consulting her work Hedylus, published in , in which Demion of Olympia (also called Daemon or Demon) is one of the main characters, who is also often referred to as God. (See the section on H.D.’s mythopoetic montages.)

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the clear forms of ancient art, the classic forms that are aligned with the aesthetic and symmetric or, in Sachs’ psychoanalytical-literary reading, the serenity of the middle-aged as against the aggression of youth. Pete represents a mood of calmness and contemplation that in Monkey’s Moon is symbolized by the book and reading person, while the joie de vivre of the dancing Whites in the bar would have to be compared to the animal joy of the wildly roaming monkeys outside. The black Pete symbolizes the principle of aesthetics, while the Whites represent the principle of (animal) passion. It appears that in reading primitivism into the figure of Pete, one falls once again into the trap of racial and academic discourses, finding what one has been accustomed to rely on, being provided with academically constructed categories and ideas of Modernism. As it had earlier in Poolreflection, the Dionysian principle reoccurs here, but not so much in the context of art but transferred to the social field and in the form of racist sentiment. While in the earlier novel the Dionysian élan vitale is still linked to elation, youthful naïveté and adolescent exuberance, it now becomes a feverish and dangerous intoxication, foreshadowing the violence and mob hysteria that eventually resulted in the barbarities of World War II. Pete seems to continue a concept that Macpherson had already implied in his earlier novel Poolreflection, to fuse mythical icon and human man. In his novel, Macpherson combined mythological concepts (Narcissus and Faun) with ‘real’ human personalities (Peter and Lex) and their psychological complexity to present plastic images of universal qualities for abstract psychological life and common human concerns. In the film, the black man Pete becomes transformed into an icon of majestic dignity, a mythic hero, akin to an ebony Apollo, Helios or Prometheus (since according to H.D. he bestows light). Thus Pete, idealized into mythic grandeur, rises above the other characters – a symbol of strength, heroism and serenity, and black superiority among the white instable neurotics. Pete represents sublimation, raising Adah up ‘into the clouds’ to him [0:17:25–0:18:55].⁷⁹ As a god-like figure, he is set somewhat at a distance from the imbroglio of the action, and is instead passive and in this way linked to the sublime grandness of nature and its gigantic forces, to trees, waterfalls, and the sky. At the same time, the mythic black giant is also intensely human and in his humanity becomes part of the ongoing psychological and social conflicts. For the hostile opponent of the mythic Pete, the filmmakers of Borderline decided on the old folktale figure of the witch with a broom for her attribute, appearing with and in flames, rather than using the figure of the contemporary Ku Klux Klan member to symbolise racist sentiments of hate and suggest the lynch-

 All citations refer to the BFI DVD version.

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ings of their time. One might question why this was so, as a Ku Klux Klan member might have appeared quite as archaic in its hood but, nevertheless, would have been fixed in time and to the US American, and therefore the Southern, context in particular.⁸⁰ The folkloric figure of the witch, on the other hand, presents an archetype and thus has a universal quality, transforming the particular socio-political problem into a human psychological one. The witch appears several times, first in form of a witch-doll in Astrid’s room, beneath the three wise monkeys – probably symbolising a warning in this context – and, even more prominently, after Astrid’s death within a heap of her belongings in her empty room, facing Pete [1:05:22]. The old witch further takes on the appearance of an old ‘Victorian’ lady, dressed in a rather old-fashioned strait-laced style and thus implying certain reactionary social and moral codes. Later, an additional symbolic attribute is added to her dress, through an ermine stole. The ermine fur acts as an unambiguous symbol for a royal sovereign or, in a more abstract sense, institutional authorities – and it will be a gloved official hand that hands over the message ordering Pete to leave town. There is also something of the censor in the figure of the witch, which is again an official ruling organ that tries to uphold the ‘code of life’ and acts, in psychoanalytical terms, as a prohibitive agent.⁸¹ Consequently, the figure of the witch symbolises the witch-hunts and witch-trials of institutional powers and the collective’s superstition of racism rather than a single evil individual. The old witch with her folktale broom, her granny basket of vegetables, in her puritanical black dress and with her ermine stole being shown in the culminating scene in a montage and superimposition with flames and in conjunction with cheering violence,⁸² suggests medieval witch-hunts as well as the Puritan crucible, Klu Klux Klan lynchings and the Nazis’ racist ideology that was on the rise at the time of Borderline’s production already – foreshadowing its brutal proceedings. Thus the folklore witch in her ‘realistic’ old lady appearance, with her conglomerate of symbolic attributes, transcends time and history and becomes a psychological symbol for the senti-

 Remembering Robeson’s personal dislike for Macpherson’s originally Southern theme, it may just as well have been due to Robeson’s instigation that the film present timeless racism rather than a specifically Southern US one.  Hanns Sachs compared censorship to modern witch-trials in one of his Close Up contributions. See “Modern Witch-Trials,” Close Up : (May ): –. To Pool censorship was an instrument of patronizing the film spectators and denying them autonomy, as well as a destroyer of art, who had to be fought (see also the chapter on Close Up).  Granny with basket [::], Victorian dress, without stole [::], with ermine stole [::], broom and flames [::], and flames and men cheering violence [::– ::].

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ment of racism and “the mentality responsible for lynching” (Debo 2001: 372, my emphasis). The superimposition of the witch with the flames appears as a vision of the white racist (played by Macpherson⁸³) [1:00:30 f], who is knocked down by Pete because he has insulted Adah. The witch image is a dream-like montage of a witch-trial, which works in a similar way to ‘condensation’ in dreaming, joining the two components of witch and flames, signifying punishment and violence, into the expression ‘witch-trial,’ and expresses the white racist’s sentiment. It is thus a projection and takes the spectator “into the minds of the people in it [the film]” (Macpherson, “As Is” 7:5, 294). However, the old woman is encountered early on by the white racist, in a ‘realistic’ situation in the bar. In this scene, she is wearing the ermine stole for the first time, sitting at a table with the manageress (Bryher) watching coffee boiling-up in a coffee-maker and starting an ‘inflamed’ talk about Blacks – she is filmed through the flame of the coffee-burner [0:20:24] and an explanatory intertitle clarifies her thought further: “If I had my way, not one negro would be allowed in the country!” To consciously perceive and understand the conglomerated symbol with its various facets, echoes and allusions at first sight is quite impossible,⁸⁴ but even the most inexperienced spectator of this film will sense, will feel, the idea of gathering racist rage and persecution that is here suggested. Through the popular folklore image of the witch, the filmmakers wanted to capture and express a feeling, an emotion of a force destructive to humanity and human interaction. As with Pete, they chose an archetypal image to suggest universality, but in the case of racism they fell back to folklore for their key figure instead of drawing upon myth, to express a baser popular sentiment of common men, while reserving the more divine and heroic, or poetic, mode for the god-like figure of Pete. He is the radiant hero who represents consciousness and intellect, the spiritual principle in humankind, whereas the witch represents the unconscious and the darker passions or dark neurotic sides in human nature. The black Pete symbolises sublimation,

 Macpherson later wrote to the Robesons: “I am quite incredibly loathsome as the man whom Pete knocks out!” (Robeson Family Archive undated, quoted in Debo : ). In a Buster Keaton-like stunt, he goes over a table, taking a chair with him and collapses in a corner. Why Macpherson chose to impersonate the white racist (H.D. playing a white female one) is not known, neither his correspondences nor his published writings give information on this point (Debo : ).  The manageress extinguishes the flame of the coffee-burner, preceding the barmaid’s vehement objection: “Why blame the negroes…?” and thus emphasizing visually the barmaid’s verbal attempt to stifle the racist talk.

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the mythic transformation from human to divine. The witch, on the contrary, symbolises the more folkloric transformation from human to animal.

6.2.2.2 Why the Use of Intertitles When Speaking in Metaphors and Continuous Association? In her Borderline pamphlet, H.D. pointed to the essential importance of the art of drama to film. Drama performed action, involved the movement of the actors and in this was dynamic and alive (Scott 1990: 118). Similar to dream-work that ‘dramatised’ thoughts, in film as in drama abstractions became visible. Another method of dream-work was to visualise abstract thought through objects. Macpherson and his crew worked single objects into an elaborate and intricate network of symbolic or metaphoric meanings and thereby created a visual language free from national restraints. By briefly demonstrating here some of these objects and how they interlink to construct such a narrative showing Borderline’s use of symbolic language, one can also see the echo of this method in my previous discussion of the image of the witch. First, the objects can be differentiated into common objects of everyday-life, such as a telephone, a piano, a coffee-maker, a suitcase or a hat, on the one hand, and into clearly symbolic objects, such as a besom broom, an Ace of Spades from a pack of cards, an ancient dagger, an ermine stole or a white rose, on the other. Some of the common objects then attain a metaphoric meaning in their context or through the course of the film. In addition to the old lady, who first appears as a real character in the café and then is transformed into the infernal vision, holding a broom in the midst of flames, there is also the object of a witch-doll, with its typical pointed hat, in Astrid’s room. On the wall above this doll dangles an ornament, consisting of ‘the three wise monkeys’ presenting the pictorial maxim: “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” By their number the monkeys are symbolic, while in their biological significance they are animals and represent, according to Darwin, the prehumane state of mankind. In their significance within the works of Pool they are an internal reference to the earlier film Monkey’s Moon and Dionysian nature. Finally, through their juxtaposition with Astrid’s face, they denote the Dionysian passions of jealousy and hate. This shot was also included as one of the stills advertising Borderline in Close Up (June 1930). It links the sentiment of racism to Astrid – and it does so after the old lady’s inflamed racist talk in the café. Simultaneously, this shot provides the first suggestion of the folkloric witch, a suggestion which later is then linked back again to the old lady, when she appears with her broom in the fire. Afterwards, the witch will appear once more, facing Pete,

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when he is going through Astrid’s room [1:05:22], which has been cleaned out with her belongings stacked up on a table. Among these items are also the doll and the ashtray from the café, which appeared in the scene when Astrid uttered her first racist remarks. The room is thus a haunted space of the mind, stacked with ‘memories,’ and the nightmare of racism with which Pete is confronted. Pete’s hauntedness is further emphasised by his make-up dark eye rings. It is an apartment symbolic of a psychologically disquieted spirit: Pete has lost his peace and serenity, expressed by the soothing breathing space of nature. Another prominent symbol in the film is the Ace of Spades. Astrid is laying cards to herself [0:34:49], diamond over hearts, and on the table lies a diamond ace and a six of hearts. When she comes to the Ace of Spades, symbol of doom and death, she stops as the card terrifies her. The face of the card shows a centre spade with a white swan in its middle. Shortly after the fatal fight between Astrid and Thorne occurs and Astrid is stabbed to death. The net of associations, unfolding around this card of death, becomes more intricate. The ornament cardface of the centre swan within the spade is prominently brought to the spectators’ attention: The card in Astrid’s hand is shown in a close-up, then she puts it face down on the other cards on the table, only for it to reappear a moment later lying on the floor, Astrid steps on it and thereby prominently points at the spade and swan with her toe – literally pointing it out to the spectators. She discovers it and again her face expresses terror, picks it up, and places it on the card table, next to the dead stuffed seagull. Soon after this card incident, Astrid gives a melodramatic performance of the ‘dying swan,’ of “these little deaths we die,” as the caption to a still in Close Up explained. Her melodramatic performance is not merely an outbreak of her hysterics, but is also highly symbolic as it visualises her loss of Thorne’s love and the pain and disappointment always accompanying such a loss or ‘little death.’ It therefore becomes a universal image for the losses encountered in life and for life’s painful experiences. Astrid’s card incident is also linked to another realm. Preceding Astrid and her ill-fated cards is the scene of the men in the café playing cards. One triumphs with his Ace of Spade over another’s spade [0:34:46], a detail that will most certainly not be registered by the spectator, but that does constitute another link to the ‘subconscious’ structure of the narrative. Here also, in the midst of play and entertainment, the cards already imply doom and a change to a darker mood. There is moreover a transformation in mood from the socializing card game in the café to the reclusive laying of cards by Astrid in her room, and from her mood of ennui to doom. Even though the Ace of Spades in the café will escape the notice of the audience, Astrid’s Ace of Spade with the swan will not, being cut in repetitively and prominently ‘pointed at’ by Astrid’s foot.

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Preceding the scene of the card players in the café again is a shot of gambolling children in the street, which at first appear simply picturesque. Here too, the children outside are linked to the men inside the café by the act of their play, the playful mood that is going to tilt into mob-hysteria and aggression later on. Thus the playful horde of children in the streets could implicitly represent the card players and therefore, as a link in the dream-like structure of the film, even suggest the white mob and be associated with the mentality of lynching.⁸⁵ Earlier in the film, there is a scene of a boy with a water-bowl containing a little fish, and a cat (which is cut into the sequence of Pete tracing Adah through the labyrinthine streets of the little village); next to the boy, on the ground, there lies a little spade. The trivial everyday object of child’s play in this scene, that at best is noted unconsciously, reappears later in the narrative, assuming symbolic significance as the card emblem. There are also other less obviously symbolic objects of everyday life which psychoanalysis terms analogies and representations: The suitcase as an analogy for leaving, for example. First it is Eslanda who holds a suitcase in her hand, intending to leave Thorne. Later it will be Throne, who is carrying a suitcase when he is about to leave Astrid. Another such object is the bottle as a common metonymy for drunkenness; this object will find closer consideration in the next section, when looking at the cult of Dionysos. Yet another one of these apparently ordinary and inconspicuous objects, though less easily interpreted, is Eslanda’s hat. First she wears a ‘white’ hat with a black lined pattern; later, in the scene of escalating racism in the café, when she is insulted by a white man, she is wearing an all plain black hat [1:01:40]. Does the hat signify race? This is hardly likely, since Pete is always wearing a bright white shirt. More likely, the change in hats (accompanied by dark make-up eye rings) denominates the change in Adah’s mood, getting increasingly dark and threatening with the intensifying racist attitude and finally disrupting the harmony between Pete and Adah. In this way Adah’s dark hat also corresponds to Astrid’s black dress in the fighting scene. It is the Pabstian technique of suggesting mood and atmosphere, similar to the colouration in Joyless Street. There is also the ashtray in the café, that appears in the scene when Astrid is raging against ‘niggers,’ and which bounces when Astrid strikes her fist on the table. It is a simple, empty ashtray which reads “Eglisa” (i. e. Eglisau) along the margin and displays a stag in its centre, which is the municipal coat of

 In his sonnet “The Lynching” Claude McKay also includes “little lads” in the crowd around the lynched body as the next generation of murderous racists. Cf. Harlem Shadows: Poems (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Co., ): .

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arms of Eglisau. Thus similar to the “Lac Leman” poster behind the bar in the café, it is an ordinary object and a realistic bar attribute. However, this object reappears several times throughout the film and thereby assumes symbolic significance. First it reappears in the scene of the fight between Astrid and Thorne, as part of the montage, when the black ink spilling into the ashtray suggests the spilling of blood in this scene. Then it resurfaces once again in the following scene in the café, where it is placed on the counter of the bar, next to Pete. Now its contents of cigarette stubs and burned off matches, that in the preceding scene mingled with the ink (blood) possibly suggesting a stake or the burned offerings of a sacrifice, has attained symbolic significance. It will reappear once more among Astrid’s belongings, next to the witch-doll, having become a set symbol in the nightmare of racism facing Pete. Some objects are more ambiguous and difficult to place, and intentionally so according to the filmmakers (Macpherson, “As Is” 7:5, 296–298), since the suggestions and associations of the mind, its dream images, are similarly incomprehensible. In combination with the Ace of Spades with the ornament swan, over which it seems to tower, one might associate the seagull with doom and death, but hardly anyone would likely associate the stuffed seagull with a bygone Victorian era, as H.D. explains it in her pamphlet: “[L]ight and air, indicated in an inblown curtain, link to the Victorian abstraction of a stuffed dead sea-gull and thence, by swift flashes of inevitable sequence, to a weathered woman-face.” A face, H.D. continues to explain, that “beats through the film like the very swift progress of those wings, doomed it is evident, and already extinguished in this ‘borderline’ existence” (in Scott 1990: 111). Nevertheless, the stuffed seagull is a consistent repetition of the bird metaphor from Wing Beat. H.D. spoke in this context of the “bird-stuffers” that represented a conventional and devitalized art, which she opposed with the new and free art of the avant-garde that she compared to the flying of a life bird. Here the stuffed seagull symbolizes the Victorian past and the ‘devitalised’ fin de siècle woman.⁸⁶ What the spectator is more likely to associate the stuffed sea-gull with, whose feathers are blown by the wind just like the gauzy curtain and the blown away cards, is Astrid’s ‘fluttering’ nervous temper. Different from the context of Wing Beat, the wing beat of the flying life bird is now fused with the image of the stuffed bird to express the nervous quality of Astrid and also her décadence. Also difficult to recognise is Thorne’s symbolic poise of a lynched man, “posed as if a noose were dangling him from a

 On Astrid as a fin de siècle woman see also Carolyn A. Kelley, “Aubrey Beardsley and H.D.’s ‘Astrid’: The Ghost and Mrs. Pugh of Decadent Aestheticism and Modernity,” Modernism/modernity : (September ): –.

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floor” (in Scott 1990: 123) when Astrid curses him “nigger lover!” – but then, as H.D. claimed, the symbolic pose was to have “subconscious significance” (ibid., my emphasis). Nevertheless, it does strike the spectator as the pose of one being accused and is similar to Martin Fellman’s before the dream trial in Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul. More obvious due to its traditional nature is the flower symbolism: Pete’s white rose symbolises love, the pure and more spiritual love of the saints, while Thorne is associated with daffodils – also known as Narcissus – and thus with refused and selfish love, but also with a final cognition of self. The daffodils stand in Thorne’s room and are also part of the montage of the fighting scene, where they summarise in one symbolic image the preceding scene of Thorne refusing Astrid’s love which concludes with his turning his head away in rejection when she is pressing herself to his chest. The daffodils also link the personal struggle between Astrid and Thorne to the myth of Narcissus and thereby their individual condition and subjective emotion is transformed into a universal one – the universal sentiment of self-centred love as well as the one of unrequited love. Different in its use from the novel Poolreflection, the Narcissus symbolism in Borderline does not include an aesthetic concept of art but only signifies a self-centeredness of personality. More than connoting an anthropological constanta it here becomes an image of pathological narcissism. The racism of the Whites originates from their own personal problems and dissatisfactions, including disappointed love for example. ₪₪₪ It becomes obvious that Pool use film as a means of reviving language and dead metaphors. I have mentioned already the ‘inflamed’ and ‘inflammatory’ racist talk of the old witch, and the Ace of Spades ‘pointed out’ by Astrid’s foot. There is also the moment in the café, when the white racist, having been knocked down by Pete, ‘tastes blood’ and the Bacchanalian drinking in the bar becomes synonymous for the Whites’ ‘thirst for blood.’ The film opens with Astrid ‘flying’ to the phone, and later she is ‘flying’ to Thorne’s breast before, a moment later, ‘flying at’ him with the dagger.⁸⁷ A fight ensues in which Astrid ‘cuts’ Thorne, who has ‘given cheek’ or been ‘cheeky,’ severely hurting him and ‘drawing blood,’ before Thorne finally ‘stabs’ her. After having committed the cruel deed, literally her ‘blood is on him,’ he feels guilty and ‘wipes blood’ or ‘licks his wounds.’ The violent conflict of Astrid and Thorne, as well

 H.D. in her Borderline pamphlet also talks about the aptness of the phrase ‘flying upstairs’ for expressing a certain anticipation of mind (in Scott : ).

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as the ‘heated’ speech of the witch, can also be transferred to the personal level of common human interaction and everyday experience. Shortly before their fight Thorne ‘sharpens his pen’ with the dagger, insinuating thereby the fight of sharp, aggressive words with their power to fatally wound. The dagger is in this context a symbol for the tongue in its metaphorical sense, rather than a Freudian phallus symbol. Macpherson, with his motto to Poolreflection, placed himself in the tradition of Shakespeare, and here he revives Shakespeare’s metaphorical language transferring it into the modern medium film. Astrid and Thorne hurting each other with the ancient dagger are a modern day version of Shakespeare’s Benedikt and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, when Benedikt says about Beatrice: “She speaks poignards and every word stabs” (II, I, 231 f). It is the film visual expression of Peter’s metaphorical phrase, when he reproaches Lex for a verbal injury that his son had inflicted upon him: “And you, you venomous demon, knew where to stick your dagger” (Poolreflection 115). The son at one point complains to his father in reverse: “It stabs me when you talk like that” (ibid. 18). The hysteric Astrid, closely linked to the stuffed seagull with its wind-swayed wings, as already mentioned, ‘flutters’ throughout the film, or is ‘all in a flutter’, ‘causes a flutter’ (which later develops into a full-size storm) and even ‘flutters her eyelashes at’ Thorne, when reawakening from her melodramatic death performance in a final and desperate attempt to win him back. Pete, happily in love for most of the film, ‘is up in the clouds’ – H.D. even points to their dreamy quality by calling them Fragonardian and thus implying a happily erotic ‘pink’ quality. And as an Apollonian god Pete ‘has his head in the clouds.’ Only later will ‘the cloud of suspicion be hanging over him’ and his smiling ‘face fall’ accordingly. Many of these figurative expressions are not limited to the English language but work in other languages as well, and the mood or atmosphere associated with these images achieves this anyway rendering the pictorial language more international than an abstractly descriptive one. It also works more simultaneously than an intertitle (as do pictures, paintings or sculptures compared to written narratives) and more subconsciously, and therefore independent of an active intellectual effort. The pictorial metaphorical language is also truer to the nature of the medium of film, while at the same time Pool’s technique links this latest means of artistic expression back to the old, universal language of mankind. A remark by H.D. builds the bridge to Eisenstein when she states that: “Man’s first attempt at art was […] the famous ‘picture’ writing” and she believes that by means of film “the aim psychologically to be striven toward” is to “‘write’ our novels and plays in ‘pictures’” (in Scott 1990: 120). Borderline accomplishes this aim because it is “a sort of dynamic picture writing” (ibid. 123). Apart from this, it is much more fun in the same way that Shakespeare

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was and still is fun. Whoever experiences the fun of Borderline might find themselves exasperated with the many, page long intertitles in, for example, a Fritz Lang film. Another component of Borderline’s pictorial language is symbolic gesture and expression used to communicate feelings. Thus, hands appear in many ways in Borderline to express certain moods and emotions. There are hands clenched in agitation or anger, hands hanging lose in passivity or resignation, hands extended or offered as a sign of help, friendship, peace or consolidation, and hands clawed in hysterics or emotional pain, to name only a few. Perhaps most striking are H.D.s hands. In all the films by Pool, her long, veined and nervous hands and her dramatic expressionist gestures express a mood of emotional agitation. The ‘fluttering’ gestures of Astrid are thus symbolic of her nervousness. Macpherson had used hands and their gestures already in his novels to express certain emotional states. H.D.’s long, white and nervous hands, clutching and unclutching or tenuously moving about and expressing a mood of wretchedness, despair or hysteria appear already, for example, in Gaunt Island. ⁸⁸ Judith Brown, in her detailed study to the implementation of hands and their expressiveness in Borderline, forgets one of the most significant hand gestures in the film in her analysis, namely, the fist. The fist as a common gesture of anger or threat develops into a symbol of social outrage, violence and racism. H.D., in an early scene in the café, is hammering with her fist on the table so hard that the symbolic empty ashtray bounces on the table [0:12:39]. The corresponding intertitle links her hammering fist to her racist hostility, exclaiming: “They are niggers, my dear!” The scene recurs once again but in a varied form when the old lady in the café, sitting before the boiling coffee-maker, is expressing her racist sentiments [0:19:47]. This time the fist is shown for the first time in combination with a flame – the flame of the coffee-burner [0:20:24] –, and again the subsequent intertitle links the symbolic hand gesture to racism (“If I had my way…”). Then the fist ‘narrates’ or rather ‘dramatises’ the account of the rising heat of racist hostility against Adah and Pete, and of the mob spirit: The witch within flames striking the palm of her right hand with the fist of her left [1:00:52], an almost imperceptible, quick cut of another fist in the flames being inserted, then another cut to the white racist who insulted Adah being knocked down by Pete’s swift and hardly visible fist. Another cut to the worker and the bourgeois in the café cheering the violence, a cut to the struck down, bleeding racist who forms a fist. Then a cut to the bourgeois shaking his fist, fol-

 Elmo’s “long hands, white and desperate, unclutching from the table-cloth, became supplicants. They spoke her whole wretchedness” (Gaunt Island ).

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lowed by several cuts from bourgeois to worker, alternating between fists and angry, hate-distorted faces and terminating in a white fist being shaken in front of the “Eau de vie” poster picturing a black body in light rays [1:02:38] and flames leaping in a ‘clatter montage’ of fist and fire. Finally the shaken fist and the flames become one – symbols merging in a single visual expression of “hate and enmity” (“As Is” 7:5, 294).

6.2.2.3 The White Bacchantae and the Mentality of Lynching Myth symbolism becomes attached to the ostensibly ordinary act of drinking. Right from the beginning, there is a disparity between the joyful distribution of drink by the barmaid in the café and the alcohol excesses of Thorne. While the drinking in the café is connected to music and dancing, Thorne’s drinking goes hand in hand with aggression and violence. Now these two diverging aspects of drinking are, as stated, related to the symbolism of myth, i. e. the cult of Dionysos or Bacchus. Whereas the barmaid is a Dionysian figure of joie de vivre, Thorne is a Bacchantian figure of intoxication and frenzy. He is introduced to the spectator when he breaks a little white female statue when raging against Adah in the first scene, an act that foreshadows his killing of Astrid in their wild struggle later on. (In her pamphlet, H.D. supplies a further explanation when she compares Astrid to a marble statue, which would constitute the respective link.) Since the statue is in the likeness of Aphrodite or Venus, the Venus ‘gone to bits’ also indicates the break-up of his love-relationship with Adah. Macpherson by the way resorts here to a symbolism that is strongly suggestive of Eisenstein, who in his Ten Days that Shook the World had a plaster statue of Napoleon crash on the floor and break to pieces to symbolise the downfall of tyranny. Only with Macpherson Eisenstein’s political symbolism is transformed into an interpersonal one. Nevertheless, from the outset the cheerful bacchanal in the bar and Thorne’s heavy drinking, though contrasting, are set parallel by film narrative technique, since there often is a cut from one to the other, and as the action progresses the two intertwine increasingly until their individual symbolism cannot be clearly differentiated anymore. Probably the most obviously symbolic image of Thorne’s Bacchanalian orgy is the scene where a woman pours red wine straight from the bottle into Thorne’s mouth, while some other person is holding his head. The wine is running from Thorne’s mouth, spilling all over him and staining his white front shirt. This image is cut into the scene in the café, where the old lady is giving her inflammatory racist speech, constituting part of the barmaid’s speaking up in reaction to the old lady’s racism. The intertitles have her say: “Why blame the negroes …?” Another cut to the people in the café is inserted and then her intertitle con-

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Figure : Venus from Borderline

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Figure : Napoleon from Eisenstein’s Ten Days

tinues: “When …” being completed visually by presenting the image of Thorne’s Bacchanalian orgy, which reads as ‘it is the whites who cause the trouble’ or ‘it is the whites who indulge in excess’ [0:22:07–0:22:42]. Later, this scene of Thorne having red wine running out of his mouth will associatively recur when the white racist knocked down by Pete, has blood dripping from his mouth, which leads to racist outrage and a general ‘intoxication’ with lynching sentiments. While the symbolism of red wine as blood is obvious, the breaking of glasses and the spilling of drink, reoccurring throughout the narrative, is less obvious, but gives a more subconsciously symbolic, dream-like associative structure to the lynching mentality in the film. The contemporary sentiment of lynching, in Borderline, becomes fused with the mythic Bacchanals of blood-thirsty ecstasy and outrageous killings.⁸⁹ Thorne’s literally blurred vision, affected by an outof-focus camera shot, symbolises his ‘lost perspective’ as much as it takes the spectator into his diffuse mentality. Macpherson relies here upon a film technique that was used by avant-garde film-makers to achieve surrealist effects (e. g. Man Ray’s Etoile de Mer, 1928), but here Macpherson uses it in its biologically realistic function of vision blurred by alcohol intoxicated frenzy. The mentality of lynching and the excesses of the Bacchanal also come together in the symbolically highly charged poster on the wall in the café, when

 Nietzsche, in his The Birth of Tragedy, had similarly judged those feasts of the Dionysian barbarian that lacked the Apollonic: “none other than the wildest beasts of nature were unleashed here to the point of creating an abominable mixture of sensuality and cruelty which has always appeared to me as the true ‘witches’ brew’” ( f). Note that Nietzsche as well refers in the context of the Bacchanal to witch imagery. In , H.D. would take up the image of the Dionysian feast in a more ambivalent way in the “Choros Translations: From The Bacchae” of her Red Roses for Bronze. In the title giving poem “Red Roses for Bronze” by the way H.D. lyrically expresses her attraction to Paul Robeson.

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the racist sentiments are at their peak. The poster shows a dark, powerful, nude male torso surrounded by light rays and reads underneath “Eau de vie.” The caption does not define an ‘invigorating life-force’ associated with the dark body but instead two distinctly different and separate elements are combined, in the manner of ‘condensation,’ to create a new meaning – similar to a metaphor, Imagist haiku or Eisensteinian montage. “Eau de vie,” or water of life, is an almost universal synonym for a distillation or alcoholic drink. Considering the mythic symbolism of alcoholic drink that has been carefully built up throughout the film, the water of life in association with Dionysos/Bacchus and wine, here, also includes blood and the intoxicated frenzy of Dionysian orgy. In combination with the image of the glorious black body, the ‘image’ of the painted writing visualises the abstract idea of lynching and simultaneously evokes a feeling of wrongdoing, since the black body is a sanctified one. The ‘clatter-montage’ of which the poster becomes part, alternates between the individual furious white men, their faces in close-up – Macpherson here, following Eisenstein, presents rather types and classes than individuals⁹⁰ –, their shaking fists, and the poster. This montage culminates in a close-up of one white fist being shaken in front of the poster, as if to threaten the dark body, and the flames of the witchhunt vision licking up – all combining to form the idea of a blasphemous sacrifice of a consecrated body and expressing the menace of mob spirit. Something similar to what the metaphor-poster presents in one image has also been achieved earlier in the narrative by means of editing: The scene of the killing is followed by a scene in the café, where the barmaid and Pete are jokingly flirtatious. The barmaid, who has just performed a wild scimitar dance with a knife in her mouth, puts the knife, an ordinary blunt fruit-knife, down. This is the point at which the happy scene literally cuts into the scene of death, because the barmaid’s fruit-knife transforms into Thorne’s death weapon. By means of an aesthetically beautiful cut-on-movement à la Pabst, Thorne’s antique dagger, being placed in a bowl with water, completes the motion of the barmaid’s simple knife being put down, and thus carefully and inseparably knits together the two scenes. The scene of joie de vivre and frolicsome flirt, by film technique as well as by content, is related to the incident of raving violence resulting in tragic death, and the ordinary knife of everyday life becomes transformed into a symbol. Here the technique of film editing mirrors the process of dreaming once again by fusing

 The man with the flat cap, the moustache, and the missing front tooth obviously belongs to the working class, while the one with the three-piece suit, watch-chain, wedding ring, carefully groomed hair and full moustache evidently is a bourgeois.

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Figure : Barmaid with knife

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Figure : Knife transformed bloody dagger

ordinary objects with symbolic objects. So the poster repeats in a varied way what the earlier editing device suggested. (At the same time, the happy scene in the café appears as a vision or memory to Thorne, who looks at the wall and as if at a picture, when the cut is made to the café scene that thus also reflects Thorne’s thoughts and memories or wishes of happier days.) The personal conflict is related to social issues and general human concerns. Narcissistic personalities and jealousy, as they dominate the relationship of Astrid and Thorne, on a larger scale are also responsible for racism, the prosecution of minorities, and war.⁹¹ They are the cause of crimes against humanity. The filmmakers of Borderline wanted to present a psychological study of the mob spirit, of the hidden human mechanisms of racism and the lynching mentality, and moreover wanted their audience to feel it. If one looks at the mechanisms the Nazis worked only a couple of years later, or even had already begun to work on at the time of the film’s production, Borderline contains an effective analysis, not only of the mechanisms of racism but also of fascism and its reliance on social jealousy and national Narcissism to raise a mob spirit and create an atmosphere of racial hostility terminating in outrageous and barbaric bloodshed against humanity.⁹² In the time of the Nazis’s rise to power and on moving predictably towards the Second World War, the Apollonian principle is driven away.

 On narcissism and mass-psychology see Freud, “On Narcissism,” Standard Edition XIV,  and note, the note contains a reference to his Mass-Psychology ().  Paul Robeson himself was to note in , faced with the threat of fascist racism by gathering hostile storm troopers at the Berlin train station, where he was standing with a white woman: “This is … how a lynching begins” (Robeson, Jr. : ).

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In modernist works ancient spring rites often seem to be a metaphor for modern grievances such as war, or race and class conflicts.⁹³ At the same time, there is as in Poolreflection, a proximity to Shakespeare, this time in the person of Paul Robeson (and possibly part of his contribution), who, at the time of the film’s production, was also performing Othello. Robeson is reported to have once said: If some day I can play Othello as Shakespeare wrote it, bring to the stage the nobility, sympathy, and understanding Shakespeare put into the play, I will make the audience know that he was not just a dark, foreign brute of three hundred years ago in far-off Venice who murdered a beautiful, innocent white girl, but that he was a fine, noble, tragic human figure ruined by the very human weakness of jealousy. (quoted in E. Robeson 1930: 96)

Othello, the virtuous Moor, who is being driven to rage and murder by jealousy; Shakespeare also analysed the mechanisms of human psychology and universal human emotions, and found jealousy at the bottom of social discord,⁹⁴ while the reversed coding of virtuous black (Othello) and vicious white (Iago) can already be found in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Like Othello, Pete, against his own actions becomes a victim of the vicious condition around him.

6.2.2.4 Secrets of the Souls – The Signature of G.W. Pabst It was Macpherson’s film paragon Pabst who had been greatly interested in the cruel combination of lust and violence, which he apparently also liked to present through ‘Bacchanals.’ In his early film Joyless Street, there is a scene of dancing and partying at the Hotel Carlton, and the wild lascivious revels at Mrs. Greifer’s nightclub, where eroticism mixes with murder. Jeanne Ney also begins with the Bacchanal of the white Russian generals, one of them sitting symbolically on top of a gigantic wine barrel, enjoying themselves with drink and women. Pabst opens his film with the introduction of the main villain Khalibiev, lolling decadently in his room, then cuts to the Bacchanal, the symbolic scene of the

 One only has to think of T.S. Eliot’s opening lines to his Waste Land: “April is the cruelest month” or Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”  It is intriguing to note, how Shakespeare in grounding Iago’s jealousy in a loss of personal profit (Othello promoted another than Iago in military rank) and his thus resulting racism is congruent to Eslanda Robeson’s explanation of lynching motivation: “[I]n case after case when a Negro lynching has been investigated, it has been proved that no white girl has been harmed, but that the unfortunate Negro had offended a white man in some economic way” (E. Robeson : ).

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condition of corruption, decadence and villainy in a post-war society. In a very similar arrangement Borderline opens with the introduction of, firstly, the hysterical ‘fluttering’ Astrid, then a violent Thorne and cowering Adah, and subsequently cuts to the happy Bacchanal in the bar, the symbolic setting of intoxication. Whereas Pabst however uses the Bacchanal to symbolise the corruption of society, Macpherson primarily uses it to express a certain psychological condition on the brink of frenzy, hysteria, and violence. Macpherson once stated that race-consciousness was nothing but a guilt complex of the Whites (“As Is” 5:2, 87) and at the end of the film, Pete becomes the scapegoat who is blamed for the disharmony in the little village and is ordered to leave. Like the primal sacrificial animal, the misdeeds of the entire white community are first tied on his back and then he is chased away. This archaic ritual of purification or catharsis is here nothing but a projection. The Whites project their sins of jealousy, aggression, hostility, unrestrained passion, and inner dissonance onto Pete. Pool recognized in it merely an older form of essentially the same concept of modern psychoanalytical projection and the mechanisms of the guilt complex. The closing frame of Pete as the modern version of the scapegoat relocates the ancient phenomenon in the present time of racism and reveals the mechanisms that operate beneath this contemporary phenomenon. The film also analyses how those mechanisms operate and exposes them as anything but time-specific. (However, racism and its archaic equivalent present only one manifestation of disharmony, communal disharmony, but the film works on multiple levels.) It was Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul that first attempted to bring psychoanalysis to the screen and visualise the condition of a human mind. Usually little regarded by Pool in comparison to Joyless Street and The Love of Jeanne Ney, Macpherson accredited this film in his Close Up editorial of November 1930 as the only one that had touched upon what he was trying to do in Borderline (“As Is” 7:5, 294). In this context, Macpherson also quoted Pabst on his film, claiming Borderline to be “the only really ‘avant-garde’ film ever made” (ibid.).⁹⁵ Macpherson also admitted that Metzner’s short film Überfall (1928), similar to Borderline, worked on suggestion but objected that it dealt with one human emotion only, the emotion of fear, and therefore was more simplified than Borderline (ibid.). In citing Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul, by means of the dagger, the filmmakers of Borderline play provocatively with Freud’s theoretical psychoanalytic sign system: The dagger is an obvious reference to Freud’s psychoanalytical discourse and an allusion

 Bryher had written of Pabst’s appraisal of the film in one of her letters. See Letter from Bryher to Macpherson, . Mai , Bryher Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, also quoted in Friedberg (b: ).

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to the phallic symbol. However, decoding it, for example, as a symbol of Astrid’s penis envy⁹⁶ in the fatal scene of death, rather than sensing violent, archaic aggression, does lead to confusion and non-understanding of the scene. So does an earlier scene, when Thorne is playing contemplatively with the dagger or when he dreamily puts it to his head. It does not signify masturbation (Kelley 2008: 467) or the like but expresses instead the contemplation of murder or violent thoughts by a semantic ‘montage’ of dagger and forehead. Similar to Eisenstein’s idea of the haiku ‘montage’, which combined two concrete objects or pictures to represent a third indescribable abstract meaning, Macpherson also joins the concrete images of dagger and forehead to express an abstract violent mentality. At a later moment in the film, Macpherson complements this haiku shot with one expressing Pete’s loving and peaceful mentality: Thorne’s head + (black) dagger = hate Pete’s head + (white) rose = love

Figure 21: Thorne’s violent thoughts

 Or to interpret the dagger in Astrid’s hand in terms of Thorne’s symbolic castration (McCabe : , ). Carolyn A. Kelley has deciphered Thorne’s dagger as a penis by which Astrid wants to masculinize herself and even discovered the significance of the name Pete, a nickname for penis (: , ), and so has Walton (: ; : ).

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If one wants to understand the dagger as a phallus symbol, then the resulting ‘montage’ should instead be read in the nature of a visual Shakespearian pun, defining the emotionally instable and violent Thorne as a ‘dickhead’.⁹⁷ Nevertheless, the presumed definitive nature of the dagger’s libidinous symbolism has been pointed out by a number of scholars. There is indeed an entire chain of phallic images ‘penetrating’ the film, for those who want to find them: The opened champagne bottles that froth over, the vast array of upright bottles in the bar, the manageress’s big cigar⁹⁸ (de-coded by Jean Walton), the barmaid’s cigarette, the pianist’s cigarette holder, the manageress holding the mop upside down and so on (Walton 1999: 255–256). Judith Brown again finds Pete’s passive “phallic power” symbolized in his relaxed and loosely hanging hands (2007: 698), Carolyn Kelley finds “his strong, veined hands and forearms […] suggestive of an erect penis” (2008: 467). Susan McCabe even pointed to the phallic symbolism of the old lady’s leek (2002: 650, even though I would say it is rhubarb) and, not to forget, there is the witch’s phallic broomstick in the infernal vision. Thorne sharpening a pencil with his dagger has been interpreted to emphasise by this ‘whittling’ his biological phallus (Kelley 2008: 466).⁹⁹ Considering the extensive array of bottles, Macpherson may very possibly allude to and play with Freud’s psychoanalytical symbolism (although he might have been stunned by the old lady’s leek phallus and academic diligence on this point), but primarily these bottles are simply an inherent part of the bar and signify the intoxication of the Bacchanal. Even though the dagger apparently has a different function in Borderline, it is after all an obvious reference to Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul and the patient’s knife phobia, and thus intentionally cites the film’s psychoanalytic discourse. (At the same time it is linked to Pabst’s technique of the cut-on-movement that is employed and demonstrated by means of the knife.) But instead of deferentially adhering to this discourse, Borderline reveals most clearly what such a ‘scientific’ interpretation of its symbolism, limited to Freudian pathology, results in: in failing to discover a deeper meaning of life in this particular art work, failing to appreciate the film’s beauty and artistic virtuosity. “Keep away from Freud,” the

 Eisenstein once came up with a somewhat similar joke when he had a photo taken of him sitting on an immense, ‘erected’ cactus which he send to a friend as a postcard from Mexico, writing: “Speaks for itself and makes people jealous!” (: , notes).  The cigar was, on the one hand, symptomatic for Bryher who did indeed smoke cigars, on the other hand, it may also be a reference and tribute to Pabst, in whose Joyless Street appears a cigar-smoking female piano player (possibly a cameo by a disguised Pabst himself) in Mrs. Greifer’s nightclub.  See furthermore McCabe (: ), Walton (: ; : ).

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film implicitly recites the earlier warning from Poolreflection once more. Pool were much too original and creative to reduce their art to a blindly devoted translation of Freud’s theory. Irrespective of this, to do so would not at all have been avant-garde since Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul had already translated Freud’s theory into film, in an attempt to visualize the new concept and explain it to a broader than scientific audience. Nevertheless Pabst’s attempt to visually capture in film the psychoanalytic method of ‘reading’ human thinking in pictures and symbols, and the mentalities thereby expressed, is obviously suggested as a model for Borderline. But in Secrets of a Soul the mental condition “had been treated objectively, from outside, from the clinical point of view” (Macpherson, “As Is” 7:5, 294). Now Borderline attempted to make such a mental condition a sensory experience to the spectator by a “subjective use of inference” (ibid. 293), instead of “externalised observation” (ibid.) and analysis. By the obvious visual reference to Secrets of a Soul, Borderline also alluded to that film’s method of visually presenting human psychology, only applying the “clinical point of view” gets the spectator nowhere in the Pool film. Here the spectator is intended to experience the passions and mental conditions of the characters from within, to feel and sympathise or rage with them. In Borderline, ‘first degree’ perception of popular art is combined with Eisenstein’s intellectual film of overtone montage. Yet it is possible after all to see in the dagger a phallic symbol and in the stabbing of Astrid and her “little death” a sexual act. But the dagger must be comprehended in all its symbolic complexity, and it must not be overlooked that the dagger itself is an ancient one. This ‘sexual act’ is no mere biological copulation, nor a satisfaction of libidinous need but a mythologically violent sexual act or rape. Therefore this sexual act can be seen in relation to Lex’s ‘rape’ by Moreen and needs to be understood in its archaic metaphorical sense: It is a painful process of initiation and cognition, a biblical ‘knowing’, and here symbolises the cognition of guilt that shocks Thorne into consciousness. The police station, to which the defendant then goes voluntarily to confess, with the dark shadow of an accusing authoritative finger pointing at Thorne, is an image of his awakened conscience.¹⁰⁰ Such an accusing finger of judgement, God or super-ego, occurred also in Secrets of a Soul, when Fellman dreams of being put on trial [1:05:21], and an authoritative index had daunted the cheerful monkeys in Monkey’s Moon [3:36]. It is not insignificant to note that the pointing finger as a shadow is black like Pete,  Macpherson not only cites Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul and psychoanalysis here but also seems to rely on earlier images from literature. Rudyard Kipling, for example, used the figure of ‘Policeman Day’ to symbolize the waken conscience that inconveniently interrupts the adventurous dreams of his protagonist in “The Brushwood Boy.”

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Figure 22: Accusing gesture from Borderline

the living embodiment of gnothi seauton in Pool’s film, and it is after this awakening that Thorne makes his peace with Pete. Yet Borderline, unlike Secrets of a Soul, does not present a dream and its analysis but different psychological waking states. In presenting several different mentalities, instead of focusing on one person’s psyche, Borderline also realises literary modernist narrative strategies of multiple subjective perspectives in the new medium of film. While Secrets of a Soul with its objective outside point of view may compare to a traditional third person narrator, Borderline compares to the stream-of-consciousness narratives of Richardson, Joyce and Woolf. Due to the medium film however, Macpherson is able to join the diegetic to the mimetic. b Borderline is to some extent also the artist’s rebellion against Freud, who stands representative for a reduction of art, myths and symbols to the neurotic and to the scientific explanation of his psychoanalytical theory, and in a broader sense the artist’s rebellion against any approach towards art that reduces it to the ‘clarity’ of scientific explanation¹⁰¹ and a construction based upon imperme-

 In Poolreflection the artist too rebels against such a ‘scientific’ psychoanalytical explana-

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able categories. Pool show proficiently in their works that art as well as life also mean projection, as particularly epitomized by their then favourite medium: film. In this these artists who cleverly beat Freud at his own game, revealing that much of his own scientific theory of psychoanalysis was rooted in projection, the projection of the analyst onto the patient. Freud found in the dreams of his patients his own scientist’s idea of mankind and failed to see beyond that. By shutting himself off from the medium of film and refusing to collaborate on a psychoanalytical film (see Secrets in the section on Pabst), he had closed his mind to the possibilities of art. In his desire to be scientific, he restricted the symbols of interplaying antagonistic forces and their meaning to a biological sex drive and failed to recognize a more universal and ageless, innate longing for unity and harmony in man. He thus blocked out the idea of a biologically as well as spiritually determined instinct for beauty in humanity, in which Pool believed. H.D. would later face up to Freud’s scientific reductionism, when undergoing analysis with him, and actively oppose the power of poetic vision to his, often misogynist, clinical pictures in her Tribute to Freud (1956). Just as the title promises, the film is borderline in the sense of being neither here nor there but verging on the edge of both. Defying all concepts of clear, exact and thus singular explanation, the film becomes all-inclusive, pluralistic and universal. It contains such a multitude of associations and suggestions that it provides accesses to manifold receptions, as all great art does: The symbols work on a level of simple sympathy as well as on a sophisticated one, on an individual as well as cultural, philosophical, historical, social, or scientific level. The symbols also work in reverse: The racism against the black man works just as well against the white man, who being reprimanded for his interracial affair with Adah, is in one shot [0:15:31] presented in the typical pose of a black lynching victim (H.D. in Scott 1990: 123). The mentality and the psychological mechanisms are the same, and Macpherson wanted to depict the mentality of lynching rather than a race problem (H.D. in Scott 1990: 112). By neither reducing man to mere biological body nor refining him to pure spiritual mind, it understands man as a holistic entity, whose antagonistic principles are joined by the heart, the principle of love. This conjunctive power is the principle that makes a human humane.

tion of his feelings: “I am going to make this clearer before I go on. (God, she was going to make it clearer. Clearer! […] Make it clearer. […] Scream, laugh, do something, but stop her from trying to make it clearer)” ( f.).

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6.2.2.5 The Lyre of the Black Apollo and the Wild Dance of Ecstasy – Uniting ‘High’ Art and Popular Entertainment The black Pete, in the person of Robeson, suggests black art and African cultural heritage in its musical form, the pure, original and unadulterated song form of the spiritual. In his association with sublime nature, light, clouds and the heavens, the low-angle shots which suggest the elevated psychological condition of sanctified elation, Pete becomes related to a pristine and sacred form of art. The stock black of the film seems instead to be employed as an abstracted symbol for a particular aesthetic form, an art form than a biological truth. The ‘classic’ black form of the spiritual reflects Robeson’s personal theory of black music. Consequentially, as Robeson embodies this theory, his living self becomes symbolic of the spiritual. (Not because he is a black man but because he is the famous singer Paul Robeson.) In the spiritual, Robeson found the accumulated experience and superior wisdom of his people and therefore an element of the collective. The spiritual to him expressed the folk spirit of communal harmony. This spirit of harmony is the dream of mankind which Pete is said by H.D. to symbolise. Given his success, apparently all his audiences, black and white, could relate to this dream and sense its promise in Robeson’s singing. The spiritual means also a spiritual wisdom rather than primitivism, and as such it is the bright power of Apollo – a power that usually is claimed by European culture to symbolize reason; here it is aligned to artistic vision and the power to transcend materialism – as it is too in Poolreflection or in H.D.’s poetics. Robeson’s music was especially the spirituals, the songs of the slaves singing of the transcendence of the struggles and pains of life, and dreaming of freedom and salvation. As critics claimed of Robeson’s singing: They are the mother-songs of mankind, those hidden songs that all men and women hear whispering in their buried memory. It is not only the dreaming Negro soul that yearns in these cumulative refrains. It is the sad soul of humanity reaching out into the mystery of life and death…. […] [the songs] reveal to astonished wordlings the world beyond their world. (quoted in E. Robeson 1930: 140–141)

In contrast to Pool, Robeson rejected jazz. He thought that it was “not a pure enough expression,” and believed that it “exploits a Negro technique, but isn’t Negro.” He thus scorned jazz as “decadent” and dismissed it because it had “no spiritual significance” (quoted in Duberman 1989: 176–177). But his rejection of aesthetic assimilation by no means implied advocating a segregationist social

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form.¹⁰² On the contrary, “Robeson was at the same time attracted to an encompassing, universal vision for mankind” (ibid. 172). He found the “spiritual significance” of this vision in the folk form of the spiritual and indeed did all his audiences seem to be able to sympathise with the experience of sufferance and the promise of triumphing over this sufferance by collective effort. In this, Robeson relying on the old folk form had already achieved what Pool were dreaming to accomplish in rejuvenating art and by taking into consideration new popular and collective media such as film. In this, Robeson’s though pure and sacred art was again different from high modernist art, not elitist and exclusive, but on the contrary inclusive and communal. H.D.’s picture of Robeson as “earth-god” then does not denote the primitive savage with loincloth and spear, especially as in one scene Pete puts on shoes, contradicting such associations of barefoot imagery and emphasising his refined and cultured status. Her “earth-god” is much rather a Prometheus who brings fire to man, and indeed Pete, in one scene, comes with petrol and lights the stove in his room for a shivering and forlorn Adah, bestowing the more spiritual fire of comfort and human warmth. (This visual ‘haiku’ of Pete and fire signifying human warmth is yet another complementary symbol to Thorne’s murderous thoughts.) He is the Shelleyan Titan who loves humanity, who hears the lament of the earth and sympathises with the human race’s sufferance, and he also embodies H.D.’s own idea of poetic vision. Robeson’s musical art, his sacred songs, are insinuated by the light attributed to Pete, similar to the association of Rembrandt paintings to Moreen in Poolreflection, and the eye-raising perspective of worship from which the spectator so often is made to look at him. His spirituals are contrasted with the secular dance music in the bar. Thus whereas the black Pete symbolises poetic vision, the white piano player represents popular culture and entertainment, and his jewelled fingers (just as likely coding him as homosexual¹⁰³) indicate commercial art. Yet Pete is associated to this popular music as from the beginning his photograph is fastened to the piano, affixed to the candleholder as a light and inspiration to the piano player [0:28:01]. In the end, after Pete has been expelled from the town, the piano player tucks Pete’s photograph into his wallet which he puts into the inside pocket of his jacket, ‘close to his heart.’ Even though this is a

 In , Robeson singing “Ballad for Americans” made his musical democratic statement following in the bardic tradition of Whitman and Langston Hughes.  Brown directly relates the jewellery to homosexuality, claiming that the “bejeweled pianist” is “unmistakably coded gay” (: ) and that “[his] jewelry alone signals his representational otherness” (ibid. ). Other critics as well have maintained that the pianist is coded gay (Walton : ,  and : , ; Latimer : , ; McCabe : ).

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most ordinary gesture, it is at the same time highly symbolic, and is similar to the end of Gaunt Island, when Robin, i. e. beauty and love, is gone but Elmo, i. e. ‘lower’ culture, keeps Robin in her heart. As earlier in Wing Beat, Borderline includes scenes that attempt to capture sound and the rhythm of music and dance movements in moving pictures, through, for instance, the close-ups of the piano player’s hands on the keys, the dancing feet and legs or the snake-like movement of the barmaid’s arms. Close Up supplies references to other experimental films working in a similar line,¹⁰⁴ and yet these shots are more than merely citations of other avantgarde films and their form experiments. The close-ups of the piano player’s fingers are not only a reference to Germaine Dulac’s film on Chopin music but are also a reference to Pabst’s more popular films. A close-up of piano-playing hands appears already in Pool’s much treasured Joyless Street, here however it is not a film aesthetic experiment but part of the narrative and realistic setting. The jolly blaring music, played by some nightclub dame who literally pounds the piano keys (a cameo of Pabst in disguise, with wig and kimono, it seems), is a realistic element of Mrs. Greifer’s nightclub. At the same time it subconsciously transports the rhythm and noise of the rompish and sybaritic mood in the club. Borderline consolidates experiment with aesthetic form and with psychological realistic narrative devices: the avant-garde aesthetic montage of the close-ups of the dancing barmaid, the luffing full glasses on the piano and the playing hands turn the rhythm and mood in the bar into a sensory experience of cheerful, dizzying Dionysian exuberance for the audience. The scores of the piano player in the film once more point to dance hall music, vaudeville and low-brow comedy. One of the score covers on the piano displays part of the song title “I’ll Be Getting Along” by Carroll Gibbons [0:27:55]. This song was from Splinters (1929), a sound film by Sydney Howard, who worked for the British film industry and whose films were described as “popular and profitable” (Sutton 2000: 114). This detail, which can easily be fixed in a still picture, is naturally missed by the general spectator of the film, or is glimpsed only subconsciously. However, the dancing movements of the barmaid and the piano player clearly visualize dance hall music to the spectator. One does not really succeed in trying to fit the pianist’s jitterbug steps in the opening scene to Courtney Pine’s newly arranged avant-garde jazz score,

 The Close Up issue : (April ) featured two stills from the avant-garde film Disque , showing in one a hand playing the piano and in the other a spinning record plus the pick up arm, informing the reader that these were “two illustrations from a film by Germaine Dulac, Disque , an experiment in visual music from a prelude by Chopin” (in between –).

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which the BFI restoration supplies. Such discrepancy was exactly what Pool criticised about musical accompaniment to silent film.¹⁰⁵ It is a fact always regretted that the original musical scores, accompanying silent films, are usually lost. Since Pool have always been classified as avantgarde, it has apparently been assumed that the music accompanying Borderline must have been jazz, and the acclaimed contemporary jazz musician Courtney Pine was engaged for the task. Enjoyable as his composition is, the jazz accompaniment in its homogeneity of avant-garde style throughout the film is somewhat misleading. The piano player in the film, as has been shown, plays popular dance music and the correspondence between Pool and the Robesons reveals that the Robesons sent records of Paul’s songs as a gift. It is actually only logical that the filmmakers, if they provided musical accompaniment, relied on Paul’s spirituals for their film, especially to emphasize the figure of Pete. If the film restorers had used this ‘sacred’ music of the spirituals, in combination with the glorious nature images and the low-angle shots of Pete, as opposed to the secular urban music of dance halls and commercial entertainment in the bar, this would have stressed the radiating and spiritual quality of Pete and it would also have contrasted these spiritual qualities with the feverish physicality of the Whites. However, at this point and on the grounds of the material available, all specifications as to the musical accompaniment of the film must remain speculative. The dialectics of art and poetic vision with consumer culture and commercialism exists not only on a musical and rhythmic level but continues on an object-related and visual level as well. Some of the objects, mostly those located in the bar, are commercial ones and this is important to note. The function and significance of objects has already been discussed in the context of pictorial and metaphorical language but several objects can also be classified into either of the two categories: art and consumer culture. Take for example the advertisement posters. To my knowledge Debo is the only one of all the discussions of Bor-

 See, for example, Richardson on the unity of music and picture in “Continuous Performance II: Musical Accompaniment,” Close Up : (August ): –, also H.D. in her Borderline pamphlet (in Scott : , ). The BFI DVD furthermore includes among its extra material a trailer from Jim Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (), a gay classic. No information relates this extra in any way to Borderline and inquiry on the point to the BFI goes unanswered; it seems to be a case of endorsing the stereotypical classification of Macpherson’s works.

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derline who so far has mentioned one of the posters, the “Eau de Vie” poster, and when she does she classifies it as avant-garde art (2001: 375).¹⁰⁶ Even though the posters usually go unnoticed, they are an integral part of Pool’s conception of art because they integrate forms of ‘popular’ culture, in this case contemporary consumer culture, into the avant-garde aesthetic film – in the same way as the Splinter’s score cover does. These advertising posters were a form of ‘cultural capital’ that even the less educated were familiar with. At the same time, these advertisements are not merely ordinary items of consumer culture but have a symbolic value that works psychologically towards sensing a certain atmosphere. The “Lac Leman” poster showing the lake with boats not only indicates the locality, but even more so affirms the leisure mood in the bar. The posters advertising “Cardinal Beer” or “Eau de vie” are not merely realistic integral parts of a bar, but are symbolic signals suggesting the ‘Bacchanal’ with its entertainment, pleasure and joy, but in its progressing intensity also its danger of intoxicated frenzy, violence and mob-hysteria. Macpherson already uses initial signs of this technique by inserting consumer items for a symbolic purpose in Poolreflection, although there the consumer item is a luxury product of exclusivity. The perfume “ambre antique”¹⁰⁷ not only characterises Peter’s love for ‘decadent’ luxury – the garnish of “silver-tipped walking canes, expensive suits, and villas” that Guest so derisively criticised (Guest 2003: 185) – but symbolises the rarified atmosphere of an exclusive and elite refined art and aestheticism for the few, which Peter initially embodies. While the advertisements and brand names in the bar symbolise a ‘popular’ consumer culture Pete’s room, with its minimalism of furniture, in contrast contains not a single consumer item and in its simplicity and asceticism is symbolic for ‘classic’ restraint and modern art. In opposition to such ‘mass’ consumer items as advertisement, alcoholic drinks and cigarettes, the ‘classic’ Pete is associated with sculpture and highly aesthetic form. He himself is presented as a work of art. Many of the shots are art photographs in motions and Macpherson himself described Pete as an “early Egyptian carving in the quality of light and shade” (caption to a still in Close Up 7:1, 44–45, see also H.D. in Scott 1990: 116) – Egypt as so often standing as a symbol of ancient black high culture and civilization. H.D. also stated in her pamphlet: “Those who know anything, even of the

 Debo assumes that the poster “was probably a German or Swiss avant-garde poster, circa s” (: ). In fact, the poster may very well have been painted by Macpherson himself, who it should be remembered had trained for commercial drawing.  While the golden colour of amber would comply with the symbolic image of the “harvest moon” suggesting Peter’s mood, it is more likely that in combination with the perfume the ancient fragrance amber is meant here.

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technique of mere photography, realise that Macpherson sculpts literally with light” (in Scott 1990: 115).

Figure 23: Pete’s ‘light-sculpted‘ head

In the same year that Borderline was shot, the artist Antonio Salemme had produced a classic life-size nude bronze sculpture of Robeson, in a pose addressing heaven,¹⁰⁸ and in 1928 Jacob Epstein, the British avant-garde sculptor, had shaped a bronze sculpture of Robeson’s head, a tangible version of Macpherson’s artistic close-ups of Pete’s monumental dark head with accents of light.¹⁰⁹ Muray’s nude photographs of Robeson in classic athletic pose have already been mentioned, while Pete is further associated with sanctified forms of architecture since H.D. explains that “the line of trees in the long popular [sic! i. e. poplar] avenue […] bring to mind the high spaces of the Karnak temple” (in Scott 1990: 116) and hence adds mythic architecture of Ancient Egyptian civilization to the “Egyptian carving in black and white.” If Borderline had been set in

 Salemme titled his sculpture “Negro Spiritual.” He had cast an earlier plaster version already in .  Pictures of the sculpture by Salemme and the bronze head by Epstein are in the Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection: (accessed  January ).

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New York or Chicago, Pete in all certainty would have been associated with the perpendicular grandness of the skyscrapers instead of ‘primitive’ nature because, as Bryher claimed, they were “open and free [and] the towers were a symbol of the wider life that we wanted to create” (Heart 319).¹¹⁰ Pete, the gigantic human bronze sculpture, is the heroic in life as well as in art. The Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin, a contemporary of Eisenstein, had once employed “an effect as of sculptured bronze” in one of his films to present soldiers. He explained: “Our ambition […] was to compel the spectator to recognise the hero in every Russian and German soldier, to make each live” (Close Up 2:4 (April 1928), caption to a still in between pages 32–33). He enhanced this effect by means of low-angle shots to effect an impression of heroic greatness. Macpherson here apparently relies on Russian film aesthetics for the representation of his hero,¹¹¹ with the difference that he lionises not the worker, farmer or soldier but the black man. And although Pete is simply dressed, with rolled up shirt sleeves, citing Soviet aesthetics, in his white shirt and three-piece tweed suit he is still not quite the Soviet proletarian. At the same time, Pete/Robeson embodies the same ‘classic’ quality that Pool found in the ‘nordic’ actors of Pabst.¹¹² He is ‘classic’ beauty in the midst of corruption and villainy, as embodied by Garbo in Pabst’s Joyless Street. He unites both the classic beauty H.D. found in Garbo and the masculine vitality of Russian film aesthetics. Pete even though he is ancient bronze and an art work, is at the same time intensely alive and human. The camera zooming in on his arms expresses the human quality of this statue [0:03:32] that, like Peter’s Praxitilean faun, “glowed, warm health colour, supple and human, full of ligaments and nerves and human tremors” (Poolreflection 17). While Pete stands for classic antiquity as well as modernist aesthetics with its clear lines and forms, and its vision, Astrid represents the late Victorian or fin de siècle period with its frills, embellishments and nervousness. The different (art) forms and periods are not longer separated but come together and unite in Macpherson’s film: “[…] Hogarth, Fragonard, Botticelli, Egyptian

 H.D. in her Borderline pamphlet draws the same parallel, when she states that Macpherson “reaches forward (strange contradiction) toward the lean skyscraper beauty of ultra-modernity. In this there is no forced note, no note of falsity because that beauty and the beauty of Mena period Egypt […] are all one” (in Scott : ).  Friedman notes as well that Pete “owes much to Russian filmmakers’ lionization of the proletariat” (“Border Forms” ). On heroic aesthetics in Russian film see further Bordwell’s chapter “Monumental Heroics: The Silent Films” in The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge: Harvard UP, ): –.  H.D. “The Cinema and the Classics,” Close Up : (): – and Macpherson, “Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney,” Close Up : (): .

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bronze and Greek marble all allied and welded, a unit and that unit modern” (H.D. quoted in Scott 1990: 116). Furthermore, Astrid, like Pete, is also likened to sculpture, but against the bronze of the hero she is the ‘dead’ marble.¹¹³ Astrid’s right hand, after she has been stabbed and is lying on the floor dead, resembles the right hand of Michelangelo’s famous marble David.

Figure 24: Michelangelo’s David (detail)

The static ‘dead’ art from Poolreflection, here literally becomes the dead form of a corpse. The resemblance of her dead body to a Michelangelo statue is of course symbolic and signifies the devitalised and static and standardised form of the

 H.D. too aligns Astrid to a marble statue and Pete, the gigantic “earth-god,” to bronze in her pamphlet on the film (in Scott : ).

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Figure 25: The dead Astrid (detail)

Victorian Astrid and her conventional views. It also recalls the static and inorganic art forms in Poolreflection that are symbolised by Michelangelo’s classic statues and the art conventions of the ‘bird-stuffers’ to which Astrid is also linked by means of the stuffed seagull in her room. Astrid’s dead white hand on the wooden floor further reiterates the broken Venus sculpture that Thorne smashed in the beginning and thus functions within the association chain of Borderline’s dream-work. At the same time, Michelangelo’s David is symbolic of the beauty ideal of the Renaissance that Robin in Gaunt Island sees in his younger brother and dreams of immortalising. Such Renaissance beauty is captured in the close-up of Pete’s muscular and veined hands and lower arms hanging at his side, as he is introduced in the first scene, presenting the heroic limbs of one of Michelangelo’s colossal statues, while his head is rather reminiscent of an ancient Egyptian bronze statue. The long duration shots that convey a static quality of the characters present them as statues and art works. Macpherson used the camera for sculpting and the dynamic medium film non-dynamically to cross into the discipline of the vis-

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Figure 26: The broken Venus and the dead Astrid’s hand

ual fine arts. His is an art film after all. This seems to have been missed by scholars who have focused exclusively on the racial or psychoanalytical content of these shots and who have limited their perspective to the confines of their racial or psychoanalytical discourses.¹¹⁴ To my knowledge, no study analysing the art references in Borderline as yet exists. Sergei Eisenstein together with Grigori Alexandrov did something along this line in their Romance Sentimentale, an experiment in sound film that was released in the same year as Borderline. They used marble sculptures by Rodin for their montages to express the theme of romance, which they satirised by mounting the musical sound track and having it run backwards in parts.¹¹⁵ Macpherson, by working with light on planes of the human body and certain poises and gestures, turns his human characters into art pieces or citations of art. However the citations are not, or less, citations of cultural capital made for reasons of aesthetic consecration but in order to implement the best forms that artists created to capture or express a certain human momentum, whether emotion, mood or haptic beauty. Macpherson thus transforms humans into aesthetic icons of emotion. Despite implementing forms of ‘high’ art, the film works largely independently of cultural capital and its coded language, which would be inaccessible to the less educated, and works predominantly through immediate or ‘first degree’ perception. Different from

 Studies of a racial approach only interpret these shots in terms of Pete’ race-stereotyped black passivity, while studies of a psychoanalytical approach see them as phallic.  Harry Potamkin, Close Up’s American correspondent, reported: “Alexandrov, Eisenstein’s co-director whom I have just seen off westward, has told me he has mounted sound in his brief experiment A Sentimental Romance […]. He has done in this film a number of things I have thought basic in ‘playing with sound,’ such as: running the sound-track backwards, inscribing or designing the sound […]” (quoted in Kahn : ).

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his novel Poolreflection and due to the medium of film, the aesthetic forms now appeal directly to the senses and stimulate sensations, and thus even an avantgarde aesthetic is reconnected to function.

6.2.2.6 Friendship and Universal Sympathy, and the Various Shades of Human Life In the end, the mythic hero and divine being Pete, Christ-like, has to descend to experience the sufferings and pains of human existence. His final words: “Yes, we are like that!” show that he is not exempt from the society of mankind but part of it. His words, a response to the manageress’s “we are like that” by which she includes herself in the group of Whites that expel Pete from the town, annihilates the differentiation between white and black into separate entities. Black and White become two components of one united whole of humanity. Pete’s final words are the complementary verb phrase to the emblematic handshake, the old symbol of Concordia and new pictogram of peace between Black and White [1:08:09]. The symbolic handshake is simply a more abstract image of the alchemical wedding that Macpherson used in Poolreflection. At the same time, it is a less controversial realistic image for symbolising harmony, human sympathy, and a reconciliation of antagonisms. Macpherson was probably still keenly aware of the outrage the little understood and misconstrued imagery of ‘incestuous’ relationships in his novel had caused and decided on a more abstracted and unprejudiced version of body imagery. Presenting an interracial love relationship was radical and scandalous enough at that time of Segregation. Pool wanted to rattle their audiences into consciousness but, after all, they also wanted their film to be screened publicly. The promise of universal brotherhood, as expressed in the symbolic handshake, remains however an unfulfilled promise in the film, a short glimpse of what might be: interracial harmony and international solidarity. Such harmonic brotherhood may be possible between individuals in the form of friendship the film assures us, but on a larger scale society is instead relapsing into the archaic. The end shows Pete at the station, waiting for the train to take him away. Racial integration and acceptance of Blacks has yet to be accomplished. Pool did not make propaganda films, they considered themselves non-political, they wanted to make art, which to them meant capturing and expressing life and truth. Art to them meant entertainment but also teaching and inspiring sympathy. H.D. claimed in her Borderline pamphlet that Macpherson was “in no way whatever, concerned personally with the black-white political problem” and that instead of distinguishing his characters in racial terms, classifying them as black or mulatto, he said “here is a man, here is a woman […] look, sympathize with them and

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love them” (in Scott 1990: 112). So after all, Borderline is first and foremost a film about humans, their longings and sufferings, their strengths and weaknesses, their passions, dreams and nightmares. The reversed ‘colour code’ of black as virtue and white as sin in the end cannot hold as life is neither black nor white but both. Therefore the strict blackwhite ‘segregation’ is already broken up throughout the film (H.D. in Scott, ibid. 123) and in the person of Adah. The mythic figure Pete eventually becomes humanized – in spite of scholars claiming his dehumanized aloofness (Brown 2007: 688) – suffering loss and disappointment by losing his love and being let down by his associates; as does also his violent adversary Thorne. In the end, the roles and moods are quite reversed: a saddened, disillusioned and lonely Pete is waiting at the station for his train, while a sedate and contemplative Thorne is sitting in the grass under a blossoming tree. Black and White in their varying nuances are the different shades of human life. Oswell Blakeston has to be understood in this context when he writes of Borderline: “It is not that the coloured people are finer than the whites … there are, simply, overtones […] But, in the ordinary sense of the word, there is no colour question, no propaganda. […] Just Borderline types. Overtones and … undertones!” (“Foreign Notes” 13). Borderline is fundamentally once more about the age-old theme of love and the conflicts of love and hate, unrequited love and love lost, the theme that had already been central to the novels Poolreflection and Gaunt Island. The film moreover celebrates in the symbolic handshake “the sudden act of kindness” that Pool found in their venerated films of G.W. Pabst. It is an emblem of reconciliation, understanding among humans and pacifism similar to that which Pabst promoted in films like Kameradschaft and Westfront. What is more, had Pabst presented in Jeanne Ney the congenial communist Andrej Labov to a German audience, to counter bourgeois concepts of the enemy communist, Borderline follows in Pabst’s footsteps by presenting the amiable and heroic black Pete to counter white concepts of racism. One of the key moments is the flirtatious scene of the barmaid and Pete. Any audience, regardless of race, gender or nationality, will instinctively sense the principle of attraction at work here. The white woman and the black man harmoniously teasing and joking with each other, anyone regardless of social background and education, should be and should have been able to sympathise. In this scene, Pete and the barmaid constitute an early and more ordinary version of the archaic symbol of love, the blending together of male and female, and the primeval symbol of (cosmic) harmony, the mystic alchymical black and white or the Asian ying and yang; symbols that are essentially synonymous. Pete is Eros, the god of love – as he appeared earlier in Robin in the novel Gaunt

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Island – his ‘eroticism’ effectually captured and expressed by the camera but frequently misunderstood. This scene presents the key to the mythopoetic symbolism in living human form: Pete with the symbolic rose stuck behind his ear, holding with one hand a shining metal tray to his head – ordinary object transformed halo – and in the other hand the ‘beheaded’ stem of the flower, becomes a ‘mirror image’ of the rose.

Figure 27: Pete with the symbolic rose of love

This is the “canonization of Pete,” as Pool described it. Macpherson herein repeats but at the same time subverts his earlier Narcissus figure from Poolreflection; this Narcissus is not self-lovingly looking into the mirror at his own reflection but is love and beauty looking out of it. The white rose ‘montaged’ to the human head is an image of Pete’s thinking, his thoughts of love and harmony, and another image of the spiritual unity of black and white. This symbol of black and white harmony is later repeated, in the varied form of the black and white handshake. The image of Pete’s head with the rose works in contrast to the earlier ‘montage’ of Thorne holding the ancient dagger to his forehead, as an expressive symbol of his ‘mind splitting’ murderous thoughts of hate, violence and fury. Thorne, nomen est omen, is the antagonistic principle to Pete and the two forces become aligned by the Pabstian ‘invisible cut’ and the transformation from fruit knife to ancient dagger described

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earlier. By means of this filmic technical device, the scene of black and white harmony and love ingenuously ‘cuts’ in/to the scene of white and white disharmony and death − integrating the editing technique of the new medium itself into the old language of metaphor and into the artistic process. The dissonance of White (Astrid) and White (Thorne) is further symbolized by the daffodils, which imply a defective mirroring of self. Had Narcissus been an anthropological symbol for the artist and for man’s longing for perfection in Poolreflection, the daffodils – mythological symbol for the Narcissus who failed in attaining selfrecognition – become the insignia for a pathological narcissism of the Whites. (Later, when Pete has been driven away, Pete’s rose is thrown away by an old white man. Pete has lost his spiritual harmony and the Whites wilfully deny the principle of love or the harmony of black and white.) “Two loves I have of comfort and despair” Shakespeare wrote in sonnet 144. These two loves are his good and his evil “spirits;” the good angel is “a man right fair” while the evil spirit is “a woman coloured ill” (l. 3–4). The figure of the fair man and the Dark Lady, who have been examined already in the chapter to Macpherson’s Poolreflection, are emblems for the happy dream and brighter mood versus the darker mood and wilder passions in human life that the film too wanted to express visually. If Shakespeare inverted Petrarch’s image of the divine fair Laura, which had become fossilized into a convention, by substituting his refined young aristocrat and Dark Lady, Borderline reversed Shakespeare’s colour code, which in turn had been a cliché, turning the white young aristocrat into the divine black Pete and the passionate Dark Lady into a white one. Consequently beauty or the ‘high’ art of poetry in the film is now represented by the black amiable giant whereas passion or popular culture is visualized by the feverish Bacchanal of the Whites. True to Pool’s art philosophy, the black Apollo cannot remain high up in his clouds but, becoming humanized by experiencing the loss and pain of life, has to descend from his consecrated pedestal. The black-white handshake symbolizes not only the peace-making of human antagonists but also the reconciliation of high art with popular culture. ₪₪₪ Ironically his film, after all, seems to have suffered the same fate as the novel Poolreflection before it. Macpherson, who very likely had hoped that the new medium of film would more successfully translate the language of dreams, and that his film would work via ‘first degree perception’ and so directly upon the emotions of his audience, faced once again the lack of appreciation of his work. This was partly due to the film’s “meaningless obscurity” and “vague symbolism” as critics complained (“As Is” 7:5, 296) and partly exactly for the film’s success in working primarily via the emotions and not the conscious understanding. Although it was shown

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internationally, most critics, and predominantly English ones, reacted adversely to the film. The venerated Pabst had been very enthusiastic about the film, especially about the camerawork, and had allegedly asked Macpherson to work with him (Bryher, Heart 309; also Friedberg 1990b: 50–54). But not even Pabst’s positive reaction and his assurance that Macpherson “must be proud of [his] work” seems to have been strong enough to encourage him to continue filmmaking. Frustrated and disillusioned, and disinterested in the ‘talkies,’ Macpherson turned away from filmmaking, moving first to architecture and later back to writing. It was not until nearly two decades later did he once more become involved in a film production, namely Richter’s surrealist film Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947). It seems significant and, all things considered, most fitting that in its time Monkey’s Moon, the less sophisticated film of commercial length but avant-garde aesthetics, was the most popular and successful of Pool’s films; maybe without being aware of it Macpherson had succeeded after all.

7 POOL Architecture: The Villa KenWin 7.1 Geographical Location and Its Literary Historical Context The villa Kenwin still exists today; it is located above lac Léman or Lake Geneva, close to the train station in the former hamlet Burier of La Tour-de-Peilz in the canton Vaud. Bryher used to give the address: Villa Kenwin, Burier s/La Tour, Vevey, Switzerland.¹ Today the address is Chemin de Vallon 19, 1814 Burier, La Tour, Vaud,² and by this address it is even possible to find the house on Google Earth and get some glimpses of it via Street View. The close vicinity of Montreux to Kenwin associates the residence of Bryher, Macpherson and H.D. with a significant literary historical context. It recalls earlier key figures of English literature: Lord Gordon Byron and the Shelleys, who resided there in their memorable summer of 1816 and were inspired to literary creativity by the encompassing sublime landscape.³ Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc feature prominently in Frankenstein, providing a restorative agent to Victor Frankenstein while at the same time aligning his monster with the sublime terror of the Swiss mountains.⁴ Percy Bysshe Shelley composed his poem “Mont Blanc,” a meditation on the awe inspired by the sublimity of the mountain,⁵ and Lord Byron was stimulated to write his “Prisoner of Chillon.” In addition, Montreux is also associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another central figure of Romanticism, and the setting in nearby Clarens of his Nouvelle Héloïse, a

 This is the address given in the letterhead of her correspondences.  For example in Inès Lamunière and Bruno Marchand (eds.), Architecture, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Facultè Enac, September , . (accessed  April ) or the German wikipedia site to La Tour-de-Peilz.  Hans-Ulrich Mielsch, Sommer : Lord Byron und die Shelleys am Genfer See () and Elma Dangerfield, Byron and the Romantics in Switzerland,  (Ascent Books, ). Their memorable summer on Lake Geneva is also always part of relevant biographies. Cf. Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfels and Nicolson, ): – and Newman Ivey White, Shelley, vol. (New York: Alfred Knopf, ): –.  Victor Frankenstein at one time encounters the monster in a thunderstorm night with the summit of Mont Blanc illuminated by flashes of lightning and the monster climbing the perpendicular rocks of Mont Salêve (Shelley, Frankenstein –).  For a relation of the sublime and the revolutionary in Shelley’s work see Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: UP, ), especially pp. – for a discussion of Mont Blanc and the Alps in this context.

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novel which was most present to Shelley upon his stay at Lake Geneva.⁶ Bryher on her part aligned Rousseau with the freedom of Nature.⁷

Figure 28: Sylvia Beach at Kenwin

Bryher herself felt that she decided on Burier because of the Alpine excursions with her father in her youth (Heart 330) but later, during the Second World War when she housed the ‘shipwrecked’ German refugees, she drew a parallel to yet another literary predecessor. Hanns Sachs had already told her earlier that he thought she had settled at Burier because of The Swiss Family Robinson (ibid. 329 f). This folk tale of migration had been Bryher’s first book when a child of

 Mielsch reports how Shelley and Byron both read Rousseau’s novel in its related setting and how Shelley on his trips around Lake Geneva was reminded of certain passages of the book (–, ).  “Our symbol of freedom was Nature, we were the last descendants of Rousseau (though we were unable to read his books) […] we tried to become a unity with the landscape” (Heart ).

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four and to her it had been “the essence of truth” (ibid. 8) and become “part of the common experience of childhood” (ibid. 9). The book had fed her thirst for adventure and instilled the wish in her to become a sailor (ibid.). Upon doing some research in the late 1930s, to find relief from the “appalling sadness” (ibid. 229) of the times, Bryher discovered that the version of the story usually read was not the original by Pastor Wyss but the adaptation by Isabelle de Montolieu, who omitted several of the sermons of the first version and instead stressed the adventures. Montolieu, Bryher further found out, was the daughter of Antoine de Polier, friend of Voltaire and contributor to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and most interesting of all she had lived and written at Bussigny, about thirty miles from Kenwin (ibid. 330). Bryher went to visit the place and the author’s house (ibid. 331) to see where the more adventurous life of the Swiss Robinsons had originated. It is an apt coincidence that among the writers who had translated the novel into English was Mary Shelley’s father, the radical reformer William Godwin.⁸ This literary historical context stresses on the one hand the issue of sublime nature and romantic adventure but also affiliates the modernist trio with Romantic boldness and reform-thinking on the other hand. Guest too points to such affiliations when she mentions that “the alarm among the local Vaudois can be easily imagined. There near the Château of Chillon, already desecrated by an unregenerate British poet […] the cubistic structure [of Kenwin] was begun” (Guest 2003: 202). Switzerland nonetheless is not merely associated with Romanticism but also with modernism. The Dada movement started in Zurich and Monte Verità in Ascona was a site of experimental communities,⁹ and Dorothy Richardson’s Oberland as presented in her Pilgrimage cycle is anything but a sleepy Arcadian outback.¹⁰ It has already been mentioned that one of the criteria for Pool to settle in Switzerland was its internationalism, the easy access to new films and the lack of film censorship. Apart from all the avant-garde artists who were friends

 Godwin wrote some children’s books with his second wife Mary Jane Clairmont. He believed that books should not only instruct children but also had to stimulate their fantasy. His translation was published in , the year of Mary Godwin’s and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s first trip to Switzerland (Mielsch : ).  Hans Bollliger, Guido Magnaguagno and Raimund Meyer, Dada in Zürich (Zürich: Kunsthaus Zürich, ) and David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: UP, ), on Monte Verità see Harald Szeemann, Monte Vertià: Berg der Wahrheit (Milano: Electa Editrice, ).  Melinda Harvey has shown how Richardon’s Oberland is the exact opposite of an Alpine sublime. Cf. “Moving, Movies and the Sublime: Modernity and the Alpine Scene in Dorothy Richardson’s Oberland,” Colloquy: Text Theory Critique  (): n. p.

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with Pool and came to visit them at Kenwin, there was one famous contemporary who had been there for a rest-cure while working on his lauded modernist poem The Waste Land. ¹¹ In contrast to T.S. Eliot’s Tiresias, who “sat down and wept” (l. 182) on the shores of Lake Leman, Pool’s associations with the locale were apparently happier ones. Their film Borderline includes a reference to lac Léman by means of a poster in the background of the joyful dancing in the bar. Even though Eliot’s implicit association with exile in his reference to lac Léman, the exile of the Israelites in his case, corresponds with Bryher’s in the late 1930s, Bryher’s romantic adventurous attitude – expressed by her memory of the Swiss Robinsons – and her decisive actions contrast prominently with Eliot’s passive weltschmerz and pessimistic lethargy.

7.2 Modern Bauhaus Architecture in the Swiss Mountains It was a provocative avant-garde object in the traditionally idyllic Swiss surrounding but an amicable and sociable place at the same time, and it was designed to be a locale for new, creative, and interpersonal relationships. Due to its provocative avant-garde nature there were difficulties in maintaining the construction permit for Kenwin and it was denounced as a “cage à lapins” and “purement germanique et ultra moderne” by the authorities.¹² Nevertheless, Kenwin was not the first ultramodern building on lac Léman. In 1923/24 the famous Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier had built the Villa Le Lac, also known as the petite maison, at the North-East lakeshore in Corseaux-Vevey for his parents.¹³ Guest describes the late Bauhaus ar-

 Michael North mentions Eliot’s stay on Lake Geneva in  in his notes to Eliot’s The Waste Land (, note ).  Elmar Kossel, Herman Henselmann und die Moderne (Ph.D. thesis, HU Berlin, , unpubl. manuscript, Mikrofich): , note . All references cited as Kossel are taken from this Ph.D. thesis. Hermann Henselmann as well mentions that the authorities called his project “une cage à lapin” and even talks of legal actions that had been necessary to secure the construction persmission (: ). For the problem of the modern architecture in the regional context see Roland Cosandey and Guy Collomb, “La maison Macpherson: cinquante ans de mise à l’index pour avant-garde,” Reprès: Revue Romande  ():  ff and Stephane Link, La Villa MacPherson (diploma thesis , Ècole Polytechnique de Lausanne, unpubl. manuscript).  Cf. Le Corbusier, Une petite maison,  (Zürich: Girsberger, ), also Adolf Max Vogt, Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage: Toward an Archaeology of Modernism, trans. Radka Donnell (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, ): . Le Corbusier had also handed in a design for the competition for the Palace of the League of Nations, also to be built at lac Léman, in  but this project was never realised (Vogt : ).

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chitecture of Kenwin also as “Lac Leman international” (Guest 2003: 202). Yet, according to Guest writing in 1984, Kenwin was “the only modern house in the area” (ibid. 203) and Kossel still remarks in 2008 that the white and cubist villa contrasts strikingly with the surrounding buildings (2008: 28). He adds however that early modern architect Adolf Loos’ villa Karma, built in 1904, is only about a hundred meters off from Kenwin and concludes that Loos’ villa, Le Corbusier’s petit maison and Kenwin rank among the most famous testimonials of modern architecture on the shores of Lake Geneva (ibid.).

Figure 29: White cube in the Swiss Alps

The Pool residence was of great proportions. Designed to freely accommodate visitors and friends, the cubistic architecture with terraces and balconies extended over three storeys, including quarters for domestic servants. The area of socialising was one spacious and openly constructed studio, including living room, dining area, a gallery with a cocktail lounge plus bar and a projector room, while the sleeping quarters were more like cabins. Kenwin was by all means an exotic place. In 1940 when the Zurich Zoo considered evacuating some of its animals due to the war and potential threats of invasion, Bryher

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even offered part of Kenwin garden to the Zurich Zoo, and she was especially keen on the prospect of having the elephant for a stay at her place.¹⁴ Even though Bryher’s love for pure and functional form most likely determined the Bauhaus style of Kenwin, it may prove worthwhile to take a look at the concept that is at the foundation of Bauhaus architecture.¹⁵ Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius stated in 1923 that his school “was attempting to bring about a reconciliation between ‘creative artists and the industrial world’” (quoted in Whitford 1992: 12). The philosophy of Bauhaus as announced in its 1919 “Manifesto and Programme of the Bauhaus” was to reunite fine arts with applied arts and crafts, to abolish the presumptuous class distinctions between artists and craftsmen and to strive for a summation of all creative production, for a reunion of all the individual disciplines of sculpturing, painting, applied arts, and arts and crafts. Bauhaus further called for a continuous contact with public life and with the people (quoted in Whitford 1992: 40) and for a ‘democratic’ architecture that dissolved social differences and furthered understanding between nations. Bauhaus also aimed to improve the quality of life by creatively shaping the environment. The ultimate aim was the building, since architecture was seen as a gesamtkunstwerk that ideally synthesised all other arts. Gropius illustrated this idea in the image of a medieval cathedral because the cathedral symbolised such a union of different disciplines (ibid. 32). It has to be admitted that Bauhaus was not the first with such a philosophy; its roots reach back into the nineteenth century, when William Morris in England, next to John Ruskin and Christopher Dresser, revived the idea of a reunion of the arts and crafts according to the medieval antetype, founded work shops, and initiated the Arts and Crafts Movement. Morris had also wanted a “living school of art” that had to be “part of [the public’s] life” (quoted ibid. 20).¹⁶ The choice of Bauhaus style is thus not merely personal form preference but seems more than natural when taking into account the affinity of Pool’s art philosophy with the Bauhaus concept of a ‘democratic’ architecture for international understanding and the reconciliation of art and industry. Along with Pabst’s films Kenwin demonstrates the influence of

 Bryher, making the best of the situation, reported this news to Macpherson in New York. See Bryher’s letter to Macpherson,  March , cited in Kenwin [:: f].  Frank Whitford (ed.), The Bauhaus: Masters and Students by Themselves (London: Conran Octopus, ), also Magdalena Droste and Bauhaus Archiv, Bauhaus – (Köln et al.: Taschen, ).  Morris stated this in his “Arts and Crafts Circular Letter, .” On Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement as a precursor of Bauhaus see also Droste (: –).

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Weimar Berlin upon Pool and shows that Pool have to be positioned in between the high Modernism of London and Paris and the ‘democratic’ art of Berlin. b Kenwin was built in 1929–1932 by the architects Alexander (Sándor) Ferenczy and Hermann Henselmann. The spacious mansion with its many spare rooms for guests was a palladium of creativity and artistic activity. The name of the villa is derived from KENneth Macpherson and Annie WINifred Ellerman, Bryher’s civil name. Naturally it was Bryher who initiated the project. For one, she had the money and for another she was a great fan of modern architecture, its functionality and minimalism: “I loved the new functional furniture, the horizontal windows and the abolition of what I thought of as messy decoration” (Heart 303).

Figure 30: Bryher at Kenwin

According to Elmar Kossel, who has reconstructed the genesis of Kenwin, the villa was Sir John Ellermann’s wedding gift to Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson (2008:

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32),¹⁷ and the beginnings of the project have therefore to be dated to the time of the arrangements for their wedding that took place in September 1927 (Kossel 2008: 37). In November 1929 the couple bought landed property from the municipality La Tour-de-Peilz and this is also most likely the time at which the contract to the architect Alexander Ferenczy was issued (ibid.). A preliminary draft by Ferenczy for the villa is already on hand in December of the same year. This draft again appears to be based on an earlier 1926 sketch by the Swiss architect Alberto Sartoris that is titled “Progetto di villa per uno scenografo a Clarens-Montreux” and was deemed to have been in the possession of the Macphersons. Sartoris was to become one of the central figures of the International Style and of Functionalism, next to Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.¹⁸ This early sketch indeed presents already all the essential characteristics of Kenwin and the formal vocabulary indebted to Le Corbusier, but the structure is much more cubic and compact, and also smaller and more simple in form (ibid. 38). Following the genesis from this early sketch to the final plans by Ferenczy and Henselmann one can distinguish a progression from a consolidated cubist form towards a more open, light and airy one. The actual construction commenced in November 1929. In the spring of 1931 Ferenczy died in a car accident and Henselmann completed the house with the assistance of Henri Python, the Swiss contact architect. For a long time there has been considerable confusion about who should be credited with the construction of Kenwin.¹⁹ Kossel comes to the conclusion that by the time of Ferenczy’s death the outer construction of the building was already largely completed (2008: 40) and that Henselmann can only be definitely credited with the interior design and the garden (ibid. 44). Kossel demonstrates how the architecture of Kenwin and its style is used to reflect a certain modern avant-garde habitus.²⁰ He shows that Le Corbusier’s classical modern cinq points d’une architecture nouvelle are combined with further elements of modern architecture. Kenwin, according to Elmar Kossel, uses architectural parts and principles in a collage-like way and employs them as a chiffre for the modernism of its architecture (ibid. 47, 49–51). The various elements do not necessarily work together in a functional context and the “cinq points” are employed like symbols and therefore work like characteristics of a

 Unfortunately Kossel does not give his source for this proposition.  Cf. Gabriele Leuthäuser and Peter Gössel (comps.), Functional Architecture: The International Style, Funktionale Architektur, Le Style International – (Köln: Benedikt Taschen, ): –, –.  Cf. Kossel, who refers also to the academic discussion (: –).  Although it is at times not clear in Kossel if the style reflects the socialist habitus of the architect Henselmann or the eccentric avant-garde habitus of the owners, since there is not always a clear differentiation between these two lines of argument.

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certain style (ibid. 47). Kossel comes to the conclusion that even though Kenwin is affiliated with the style of Le Corbusier in prominently citing his cinq points as a chiffre of modernism it is in construction more alike to other Bauhaus projects (ibid. 47–49).²¹ Inside, the cocktail bar of Kenwin was modelled after a bar by Walter Gropius (ibid. 46). Although this is the work of the architects Ferenczy and Henselmann, who were familiar with the projects (ibid. 48), the ‘German’ signature must have been most welcome to Bryher with her love for Berlin and Weimar German avant-garde culture. In 1929 Berlin was the leading domicile of modern architecture and the young Henselmann then worked for Leo Nachtlicht, according to Henselmann one of the most important Berlin architects at the time (Henselmann 1981: 78, also quoted in Kossel 2008: 25). So it must have appealed very much to Bryher, who was going for an ultramodern German house, that Ferenczy acquired the assistance of Henselmann, and it was Pool who unmistakably identified Henselmann as the architect of Kenwin. Apparently Pool were eager to point to the German architect that had constructed the villa. A full-sized illustration of Kenwin in Close Up was accompanied by a caption identifying the “brilliant young German architect” Henselmann and Macpherson’s filming of the construction of Kenwin includes a shot of a large sign reading “Architecte H. Henselmann.”²² Kossel also points to the fact that Close Up is the only contemporary source positively documenting Henselmann’s authorship (2008: 44). Identifying Henselmann as the architect of Kenwin may be attributed to Pool’s ultramodern habitus but it is just as much in line with Pool’s general ambitions to support and promote young yet still unrecognised avant-garde artists. Henselmann, who then was a young and insignificant architect, would later indeed become one of the famous German modern architects of Berlin and then the GDR. According to Kossel, Kenwin reveals an understanding of architecture as the expression of an idea and as an image more than a functional structure. It was intended by the architects, so Kossel claims, to represent the unconventional lifestyle of their clients and their circle of acquaintances (2008: 50); even though Kossel here seems somewhat too eager to demonstrate the Macphersons’ unconventionality by means of the architectural style. Like so many other academics writing on the Pool group, he fits his arguments to a preconceived idea of

 Kossel lists here Rupenhorn in Berlin by the German brothers Hans and Wassili Luckhardt, the house Klipper in Stuttgart and the hospital in Waiblingen by Richard Döcker, as well as house Colnaghi by Paul Artaria and Hans Schmidt, and a house by Mart Stam in the Baba quarter in Prague.  Fragments of Macpherson’s documentary of the house’s construction are inserted into Goël’s film on KenWin [::].

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their avant-gardism as stressing form over function and content. (His argument may be significantly informed by Henselmann’s characterisation of Pool; he wrote of Kenwin that he “built his house which was just as curiously coulisselike and suggestive as its residents” (quoted in Kossel 2008: 51, my translation).²³) His discussion also focuses on the house exclusively, ignoring the garden. This is all the more surprising since according to Kossel’s own research the garden must be considered one of Henselmann’s main contributions. Henselmann himself however only mentions the roof garden in his autobiography, which is part of Le Corbusier’s cinq points. But I will come back to the relevance of the garden later. I have recorded that Kenwin was initially Bryher’s idea and primarily accommodated her aesthetics. In its very first stages it appears to have been conceived as a ‘simple’ modern white cube. This is confirmed by the Functionalist Sartoris’ early sketch, especially given that the sketch was in the possession of Bryher. Furthermore, an early photograph of Kenwin showing a finished outer construction presents the entire building as a classical modern all-white cube, without the black offset of staircase tower and entrance hall that Kossel describes and that must have been added at some later point.²⁴ The functionality of modern architecture, as well as the minimalist and purist form, appealed most to Bryher and her first and foremost concern had certainly been with the white cubic structure of the villa. Nonetheless, as already mentioned, Kenwin was also closely related to Pool’s film interests and this appears to have made a notable mark on the construction of the villa. Originally it had been designed as a film studio for Kenneth Macpherson and had its own film projector room were Pool films were shown in private screenings.²⁵ Furthermore it had been intended as real film architecture for Macpherson’s films (Kossel 2008: 50), ‘coulisse-like and suggestive’, but by the time it was completed Kenneth’s interest in making films had faded somewhat, due to the arrival of ‘talkies,’ and he was more fascinated with making houses then (Guest 2003: 203). In addition, “the Swiss, having decided that given the modernity of the building its owners intended to use it for pornographic films, forbade them to film there” (ibid.). So in contrast to the claims of

 “[Den Macphersons] baute ich mein Haus, das ebenso eigenartig kulissenhaft und anregend wirkte wie seine Bewohner.”  “The Building at Kenwin,” H.D. Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library. The photograph of KenWin is undated. Guest also includes this photo in her H.D. biography, dates it , and erroneously identifies it as the setting of the film Borderline (Guest : picture section in between –).  Perdita Schaffner remembered these screenings (quoted in Kenwin [:: f]).

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Kossel, Guest and others, it can never have been a setting for a Pool film.²⁶ But private screenings were still held in its projector room and the special lighting of the interior design was yet another means of projection, as will be explained shortly. Apparently it had been Pabst who recommended the film architect Ferenczy to Bryher and Macpherson (Kossel 2008: 34; Henselmann 1981: 123), since both Pabst and Ferenczy were working for the UFA then. Before he came to film he had worked in the theatre devising stage settings and rebuilding theatre interiors.²⁷ In Berlin Ferenczy continued to work as an interior designer and reconstructed apartments for a refined clientele of artists and actors. Alfred Markowitz has demonstrated how Ferenczy combined different styles and fitted the interior design of private rooms to the ‘psychology’ of the individual space and its inhabitant, to a female boudoir, an office place, a salon, etc. He designed the rooms according to different moods that they were intended to affect. Markowitz, writing on Ferenczy’s early works of interior design, shows how much décor was a part of Ferenczy’s work then, albeit stressing that it was never overdone and always true to its function, and closes his account by indicating prospective works in structural design (1925: 8–9, 20). Markowitz differentiates between two historical directions of architecture, the individual and “subjectivist” style and the collective and “objectivist” one (ibid. 7–8) and argues that Ferenczy’s work has to be seen in this context. He claims that Ferenczy was someone who combined the different historical styles individually according to function and mood (ibid. 10). The eclectic method of operation that characterises Kenwin is attributed to Ferenczy’s style and especially to his work as a film architect (Kossel 2008: 51). As a film architect Ferenczy was acquainted with furnishing sets in a particular style and in order to accomplish this he had to know the corresponding form vocabulary. In film, architecture becomes a style by which it becomes possible to convey various connotations with regard to content and moral (ibid.), and, Kossel forgets to mention, atmosphere, psychology and mood. Kossel points to the importance of artificial light in Henselmann’s concept for the interior design of Kenwin and it is exactly the light and its effects that are also connected to the film context of the house. One of the special curiosities was a lamp in the cock-

 Kossel includes the undated Beinecke photograph of Kenwin (“The Building at Kenwin” see note ) among his illustrations (ill. ), erroneously identifying it like Guest as a film still from Borderline.  On the life and early work of Ferenczy see Alfred Markowitz, Architekt Alexander Ferenczy (Leipzig, Wien: Friedrich Hübsch, ).

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tail lounge on the gallery of the studio. This lamp was equipped with a propeller that was to be set in motion by the warm air given off by the light bulb and thus throw shifting light effects onto the ceiling: “The light of the torchieres with etched glass and little motors was to flood or illuminate punctually or indirectly the studio and the bar according to wish and by means of remote-controlled buttons on tables, or even was to paint the ceiling to music with light” (Henselmann 1981: 137, quoted in Kossel 2008: 46).²⁸ In a letter to Macpherson, Henselmann even imagines a fictive dinner party whose moods and activities are backed by the alternating light, ranging from direct light at table to a more dimmed and cosy atmosphere at conversation through to lively light during dancing. For the external room he suggests a reflecting plaster to achieve diffuse lighting and even on the outside façade it was intended to be possible to impart the desired atmosphere by means of various colours of light.²⁹ Architecture was to be dematerialised; it was to become a projection screen for the moods of its residents (Kossel 2008: 46–47). The light animates the otherwise static form of the house and gives life and content to the form by bestowing a certain psychology to it. Henselmann’s interpretation of artificial light as mankind’s victory over the night in this context (ibid. 47) displays some parallels to H.D.’s ideas of film as light, projection and vision, as she expressed them in her two “Projector” poems and “Writing on the Wall”, which relate projection with poetic imagination and creativity.³⁰ Henselmann’s concept of colours of light flooding the walls to create atmosphere furthermore recalls the cinematic effect of flooding the film screen, which Elliott had described in his Anatomy of Motion Picture Film. Henselmann understood architecture as part of one’s being, “because a house is not merely a thing. A house is a being. And when it is your house – it is a part of yourself” (quoted in Kossel 2008: 25, my translation).³¹ The architect’s philosophy that a house was connected with the being of the people living there went hand in hand with Pool’s understanding of art as being closely related to life and must have found approval with the owners. Kenwin presents a modernist style connected with various connotations, content-wise and moral-

 “Das Licht der Strahler mit aufgerauhtem Glas und kleinen Motoren sollte das Studio und die Bar punktartig oder indirekt je nach Wunsch und durch Taster and Tischen ferngesteuert durchfluten oder erhellen oder sogar die Decke bis zur Musik mit Licht bemalen.”  Henselmann reports that originally parts of the outside façade were to have had a plaster mixed with sulphur and zinc that would reflect a special mouse-grey light in different colours but that this project was in the end prohibited (: ).  For her “Writing on the Wall” see H.D.’s Tribute to Freud (–).  “Denn ein Haus ist kein Ding. Ein Haus ist ein Wesen. Und wenn es dein Haus ist – ein Stück Wesen deiner selbst.” Kossel chooses this quote to introduce the chapter on Kenwin in his book.

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wise. Henselmann wanted an architecture that functioned as an ideal projection screen for the individual moral, political, and zeitgeist issues of a certain time (ibid. 50), and he published notably to supply the recipient with a ‘reading guideline.’ Kenwin takes up ideas that already featured prominently in the Pool film Monkey’s Moon and finally realises them architectonically. For example, the monkey cage in the room with the reading person (signifying in the film the Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic) became an integral part of the villa. In the 1930s the library at Kenwin included a monkey cage for Macpherson’s guenons (ibid. 30, Henselmann 1981: 123, 136). Also, the lighting, as emphasised by a close-up shot of a lamp in the film, features prominently in Henselmann’s correspondence with Macpherson. Most prominent is the dynamism of the interior space of the house and the exterior space of the garden in this film, symbolising animal joy and conscientiousness, nature and form, the Dionysian and the Apollonian principle. This dynamism of interior and exterior space is taken up by the architecture of Kenwin and its large garden, continuing the symbolism of Monkey’s Moon and representing a lived dialectics of literary art and animal life or nature, work and leisure, moments of friendship as well as conflict.

7.3 KenWin – The Dialectics of Classic Modern Form and Nature Kossel has shown how Kenwin symbolises a certain modernist avant-garde habitus and the details on architectural style and mood have shown that Kenwin transcends mere form and becomes artistic idea and psychological setting. Henselmann claimed that the Macphersons were stout Marxists. Although this apparently originated in his need to justify his private project for some rich people to his own socialist beliefs (Kossel 2008: 9–10), there is also a possibility that he perceived but misconstrued their older and more universal rather than Marxist dialectics.³² He did note that Bryher herself worshipped the ascetic principle (Henselmann 1981: 135, quoted in Kossel 2008: 32) and described her as serious-minded in contrast to a flippant Macpherson. However, his statement that she and Macpherson were “suffering severely” from their wealth (ibid.) is quite amusing, especially considering Macpherson’s pleasure-seeking life-style. Kenwin, above all, seems to represent once more the dialectics of the different

 Henselmann remarks that they “knew more about Marxist philosophy than [he]” (Henselmann : ).

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artistic principles that characterise all works of art by Pool, particularly the antagonistic principles embodied by KENneth and WINifred as they are symbolised in the scrapbook photomontages. The contrast between the white, compact and hermetic entrance and the open, more irregular garden side points to an interaction of Apollonian serenity with Dionysian playfulness, classic but static form with romantic asymmetry and affinity to nature.

Figure 31: Kenwin, front and garden view

The garden, to now return to this aspect, despite being presumably one of Henselmann’s major contributions to the villa, has usually been completely overlooked in all discussions on Kenwin.³³ Kossel does not relate the construction of the garden,

 Even though Kossel points to the contrast between the compact northern façade and the spacious back and mentions that the back of the villa is set in relation to the garden and landscape (: ), he does not draw any conclusions from this.

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apart from one rough sketch showing the garden path to the house with its stonebordered stairs, and compared to Henselmann’s other precise plans for the interior this sketch appears more freely drawn, almost like the detail of a draft for a landscape drawing. Yet the garden is a crucial complement to the house, as is the contrastive Alpine surrounding. Even though a garden does play a role in Le Corbusier’s cinq points, it is only his roof garden. Kenwin garden in its function as a zoo was quite distinctly Pool and functioned as the Dionysian complement to the clear geometry and ascetic form of the house. Kenwin, the Bauhaus villa in the idyllic hills, united aesthetic modern form and animal (wild) life and nature: The modern architecture with its appending large garden housing several animals – Perdita’s cat Peter, Macpherson’s monkeys, Perdita’s long-tailed monkey, dogs, and not to forget the prospective elephant of the Zurich Zoo – combined along with Pool’s other productions the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Kenwin is the manifestation of Pool’s artistic dialectic principle in stone – and garden, one may add. It is their artistic principle become architecture. At this point it will be helpful to consider the visual key to their artistic principle once more and apply the symbolic photomontages of the scrapbook to the reading of Kenwin. The art concept personified by Bryher is visualised by an ancient temple that in its out-of-focus quality suggests the silhouettes of cathedrals, by an ancient monastery symbolising asceticism and purity, by clear, vertical geometry and an emphasis on architecture and thus a more static form. Yet this static form of stone is set in relation to organic nature, into which the sacred forms transform and in which Bryher is depicted, in what in the end might well be Kenwin garden. Kenwin is Bryher’s modern monastery of close to cathedralsize amid sublime nature – although a life-style including a large domestic staff of maids and chauffeurs³⁴ hardly qualifies as a monastic one. But the functional and minimalist Bauhaus style, clean of any superfluous décor, certainly complies with a culture of asceticism. Le Corbusier once drew a parallel between old sacral architecture and modern construction, claiming that the skyscrapers in America were the cathedrals of the twentieth century.³⁵ Bryher saw in “their detached, impersonal beauty […] a symbol for the wider life that we wanted to create” (Heart 319). Modern architecture to her was “open and free” (ibid.). The ultramodern Bauhaus architecture of Kenwin is just another artistic expression of pure avant-garde art form, yet in its functionality it represents a decidedly purpose-oriented art.  Guest lists governess, gardener, chauffeur, cook, and maid (: ) and Kossel mentions rooms for the domestics (: , ).  See Le Corbusier’s account of his journey to America in When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People (Cornwall: Cornwall P, ).

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While the house presents modern aesthetic form, Kenwin Park with its animals and flowers and trees represents animal joy, freedom, and an almost paradisiacal natural state. The gardens better correspond with the photomontage in Pool’s personal scrapbook capturing the artistic principle symbolised by Macpherson. It is a principle that is characterised by an abundance of tree tops and wild growth, and a certain moment of chaos. Another element stressed by this photomontage is décor – in the form of the Celtic costume and the bronze amoretto – and in its close combination with the natural vegetation this might hint at Art nouveau,³⁶ an architectural predecessor of Bauhaus that emphasised the unity of arts and crafts while opposing minimalist form through its accent on décor. There is a passage in Macpherson’s novel Gaunt Island which takes up this aspect of décor versus simple functional form: “And as for Renaissance architecture and furniture, it’s pure horsehair 1880! […] All that obvious ornament! My God, I wouldn’t take a present of it” (Gaunt Island 48). The passage suggests the Arts and Crafts Movement initiated by William Morris, which advocated traditional craftsmanship and romantic or folk styles of decoration.³⁷ Too little material on Macpherson exists to say if any of his family of professional artists had been part of the Arts and Crafts Movement or to verify if he indeed cherished the Art nouveau style in architecture, but that his was rather a décor-loving than minimalist and anything but ascetic taste seems also confirmed by Guggenheim’s remark on his “elaborate furniture” in later years (Guggenheim, Confessions 301).³⁸ There is also one curious photograph among the digital image collection of the Beinecke Library entitled “Kenwin Studio, Burier, Switzerland” that shows a wooden suite and furniture that strikingly deviates from the typical Bauhaus furniture at Kenwin.³⁹ The ‘nature’ photomontage in the scrapbook is dominated by the dynamic, in contrast to the static in the ‘architecture’ montage, and presents a circular arrangement of photos versus the linear in the other one. Apart from the trees the focus is on man or human nature, and by means of the still from Wing Beat, with its close relation to the still from the Pabst movie, is associated with human psy Art nouveau derived its extravagant décor from organic forms in nature. Cf. Arnold Lyongrün, From Nature to Ornament: Organic Form in the Art Nouveau Style (Mineola, NY: Dover, , repr.). Klaus-Jürgen Sembarch begins his book on Art nouveau with the statement that Art nouveau and cinema are associated. Cf. Art Nouveau (Köln: Taschen, ): .  See for example Rosalind P. Blakesley, The Arts and Crafts Movement (London: Phaidon, ).  She also was to mention his “frivolous and prewar” ideas of interior decoration (), and points to his elegant clothes and luxurious life-style (Guggenheim, Confessions –).  H.D. Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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chology and emotion, and last but not least with the new naturalistic art medium film. In this the park is connected with Macpherson’s artistic principle as well as with a joie de vivre mood, taking into account the garden’s symbolism in Monkey’s Moon. Moreover, as the villa Kenwin was designed as a film studio and film set with complex lighting effects to stimulate certain atmospheres, both garden and house are closely related to the artistic persona of Macpherson. He was also the one who became interested in building houses, very likely because on the one hand architecture is another medium that closely weds art to human life and on the other hand unites the arts. Bryher again, who after all chose Switzerland for their settlement, has to be closely related to the romantic Alpine landscape. Although there is a certain tendency to associate the artistic persona and habitus of one with the Bauhaus villa and the other with the villa’s park, it becomes obvious that house and surrounding nature cannot be neatly separated into the living individuals Bryher and Macpherson; rather, they represent dialectic artistic principles that are at work within both individuals and their creative activities. The antagonistic principles work within the individual members of Pool as well as in their dynamic relationships and ultimately in their art. Kenwin can be considered a visual manifestation of these artistic principles. That the discussion of Kenwin focuses on Bryher and Macpherson and somewhat neglects the person of H.D. is due to the fact that the name of the villa Kenwin already directs such an exclusive approach. Furthermore Kenwin was a collaborative project of Bryher and Macpherson, as their correspondence with Henselmann shows (Kossel 2008: 40–45, 47). Despite this, H.D.’s favoured simple Hellenic style and also the nature spirit that infused her poetic credo as well as her ‘Oread’ persona will be easily discovered in the synthesis of architectural form and nature in Kenwin. The white cubist structure within nature obviously relates just as well to the artistic principle and persona of H.D. as symbolised in the scrapbook montage: the white ancient Greek sculpture fragments geometrically arranged and joined to a naked Oread H.D. in nature. In her autobiographical short novel Nights H.D. has her heroine say: The house was her spirit – she had never so loved any house. It was parallel and modern and ran level with the lines of mountain, it was squares to be bisected and parallelograms and rhomboids. In the sparse and geometric contour of the house, there was all wisdom […] She would be so embodied in long parallelograms and in square and cube and rectangle. (90)

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The “sparse and geometric contours” clearly recall those of Kenwin and demonstrate that H.D. could easily identify with the place artistically, though she did not necessarily feel at home there.⁴⁰ The September 1931 issue of Close Up dedicated a full page to photographs of Kenwin, depicting the almost completed garden façade of the villa.⁴¹ Kossel attributes the publication in Close Up to a courtesy from Bryher and Macpherson to Henselmann, who had asked for pictures of the house for purposes of presentation. He also points out that the collage form deviates from the conventional form of presentation in an architecture magazine (2008: 44). Macpherson’s presentation of Kenwin once more emphasises the dialectics of Kenwin’s architecture and its dynamics. The picture on the upper left displays, especially due to its montage technique, an intricate arrangement of railings, stairs, terraces and balconies that in their continuance on different levels and of different perspectives vaguely call to mind M.C. Escher’s architectural labyrinths and impress as rather chaotic. The picture on the lower right, not a montage, presents the plain white façade of the studio cube lined by ribbon windows below and bedroom balconies above, which both appear dark or in shade and contrast with the white plaster. This picture with its regular geometry impresses as very structured. The first picture suggests dynamics while the second one comes across as static; the first one appears three-dimensional while the second one seems two-dimensional. Macpherson’s collage plays with open spaces and space volume versus solid form. The left picture shows the three floors of the villa with their balconies and railings and the stairs from a low angle, continuing via montage the stairs but shifting the perspective to one of high angle. In this picture the shadows of the railings paint a geometric pattern onto the concrete of the terraces that again contrasts with the plain white façade in the other picture. This picture is rather cubistic and modern while the other is cubic and archaic. There is no saying why Macpherson concentrated on the garden façade alone for his Close Up collage of Kenwin but this may have to do with the courtesy towards Henselmann, to which Kossel alludes, and with Henselmann’s contribution to Kenwin. The photo collage of the villa displays the caption: “A house on Lake Geneva, designed by Hermann Henselmann, a brilliant young German architect, whose designs for a Folk-theatre with many uses for film we hope to publish in our next

 As her daughter Perdita proposed in her preface to the novel: “In actual fact, H.D. was never fully at home in Kenwin […]. She – as did I – found it cold, both in temperature and spirit” (Nights xiii). On H.D. and the geometric in her works see Miranda B. Hickman, The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats (Austin: University of Texas Press, ): –.  Close Up : (September ): .

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issue.”⁴² Henselmann himself was strongly influenced by both Le Corbusier and the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Lloyd Wright’s architecture represented to Henselmann individual freedom and flowing spaces since his houses were no longer compact and static cubes but conceived according to modern motion processes while Le Corbusier was to him a high priest of rationalism and a visionary of form. While Lloyd Wright aimed at a recovery of natural existence despite industrial mass production, Le Corbusier strove for higher orders of being that were based on the new possibilities realised by the industrial revolution, while his ultramodern architecture was based upon an idea of absolute harmony of classic origin (2008: 126– 133). Thus Henselmann’s personal concept of architecture was also based on a dialectic concept. The Kenwin collage was set in association to a discussion of architectural films in Close Up, which again included a couple of photos of Le Corbusier buildings. Another artist who had linked ultra modern architecture to poetic creativity and film was Man Ray. His Les Mystères du Château du Dé (“Castle of Cubes” 1928) is a cubist-surrealist film poem on the Villa Noailles, like Kenwin a building of international style.⁴³ His more or less abstract art film concentrates on shapes and forms and the play of light and shadow. The humans in this film are ‘de-humanised’ into shape and form by wearing stockings over their heads and black-and-white striped bathing suits. Scenes like their rolling on a floor with a pattern of shadow and light that corresponds to the stripes on their suits are striking if somewhat bizarre experiments in form. The film’s title points to Man Ray’s source of inspiration, Mallarmé’s poem “Un Coup de Dés” whose central theme is pure abstraction of language. The poem plays with white paper space and how the interaction of words and blank space create dynamics in reading; Man Ray’s film translates this concept into film. Macpherson too captures patterns of light and shadow, planes and angles in his filming of Kenwin, though his film is not abstract but documents the construction of the house and the people that appear in his film are personal humans with faces, the builders, painters, and Bryher and H.D. Yet his film incorporates experiments in form and avant-garde aesthetics into its documentary nature. Macpherson’s filming of Kenwin relates architectural form to scenery and documents how house and surrounding nature were affiliated to Pool: The typically modern horizontal ribbon windows present a panorama view onto the ‘Classic’ beauty of the surrounding hills and trees and onto Lake Geneva while  According to Kossel this is the only contemporary source that identifies Henselmann as the architect of Kenwin (: ).  Helmut Weihsmann, Cinetecture: Film – Architektur – Moderne (Wien: PVS Verleger, ): –.

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the stairway tower is associated with the ‘Romantic’ rocky sublime of the snowcapped Swiss mountains (in Kenwin [1:01:17–1:01:29]). (In contrast to the collage in Close Up, the film this time affiliates the horizontal with the rolling and dynamic, and the vertical with static form.) Macpherson’s documentary, although relating modern form to romantic Swiss scenery, unfortunately also does not provide archival material for an idea of the garden since the house was still under construction then and the garden still all rubble.

7.4 Later Years through to Today (Outlook) The architectural project Kenwin corresponded well not only with Pool’s programme of modernism but also with their humane positions. In the 1930s and 1940s Kenwin became a sanctuary for refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, among them many from the German intelligentsia. Bryher records that her “first fugitive from the Nazis arrived actually in 1933 but the flood began during the following year” (Heart 325). She got actively involved in helping people to leave Germany and assisted over one hundred refugees to safety.⁴⁴ Many were housed in Kenwin before continuing to their final destination. In 1940 Bryher herself finally had to leave her Swiss home for England but she returned after the war in 1946 and remained at Kenwin until her death in 1983. In her solitary last years at Kenwin, all that remained was the aura of history; prose, film and poetry had disappeared from the set, as had Macpherson and H.D.⁴⁵ After her death Kenwin remained unoccupied and fell into neglect. Demolition was even considered since restoration seemed impractical, until the architect Giovanni Pezzoli bought it in 1987 and completely restored it. Details on the restoration will be found on his webpage Contexte Kenwin, with many photographs documenting the process as well as additional material on the house and its history.⁴⁶ (The webpage also suggests that Kenwin may be visited by interested parties and provides contact addresses; however, personal experience indicates that not all requests will receive a response.) More than half a century after the initial controversy over the construction of Kenwin the Swiss authorities finally declared it a landmark (Guest 2003: 202) and in October 2005 the Swiss TV network TSR (Télévision Suisse Romande)

 This information is supplied in a brief abstract on Bryher added at the end of her autobiography (Heart ).  “The splendid library […] with its Elizabethan acquisitions is elsewhere. Novels from the twenties up to today are to be found, as well as an extensive history of the canton of Vaud. Bryher’s necessary historical books are still there. No cameras turn. Nor poems” (Guest : ).  (accessed  April ).

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even broadcasted an interview with Giovanni Pezzoli on Kenwin, now one of the special monuments of Vaud, and its complex restoration.⁴⁷ ₪₪₪ In 1996 Véronique Goël made a documentary film about the restored villa and its history; it is a collage of quotations from texts and letters by Pool and their friends, archive photographs and film snippets. In presenting the voiceover in English, French and German (with French or German subtitles), and with the German voice of renowned German actress Edith Clever, Goël’s film is true to the international attitude of Pool. Her film Kenwin presents the vision of a life spent together in friendship and love, and experiments with the aesthetic fascination of architecture, literature and music (Zimmermann 1997: 9). Goël joins archival black-and-white photographs and film sequences of Pool with scenes filmed in black-and-white of the Pezzoli family living in the villa today, and she adds the ‘voices of the dead’ by way of their letters, with one individual voice per letter. By merging the past with the present Goël revives the history and memory of the Pool trio, reanimates the creative and artistic space of Kenwin and creates a multi-layered history of this space. This concept would have been much in Bryher’s spirit, since she believed that “history itself is philosophy. It dies and is continuous” (Heart 242). Goël also includes the voice of H.D.’s daughter Perdita Schaffer, who too used to live at Kenwin, and closes with an excerpt from a recorded H.D. poetry reading. Perdita’s contribution and H.D.’s recorded voice are authentic voices from history and Perdita, who was still living in 1996, constitutes the living bond between past and present in the film.

 “Le court du jour” Spécial Immobilier: Villa Kenwin-Bauhaus (Tour-de-Peilz),” tsr.ch – vidéo. (accessed  April ).

8 Close Up – A Popular Forum for Film and Film Culture In comparison to the scrapbook with the photo montages, which was an entirely private creative medium, and the Pool novels, which had addressed a small readership, the Pool films reached out to a somewhat larger audience. For one, they were shown in independent movie theatres and by film societies in a number of European cities and thus reached, though not the masses, parts of the public that amounted to several thousands. For another they were silent films and therefore not restricted to English-speaking recipients. Foothills, as Macpherson’s article on this film reveals, was a collaboration between the artist and the public, in the form of local village people. Borderline too had incorporated people from the local community in the production and thus qualified as an inclusive art project.¹ The film magazine Close Up, however, ultimately and in full converted into practice the art philosophy that Macpherson delineates in his two early novels: The artist has to engage in life, has to accept contact with the popular and the public and must not withdraw from society into secluded aesthetic spheres, at least not for good. Through Close Up the artists left their purely aesthetic domain and got in touch with the public. They descended from their Parnassian heights to mingle with the crowd and by means of their contact affect progress. Close Up was the artists’ instrument to reach out. By means of the magazine, the editors and contributors established a network² of film interest and a connection and communication between the amateur and the avant-garde artist. The magazine pooled popular and ‘high’ art and mediated between the two. The editors literally got into contact with the public for they answered letters and responded to questions, suggestions, and requests. At first, the magazine started off as a “family affair,” as Richardson remarked,³ with Macpherson, Bryher, Bryher’s brother, H.D., and Richardson contributing articles, plus one article on their friend Allégret’s Congo film by their Paris correspondent. But soon the staff expanded. The editors won friends

 According to Bryher “everybody wanted to be in it” (Heart ).  Francesca De Ruggieri has pointed to the “‘rizomatic’ quality” of the magazine and argues that “Close Up may thus be read as a huge hypertext” and an international cultural network. See Paola Zaccaria and Francesca De Ruggieri, “Close Up as Con(n)text,” Networking Women, –.  “It is as you see rather a family affair for the moment. But several Big Bugs have promised articles: Havelock Ellis, Huxley, Lawrence…” Richardson in a letter to P. Beaumont Wadsworth, July . Quoted in Fromm (: ); also cited by Marcus in Close Up –, .

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for contributions and acquired regular correspondents in the metropolitan centres Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna, Geneva, New York, and Moscow. Film amateurs and professionals alike wrote for Close Up; German film critic and Berlin correspondent Andor Kraszna-Krausz, editor of two German film magazines, and film critic and New York correspondent Harry Alan Potemkin were specialists, while Macpherson, H.D. and Bryher had just recently discovered their interest in films and invited friends with none to little knowledge on the matter to contribute. Close Up soon included contributions from a variety of fields and disciplines, and set film and cinema in relation to literature, psychology and psychoanalysis, educational reform, cultural matters and social issues, and this on an international scale. It is notable for its interdisciplinary interests and genre diversity. Next to H.D. and Dorothy Richardson, it printed contributions from modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and René Crevel along with such a conventional but successful Edwardian author as Arnold Bennett. Hence, the magazine mustered acclaimed experimental avant-garde writers and conventional but highly popular novelists, and spanned the literary and artistic field from one pole to the other. (To recall once more, Bennett was the realist and social author from whom Woolf had decidedly distinguished herself and modernist fiction.) Close Up furthermore featured contributions by such distinguished artists as: Russian filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov; French avant-garde filmmakers Man Ray and Eugen Deslaw; Austrian-Hungarian film architect Ernö Metzner; English documentary filmmaker John Grierson; Harlem Renaissance celebrities like Elmer Carter; and in the last issue Upton Sinclair, to name some of the best known. And on top of correspondents in the great film cities, Close Up also printed contributions by Japanese, Belgian, and Czech film critics. This shows that in addition to spanning the literary field, Pool’s film magazine also incorporated various positions from the artistic field of film. In contrast to many of the avant-garde little magazines, which were stages for self-promotion and distinction, Close Up was a forum for discussion that pooled information and radiated ideas. Macpherson chose the film technical term for a title because he personally liked close-ups (“As Is” 1:5, 10) and, of course, the term fitted a film magazine. In the early days of film, close-ups had been new, strange, radical and often irritating to the spectator but by the 1920s they were “the order of the day” (ibid.). They were an example of the new and experimental become standard. Close-ups are usually directly related to dynamics and movement, in contrast to the more static quality of the long shot. Moreover, the close-up shows detail and can be

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used to reveal emotions (Bordwell and Thompson 2008: 191–193).⁴ It may also capture details that usually escape notice and in this work in analogy to psychology (Sachs, “Film Psychology”). This seems to connect it closely to the focus on detail and fragment in modernist literary texts. But the close-up is not only a device used for representing psychology; it is also much used in montage, especially in what was known as ‘the Russian method’. Sergei Eisenstein, as mentioned already, thought that “an abstraction of the lifelike may in certain instances be given by the close-up” (“Dickens, Griffith” 242), and he continued to point out that “isolated from naturalism and abstracted in the necessary direction” such a close-up could become a universalised “sensually palpable” concrete image (ibid.). Thus the close-up, to Eisenstein, becomes a symbolic picture detail (ibid.). Eisenstein’s idea of the close-up is very similar to H.D.’s idea of the fragment. The close-up unites the two aspects most dear to Pool’s art philosophy: experimental form and representation of human nature and psychology. In addition to the film technical meaning of the term, ‘close up’ in English (spelled without a hyphen like the magazine title) also means ‘to be close at hand’ or ‘right at something’. Regarding a film magazine this, of course, describes a journalism that is involved, that reports from the scene, and whose journalists have their fingers on the pulse of film culture.

8.1. State of Research and the Close Up Anthology Unlike many other Pool works, Close Up became well-known but as yet there has been little research published on the film magazine. The first study is Anne Friedberg’s dissertation (1983), followed by Jane Marek’s article “Bryher and Close Up” (1990), and the Close Up anthology with scholarly introductions by James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (1998).⁵ More recently there has been a study by Paola Zaccaria and Francesca de Ruggieri (2004).⁶ While Friedberg’s work emphasises the internationalist importance of the magazine and its avant-gardism, Marek, Zaccaria and Ruggieri shed light on Bryher’s hidden role in the publishing and editing of the film magazine. There are furthermore the chapters on Close Up in works by Laura Marcus (2007) and François

 Eric Elliott as well attributes a chapter to the close-up in his POOL book Anatomy of Motion Picture Art.  Friedberg, Writing about Cinema (); Marek, “Bryher and Close Up,” H.D. Newsletter : (): –; James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (eds.), Close Up – : Cinema and Modernism (Princeton: UP, ).  Their “Close Up as Co(n)text” in Networking Women (–).

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Bovier (2009). Marcus provides a more general account, whereas Bovier concentrates on the “hieroglyphic model” in Close Up and follows a somewhat similar arrangement to the anthology by Donald, Friedberg and Marcus. However, in addition to a discussion of the psychoanalytical articles and Richardson’s contributions and her écriture feminine, he pays significant attention to Eisenstein’s montage theories and to documentary style in film. Close Up is also acknowledged in volume one of Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s three volume The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2009), with a contribution by Laura Marcus. (The jacket cover presents Close Up among other little magazines and thus at once defines it as such.) The Close Up anthology by James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (1998) assembles several important contributions from the magazine, categorises them, and provides helpful additional research material. Furthermore, the anthology constitutes a valuable contribution to academic research in reviving Close Up and Pool to cultural memory and revealing their impact on modernism. However, the anthology is also somewhat misrepresentative of the conceptual nature of Close Up. Donald, Friedberg and Marcus have sorted many of the contributions into separate sections – those on POOL Films, those on silent and sound films, those on cinema and psychoanalysis, etc. – and compiled the contributions by H.D. and Dorothy Richardson into discrete sections. However, they have ‘cleaned’ the contributions by H.D. of her non-journalistic “Projector” poems, consigning them to poetry anthologies. They have also eliminated Stein’s literary pieces, “Mrs. Emerson” and “Three Sitting Here,” arguing that these are included in various other collections. This is legitimate since the editors strive to revive and make accessible contributions that are little known and they have limited space for doing so. Yet they also want to present the specific nature of the journal and the literary pieces they omit are an important part of this nature since they constitute avant-garde contributions typical of the little magazines. Even though Donald, Friedberg and Marcus admit the “literary, sometimes even poetic, qualities” of the journalistic contributions by H.D. and Richardson (1998: vii), they homogenise the journalism genre that Pool intentionally mixed with literature and poetry in their endeavour to wed the antagonistic poles of the literary and artistic field. (Pool understood their art as life and life to them was all-inclusive.) It is therefore most important to consider these literary pieces in the context of the film magazine too. Granted the editors had to make cuts due to limited space, but their homogenised journalism misplaces Close Up within the literary field and alters the nature of Pool’s film magazine.

8.2 Wedding the Concept of the Avant-garde Little Magazines

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The editors of the anthology also largely ignore Macpherson’s editorials; of the more than forty written they reprint only three.⁷ In dividing and arranging the contributions according to fields of interest, they consequently neglect to pay attention to the original composition of the contributions within the individual magazine issues and how these dovetailed. Herein the anthology falls short of showing the well-constructed ‘poetic’ arrangement of the film magazine. So far no scholarly examination of Close Up, to my knowledge, has paid any attention to this poetic arrangement. This, however, is exceedingly important because it reflects how even such a ‘popular’ mass product as a magazine can be artistic in composition and conception. The careful arrangement of contents in a single Close Up issue works in analogy to the artistic cutting that distinguishes a Pabst film from the industrial Hollywood product. After all, cutting and arrangement are the principles of editing and this filmic understanding was applied by the magazine’s editors. Before I examine some of the magazine contributions to show Pool’s intent in promoting film culture and demonstrate the ingenious way in which individual contributions relate to each other in the composition of the magazine, Close Up shall first be placed in its historical context and in the literary field. Pool’s magazine was by no means the first English film magazine; the Kine Weekly had existed since around 1890.⁸ But the Kine Weekly was a trade newspaper for persons working in the film industry and it catered to the British film industry and its interests, whereas Pool wanted a magazine for the people and in the public interest.

8.2 Wedding the Concept of the Avant-garde Little Magazines to Film Journalism and Weimar Berlin Film Culture Pool’s film magazine Close Up was, as the subtitle stated, ‘devoted to films as an art.’ It promised in banderols across the cover to be ‘an official guide to better films’ and declared that it would not present gossip (no yellow press journalism)

 The three reprinted editorials are his first editorial launching the magazine, one editorial on Hitchcock’s first sound film Blackmail in the anthology part “From Silence to Sound”, and one editorial on his film in the part on “Borderline and the POOL Films.” In addition the editors of the anthology allow about one page to his editorial in their general introduction.  British Cinema History Research Project (accessed  August ). The Research Project also provides an online index to the content of the trade journal throughout the years.

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but theory and analysis.⁹ This already signals that Close Up was not launched as a commercial enterprise but rather followed in the tradition of the little magazines that had once helped many classic modernists to become noticed. These little magazines were started by some, usually private, initiative that had an exclusively avant-garde, experimentalist concern and assumed a decidedly anticommercial position in the publishing field. They provided an alternative means of publication from the traditional trade system and helped the modernist author to distinguish him or herself from this system. Due to their sharp disapproval of economic interests, these magazines usually had only a small number of issues, achieved low-circulation, and disappeared again after a short while. Nevertheless, without these little magazines, many of the canonical authors of Modernism might never have been published since commercial publishers would not have taken the risk. Bryher, having been part of the Montparnasse experience, knew all about these little magazines and when Macpherson became interested in film she naturally suggested that he should start a film magazine (Heart 289). Knowing that numerous copies of the little magazines usually did not sell and instead piled up in some dusty corner of bookshops, Bryher had no illusions about their film magazine lasting for long and started out with a working capital of sixty pounds and the usual 500 copies for their first issue.¹⁰ She was astonished when all copies sold immediately and their film magazine became an instant success. Bryher even wondered if they had done something wrong as this had never happened with the little magazines and success in publishing seemed to entail betrayal of commitment and failure in artistic quality. Unlike most of its literary ancestors, the film magazine lasted for six years and in the end had a quite notable readership of 5,000 (Heart 289). More recent research has revealed that the avant-gardes’ sharp distinction from consumer culture and commodification is a self-stylisation within the literary field, a myth of Modernism, rather than an actual fact.¹¹ Some examples of  The cover wrapper ‘guide to better films’ embellished Close Up : (March ), the promise for ‘theory and analysis no gossip’ Close Up : (October ). The covers with wrappers are reprinted in the Close Up anthology (: , ).  “We expected it to last three issues and had five hundred copies printed” (Heart ). In estimating a run of three issues, Bryher gave it about the same chance as Lewis’ BLAST, which had lasted two issues.  Sabine Buchholz has examined this in the specific context of the little magazines. Cf. “Das avantgardistische Publikationswesen und die Konsumliteratur in der klassischen Moderne Englands – Teil I: Positionierung im literarischen Feld: die limitierte Ausgabe und die little magazines,” Anglistik : (März ): –. Her analysis has been very helpful in the examination of Close Up. See furthermore Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf,

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such self-promotion will be found in the subtitle of The Little Review, which boldly announced the motto: “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste,” or Pound’s essay on the little magazines.¹² Avant-garde authors faced a dilemma: on the one hand, financial success compromised their position as ‘sincere’ artists while, on the other hand, they had to avoid being taken for mere amateurs (Buchholz 2006: 40). As a result they devised methods to distinguish themselves from traditional trade and popular taste and be perceived as highly skilled specialists. It was exactly its association with these magazines and such an avantgarde elitist habitus that, at least in the beginning, constituted a problem for Close Up, and the discussion of its editorial will show how Pool took a firm stand against any such elitism. Buchholz notes that the little magazines often printed adverts that were completely contradictory to their avant-garde mottos, such as announcements of popular novels or bodice adverts next to radical feminist articles in a suffragette magazine (2006: 61–67). This is different from the advertisements in Close Up, which are in harmony with the magazine’s content and philosophy. In general, advertisement is sparse and predominantly it announces books or films by Pool. Some of this advertisement is more subtle in that it features congratulations and tributes to Close Up by acclaimed and popular filmmakers such as Paul Leni, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Renée Adorée, or Sergei Eisenstein.¹³ The sporadic commercial advertisement, however, not only fully agrees with the rest of the content but even assists the magazine’s goal. Thus the advertisement for the ‘Jackie’ Debri projector¹⁴ informs readers about the possibility of watching movies at home and wants to motivate them to engage in private viewings. The editors of the magazine (in itself a ‘popular’ genre) not only fully embrace popular culture, which after all also comprises consumption, but even use and redefine its strategies for their own artistic ends. By this redefinition they manage to re/convert economic capital into a cultural capital

Eliot, Yeats (Stanford: UP, ); Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Faces of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception – (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, ); and Jane Garrity, “’Selling Culture to the Civilized’: Bloomsbury, British Vogue, and the Marketing of National Identity,” Modernism/modernity : (): –. For more general approaches on the topic of the avant-garde and consumer culture see Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism (); Kevin J.H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt’s Marketing Modernism (); and Joyce Piell Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism? that were cited earlier.  “Small Magazines,” The English Journal : (November ): –.  Leni, Murnau, Lubitsch, and Adorée sent their best wishes towards the end of the first successful year. See Close Up : (May ): , , , and . Eisenstein sent his tribute to the “Editor of the Closest Up to what cinema should be” a little later. See Close Up : (January ): .  This advertisement is found in the March  issue.

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for the multitude. The same relation of commercial product and symbolic message, which in the magazine is used for the purpose of ‘psychologically’ effecting motivation and education, is already employed in Macpherson’s artistic works to affect atmosphere. In the avant-garde film Borderline there are the advertisement posters with their symbolic value and the various alcoholic beverages with their brand names. Even in the early experimental novel Poolreflection some stray consumer products of representative significance appear, such as Peter’s perfume “ambre antique.” One of the wittiest adverts is a snapshot of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the President of Czechoslovakia, reading Close Up. By distinguishing film culture in this way the advertisement not only suggests, especially to readers from a strongly class-conscious society such as England, that films are respectable and cultured but also gives proof of the magazine’s illustrious international success. A caption assures the reader that the President “believes in the art of film” (Close Up 8:4, 310). Close Up even ‘advertises’ advertising by including among their film stills one from “a recent advertising film by Francis Bruguière and Oswell Blakeston.”¹⁵ This advert illustrates how abstract avant-garde film aesthetic can be applied in a commercial context and will improve the commercial standard. It confirms Macpherson’s confidence that “good art IS commercial.” Macpherson’s attitude was not only more forthright and honest than the habitus of other avant-garde artists, but he was even of the utterly heretical opinion that it was the job of the artist “to think out the commodity” (“As Is” 2:4, 9 and 10) that the industry then could commercialise. For it simply was not in the nature of the industry to risk experiment: Sheer business, sheer commerce is hard headed and deals with established things. […] Thus it is useless to look to sheer “business” to supply artistic and experimental progress. […] In other words, if we create a lively interest in artistic, educational endeavour and development, if we stir things and people up, set up a high-tension current, “Business will develop out of it”! (ibid. 9)

Macpherson’s primary concern however was not with self-promotion and personal profit, as in a maybe more post-modern sense, but with the avant-garde artist’s social function of educating and stimulating society to creativity and active participation. To this end, the artist had to establish a symbiosis with ‘business’ and

 Close Up : (June ): ; the still is included in Oswell Blakeston’s article with the meaningful title “Can Cinema Be Taught?”

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ultimately employ the industry in order to accomplish a broad distribution of creative education and thus social progress. Close Up came in an octavo format and was bound in an orange wrapper, with the magazine’s name printed on top in black, plain or ‘restraint’ style letters. The magazine price, printed in English, French, German and American currency in the bottom right, testified to its internationalism. The simplistic ‘classical’ style of the first issue was soon amplified by a black and white photo print on the cover, a close-up from some film that varied with each monthly issue, and the subtitle “The Only Magazine Devoted to Films as an Art,” printed in a smaller but more decorative italic style. The cover picture obviously illustrated the magazine title, while the orange wrapper utilised a signature promotional tactic of Modernism. Much has been commented upon the revolutionary graphic design of Lewis and Pound’s legendary first BLAST issue (1913) bound in lurid pink, but only recently have cultural studies scholars pointed to the blatant visual advertising strategy of this artistic statement (Buchholz 2006: 66). Usually not mentioned in this context is the fact that The Little Review followed, in April 1919, with an issue in bright lemon yellow and that The Blue Review (1913) came at least in brilliant blue.¹⁶ Macpherson, having trained professionally for advertising, almost certainly did not decide on the signal colour orange for purely aesthetic reasons. It is safe to presume that he very consciously applied advertising strategies in devising the design of Close Up. In 1931, when Close Up was changed from a monthly to a quarterly,¹⁷ its format was changed to a larger-size quarto. The design of the cover became more sophisticated and ‘dynamic,’ the title was printed vertically and horizontally

 The Modernist Journals Project: “modernism began in the magazines”. A Joint Project of Brown University and The University of Tulsa. Digitized Journals. (accessed  August ). Even taking into account that there may be some degree of falsification as to the colours in the electronic display, as well as changes affected by time, the examples nevertheless demonstrate the difference in design between such magazines as The Blue Review (s in ), The Little Review ( c, $/£ in ), Coterie (s d in ), Others (c in ) or Rhythm (s in ), and cheaper ones such as The Freewoman/ The Egoist (d, d in ) and New Age (d, d in ), which had a strong social and political agenda and aimed at a different audience.  Pool explained this change to their readers by the changes that had occurred in film development. The talkies had supplanted silent film and would result in a waning of public interest in foreign film, due to language difficulties. Also, the format of the silent film,  mm, had been supplanted by the more recent  mm film stock, which meant that amateur experimental films could be no longer shown in the cinemas (“As Is” :, –).

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aslant in orange on a black bar, suggesting film negative.¹⁸ Macpherson promised his readers that the magazine “will be very much enlarged, printed on art-paper throughout, and much more fully illustrated, with subtitles in three languages (“As Is” 7:6, 367). Although it maintained a format convenient for reading and never adopted the demonstrative, over-sized folio format of BLAST and Form, there are several indicators that Close Up, like Form and The Golden Hind, belongs to the category of magazines that were at the same time collector’s objects. Buchholz has examined The Golden Hind and Form as examples of little magazines that follow similar publication strategies to the modernist limited editions. Luxurious quality, sumptuous graphic design, and a high price turn a simple magazine into art and thus a collector’s object (Buchholz 2006: 51). Close Up appears to follow this tradition, but there are notable differences: For one, Close Up did not start with the sophisticated larger-size format but only changed size and format after almost four successful years in print. The alteration was, Pool explained, also a reaction to changes in film development. For another, even though the individual copy increased in price, the annual price was still fourteen shillings and therefore, as Macpherson was most eager to stress, the price “virtually remain[ed] the same” (“As Is” 7:6, 370). Plus, the readers would be compensated for a loss in numbers by a gain in quality, so on balance they came off even in the deal. The magazine was still quite reasonable compared to others in the little magazine market; Close Up cost barely half as much as Form, which had a price of £1,4s per year for the ‘normal’ edition¹⁹ (Buchholz 2006: 51). The original Close Up monthly was sold for one shilling per copy. (This was about the price of a loaf of bread in England, or two loaves in Germany, and thus was in the price range of daily nutrients, which is rather symbolic of Pool’s art philosophy.) Furthermore, Close Up from the beginning and even at one shilling per copy had set value on good quality. The first twelve issues, up to August 1928, had been printed by the Paris master-printer Maurice Darantière, whose role for avantgarde distinguished publications I have already discussed. Even when offices were switched to London any change in appearance was barely noticeable (Friedberg 1998: 318).²⁰ What was more, the early copies were soon available

 The various covers of the Close Up magazine can be compared under .  The de luxe edition, which was limited to sixty copies, even amounted to £,s per year (Buchholz : ).  According to Friedberg, Darantière specialised in hand-set type in the Gutenberg manner. Bryher moved the printing to London in . Friedberg assumes that this was due to the offices

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in bound format and advertised in Close Up (July 1929) as collector’s books and “reference books for the future”. The advert explicitly pointed out that the collector’s issues would increase in value. Yet, in accordance with Pool’s policy of good quality and high artistic standards for the multitude, the price for these ‘art objects’ was still shillings and not pounds. The little magazines, however, are only one part of the double parentage of Close Up. In addition to their avant-garde art heritage, Pool’s film magazine was apparently also much influenced by, and perhaps even modelled on, German film magazines. The Bryher Papers at the Beinecke Library in Yale include folders containing copies of the Illustrierter Film-Kurier and the Amateur Film für Alle.²¹ While the Amateur Film für Alle is not dated, the Illustrierter Film-Kurier is dated 1927–1929 and 1929–1931. This gives reason to believe that at least the Illustrierter Film-Kurier was already known to Pool and may have contributed to the conception of their film magazine. Like the German film magazine, Close Up would print new film releases and the programs of some film societies at the end of an issue. The Illustrierter FilmKurier was the first German film daily. Started in 1919/1920 it cost 50 Pf per copy, printed film programs, had a high circulation rate, and can be classified as journalism for the masses.²² Amateur Film für Alle, or Film für Alle as it was properly called, was a film magazine edited by Close Up Berlin correspondent Andor Kraszna-Krausz and “the first monthly publication in Europe devoted to the problems of purely amateur cinematography.”²³ The magazine has already been mentioned because Macpherson published in it an article on the production of his film Foothills. The magazine was associated with the amateur filmmaker movement in Germany.²⁴ In 1927 the Bund der Filmamateure (BdFA) was founded, a society for non-commercial film

of Close Up being situated in London then, but Bryher had printed with Darantière for years irrespective of where her offices were located.  Series VIII. Film, Box , Folder  (Amateur Film für Alle) and Folders –, – (Illustrierter Film-Kurier).  On the German film magazine see also Herbert Holba, Illustrierter Filmkurier: – (Wien: Verlag des Dokumentationszentrum Action, ).  Close Up published an advert with this announcement in one of its issues, along with an advert for Kraszna-Krausz’s Filmtechnik, a fortnightly journal “for all artistic, technical and economic questions of film-essentials” and the “paper of the Dachorganisation of creative film artists of Germany” (: (March ): ). Accuracy requires one to add here that The Psychoanalytic Review was, by subtitle, also devoted, “to the understanding of behaviour and culture.”  “Two magazines for amateur filmmakers existed in Germany in the s already: Film für Alle and Der Kino-Amateur, as well as an interested readership.” Cf. Reclams Sachlexikon des Films, ed. Thomas Koebner (Stuttgat: Reclam, ):  (my translation).

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in Germany that, among other things, promoted film for international understanding.²⁵ So while Donald, Friedberg and Marcus see, next to the little magazines, the French journals dedicated to the cinema as the other antecedent of Close Up and thereby put a stronger emphasis on “an intellectual and literary readership” (1998: 12), I would argue that German democratic film culture was the other major influence. The coinciding of Close Up’s commencement in July 1927 with the foundation of the German film association BdFA on June 4th seems to point in this direction as well. The concurrence seems persuasive, especially compared to the gap of more than a decade between Close Up and the French journals to which the editors of the anthology point (ibid.). This impression is reinforced by the close relationship with Pabst and Pool’s continuous visits to Weimar Berlin. (While Pabst’s influence on Pool is usually acknowledged, his close association with the popular German film movement and German film as a bourgeois-liberal instrument for promoting democracy is usually ignored.) What is more, in 1928 Pabst, Heinrich Mann, Käthe Kollwitz and other German artists founded the Popular Association for Film Art (also the People’s Association for Film Art) in Berlin, and a statement of this association was printed in Close Up. ²⁶ The Association was leftwing liberal and fought against “artistic trash, intellectual poverty and, not least, against political and social reaction” and for film as “a medium for the broadening of knowledge, enlightenment and imagination, a medium for international understanding and reconciliation” (Schwarzkopf, “Volksverband” 74–75). It was an engagement of “all sincere democrats” (ibid. 74). This was the spirit from which Close Up was born. Pabst had already joined two left-wing film organizations by the time of Jeanne Ney. “As the socially critical filmmaker of Joyless Street, ‘the red’ Pabst (der rote Pabst) viewed himself as someone who was in a unique position to realize his fight against bourgeois cinema from within the institutions of the commercial establishment” (Bathrick 1990: 53). When he was elected chair of the Dacho²⁷ (German film workers union) in 1931, Pool published an interview with Pabst on his new position and the concomitant tasks that awaited him

 Reclams Sachlexikon des Films () and Gerhard Kemner and Gelia Eisert, Lebende Bilder: Eine Technikgeschichte des Films (Berlin: Nicolai, ): .  Rudolf Schwartzkopf, “Volksverband für Filmkunst: Our Goal and Our Way,” Close Up : (May ): –.  The Dachorganisation der filmschaffenden Künstler Deutschlands (Dacho) was the ‘official’ trade union of the German film industry. The organisation consisted of several affiliated professional associations from the film industry and represented the interests of the filmmakers, workers, and artists in contrast to the representation of the film industry (SPIO).

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(Kraszna-Krausz “Microphone” 122–126). For his program speech at the delegates meeting of the Dacho in 1931 Pabst chose the motto “Der Film dem Film!” (the film for the film’s sake), a demand Macpherson had voiced in his first editorial to herald the start of Close Up. The Berlin influence on Close Up becomes at times even visible in the spelling of names, hence the English film magazine writes Pudowkin and Alexandroff in the German style, instead of the English Pudovkin and Alexandrov, and often the titles of German films are given in the German original. Film für Alle listed a subscription price of 2.25 RM per quarterly; it cost therefore a little less than Close Up but in turn contained a considerable amount of commercial advertisement, largely for filming equipment. Close Up was less technical than the German magazine and contained comparatively little on the specific technicalities of film but instead included poetry and experimental literary pieces as well as film psychoanalysis. Pool outsourced their instruction on filmmaking and film technology for the amateur by publishing full-sized monographs by Eric Elliott and Oswald Blakeston. Close Up was also much more international than the German magazine. From the beginning it regularly contained articles in French,²⁸ and starting with the quarterly featured subtitles in English, German, and French. Furthermore, the distribution of the magazine was international, as the prices in English, French, German, Swiss, and Austrian currencies printed on the cover confirm. In June 1933, shortly after the bookburning in Berlin by the Nazi regime, Close Up discontinued printing German subtitles – a political as well as artistic statement.²⁹ b Clearly, although Close Up looks like a little magazine and promotes avant-garde form, its content aims not at elite specialists but is intended for the people and for the advancement of a ‘popular’ art. Its concept is apparently closely related to film developments and initiatives in Weimar Berlin, and more generally to the Weimar culture of applied arts for the public. (Pool’s Bauhaus villa coincides with this notion.) The subtitle, although usually misinterpreted, is actually key: ‘devoted to the art of films.’ The motto at once unites the incompatible in the reputed oxymoron ‘the art of films’: art (the aesthetic) is wedded to popular

 From the second issue onwards, there were regular contributions by Geneva correspondent Freddy Chevalley and Paris correspondents Marc Allégret and Jean Lenauer, as well as two pieces by the Surrealist poet René Crevel (in the August and November issues of ).  By then the boycott of Jewish firms had begun ( April ), the Gestapo had been founded ( April) and the Bauhaus had been closed ( April). Friedberg, “Chronology” in Close Up –, .

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films (non-art) with the intention of promoting a high-quality art for the public. The ‘devotion’ again indicates the uncompromised and sincere commitment of the historical avant-garde modernist. Even before its change to the “more fully” illustrated quarterly, Close Up provided its readers with ample visual material – a non-pictorial film magazine would indeed have been odd. Nonetheless, these pictures were not mere illustrations but were usually explanatory film-stills from the movies discussed in the magazine. Film-stills were furthermore employed to ‘teach’ readers to see and understand film aesthetics, for example by juxtaposing good and poor film quality. One such case in point is the ‘realistic’ and ‘artistic’ quality of two British studio productions: Presenting a still from The Wrecker, a 1928 Gainsborough Pictures production, the explanatory caption points to a lady who gets out of the wrecked train “emerging as from her limousine,” while a figure next door is “coming out of the window upside down.” The caption further announces that the editorial ‘we’ “find such realism a little unpleasant.” Another still below it from Paradise, a 1928 British International Pictures production, portrays a clichéd scene and comments satirically: “Our idea of the artistic.”³⁰ Opposed to these examples from the British film industry are two stills – close-ups, as opposed to the static long shots in the industrial productions – from Monkey’s Moon with informative matter-of-fact captions that point to the documentary quality of the film.

8.3 Macpherson’s Editorial “As Is” – Vox Populi of Film Art Macpherson’s editorial delineated the magazine’s programme of having film recognized as art and seizing film from the firm grip of the industry and making it public. It called upon the readers to become engaged in film culture, to start their own film clubs, to ask for specific films at their local film theatre, and to experiment with filmmaking themselves. The editorial also voiced a belief that film art should entertain and educate, provide inspiration, and stimulate creative activity.

8.3.1 “How furchtbar funny that an Englishman should have started Close Up” The title of Macpherson’s editorial already indicates the direction of the magazine: “As is” is a term in trading and denotes that a product or item is accepted

 The film stills are given in Close Up : (July ): in between –.

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in its present condition and ‘with all faults’ and in the context of Close Up this product, of course, is film. Macpherson launched Close Up with editorials on the state of the cinema and set the tone for the magazine’s interest in working out the aesthetic potential of film. In his first editorial he provides a historical overview of the cinema and an interim summation of where film is at: “Fifty odd years hasn’t done so badly in getting an art into the world that fifty more will probably turn into THE art, but now, after somewhat magnificent growth, one feels here is its critical age” (1:1, 5). Such are the inaugural words of Close Up. Macpherson points to the achievements that have been accomplished in filmmaking and to the various contributions of different countries in the process of film development. Germany first solved problems of over-lighting, resulting in bad photographic quality, by greatly reducing the use of arc lamps and achieving a certain morbid, unreal quality that was nonetheless gripping and full of suspense (1:1, 6–7). Vienna “was tripe,” Hollywood ranged wider than Vienna, Italy was slightly worse than Hollywood, France was struggling with tradition, and England trailed hopelessly behind regarding film development, having nothing to offer but stock comedies (ibid. 7). Then Russia appeared on the scene with Eisenstein’s Potemkin and got hold of something new in film, but the Soviet administration curbed its chances by making it a “Slave to Soviet approval” (ibid. 11), and Germany presented Joyless Street, raising sociological and humanitarian issues in film. France, despite its ponderous attempts at imitating Hollywood, is given credit for evolving “the best colour process” and experimenting vigorously (ibid. 7). Besides introducing his readers to the present condition of film and film technology, Macpherson’s classification of countries and their films provided a first catalogue of orientation to the newcomer. “The thing was, first of all, to get the medium developed so far as to be FIT for art” (ibid. 6). This had been accomplished over the previous fifty years, but now film was at ‘its critical age’ because, according to Macpherson, the conventions of commercial film would soon become traditional and standard (ibid. 5). Contrary to what scholars usually claim, Macpherson is far from snubbing the film industry. On the contrary, he points out that it was commercial competition that advanced the development of film and filmmaking in the first place, but he sees a conflict between the artist, who “wants to work his medium straight” and the business manager, who “also wants HIS medium straight” (ibid. 8). The descendant of a family of professional artists is not outright contemptuous of the commercial aspect of art but he is keenly aware of the resulting problems. Macpherson here points to the two antagonistic forces within the artistic field, as Bourdieu delineates them, and the dialectical dynamism between these forces informs much of how he positions film in this field, especially in his first two editorials.

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Turning to the cultural field of England, Macpherson expresses great scepticism about an English film revival since England has nothing but a film industry and will not start with anything new but “with a complete acceptance of the film convention as is” (ibid. 8). It will revive film INDUSTRY but not film ART (ibid. 9). The film industry also already had its own organ, the trade magazine Kine Weekly. The problem with England was that the attitude towards art in general was so amiss that Macpherson doubts “any art to indigenously flower there,” since the Englishman had only one passion: sports (1:1, 8). It was to this end that Pabst laughed heartily about the fact that the first film magazine to promote film art was coming from England of all places (quoted in Donald, Friedberg, Marcus 1998: 21).³¹ It seemed incongruous that it should come from a country where an amateur film movement was non-existent, instead of from Weimar Berlin with its intellectuals and artists. Nonetheless, Macpherson notes that even in their early crude and purely industrial form films had already something captivating about them. He recalls how as a youngster he saw a clichéd Wild West drama and even though he did not believe the story, he still “got the mesmerism of the thing, and something quite apart from purely conscious felt, oh yes, this is right, this is apt. This belongs” (1:1, 5, my emphasis). Macpherson here points to the sub-conscious power of film that works on the level of emotion and sensory experience. People perceived somehow “a sense of life and expectancy” with this new and still fresh medium that contrasted with the somewhat “outworn mediums” of painting, literature, theatre and music (ibid. 6). It was the ‘popularity’ of this medium that excited Macpherson from the first, “of all [art] mediums” this one was the one “with fewest limitations” (ibid.) and therefore the one best apt to reach the many. It constituted a perfect channel for creativity for and of the people, and Macpherson claims that “the hope of the cinema lies with the amateur” and that “the competent commonplace […] will set the pace” (ibid. 14). The ‘competent commonplace’ must not be confused with mediocrity, which Macpherson found in Hollywood productions (ibid. 10). Instead it must be seen in productions such as People on Sunday (1930), a low budget amateur enterprise with am-

 “Ah how my friends and I have discussed CLOSE UP. It is so funny, so furchtbar funny you permit, that an Englishman should have written it. The thing we all desire, the paper that expresses our innermost psychological thoughts and an Englishman has done it. … Ha … ha … you perceive, do you not, how furchtbar funny it is … How funny that an Englishman should have started CLOSE UP. For English films!!!!!!!” (Bryher in a letter to H.D.,  October , Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.)

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ateur actors filmed on non-working days, whose amateur filmmakers later became famous professionals.³² Macpherson concluded his first editorial on the tenor of “film for the film’s sake” (1:1, 14), which was apt for a magazine that claimed to be “devoted to the art of films.” However, he used the phrase in the context of amateur film and “the competent commonplace.” This phrase, which combines the popular medium not yet considered art with the ‘pure’ art principle of Aestheticism, shows his intention of bringing together the aesthetic with the popular and thus uniting two positions in the literary field usually considered irreconcilable in order to advance a heightened standard for popular art. However, the phrase has usually been mistaken to classify Macpherson a film Aesthete and apologist of pure experimental film avant-gardism, in his time as well as in academic research up to today. In her Close Up anthology, Laura Marcus still contrasts Macpherson’s “aggressive avant-gardism” with Richardson’s “relativity of aesthetic ‘value’” (Donald, Friedberg, Marcus 1998: 152). Even in the recent second edition of British National Cinema (2009), Sarah Street positions Close Up in the elite avant-garde art sector, assertively ascribing a typical “modernist attitude” (150–151) that is dismissive of popular culture to Macpherson.³³ And in her History of British Film (repr. 2001) Rachel Low ascribes Macpherson “a low opinion of mere comprehensibility” (108).³⁴ In academic studies to date, Close Up is usually associated with the aesthetic and avant-garde as opposed to the public taste.³⁵ Congruent to the BFI’s new jazz score to their Borderline restoration, the current website of BFI Screenonline, “the definitive guide to Britain’s film and TV history” as it claims to be, likewise alleges the magazine had ‘little regard for the public taste’ in an article on Close Up. ³⁶ Nothing was further from Macpherson’s intention; from the outset of their Close Up project Macpherson and Pool put their empha-

 Billy Wilder later went to Hollywood and grew famous with films like the Marilyn Monroe classic Some Like It Hot ().  “Macpherson’s dismissive comments on popular cinema in the s are representative of a critical, modernist attitude which prevailed among the cultivated elites who were coming to terms with new media and technology” (Street : ).  Low at least grounds her judgment in Macpherson’s editorial defending his film Borderline, but she mistakes this one particular case for “in any case” (: ).  Next to Street, Nollen () repeats the cliché that Macpherson “was generally contemptuous of commercial cinema” in his Paul Robeson: Film Pioneer ().  “While Close Up both enthused and excoriated with little regard for the mass public taste, a mounting pile of film books, aimed more at a general readership, tried to make sense of the burgeoning scene.” See Geoff Brown, “March of the Film Intellectuals,” BFI Screenonline – , no pagination. (accessed  August ).

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sis on the public. They organized and helped with public showings and set up film societies (1:1, 15) and were most concerned with involving the public. They wanted to stir people into action, or at least discussion, and were dismissive of apathy and non-interest (1:2, 5–6), as well as of pretentious “awrt for awrt’s sake” (6:1, 2). With his devoted promotion of amateur art, Macpherson is entirely at odds with the classic high avant-garde modernists who were most concerned to be seen as specialists and distinctly superior to the amateur. Yet it is notable that Macpherson, despite his emphasis on the public interest, his promotion of amateur art, and his acknowledgement of the achievements of the film industry from his first editorial on, felt compelled to make the following announcement in his second editorial: A great number of my correspondents […] have got away with the idea that I am, that Close Up is, out to high-hat and scorn the commercial film, and go on to elevate the whole cinema industry to a point of indescribable aestheticism. Far from it. We want it understood that we accept and laud the film in any form. […] Nobody wants […] to rob the masses of their entertainment. (1:2, 15–16, my emphasis)

The notion that Close Up was out for “indescribable aestheticism” obviously resulted from the magazine’s association with the little magazines and its claim to be “devoted to films as art” and its demand for “better films.” Contributions by such modernist writers as H.D. and Dorothy Richardson in the first Close Up issue, as well as the announcement of pieces by celebrities like André Gide, Gertrude Stein, Osbert Sitwell, and Havelock Ellis,³⁷ in the magazine’s initial effort to change the reputation of films as trash by aligning them with consecrated avantgarde artists added to the prejudice. Macpherson himself was among the first who realised that it was “the first natural prejudice” that “a journal devoted only to film art” would get away from facts and instead glorify “the bizarre, the stunted, the absurd” (3:1, 6–7). He did not tire of distinguishing Close Up’s intention for film art from such “stylized” notions and “fancy isms” (2:2, 10). At the same time he assured his readers that he was just as adverse to the traditionalists, who cited the not-to-be-equalled greatness of Shakespeare, Shelley, Milton, da Vinci, and Beethoven (4:1, 5–6), as to the cliques or groups “taking an ‘ism for [their] torch” (3:1, 7). In fact he much blamed these “‘fashion-in-ideas’ groups” and their “conventional freakishness” for the contempt that the trade

 Gide and Sitwell never contributed anything in the end and Ellis only submitted a letter. Ellis’ letter is a comment on a film about venereal disease. See “Comments on False Shame” in the ‘Comments and Review’ section of Close Up : (February ): .

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fostered against ‘artistic’ films (ibid.) and yet he initially found Close Up to be “accused of just that very thing we most certainly had no illusion about” (3:1, 7), when Close Up was designed to be “a really useful organ to all” and “a sort of battleground” for different opinions (ibid., my emphasis). The early allegation, however, seems to have been continued in academic research. Macpherson even complained that he was supposed to uphold art and print “the beastly word on my cover, and at least twenty times on as many pages” (ibid. 6), when he was disgusted by a meaning of Art that was “some static symbol or regime” (ibid. 6). As stated before, Macpherson sided in his rhetoric with the public reader. At the same time, he is more averse to superfluous décor and ornament and fin de siècle relics in his editorials than in his novels. This is probably due to the circumstance that while the reader of Close Up had yet to be educated to appreciate new forms, Macpherson’s novels on the history and philosophy of art and artistic principles had to defend the legitimacy of fin de siècle art against the radicalism of some modernists, who wanted to entirely annihilate all previous forms of artistic expression. Furthermore, Close Up wanted to advance film art versus the existing commercial film whereas Macpherson’s experimental novels call for the acceptance of popular forms and the art industry versus exclusively ‘pure’ art and aestheticism. One is a ‘popular’ magazine that promotes art form while the other is an experimental novel that promotes popular culture. One of the major problems that the editors of ‘the magazine devoted to the art of films’ were facing was the general attitude towards films. Many people were indifferent to and many artists were prejudiced against the medium; even movie-goers would not consider film as art and sneered at those who did (1:2, 5–6). In his second editorial Macpherson reveals some of the mechanisms of the artistic field and sets out to explain to his readers what art means to Pool. The ‘problem’ with film at the time was that this artistic medium was still so new that it had not yet been consecrated in the artistic field. Movies are not the Salon or the Royal Academy, they are not the Louvre or the British Museum, they are not Dostoieffsky or Anatole France or Rudyard Kipling, they are not Beethoven or Debussy. They are not linked up. Nobody has related them to these people and the thing is nobody can! They aren’t related to these people and the things they stand for. The movie is the new thing, the movie goes back to no tradition. And millions will deplore it. (ibid. 8)

It is nevertheless exactly this “utter newness” (1:2, 8) that Pool see as the great chance. Film has not yet been institutionalised and is still accessible without accumulated cultural capital, which means it is still for the many. Macpherson admits that film does have its conventions but these conventions, since they are still young, are incomparably small compared to the weighty conventions that

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have been established by long tradition in other arts. Art conventions predetermine meaning and prevent true seeing and understanding (ibid.). Since the artist, according to Pool, has to be a teacher that moves on ahead “pointing out beauty or truth” (ibid.), his educational function becomes obliterated by conventions that leave him only repetition. Macpherson illustrates this by giving an example from the highly consecrated art of poetry: Nightingales and spring as images for poetic beauty have such a long tradition that “literature will lose its meaning” if the artist goes on saying “‘ah Spring!’ and ‘ah Nightingales!’” (ibid. 9). As a result of this the modern day author in his attempt to break with such worn-out poetic conventions “writes poems to squeaking shoes and jampots, and that is getting beauty upside down” (ibid.). Macpherson’s example not only explains the modernist artist’s dilemma but also gives much insight into his rhetorical strategy as editor. While on the one hand he is fully the modernist avant-garde artist pointing out the banalities of popular Victorian poetry to his readers, he sides on the other hand with his readers in expressing discontent with modernist aesthetics, which are no longer comprehensible to the multitude. His novel Gaunt Island contains a similar passage in which the two modern poets Robin and Geoffrey are said to write poetry “of metal and the scullery” because they are so tired of nightingales that they prefer pigs (76). Here the attitude towards the modernist aesthetic is not as satirically judgmental as it is in the editorial. This certainly is due to a difference in readership, for in his editorials Macpherson addressed a broader public than in his experimental novels. The difference in audience and the difference between journalism and the novel become manifest in the style. In his editorials Macpherson’s style is plain and outspoken, often witty and humorous and incorporates illuminating examples and metaphors now and then, whereas in his novels his style is more experimental. Macpherson further exposes the pretensions of bourgeois aesthetics and cultural capital when discussing conventions of reception. People going to the theatre, an art form that has long been institutionalised, will dress up for the cultural event and express attention and approval regardless of the quality of the play. Macpherson finds it much more “commendable” to sit in front of a bad film and be inattentive or flirting with one’s neighbour than to sit “prinked and starched in front of a bad play” and applaud (1:2, 9). But it is the very people who applaud a bad theatre play who will snidely look down on ‘uncultured’ cinema-goers. The cinema-goers, Macpherson is convinced, would show better judgement of a bad play, as they do of a bad film, by simply paying no attention. Macpherson, in accordance with Bourdieu, shows how bourgeois aesthetics have become detached from life and life’s objective. “Real entertainment” will, in contrast, present something to the audience that it can recognise and relate to and

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consequently people will become alert and receptive (3:4, 6). Obviously Pool had a strong concern with the anthropological purpose of art, which shall be further examined later in this chapter. The film medium presents a great chance to the artist; what has been wrong so far, Macpherson claims, is simply the attitude to film. “It has been film industry, film industry, film industry” up to now and so people think that there is no art to it, that it is “all purely industrial” (1:2, 13). Therefore Close Up now will start to “talk film art […] until the right balance is established” (ibid.). Since the function of the artist is to be a teacher, Close Up starts out to inform and instruct people, to work against ignorance and spread knowledge about films. Close Up intends to make visible what has been invisible; they want to make people aware of the “great number of small film makers busy trying out new forms” and to open “the public mind to the realities of the screen” (ibid.). Raising public awareness of what has been done will eventually result in the public’s demand for better quality films and since “really good art IS commercial” (1:1, 9) the film industry will then have to live up to the demanded standards and assimilate artistic experiment and form to commercial film. Macpherson’s hope in this regard firmly rests with the public: “The public isn’t a pack of fools. Narrow and illiterate very often, but there are distinct limits beyond which one cannot descend, just as, there are distinct limits beyond which one cannot AScend if one is out to grab its attention” (ibid. 10). Macpherson graphically depicts this dynamic process between the antagonistic forces of industry and experimental art in terms of a cultural battle – transforming Bourdieu’s abstract physics force field into the more concrete image of a military battlefield. After an initial stage of “awful misapplications” of avantgarde visual art forms and “gushings of pseudo-pseudo modernists” (1:2, 14) and the rise of a superior attitude, as well as an ensuing stage of taking it for granted, there will finally be “a slow welding, a peeping across from the Commercial ambush to the Rebel (that word will be used) ambush” (ibid.). Pool’s hope is for coordination and “a growing together” (ibid.) of industry and art that will enrich film for the good of the public. It is an adaptation of the concept of applied arts to film: artistic forms developed by the artist and reproduced by industry for the benefit of the multitude. Again, this notion was particularly present in Weimar Germany, in its films as well as in its Bauhaus concept, and in Russia, where “the cinema is not an industry apart […] but is taken right into the centre of civic life” and where there is “collaboration between producing units and the people” (3:3, 8). Working towards this future goal, Close Up in the meantime engages in the public showing of progressive films to spread knowledge of what already exists (1:2, 15). Between ‘pure’ film art and popular

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‘trash’ Macpherson locates “films like Sunrise and White Gold [that] bridge the two extremes” (2:4, 11). ₪₪₪ I have already said that Pool engaged with the public and took pains to actively involve it in film culture. True to the notion that the artist has a teaching mission and has to move ahead, Macpherson’s editorials not only discuss films but often ‘educate’ the readers to competency on various specific issues of film culture.³⁸ In his editorials Macpherson also proposes fundamentally new ideas, such as Pabst’s idea for a film stock company in Europe that would revolutionise the conditions governing the film world up to then (3:3 and 3:4), and becomes actively engaged in changing a faulty status quo. Thus his editorial on censorship (4:2) first supplies full information on the topic, including excerpts from the censorship lists of the British Board of Film Censors, partly satirically commented on by the editor, and then points to a petition included in the present Close Up issue. The editor asks his readers to read the petition and, in case they agree, to sign it and take action by collecting further signatures. About a year later Macpherson mentions in his editorial that Close Up readers have been the pioneers of a movement opposing the censors that by then included “an active commission of forty members of Parliament” (6:4, 253),³⁹ but that the fight for film freedom was still continuing. Censorship had from the beginning and in several ways been of concern to Close Up. Macpherson and Blakeston addressed it in their novels, Elliott in the introduction to his Anatomy of Film Art, and Bryher in Film Problems of Soviet Russia. Not only did censorship patronise audiences and rob them of their right to personal judgement but it also destroyed pieces of art. Any “nonentity in official status” (1:6, 6) completely unfamiliar with the subtleties of filmmaking could simply snip out several feet of film, without any regard to the balance of the whole composition. The result would be a mutilated art work at best and a film lacking in meaning at worst. No one, Macpherson stresses, would do that to works in the other arts. Who would think of knocking the hands from an Epstein sculpture, cutting out the head of an Augustus John portrait, or shortening chapters so as to entirely change their content in translated editions of André

 These issues include censorship (:, :, :), the economic situation of the Ufa (:), the costs of filmmaking (:, :), the latest technical developments (:, :, :), an official police study on the (non)relation of crime and cinema (:), Negro film (:), Russian film (:), and films of physiology and health (:).  Dorothy Richardson had already earlier supplied information on the outcome of the censorship petition for Close Up readers and had also reported of disappointments. Cf. “The Censorship Petition” Close Up : (January ): –.

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Gide or Thomas Mann, without so much as even contacting the artist about it (ibid. 5). No one, since these were respected as art works and protected by copyright. But since film was still regarded as merely industrial and not as art, the filmmakers had to suffer such insults to their creative work. Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul “lost all meaning,” Lang’s Metropolis “was a complete flop” due to indiscriminate censorship cutting (ibid. 8), and Eisenstein was accused of misrepresenting history when it had been Lenin who ruled that all scenes showing Trotsky had to be cut out from Ten Days that Shook the World (3:2, 7–8). To prevent this, “an efficient system of protective copyright” (1:6, 9) was needed and Macpherson expressed his optimism that the public would support directors who refused to supply films except on their own terms (ibid.). In the meantime Close Up worked against censorship by printing stills from banned films, such as the Russian films that were not shown in England due to their political content,⁴⁰ and by writing about them so as to acquaint their readers with these films. The magazine also often reported which scenes had been cut from which films and for which country, usually providing its readers with a brief summary of the deleted scenes and thereby filling in the gaps censorship had created. Such a positioning as anti-censorship was, on the one hand, in accordance with a modernist avant-garde attitude. Woolf, Joyce, Beach and many others had criticized censorship and defended authors and their individual works of art.⁴¹ With Joyce, censorship had even been utilised for self-promotion, as Bucholz and others have shown. On the other hand, Close Up fought censorship of film, a popular medium not yet considered an art, and thereby once more transferred modernist culture to non-modernist mass culture.

8.3.2 Film and Anthropological Aspects of Universality One primary concern of Close Up was to advance the recognition of film as art in the general consciousness. Another important aspect that emerges from Macpherson’s editorials is an anthropological and humanitarian concern that is closely connected to film and art. From his first film experience on, Macpherson had felt that film, even in its crude industrial form, had a mesmerising power and a “sense of life.” He realised film’s “acute sensitivity” and saw “the infinite possibility in the moving picture camera for creating and making tangible the  Eisenstein’s famous Battleship Potemkin, for example, was banned from – in England (Street : ).  For a fuller account of modernist attitudes to censorship see Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship (Cambridge: UP, ).

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most subtle thoughts, impressions, apprehensions” (1:4, 7, my emphasis). Film has to do with feeling, with sensations and emotions, and hence with human psychology and nature. By means of the film medium, it is possible to receive and project visions; anyone can become a visionary now. What had once been reserved for the entranced priest, initiated mystic or visionary poet, the experience of transcendental ecstasy and recognition, of happiness and beauty, is now open to the multitude. But even on their most basic level movies have yet a social function. They are a communal experience. People go to the cinema to enjoy sweets and hold hands or snuggle up to each other (1:2, 9) and this already has to be welcomed, according to Macpherson. The new movie “Cathedrals” bestow “a sense of festivity, of being part of life, and in the pulse of things, of not being lonely or cut off or friendless” (2:2, 7). They provide warmth and comfort and music and fun. In describing the “tall architecture” of a movie theatre and an orchestra announcing “largely and with sonorous wind instruments, Drama!” (1:4, 11), Macpherson suggests the ancient drama festivals with their performances in the great amphitheatres. As a Dionysian experience, the cinema continues an ancient cult and feeds a human need. Macpherson’s editorial here dovetails with H.D.’s “Projector” poems, especially the second one, which appeared in the same issue as the cited editorial. The cinema offers a palliative to people and an escape from the drudgeries of life, from their problems and worries, and even from themselves. “Obliteration of identity is the cinema’s great gift” (3:4, 8). They can forget for a while and relax before they return to their problems and worries, and that is fine. But, Macpherson objects, these people continue from where they left off, they go home “with no message and no construction” (ibid. 9). How much the better if respite “becomes renewal of faith” and if people “go, not back to drudgery, back to problems gnawn to bits and worries worn shapeless, but with inspiration, strength and gratitude” (ibid.)? How much the better if “entertainment becomes life” and inspires life and lifts the spirit? To Pool, art was first and foremost entertainment and not ‘Art’ aloof on its lofty pedestal. It also had to be useful, and it had to make people think, not by forcing taxing thought upon them but by inducing them to think easily and unawares while entertaining them. This was the “necessity of Film Art” for humanity (ibid.). Pool’s philosophy of art builds on ancient theories of art and the principle of delectare et prodesse. The artist should not be a detached aesthete who turns away from the masses but an educator “in the best and wisest sense,” who raises the standards while at the same time still delighting the masses (2:4, 8). This artist, who provides entertainment as well as possible solutions to life, in accordance with Karl Eibl’s approach to the necessity of art, advances individual and communal well-being. His or her entertainment and provisions of beauty function as a balance

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to the stress and demands of daily life, and the invigoration and inspiration that the poet bestows upon humanity by means of his or her art strengthens the peoples’ physical and spiritual constitution. To this end Pool advocated “the kind of film that any normal intelligent person could understand” (ibid. 10). Films like St. Petersburg, Jeanne Ney, or Bett und Sofa they found “superb because they are true to life, because they say something we know, because they move us, because their beauty is a beauty we recognise, and their greatness a greatness we can comprehend. In a word they are concerned with practical problems in which you and I might be involved at any time” (2:4, 10). Pool found in film a humanitarian and democratic art medium that would not split society into refined art connoisseurs and uneducated art philistines, into bourgeois aesthetics and popular culture, but on the contrary unify society by appealing to all alike due to its inherent attraction to human nature: For the curious thing about the film is that its best and highest attainment is not for the few but for the many. Here is actually a great art for the multitude and for the few, appealing to both alike. But if that is to be so it is life that must be reproduced. […] unless I am very wrong, there is actually no such thing as the pure abstraction, for humanity at any rate, since the human mind is not abstract. (2:2, 11)

This is the reason why Macpherson, as H.D. reported, preferred the birch tree to the match stick for his art. The birch tree is ‘natural’ and its beauty will be easily recognised by the multitude, due to an inherent human recognition of its being part of biology, of ‘life’. Eibl, it will be remembered, connects such perception of beauty in nature to evolutionary remainders of one-time indicators for survival or recuperation in the human psyche (2004: 325–326, 329). The match stick as an object of aesthetic ‘value’, on the other hand, is ‘unnatural’ pure abstraction. It can only appeal as beautiful to the few, who have learned to detach the object from its function in life and appreciate it as pure form; to the common mind it is “getting beauty upside down,” to quote Macpherson once more. The match stick signifies coded language whereas the tree, being truly representative, becomes a universal symbol for life, vitality or regeneration. Next to the concrete symbolism of the tree, Macpherson also discovers a more abstract symbolism of psychological reality, which is nevertheless still representative of human life: “Pabst’s cheap hotels, or the mere fact of his rain sodden landscape in Jeanne Ney are the nearest to pure abstraction that we have. Because somehow they are so true as to cease to be objective they become states of mind” (2:2, 12). Here the outside environment and weather become symbolic for human mood. In this context one is obviously reminded of Macpherson’s own Gaunt Island and the intimate relation between environment and human psychology in the novel. Macpherson particularly admired Pabst’s psychological re-

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alism, the authentic atmosphere and true to life characters in his movies, and his humanism. His films were true to human existence and worked according to the law of life. Macpherson once declared: “Virtue shall be rewarded; the wrong-doer shall be punished. That we know. It is the first law of the world, of the cosmos” (1:3, 10). But he demanded that this law work according to human psychology and not according to some ill-defined moral. In discussing film conventions, Macpherson complains that these conventions “coded in 1910 language” (i. e. the phoney yet highly conventionalised Edwardian times) are only recognisable to the habitué, who knows their meaning. To the novice, they mean absolutely nothing because they are in no way representative but constitute merely “the commonly accepted formulas” (2:2, 11–12). Macpherson’s criticism of formulas in art can be extended from ‘trash’ films to institutionalised bourgeois aesthetics, and to some degree even to ‘pure’ avant-garde aesthetics: all are ruled by conventions that are completely unrepresentative of actual human life. Macpherson wants such empty formulas to be replaced by truly representative “sets of symbols” that are used individually and diversified (ibid. 12). The psychology in a film has to be right. The “spirit of the thing” (1:3, 11) represented has to be right. People intuitively know, from their own life experience, how a person behaves in a particular situation and that a person would never behave according to the formulas of film convention in real life. Macpherson finds such accurate psychology especially in German films, where “the people are alive” because they “behave naturally” (1:3, 11). Much of the universality of film and film language rests in psychology. Film, silent film, is not restricted to national language and thus to national boundaries, film works by sensation and emotion and thus induces the spectator to understand by sensing and feeling (ibid. 12, 15). Sound film re/introduced language restrictions (1:5, 8) and ultimately caused the art of film to die. Hollywood had industrialised and mechanised the original sensitive experience of film. It spit out industrialised plots that affected a mechanised reception by the spectator. The spectator was doped and no longer stimulated by what s/he saw; s/he became a passive automaton instead of an absorbed but actively feeling human being.⁴² So while Close Up granted that such ‘dope’ could give relief from the hardships of life, it warned at the same time of the inherent danger in mechanised re-

 Close Up also attended to this topic in a complementary article by Bryher, “Dope or Stimulus,” Close Up : (September ): –. In a later contribution, Bryher talks of the “tinned ideas” of Hollywood. See “The Hollywood Code,” Close Up : (September ): – and : (October ): –. On the industrial productions of Hollywood, as opposed to the sensitive film art of Pabst, see also Clifford Howard, “A Hollywood Close-Up,” Close Up : (January ): –.

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ception. Not only did such an automatic film experience lack a constructive message, but at worst it affected a routine blind reaction that was severed from sympathetic human understanding. Such a reaction, and herein lay the greatest danger, was liable to manipulation and propaganda. Macpherson describes an instance of mechanised reception that he witnessed in Berlin, when watching Hoppla Wir Leben, “a Red play combined with film”: “Every time an anti-war sentiment or anti-militaristic gesture takes place there are whoops and roars of applause” (1:6, 13). This, he criticises, is not the response of sensitive human understanding but the reaction of mob-hysteria, “a madness that will cause nations to scream equally blindly and without feeling either for or against war” (ibid., my emphasis), and he warns of the danger of waking such mob-hysteria. To such a mechanised reception he opposes the sensitive films by Pabst, in whose psychological realism Macpherson discovers the anthropological universality of films. In the Russian films, in their greater concern for the poor and deprived, and independent of their political agenda, he finds this anthropological universality as well: Take any of the ideas used by the Russians. They are burning and vibrant and of the greatest importance, not abstractly, but in their direct application to humanity. I say humanity, because they are far too great in conception and in execution to be confined within national limits. (3:3, 8)

In this ‘direct application to humanity’ Pool saw the great potential of film to sensitize people and make them receptive to human feeling and sympathy. To this end, Close Up wanted the Russian and German “universal films” that dealt with “construction and life as it actually is” (6:4, 252) to be advanced, especially in England where predominantly sentimental films were shown and where, according to Bryher, a “psychological revolution” was needed (Film Problems 11). Congruent with the goals of the German Association of Film Amateurs, Macpherson states that films can be: (a) language (b) educator 1. A universal (c) backbone (a) sympathy 2. An international (b) friendship (c) common-sense (a) goodwill 3. An inter-racial (b) league of nations (c) peace-conference

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in addition to being “entertainment, art, comfort and stimulus” (1:3, 5–6). Macpherson sees in film a potential instrument for international understanding and all-human sympathy. Films such as Chang or Voyage to the Congo, which introduce foreign ways of life to the European, raise curiosity and make people wish to know more about these countries and their customs. In addition to stimulating curiosity and a desire to learn more, these films “excite pleasure, sympathy and understanding” (ibid. 16) and “create respect […] and often admiration” (ibid. 14) for the foreign culture. Film provided the avant-garde artist with a unique medium for art ‘in its best and widest sense’ of educating the public by entertaining them. In addition it had the great advantage of being by nature a ‘life’ art, since the artist worked with people and thus with living matter, as opposed to other artists (the theatre excepted) who worked with inanimate ‘dead’ matter such as marble, canvas or typing paper (2:2, 14–15). Moreover, it was a collective art and a communal experience. Close Up was designed as a public organ of this new art and consequently “such a journal as Close Up [is] not founded to minister to a handful of idle, selfish intellectuals, to enclose them round and pamper them with gratification of their idle, selfish whims, but to make [its] way slowly and steadily into the public consciousness” (2:4, 8).

8.4 Film Journalism and Poetry: The Poetic Contributions of H.D. H.D. not only acted leading roles in the Pool films and was involved in cutting the films, but she also enthusiastically contributed to Close Up. Among her contributions are several extensive film reviews, her article series on “The Cinema and the Classics” that will be examined here, and an interview with G.W. Pabst (“An Appreciation”), all of which testifies to H.D.’s interest in film journalism. She also contributed two poems and thus is at the same time one of the well-known modernist artists published in the magazine. H.D.’s “Projector” poems are rather difficult to classify. They appear to be film reviews (the second poem’s subtitle “Chang” refers to a documentary film) in lyric form. They apparently do not encourage biographical or personal psychological readings, methods so often chosen for H.D.’s other works, nor interpretations based on myth revision or gender. Nevertheless they complement H.D.’s “The Cinema and the Classics” contributions and together with these translate H.D.’s poetics into the context of film and cinema. While “The Cinema and the Classics” takes up H.D.’s concern with form and align the film body and film star with her lyric form of purification and restraint, the “Projector” poems continue her thoughts

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about poetic vision and projection, which from the beginning seemed closely related to film and which I have discussed previously.

8.4.1 The “Projector” Poems H.D.’s first “Projector” poem⁴³ in the initial issue of Close Up is a choral hymn to the cinema. The poem is in her usual mythopoetic Imagist style and H.D. relies on her usual collective poetic voice. The choral voice praises light, which is of course the light emanating from the projector onto the cinematic screen. Not only is this glorious light personified from the beginning but it is the resurrected ancient god of light himself, Helios/Apollo “in new attribute” (47). Apollo, the lord of poetry (46) and the champion of beauty (47) leaves the temple “they built him” and strides forth unadorned and “so simply […] they knew him not” (48). The fair god goes to “a lowly place” and “shows his splendour / in a little room” (49). He is not only the “lord […] of majesty / and pomp” but also “of markets / and the cross-road / and the street” (46) and in this includes in his divine nature also Hermes, god of trade and commerce, who originally gave the lyre to the god of poetry to compensate him for a theft. The poem opposes the choral “we” to an antagonistic “they.” “They” are emphatically averse to Apollo descending from his pomp and majesty to the streets and lowly places. “Not this, / not this, they say […] not this” (ibid.) but the choral “we” are of the exact opposite opinion and “greet / light / in new attribute” (47). While “they” do not even recognise the god, who has put down his majestic regalia, “we” hail and welcome him who has returned to bestow beauty on the world. Of course “they” are the highbrow intellectuals and the ‘bird-stuffers,’ the proponents of art conventions, who will not accept the cinema as an art form, while the choral “we” are Pool and their group of film enthusiasts. The “stage [that] is set now / for his mighty rays” (49) is the movie theatre and the “lowly place” and “little room” where the god of beauty and poetry “shows his splendour” represent ‘low’ art and popular culture as opposed to the temples or halls of fame that symbolise ‘high’ art. The god of poetry has returned to reclaim beauty from “these” who have institutionalised beauty and art, who have defined it as “power […], city / and the state” (ibid.), and to give it back to the people for enjoyment. The god of light has returned to those that “in an evil day […] crouched despairingly” (ibid.) and brings them joy and pleasure and delight; he “reclaims the lost” (47). This ‘descent’ of beauty to comfort the ‘lowly’ echoes ideas from Macpherson’s

 In Close Up : (July ): –.

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and Blakeston’s novels about the aesthetic potential of film for desperate and beauty-starved slum children. Cinema has to reclaim those who, due to disadvantages in education, lack the possibilities and means, i.e. cultural capital, to find pleasure in ‘high’ art but who nevertheless crave ‘poetry’ or beauty of some kind in this dilapidated world. The god of poetry is at the same time the god of healing who ‘heals’ the wounds which modern times have wrought on humanity. He will bring about reunion and renewal and sets out “to reassemble / and to readjust / all severings / and differings of thought, / all strife and strident bickering” (47). Apollo gives “fresh hope / to the impotent,” supplies “anodyne” (50) and “balm” (51) to “tired feet” worn dusty (50) and cooling to “weary brows” as well as “delight / [to] the weary eyes” that have never beheld beauty (51). The entire end passage of the poem circles around this issue of the recuperative power of beauty and art. Here poetry and art become, in line with Eibl’s theoretical approach, a human necessity and a means to secure survival and well-being. In the archaic creation image of “light that batters gloom” (49), H.D. captures the psychological dimension of art, its power to alleviate depressive moods as well as its power to “batter” ignorance and misery and to better humanity. Nevertheless, there is also a spiritual dimension attached to the god of light since “the Pythian” is the patron of Delphi and therefore the god of prophecy and vision. The Pythian “that batters gloom” (ibid.) and in his simple attire descends to rescue humanity with his light becomes a Christ-like figure of salvation. The restorative power of beauty in the last section is closely linked to “vision” (50), recalling again H.D.’s concept of poetic vision and the Orphic mysticism of rebirth as she described it in her Notes on Thought and Vision. As already mentioned, H.D. therein noted that anyone was capable of experiencing poetic vision. The projector that casts the cinematic vision onto the screen becomes the poetic medium that grants poetic vision to all. As with so many of her other works, H.D.’s “Projector” poem uses an ancient setting or theme and mythological imagery to discuss modern issues of art and life. By its alliance to the light of Apollo, cinema is raised by H.D. to the status of classic beauty and art. This central relation between classic poetic vision and modern cinema in H.D.’s poem is once again visually summarised two issues later in the September edition in two “Sketches for Studio Sets” by Macpherson (17). The first sketch, titled “An Audience,” presents a movie theatre with close to amphitheatric seating arrangements. From the top of the dark theatre emanate rays of light that project a face onto the film screen. The second sketch beneath is titled “At Delphi” and shows a cluster of ancient Greek columns with a tympanum, a stretch of land, a group of trees in the distance, and in the front something that may resemble a veil and symbol of ‘revelation’. (Macpherson’s sketch-

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es in turn immediately precede Stein’s piece “Three Sitting Here” and thus continues the leitmotif of seeing in the sense of knowing.) H.D. supplied a second “Projector” poem for the October issue⁴⁴ that continues the subject-matter of the first but is also attributed to a particular film by its subtitle “Chang.” Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness was released a couple of months earlier that year and is a mixture of documentary film and melodrama; it is documentary “moulded into story form” (Anonymous, “Film” 82 f), as an anonymous review of the film in the corresponding Close Up issue stated.⁴⁵ This shows that H.D.’s second “Projector” poem directly responds to a recent film and, to some extent, can be seen as a film review in poetic form. It mentions animals and scenes that appear in the movie (Mandel 1987: 43) and fuses them with the ‘classic’ theme of the first poem. Some parts even correspond with the anonymous film review; for example the monkeys that are “swinging and chattering through the tree tops” (Anonymous, “Film” 84) reappear as “wondrous creatures [that] leap / from tree to tree” (“Projector II” 36) in the poem and while the review mentions “a beautiful ghost of an ape” (Anonymous, “Film” 83) the poem speaks of “ghost-beast” (“Projector II” 36). Charlotte Mandel has even claimed that the anonymous reviewer is H.D., grounding her assumption on the style of the review (1987: 42–45). However, the ‘lyric’ film review makes liberal use of poetic freedom. Thus the poem, unlike the review, does not mention the spectacular elephant stampede that was the film’s great sensation. The effect of this scene, filmed from a pit in the ground beneath the onrushing elephants, was increased by the latest technology of the magnascope (Mandel 1987: 42), a projector magnifying lens that made the scene “suddenly flash […] on three times larger than the normal size” (Anonymous, “Film” 83). The poem, however, concentrates on what the review describes as the “parenthetical insertions of different beasts engaging in some different quest” which successfully “made [one] to be aware of the whole jungle” (ibid. 84): The monkeys leaping from tree to tree (42), the various animals springing, writhing, rearing, flying or lapping water, and the snake crawling through the grass (44), the cataracts and forests (36), the reeds, underbrush, fern and bush (39) of the jungle. The

 In Close Up : (October ): –.  Anonymous, “Film of the Month: Chang,” Close Up : (October ):  f. The enthusiastic review praised Chang as “the film of the year, of the age” (). The producers of Chang would later become famous for producing King Kong (), a film that Close Up did not approve of but described as the “ne plus ultra of the diseased American movie mind” and as ‘unwholesome.’ Cf. H.G. Weinberg, “Notes on America” (section ‘Comment and Review’), Close Up : (August ): .

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poem puts an emphasis on the wilderness and the wildlife and stresses the poetic naturalism of the film. “Projector II” opens with the light of the sun-god, this “gift” of his to humanity (35) and thereby continues the mythic topic from the first “Projector” poem. But the second “Projector” poem is more than a continuation of the first; it is a complement. Difference manifests itself already in the title; while the first poem bears only the technical term of the cinematic device, the second poem is given a subtitle that specifies and relates the ‘pure’ art form of film to nature and life.⁴⁶ The emancipating Apollonian light of divine sublime vision from the first poem becomes already in the first section of the second poem related to the animal power of fascination (ibid.). Now it is the sensory power of vision that enchants the enthusiasts and pulls them into the screen: we sleep and are awake, we dream and are not here; our spirits walk elsewhere with shadow-folk (36)

In this trance state the watching enthusiasts participate in the animal life of the jungle. They become “one with snake and bear” (40) and in doing so abdicate their singularity and become re/united with the animal universe: “you have no life who taste / all-life / with bear and lynx” (ibid.). In this second “Projector” poem the antagonistic “they” of the highbrow intellectuals and ‘bird-stuffers’ who despise cinema and deny it the status of art have completely vanished; now there are only the choral “we” and the light god himself. The voice in the poem changes halfway into the third of the five sequences – and thus exactly at midway of the poem – from the collective choral voice to the god’s divine persona. The god of poetry and beauty himself now chants “evoe / to the car of Linnaeus, / my brother” (41). This is H.D.’s mythopoetic image for art embracing nature. H.D. chooses her botanist⁴⁷ most ingeniously for the homophonous Lenaeus⁴⁸ is the appellation of Dionysos and the chant ‘evoe’ is the cry of the followers in his train. In fact, in the last sequence the chant is “to the car / of god-king Dionysus” (43), only here it is not the Bacchantae welcoming Dionysos but, quite astonishingly, Apollo himself (41). “The

 According to Mandel the film titles translate “Chang” as being Thai for “elephant” (: note ).  Carl Linnaeus (–), Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist.  H.D. would later use this appellation for the god of wine and ecstasy in her “Choros Sequence: From Morpheus” in Red Roses for Bronze ().

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god who trod / Parnassus” and “who bade man create / form” (42–43, my emphasis) now together with his brother Dionysos celebrates “the feast” (43) and “pure ecstasy” (44). The two gods that are usually seen as completely antagonistic, one representing vision and reason and the other intoxication and ecstasy, here appear as brothers and a unity. They symbolise the different genres of art, poetry and drama, and the two components of beauty/form and emotion/sensation. Dionysos as the patron of drama ties back to the title of the film Chang, a ‘drama of the wilderness.’ H.D. places Chang suggestively within the tradition of ancient dramatic festivals and alongside the tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles. She thereby associates modern cinema with ancient rites and sacred practices as well as with the ancient philosophy that drama and poetry are beneficial to human health. The two “Projector” poems with their divine figures of Apollo and Dionysos work in analogy to Macpherson’s two early novels. Both the poems and the novels build two complementary parts that form a dialectic unity. They each present, in their first part, the Apollonian principle of beauty and ‘pure’ aesthetic form and, in their second part, the Dionysian principle of passion and animal nature. Both promote the art philosophy that aestheticism has to be enriched by nature and naturalism. This is not to say that the works copy each other but instead shows that Pool collaborated and interchanged ideas. Yet each of them set their own emphasis. While Macpherson casts the ancient mythological figures in modern but common and living human shape, H.D. idolises the new artistic medium as ancient godhead and is more interested in the spiritual dimension of poetic vision.

8.4.2 “The Cinema and the Classics” – Classic Poetics for the Public H.D. started her contributions to Close Up with the first part of a sequence of three on “The Cinema and the Classics” in the very first issue.⁴⁹ With these articles H.D. carried her poetic credo into the public realm of journalism. In her journalistic contribution the collective choral voice of her poems now becomes an “editorial ‘us’” (23). H.D. thus adapts her former concern to a new, more popular medium. I mentioned earlier that H.D.’s concern was to revive the classics in popular modern culture and that her own Grecian style was closer to popular taste and dress reform than to traditional academic classicism. It is therefore not surprising that her first article on “The Cinema and the Classics,” significantly subtitled ‘Beauty,’ focuses

 “The Cinema and the Classics I: Beauty,” Close Up : (July ): –.

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on the popular figure of the film star to delineate the concept of ‘classic’ aesthetics for modern culture. By focusing on the film star H.D. chooses the agent of popular interest to examine the idea of beauty in film. H.D. starts off from the premise that a general necessity for beauty prevails in all humans, that it is not some prerogative of highbrow intellectuals but that the mob as well craves beauty. But the mob, or “lump” as H.D. terms it in her article, without knowing “has been deprived of beauty” by the “mechanical efficiency” (25) of the American film industry. This film industry has replaced beauty with a mere “totem” and the ‘lump’ has become fixated by this effigy. Therefore it is now the duty of the “leaven,” the “valiant, little army of the advance guard” (23), to win back beauty for the cinema and for the public. The “little leaven” is not snobbishly above the ‘lump’ but is democratically “wedged” in and starts the process of fermentation from there. The imagery of the leaven and the lump here effectively illustrates the organic process of growth from within. It further presents a process decidedly different from either ‘detached’ top down imposed reform or the violent ruptures of revolution, since the fermentation is advanced slowly but continuously by mutual contact. But what exactly is this ‘classic’ beauty that is universally demanded? H.D. emphasises that in its Hellenic sense ‘beauty’ (kalon) also means ‘goodness’ (24, 27). Classic beauty contains a quality of virtue, which must not to be understood in terms of conventional social morals, and in this is profoundly different from the ‘pure’ aesthetics of l’art pour l’art: […] the world will not be sustained, will not exist without that classic, ancient Beauty. Beauty and Goodness, I must again reiterate, to the Greek, meant one thing. […] Kalon, the mob must, in spite of its highbrow detractors, have. […] Beauty was made to endure, in men, in flowers, in hearts, in spirits, in minds. That flame, in spite of the highbrow detractors, exists at the very centre, the very heart of the multitude. (27–28)

Beauty has to do with reality, beauty is reality (32). H.D. uses Greta Garbo in Pabst’s Joyless Street as an example of what she means by ‘classic’ beauty in the cinema. Garbo “frail, very young” but ‘vital,’ wanders “in photogenetic guise” (27–28) through the dismal, poverty-stricken little street of postwar Vienna. Garbo’s “purity” (30, 31) within the omnipresent corruption of a postwar society makes her “a symbol” (29) and infuses the whole story with an “authentic pathos” and “finely spun tragedy” (28). According to H.D. it is her natural, not exaggerated beauty and her “youth and charm” (29) that give her this classic note. H.D. likens her Nordic beauty to a “nordic ice-flower” (27, 33) and by this appellation integrates the movie star among her Imagist poetic flowers; these harsh and marred blossoms which symbolise a certain austere quality of life. It is this quality of which H.D. says: “I can’t for the life of me label [it] otherwise than classic”

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(29). H.D. compares Garbo in Joyless Street to the tragic figure of Helen of Troy, who nevertheless “rises triumphant and denounces the world” (32). This young Garbo of ‘classic’ beauty is the exact opposite of the Hollywood Garbo as she, for example, later appeared in The Torrent. The Hollywood Garbo has become “devitalized,” “distorted,” and an “unbelievable parody of life” (26). The natural quality has been transformed into utter artificiality, the youth and charm replaced “with sewed-in, black lashes, with waist-lined, svelte, obvious contours, with gowns and gowns […] trailing on the floor, with black-dyed wig” (27). In contrast to ‘classic’ beauty, Hollywood’s idea of beauty is a cliché. To Hollywood a beautiful woman “must be a vamp, an evil woman, and an evil woman […] must be black-eyed, must be dark” (ibid.). The Hollywood Garbo is no longer a wild Nordic flower but a “tissue-paper rose” (ibid.), a fake. Especially in the beginning of Close Up, Pool defined their position in the field in opposition to the Hollywood film industry and its industrial products. H.D.’s first contribution consequently takes a decided stand against Hollywood film conventions and positions film art with ‘classic’ art and aesthetics: “As long as beauty is classic, so long beauty on the screen, presented with candour and true acumen, must take its place with the greatest master-pieces of the renaissance and of antiquity” (29). After showing in her first contribution that classic beauty in cinema culture is possible and does exist, H.D.’s second article turns to the presentation of the classics and classic themes in film.⁵⁰ Looking particularly at setting and costume, H.D. reveals that the classics are not about drapery, paste board palaces and overwhelming battles, as the fortunately young film conventions would have it, but about a spirit of simplicity. Classic means “simple beautiful line,” “clean line drawing,” “sculpture” and “geometric design” and the natural naked or near naked human body (30–31). H.D. recurs here to her poetic principle of restraint and extends this principle into cinema. In her description of a classic Greek interior as “simple, cold and chaste, with one blocked in doorway” and “blocks of solid masonry, squares and geometric design” as an example for “the pure classic note” (30) there echoes the functional architecture and spirit of the Kenwin she so loved. Classic, that is “slightly natural, naturalistic but formalised” (34), is not Venetian glass on Nero’s banquet table (33) or Phaedra appearing in crinoline (37) as Hollywood ‘classicists’ have it. ‘Classic’ is not the grandiose and exaggerated but the simple, and in this “true modernity approaches more and more to classic standards” (36). She finds it necessary to “remove a lot of trash” (31) from film, just as Modernism wanted to remove a lot of

 “The Cinema and the Classics II: Restraint,” Close Up : (August ): –.

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trash from literature and art and excavate the essence. Clearly the imagist poet refers back to Imagism here and its doctrine of the ‘hard, clear and precise’ image and the economy of artistic expression. The overcrowded settings, fake wigs and the piled and curled hair in the style “of our 1880 great aunts” (ibid.) are therefore to cinema what the superfluous verbiage and abstract metaphors of the Victorians were to poetry. H.D. advocated “the ‘classic’ as realism” (30). But ‘classic’ not only means simple but also timeless and universal, due to its being ‘naturalistic but formalised’ and in this approaches the symbolic: “A bare square room is to-day what it was in Pompeii, what it more or less was in Athens, in Syracuse. A garden remains a garden and a rosebush a rose-bush” (32). Here also is the chance for the amateur because “one branch, placed against a soft back drop […] with suitable cross-effect of shadow” can without much expense suggest a classic laurel grove (32–33). The cinema is the perfect medium to accomplish such suggestion and projection, such “illumination” of “art made reality” (39). If restraint were enforced, then the cinema, so H.D. believed, could rise to “the poetic and religious ideals of pure Sophoclean formula” (ibid.). In her final article, H.D. reflects upon the new technical invention of the Movietone or ‘talkies’.⁵¹ As stated several times in Close Up and manifested in their late silent film Borderline, Pool were critical of the ‘talkies’.⁵² The ‘talkies’, they eventually came to believe, had caused the art of silent film to die and with it their cherished amateur film. Sound film equipment was too expensive for the amateur and too heavy to achieve the same dynamic motion filming of the lighter cameras for silents. In line with this attitude H.D. at first raises the question if “the good old-fashioned conventionalised cinema product [is not] a more vivid, a more vital, altogether a more inspiring production” (18–19) than the technically more efficient Movietone. She comes to the conclusion that the new invention is too mechanized and that “some genial sub-strata of humour or humanity” (28) is lacking. The visionary dream image of the silent movie has become “a sort of robot” because sound and image, although working in “perfect mechanical unison” (21) are merely welded but not wedded (20). She criticises the new technology as too perfect in that it leaves nothing to the spectator to contribute whereas the old silent medium stimulated participation by suggestion and association: “I want to help to add imagination to a mask, a half finished image, not have everything done for me. I can’t help this show. I am completely out of it” (22). In stim “The Cinema and the Classics III: The Mask and the Movietone,” Close Up : (November ): –.  On Close Up and sound film see also Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (Oxford: UP, ): –.

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ulating the participation of the spectator, film had successfully achieved what modernists desired to accomplish through their experimental pieces. The cinema art of silent film had been “a matter […] of inter-action” (ibid.). These “masks” and “images” of the silent film H.D. likens to the masks in ancient Greek drama and the cinema theatre she likens to those ancient places of vision and sacred rites, the temple and the church (23). The masks are representative; they symbolise “Love and Hate and Man and Woman” and stimulate “emotion and idea” (ibid.). They “originally presented life” and are “symbols of things that matter” (ibid.). But they are crude images, abstracted from reality and the specific to present the more general and universal. In its universality the mask or image then “became a part of some super-normal or some sub-normal layer of consciousness” (ibid.). Here H.D. links the mask as symbol to human psychology. Ancient drama is again closely connected with recreation and redemption (23) and with healing (31). The Movietone in its utter mechanical perfection threatens to destroy these divine visions since it substitutes “too much reality” for the crude symbols (ibid.) and actual human personality for the universal mask: “The mask […] seems about to be ripped off showing us human features” (30). Nevertheless, while H.D. finds Movietone lacking in potentiality for artistic vision and unable to present the “something inside” or constitute “our inner place of refuge,” she welcomes it as a valuable instrument for ‘outside’ matters: So I say yes to anything having to do with reality and with national affairs and with education: then the Movietone is perfect. The outer vision, yes, should be projected, the outer sound, yes, should be amplified and made accessible. […] It is excellent as a recorder, as a corrective of technical flaws, or as a means of indefinitely protracting artistic perfection. Art under this magnascope can be dissected and analysed. As an instrument of criticism, yes, as an instrument of international understanding, yes and yes and yes. […] The Movietone has to do with the things outside the sacred precincts. (29–30)

The Movietone to H.D. supplies a great instrument for analysis and knowledge, particularly for the ‘outside’ issue of education and international politics. The Movietone with its ‘bottled’ or distilled America, England, and Germany, H.D. believed, could teach nations to understand nations (24–27). She goes on to describe two examples of such ‘bottled’ nationality as she encountered them in the Movietone programme she watched: President Coolidge, whose “arid talk of republicism and ‘man of the people’ stunt” is so symptomatic of America while Lord Birkenhead standing in a garden before a row of oak trees is so representative of England (26). To H.D. “nations are in turns of wrists [and] in intonations of voices” and since the new medium was so apt to perfectly record all these minutiae “peace and love and understanding and education could be immensely aided by it” (ibid.). From such a “prac-

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tical viewpoint” she found the new technology excellent but it was of no value for the “realm of pure sentiment” (ibid.). As an instrument of analysis and knowledge she then links the Movietone with the ‘know thyself” of the Delphic Apollo and the new invention eventually becomes an educational “instrument of twin divinity” since it appeals to eyes and ears which are “the gate ways to the mind” (27). By the end of her article H.D. establishes a parallel between the goat-herd chorus of the early ancient Greek tragedies and the Eleusinian mysteries with silent film and the new Movietone respectively; the Movietone she equates with a more advanced “Euripidean sophistication” (31). Thus she skilfully links the development of cinema historically to the development of ancient drama and the new invention to the classic artistic medium. Due to the continuous refinement of an artistic medium, the Movietone has to be welcomed by the artist, she concludes. Her position shows that Pool did not reject the new technology per se but while they found this ‘cold’ medium apt for analytical purposes they considered it entirely insufficient for waking genuine human sympathy. H.D. does not fail to point out that “we want healing” (ibid.) and that too much reality, as the Movietone presents it, is more than the human soul can cope with and counteracts the desired process of healing.

8.5 The ‘Purely’ Experimental Literary Contributions of Gertrude Stein The first issues of Close Up, which still followed largely in the tradition and strategies of the little magazines, were particularly keen to present literary contributions by established avant-garde artists to launch the project of a magazine for the art of films. Since the magazine also wanted to capture the attention of the literary world and win its interest in film, featuring signal names promised to be a successful strategy. It was also logical that the editors of Close Up would start their project by soliciting contributions from their acquaintances and friends, among them Gertrude Stein. Macpherson’s letter to Stein not only gives insight into the editorial procedures of organising the magazine and into the artistic networking of Pool but also provides a first idea of how Stein’s experimental writing is connected with film art (quoted in Donald, Friedberg, Marcus 1998: 14):⁵³

 Macpherson’s letter was originally published in The Flowers of Friendship: Letters to Gertrude Stein, ed. Donald Gallup (New York: Knopf, ): –.

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Riant Chateau June 24, 1927 Dear Miss Stein, I am sending you under separate cover a copy of my latest book Poolreflection, and the first issue of Close Up, a monthly magazine to deal with films from the artistic, psychological and educational points of view. I hope you will enjoy both of these but especially Close Up which I am editing and which I believe will be welcomed by the greatly increasing numbers of people who are coming to regard films as a medium for the possible expression of art in its most modern and experimental aspects. I consider you have done more toward the advancement of thought in art than almost any other writer. Apart from which, one derives a real and stimulating pleasure from your writing. I really want to ask now if perhaps sometime you would send a poem or article for Close Up in which this development of experimental art is concerned. You will see that H.D. has written a charming poem Projector, which has this bearing upon form in the films. The most modern tendency seems so linked up in this way and the kind of thing you write is so exactly the kind of thing that could be translated to the screen that anything you might send would be deeply appreciated. Our terms are two guineas for a poem or short article, three guineas up to three thousand words, our limit. The intent is to form a kind of debating ground for distinguished minds, in contemporary thought and art, and to go on from there. With compliments and best wishes, Kenneth Macpherson

Macpherson’s letter clearly emphasises the experimental form here as related to film, thus liberating film in this instance from its popular context and raising it to the ‘pure’ aesthetic of avant-garde form experiment. Stein answered by sending two pieces, “Mrs. Emerson” and “Three Sitting Here,”⁵⁴ which are in the style of her well known portraits “Picasso,” “Matisse,” “Cézanne,” and “Man Ray.” These literary portraits attempt to give a picture of the artist by capturing his artistic personality as well as his artistic style in writing. Thus “Picasso” for example is composed of rather paratactic sentences to represent the angles, abruptness and collage quality of Cubism⁵⁵ while Matisse and the lines of his flowing impressionism are rather captured in a hypotactic style of writing. “Picasso” and “Matisse” had first been published in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, which demonstrates their relation to the new media. All her

 “Mrs. Emerson” appeared in Close Up : (August ): –, “Three Sitting Here” in Close Up : (September ): – and was continued in Close Up : (October ): –.  On Stein’s cubistic writing style in her early portraits see Randa Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, ): –.

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portraits have in common the repetitious style that was so characteristic of Stein and which she explained in her lecture on “Portraits and Repetitions.” Stein herself rejected the idea of ‘repetitions,’ since she doubted there was such a thing, and preferred to speak of ‘insistence’ (“Portraits” 99). She explained that she did not repeat but said something over and over in an always varied and not identical way. In this way her ‘repetitions’ emphasised a particular aspect or idea and therefore were in truth not repetitions but ‘insistences’ that expressed an essence and an existence. By this technique she attempted to capture “the vitality of movement” (ibid. 103) and movement to her meant life (ibid. 101). Only descriptions of things could result in repetition while “insistence is always alive” (ibid.) and consequently Stein never described. As a result Stein’s literary pieces have to be ‘read’ according to the ‘insistences’ in a text. Stein herself recognised the similarity between her literary portraits and film: “I was doing what the cinema was doing, I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what a person was until I had not many things but one thing” (ibid. 104 f). She pointed out that this similarity was not intentional on her part, that she was not even familiar with the cinema at the time of writing her portraits. But she admitted that she was a product of her period and this period she recognised as “the period of the cinema and series production” (ibid. 105).⁵⁶ The cinema provided her with a graphic explanation for what she tried to do in her writing: “each time the emphasis is different just as the cinema has each time a slightly different thing to make it all be moving” (ibid. 106). Macpherson recognised this similarity and this is what he means by asserting in his letter that Stein had done so much for “thought in art.” She had thought about ways to generate an art that is life. (True to their name, Pool received such ‘thought in art’ that resulted in a certain new form and connected this new form with a popular medium; they applied theory to practice.) Despite her close relation to Picasso and Cubism, Stein, as a student and ‘proselyte’ of William James via James’ theory of the stream-of-consciousness,⁵⁷ belongs to the ‘liquidist’ experimentalists like Woolf, Richardson, and the Joyce of Ulysses. In contrast to Pound, Stein’s Cubistic style captures not an aesthetic stasis but the movement of the thing. Macpherson would relate Stein to such aesthetic movement and he would point to such movement and fluidity in connec-

 For a closer examination of Stein’s cinematic writing see McCabe (: –).  On James’ theory and his influence on Stein see Dubnick (: ). Dubnick points in this context also to Stein’s “distinction between static words (nouns) and dynamic words (verbs, prepositions)” (ibid.), a distinction which again can be related to Pound’s aesthetic stasis of his noun-dominant haikus versus H.D.’s verb-oriented and more dynamic Imagist poems, as well as to Eisenstein’s montage ideas as discussed in the chapter on Montage and Metaphor.

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tion with film. In his editorial immediately preceding Stein’s second part of “Three Sitting Here” he exulted that film was “not static but with all the resources of movement, change, rhythm, space, completely fluid to the will of the artist” (“As Is” 1:3, 16). b Stein’s first Close Up contribution “Mrs. Emerson”⁵⁸ had been written years before and, as Anne Friedberg has already stated, does not directly address the cinema but contains indirect references. The “new houses” without “windows for ventilation or any other use” suggest cinema theatres and the “kindly amazing lights” the films (Friedberg 1998: 14–15). Friedberg’s examples are taken from a passage that circles around visual experience and more than any other seems to suggest film: I cannot see I cannot see I cannot see. I cannot see. I cannot see beside always. I have not selected my pronunciation. I have not selected my pronunciation. I will repeat I will not play windows. In the new houses there are no windows for ventilation or any other use. They say that that is their use. They say that kindly amazing lights they say that kindly amazing lights and they say no that is not the use of a word, they say that unkindly certain lights, anyhow when I am pronounced that certain cheerful shapes are fainter, they say that they have pronounced exceptionally. (“Mrs. Emerson” 24)

The passage contains further suggestions to film such as the “cheerful shapes” that appear in the dark windowless house and the reference to seeing or not seeing in the dark. Also the mention of “not selected pronunciation” could suggest early silent film. Stein’s literary portraits, as already mentioned, circle around the essence that composes the picture; with Picasso it is his tireless working and with Matisse his continuous struggling. In “Mrs. Emerson” some ‘essentials’ of cinema emerge and are repeated, altered, and continued; in short they are ‘insisted’ upon throughout the text. These ‘essentials’ are related to the issue of seeing and not seeing, of saying and communication, of hearing and voice and, last but not least, of repetition and association. Repetition and association constitute of course the resemblance to film in the form and style of Stein’s writing, the ‘es-

 Close Up : (August ): –.

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sence’ in form. The piece actually opens by pointing to these ‘echoes’ in writing: “The regular way of instituting clerical resemblances and neglecting hazards and bespeaking combinations […]” (23). The “clerical resemblances” bear a double meaning. On the one hand, they point to the written repetitions with their slight alterations that compose the text. On the other hand, especially in following so immediately on the title, they associate in conjunction with the “Mrs. Emerson” an alternative Transcendentalism. Such spiritual ‘seeing’ and spiritual vision again sets Stein’s contribution into close relation to H.D.’s “Projector” poems, emphasising film’s possibilities for poetic vision. “Mrs Emerson” preceded H.D.’s second article on “The Cinema and the Classics,” in which H.D. discusses her concept of classic ‘Restraint’ in application to cinema. H.D.’s contribution was followed by four photographs from Man Ray’s recent experimental film Emak Bakia. This arrangement in the magazine establishes an association between the two contributions on artistic vision and art form. By this ingenious arrangement the literary piece by Stein, which was originally composed without any relation to film or the cinema, becomes joined to film. Stein’s experimental literary piece of cinematic ‘repetition’ is even illustrated by the visual ‘repetitions’ in the photos from Man Ray’s avant-garde film. Three of the four photos are composed of a set of four film strips each showing a series of images that only slightly differ from each other, while the fourth photo (a film-still) points to Cubism. These examples of Man Ray’s visual avant-garde experiment explain by association Stein’s literary experiment to the magazine reader.⁵⁹ “Mrs. Emerson” was not especially composed for Close Up but had been written more than a decade before the commencement of the magazine. First published in 1914, two years after “Picasso” and “Matisse,” it falls into the phase of Stein’s early portrait experiments (McCabe 2005: 243) and into a time in which, according to Stein, she had not yet become familiar with the cinema. “Three Sitting Here,”⁶⁰ in contrast, was written in the spring of 1927, according to McCabe (2005: 243), and falls into the vicinity of the conception of the magazine. About this time Stein also became or had become familiar with the film medium and had even been filmed herself.⁶¹ Stein’s second and longer piece, which

 It may be worth noting that the arrangement, as it actually appears in the magazine, digresses from the list of contributions as given in the “Contents,” where Man Ray’s photographs appear at the very end and after Richardson’s column on musical accompaniment. This alteration in arrangement seems to indicate carefully concerted composition of the magazine and its contributions by the editors.  Close Up : (September ): – and Close Up : (October ): –.  The Beinecke Library holds a home movie taken by Julian Stein in its Gertrude Stein collection. The movie shows Michael Stein’s home, designed by Le Corbusier, and Gertrude and Alice

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unfolds over two magazine issues, begins with opposing a speaking “me” with “they” and ‘insists’ on “they love me so” (17). Terms that ‘insist’ on this loving throughout the text are “agreeable,” “attracted,” “devoted,” “pleasing” and “pleasure,” “delighted,” and “approval.” This sets a tone of veneration that complements the tone in H.D.’s “Projector” poems and in the context of the magazine praises the new film art. Stein’s piece further calls attention to “the difference between dates and figs” (18), a phrase that repeats, or rather ‘insists’ on, a difference mentioned earlier between “lilies of the valley abundantly” that are loved by “everybody” and “hyacinths violets camellias which are not to be found and lilacs” that are neglected (17).⁶² To a reader familiar with Macpherson’s programmatic editorials in the preceding issues this would ultimately suggest the difference between widespread popular film culture and rare film art. It is important to note, however, that Stein’s text throughout ‘insists’ that there is a reason for the populace to love film and that it recognizes “the necessity of everybody rejoining lilies of the valley and everything” (ibid., my emphasis). It is once more the same necessity for beauty which the lower-classes nourish that is acknowledged in the novels by Macpherson and Blakeston and in H.D.’s previously examined article on Beauty. Opposed to “they” and the multitude of “everybody” is a singularity of “one” that then becomes “every one” and continues to be “wedded” into “we” and “all” (21). This “one” breaks a lance for the neglected hyacinths: There is absolutely no reason to decry hyacinths and it is not done by any one who is devoted to me and as every one has an excellent reason for finding me pleasing there is at least no reason for decrying wild hyacinths in their season. (19)

In the context of the film magazine this passage presents the intent of Close Up to ‘cultivate’ film art, and in order to ensure that the poetic parallel of flowers and film art is not missed Stein additionally inserts the signal word “devoted” that surely triggers the association to the magazine and its aim as announced in the magazine’s subtitle. This consequently reveals the speaking “me” of the

B. Toklas at the Hotel Pernollet in Belley. and also (accessed  July ). The movie is dated “circa ” and judging from the people’s dresses it is spring or summer time and hence around the time of the writing of the Close Up contribution.  If Stein’s contribution was, as McCabe claims, already written in spring it is an amazing coincidence that the text here so closely corresponds to H.D.’s “The Cinema and the Classics” article in the first Close Up July issue that Macpherson had sent Stein. H.D. in her article, talking about the rare ‘flower’ Greta Garbo, compares her to a camellia (); in the same article H.D. also wonders about the aesthetic taste of the public.

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text to be the film medium itself and not a “megalomaniacal” Stein, as has been assumed (Dydo and Rice 2003: 165, 166). From the beginning the text presents an intermediate “they,” who keep on wondering throughout about “the reason why they love me so.” “They” are situated in between “everybody” and “lilies of the valley abundantly” of which “they” are hesitant (17) and the exotic rare “neglected hyacinths” and the single “one.” “They” apparently are the “three sitting here” from the title – three being the smallest possible number signifying plurality while at the same time still capturing singularity – and in the context of Close Up it is tempting to identify these three as Bryher, H.D. and Macpherson. Macpherson himself suggests such a reading by inserting the phrase “we are still sitting here” in his editorial immediately preceding Stein’s piece. There the phrase appears most craftily on eye level right next to the Stein title on the opposite page (II 16),⁶³ thereby evoking the suggestion visually.

Figure 32: Macpherson’s continuity editing in the journal

 The second part that continued the piece from the September issue and was published in the October issue is here marked by the Roman numeral.

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It is a literary Pabstian cut-on-movement that Macpherson here realises on the printed page, and that continues his editorial thought into Stein’s piece. Similar to a cut-on-movement in a Pabst film, this cut is ‘invisible’ to the reader in that it will not be consciously perceived; only one familiar with and sensitive to Pabst’s method (and Macpherson’s admiration thereof) would spot it. In applying Pabst’s film technique to join the two magazine contributions, Macpherson achieves a synthesis of optical or sensory association and theme. He also, to some degree, synthesises sensory film art and modernist stream-of-consciousness writing technique. Macpherson’s literary cut-on-movement is further a demonstration of the careful and artistic craftsmanship of the magazine, just as the magazine distinguished artistic from industrial editing and high quality work from cheap mass production. Macpherson’s editorial also reflects upon ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and presents the editorial ‘us’ as sitting in a movie theatre watching a film and wondering about the value of the cinema. Stein’s highly experimental piece repeats, or rather ‘insists’ on, what the editor has just stated in the more direct and ‘popular’ style of journalism. Consequently the common Close Up reader will now recognise meaning in the experimental style that he formerly, without much doubt, assumed to be absurd, nonsensical, or completely hermetic. In its combination with the ‘popular’ journalistic style the artistic experiment becomes widely comprehensible and therefore entertaining to the many. Yet Stein need not be pinned down as to the identity of the “three sitting” and it is just as well to assume that “they” simply represent the small number of film enthusiasts who negotiate between popular culture and ‘high’ art. Consequently in “Three Sitting Here” the intense love and appreciation of film, intensified by Stein’s technique of insistence, becomes the leitmotif that is carried by associative imagery via Sunday (17), church (23), all join (21) through to the wedding (22) of popular cinema culture with a more exquisite film art. Stein’s early contribution already ‘insists’ on a cooperation of popular culture and film art, not on a distinction between film art and the popular as is stressed so often in research on Pool and film. There is every reason for the greeting with which they do not deny that they do not need to try to believe that it is a necessity desirably to unitedly admire me. In reality to excitedly admire me. They do admire me. In their admiring of me there is connectedly a reunion of their celebrating their admiration for me and of me. (II 20)

While the first part mostly centres on the love of film and wonders about the attraction of the medium to the public, the second part seems more concerned with the development of film art. Since in the second part the ‘insistence’ is on “addition” and “sharing,” new words of emphasis such as “recuperation”

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(II 22, 24), “refreshing” and “renewal” (II 22), “rejoicing, enjoy, gay” (II 21, 24, 25), and “qualification” (II 21) are introduced. Stein’s “Three Sitting Here” continues the style of ‘insistence’ into a nearly visual pattern, consisting of the word ‘snippets’ “much,” “as,” “may,” “day,” “they,” “gay,” “say,” “lay,” “do,” “so,” “not,” “to,” with the reappearance of “admire” and “love,” and “know” and “how” at the very end. The words are arranged somewhat diagonally by ‘mu’s and ‘ay’s or ‘ey’s and suggest a wave-like impression across the page.

8.6 Dorothy Richardson’s Serial Column “Continuous Performance” The title of Richardson’s Close Up column, which continued throughout all the years of the magazine, points already to the serial nature of the column and aligns it with Richardson’s literary life’s work Pilgrimage. As with her novel cycle, her film column title provides an umbrella term under which to loosely assemble the various individual pieces.⁶⁴ Like H.D., who in her articles on “The Cinema and the Classics” translates her Imagist-Hellenic poetics of simplicity and restraint into journalism, Richardson translates the literary life-cycle form of her series with its innovative ‘stream’ technique into her journalistic “Continuous Performance.” The numbering of the first twelve columns not only highlights their sequential mode but also covers the first year round of the monthly magazine and therefore suggests the symbolism of the life-cycle. Both writers apply their respective literary styles and philosophies to filmmaking and film culture. In contrast to the poet H.D., Richardson began her writing career as a freelance journalist, almost a decade before the first of her Pilgrimage novels was published, and for years after continued to earn a living through her journalist work.⁶⁵ When Dawn’s Left Hand, the tenth volume in the series, was published, Bryher wrote a review in Close Up in which she remarked upon the cinematic quality of the novel: What a film her books could make. The real English film for which so many are waiting. Apart from Miriam herself, the pages are filled with people, men and women who resume their whole thought and vocabulary in a few phrases, or a few actions, immediately to be

 Marcus prefers to speak of “containers for series that were themselves open-ended and unbordered” (“Introduction” ).  Gloria G Fromm, Dorothy Richardson: A Biography (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, ).

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recognised, for they are to be met with every day. Dawn’s Left Hand begins (as perhaps films should) in a railway carriage. Miriam returns from a holiday in Switzerland: the London year goes by, apparently nothing happens, underneath the surface an epoch of life, of civilisation, changes. She meets a friend, refuses to marry a doctor, her own development progresses. And in each page an aspect of London is created that like an image from a film, substitutes itself for memory, to revolve before the eyes as we read. (Bryher, “Dawn’s Left Hand” 338)⁶⁶

It will be remembered that Bryher was to recount in her autobiography that film had taught her speed and to “get her characters moving” (Heart 289–290), and in her review she points to “whole thought” that is captured cinematically “in a few phrases or actions,” which are immediately recognised because they are representative of human daily life. In reviewing the novel, Bryher associates the movement of film with the cycle of life and the cyclical narrative style that is so characteristic of Richardson. Bryher insinuates through emphasising how the novel begins in a railway carriage – Borderline opens with a train in motion – and how the London year goes by that the journey of life with its separate stages is taken up in the cyclical structure of the narrative. She further links film to human consciousness and subconsciousness. Memory becomes a chain of “images from a film” that “revolve before the eyes” while much of life’s continuous stream passes by subconsciously and the changes occur “underneath the surface.” Just as film is related to life, so it is also related to the narrative structure and the reading experience this structure evokes. The reader follows the continuous stream of the narrative, in which “apparently nothing happens,” while subconsciously witnessing how the protagonist matures and thus experiencing a process of maturation. Apparently Richardson herself confirmed the veracity of Bryher’s observation. In a letter to Bryher she wrote: “And what can I say about your review in C.U., emphasizing the aspect no one else has spotted” (Fromm 1977: 231, cited in Marcus 1998: 153). Marcus, who anticipated me in remarking upon Bryher’s comment on the “cinematic dimensions” in her review, finds it safe to assume that Richardson was referring to this passage in her letter. In contrast to Marcus, who opposes Richardson to Macpherson’s “aggressive avant-gardism,” I would argue that Richardson and Macpherson represent the popular voice, and that his editorial at the beginning and her column at or towards the end of the magazine constitute something akin to a frame. It is rather in analogy to such framing that this section on Richardson is to conclude the present chapter on Close Up. Since Richardson’s “Continuous Performance” con-

 In the section “Book Reviews,” Close Up : (December ): –.

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stitutes already the largest section in the Close Up anthology by Donald, Friedberg and Marcus, where it is reprinted in full, and since much of her interest in this new form of entertainment for the public corresponds with Macpherson’s, the present examination of Richardson’s contribution shall be brief and merely illustrative.⁶⁷ While Macpherson recounts personal visits to film performances in Switzerland, Berlin, Vienna, and New York, Richardson reports on her visits to movie theatres in and out of London and concentrates on the English audience. Bryher claimed once that Pilgrimage was an excellent English social history (Heart 282) and Richardson’s column is also very much concerned with sociological issues. She is particularly interested in the educational potential of film and in the audience’s reception of films. In her column she covers her cinematic field studies. Richardson wrote on performances she attended in the slums, in remote rural villages, in the West-End and in London’s independent The Avenue Pavilion.⁶⁸ She converses on the unity of music and picture, on the superfluousness of numer-

 For further research on Richardson’s contribution to Close Up see Diana Celeste, “Dorothy M. Richardson instancabile spettatrice,” Close Up –: Antologia della prima rivista internazionale die cinema, ed. Paola Zaccaria (Torino: Lindau, ): –; Vittoriana Villa, D. Richardson: Spettacolo continuo (Napoli: Liguori, ). Maggie Humm as well briefly discusses Richardson’s contribution in her short section on Close Up, but apparently is trying to make it fit the Companion’s agenda. She alleges that Richardson’s “themes are visibly ‘feminine’,” that she is “frequently addressing an everyday woman spectator” and that her “major essay [is] ‘The Film Gone Male’.” In fact, this essay, Richardson’s second to last, is one of her shortest, if not the shortest, of her contributions and her major interest throughout seems to be lowerclass film audiences in general, and the potentiality of film to entertain and educate the masses. The spectators she is concerned with in “Continuous Performance VII: The Front Rows,” for example, are three boys. Humm also discusses H.D.’s contributions but speaks of “a series of twelve substantial pieces group as ‘The Cinema and the Classics’” and one wonders if she may be confusing H.D.’s series of three with Richardson’s sequence of twelve. She also claims that H.D. is “speaking in an engaging personal voice which is always gendered,” when in fact H.D. explicitly states that her voice is an ‘editorial us.’ I do agree with Humm in her registering the collective and democratic attitude of both H.D. and Richardson but would not define and restrict it to “women’s modernism” since Macpherson displays exactly the same attitude. See Maggie Humm, “Women Modernists and Visual Culture,” The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, ed. Maren Tova Linett (Cambridge: UP, ): –.  Cf. “Continuous Performance X: The Cinema in the Slums,” Close Up : (May ): –; on rural villages “Continuous Performance XII: The Cinema in Arcady,” Close Up : (July ): –; about a performance in the West-End see “Continuous Performance II: Musical Accompaniment,” Close Up : (August ): – and on the Avenue Pavilion see “Continuous Performance: Pictures and Films,” Close Up : (January ): –.

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ous captions, on ‘talkies,’ on film and issues of gender.⁶⁹ She claims that the cinema offers a greater salvation to the poor and destitute than many philanthropic ventures, which are often doctrinaire or fall short of true relief (2:5, 59–60). Even more refined entertainment is but “a conducted tour” to them (ibid.). The cinema, on the other hand, meets their all-human “demand for pictures” (ibid. 61), it offers them joy and relief, physical as well as spiritual, from the hardships of their lives. Richardson echoes here once more the anthropological concern that Pool connected with film. Furthermore, according to Richardson, the cinema is the most powerful civilising agent there is (2:5, 60). Even the minimum of any kind of goodness that there will be in any kind of film, will be “civilisation working unawares” (ibid. 62). Richardson also came to the astonishing sociological insight that the cinema, while a communal experience that provided social life to the anonymous urban individual, at the same time offered solitude to the rural villager who otherwise could never escape the “ceaseless association” (3:1, 55) and the all too familiar. To rural villagers the cinema introduced the freshness of unknown people and the experience of city life, and all to their improvement. She finds that this cultivation has made them less parochial and more aware of the world and its possibilities (ibid. 56–57). Richardson proves Macpherson’s point that the public knew intuitively when the representation on the screen was accurate and when it was entirely at odds with life. Recounting the reaction of the audience at a small local cinema to the first slow-motion film they encountered, she expresses her sympathy with their hysterical laughter at the “sharp touch of the grotesque” (2:6, 56). The slow-motion shows three running athletes exerting their powers to the utmost “in desperate competition” (ibid.) for victory, moving as with leaden limbs in far less than even walking speed. On the other hand, the slow-motion of an athlete winning the high jump affects a completely opposite reaction. It is such a “marvel of the levitation” (ibid. 57) and so associated with the human dream of higher achievement that the audience answers with the perfect silence of awe (ibid.). Richardson further confirms that the public is not bored by “films ‘above their heads’” (2:1, 63) if these films are well-made and the characters and situations convincing, but they grow inattentive in the meaningless movie, no matter what glamour it presents (ibid. 64). Her field studies supply empirical data to support the con-

 On music see the previous footnote for “Musical Accompaniment;” “Continuous Performance III: Captions,” Close Up : (September ): –; on ‘talkies’ “Continuous Performance: Almost Persuaded,” Close Up : (June ): –; and on gender issues “Continuous Performance VIII,” Close Up : (March ): – and “Continuous Performance: The Film Gone Male,” Close Up : (March ): –.

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cept of Close Up and Macpherson’s programmatic editorial. Her column is furthermore a record of the avant-garde artist in contact with the people and participating in popular culture.

Part V ~ The End ~

9 Conclusion: The Disintegrating Body of Pool and the Spirit of Art I started out claiming that Pool constitute a third pillar of modernism between the established canonical poles of those modernists tending to objectivity and those tending to subjectivity and I hope to have successfully shown that they do. Not only do they mediate between the diverging tendencies in modernism, which promote the object and the classic form of universal validity on the one hand and individual subjective psychology on the other, but they furthermore welcome popular culture, especially film culture. Thus they unite the radical aesthetic experiments of Modernism with popular entertainment and amateur art, which are still so often seen as contrary to the avant-garde art movements. The Pool phenomenon, with its artistic collaboration and pooling of conflicting artistic and aesthetic tendencies within modernism, presents an assessable nucleus that is representative of the internationalism, plurality, and complexity of modernism. Like some of their modernist associates, Pool acted from several positions such as authors, editors, critics, and publishers in the literary and artistic field but unlike their associates, who acted mostly in the subfield of limited production, Pool freely embraced the entire field by seizing popular media and by producing films and publishing a film magazine that notably exceeded the circulation of the avant-garde little magazines. In accordance with their interest in film and different from many of their modernist acquaintances, they did not position themselves in distinction to popular culture and the public but instead in alliance with it. They wanted to wrench the mass medium film from the industry, with its purely commercial concerns, and reclaim it for artistic expression and the common interest. In their endeavour to re/convert economic capital into cultural capital for the people they even turned to advertisement and redefined its strategies to accommodate their purpose of motivating and educating the public. At the same time, they set out to show that products of mass culture such as film or film magazines could be highly artistic, literary, and of high compositional quality. By advancing the quality and aesthetic finesse of popular culture, they aimed at raising the standards for the industry and its commercial productions. If audiences got a taste for high-quality products, they would raise their demands and the industry would no longer be able to serve them low-quality productions. Pool realised that the art of Modernism, with its radical aesthetic experiments that were interesting only to the specialist, was in danger of losing touch with the public. The coteries with their movements and –isms, although

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revolutionising artistic conventions, had in advancing the autonomy of art eventually severed art from the multitude and its public interest and catered with their aesthetic elitism ultimately to the institution of art. Therefore modernist aesthetics had to be made accessible to the public again and film culture provided a promising opportunity to do so. Pool believed in the social and communal function of art and in the social responsibility of the artist. The artist must not avoid this responsibility and withdraw into secluded aesthetic spheres but had to engage in human concerns and become involved with the public. Artist and art had to work towards the advance and for the benefit of humanity. Art was too meaningful for the progress and education of mankind to be limited to aesthetic self-sufficiency. Like other avant-garde modernists, Pool upheld an ethos of devotion to art, but they redefined this devotion as a devotion to the spirit of art, not form, and a dedication to humanitarian progress and enlightenment. Accordingly, the avant-garde artist must operate from the midst of the people and must start the process of innovation from within society and not impose it from without. To this end s/he has to make concessions in order to captivate the interest of the multitude. Whereas the avant-garde experiment was only possible in the field of limited production, it then had to find its way into the field of mass production, for only if it was produced in great quantities by the industry would it then become available to the public at large and inform and shape everyday life. The artist had to cooperate with the industry not for personal economic profit but to advance a modern life-style for the people. The applied arts of the Bauhaus movement, as represented by Kenwin with its functional furniture, were one way of achieving this end; film culture, especially like that of Weimar Berlin, provided another. In this context Pool also promoted amateur art, which was independent of the industry and thus free to experiment yet not elitist but of the people, and it posed a democratic “competent commonplace” to a highly specialised aesthetic. It furthermore involved the people and encouraged them to shape their own culture. Particularly the analysis of the works by Pool has shown how they engaged in dialogue with the different artistic tendencies of their time. But considering Pool and their works simply in exchange with and reaction to other avantgarde movements and positions fails to fully comprehend their art and aesthetic concept. Aesthetics to Pool were not only semantically related to aesthesis. They were more than simply a highly specialised style or means of social distinction; they were an integral part of human life and nature and inextricably linked to human perception and understanding. This is where a sociological system-theoretical approach like Bourdieu’s falls short and where anthropological and even biological aspects come into play. Pool grounded the need for aesthetic and creative activity in human nature and psychology, giving consideration to both re-

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cent psychoanalytical theory and older philosophical-psychological ideas and ancient poetological concepts. Freud’s recent psychoanalytical work confirmed a need for creative expression in human nature. But while the dream constituted a balance to the harsh realities of life, providing comfort and relieving stress, it was a purely subjective individual experience. Consequently Pool reconnected dreaming to the collective experience of ancient myth and drama. Art then had had a communal function and had provided entertainment and pleasure as well as vision and understanding to the people. Pool strove to revive this ancient communal spirit of art and in the cinema they discovered a promising medium for their pursuit because the cinema attracted the populace. It was a place where people went and met for entertainment and recreation, and moreover where they were not awed by institutionalised art. If enhanced in quality and raised to the level of artistic expression, the cinema would not merely distract people from their daily problems and struggles but as art could provide them with a better and more lasting comfort. What is more, it could sensitise them to the experience of life and their fellow humans and provide them with a deeper understanding of life and human nature. In the twentieth-century’s augmented focus on the individual’s subjective perspective, Pool discerned an inherent danger of narcissistic self-absorption that would ultimately result in a lack of human compassion and understanding of others. They discovered a similar narcissistic tendency in a modernist art that became increasingly self-reflective, form absorbed, and removed from public concerns. In opposition to these tendencies they endorsed the idea that modernist aesthetics needed to appeal to the public while in turn popular entertainment needed to be endowed with artistic form and quality, just as the Apollonian dream or vision, with its moment of recognition, had to be joined to the communal Dionysian experience. Accordingly, Pool reconnected Freud’s modern egocentric ‘pleasure principle’ to a fundamental ‘primitive’ mode of playfulness in humanity, which it shared with the animal. Like the animal, humans too needed to play, but unlike the animal human playfulness could express itself aesthetically and manifest itself in jokes, puns, metaphors, stories, poetry, sculpture or music. To aestheticize the experience of life was an integral part of human nature. Dream theory had revived older ideas that humans expressed sensations and emotions in images and symbols, but psychoanalysis also reduced them to the individually pathological and neurotic. Pool disengaged them from this restricted new context and set them again in relation to ancient myths as a communal poetic language expressing emotions, life-processes or natural forces. Especially in film Pool found a means of creative and artistic expression that complied perfectly with these anthropological preconditions. Film worked along psychological lines; it projected, suggested, expressed and stimulated sensations

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and emotions through images. It narrated in pictures. It also worked in analogy to human physiological perception and cognition, since the visual sensation triggered an emotional and intellectual process. Contrary to many of their fellow modernist artists, who dismissed film as mechanical and inartistic, Pool discovered therein a medium of highly poetic potential. Film was able to capture impressions visually and speak in metaphors, symbols and associations. At the same time, it presented life-like images and human forms, and it was the most dynamic means of artistic expression to date. With the exception of theatre, film was the only art that worked with human material and that was a collaborative production of director, actors, cameramen, light technicians and cutters. Film art was at once representational and abstract; the human characters were personalised and yet they represented universal human emotions, like the masks of ancient drama that had symbolised hate, love or jealousy, virtue or vice. Film was therefore psychological and organic in an anthropological sense, and it funnelled diverging aesthetic attempts of the modernists, since it was objective as much as subjective, worked with the concrete image as much as with diffuse emotion, and was Apollonian and Dionysian at once. The analysis of a modernist language of images and emotions has revealed striking parallels between modernist avant-garde aesthetics and film technique, regardless of many artists of Modernism’s self-promoting efforts to distinguish themselves from popular culture. Thus despite his dismissive attitude to the cinema, Pound’s Imagist and Vorticist ideas of image conjunction bear resemblance to Eisenstein’s montage theory and both conceptions ultimately trace back to the Japanese haiku. Woolf, in turn, who in her famous essay openly rejected film as inartistic, aimed at a similar responsive situation to Pabst with her continuously flowing stream of narrative. Contrary to those modernists who turned to the classics to find forms of universal validity, Pool believed that the forms must change and be adapted to modern times and life-experience. They found universal validity in human psychology and nature; contrary to those modernists who aestheticized subjectivity, they abstracted from the subjective to the general and archetypal. Concerning modernist art they furthermore realised that, on the one hand, mere concentration on the object and the promotion of an objectivity that was detached not only from the human form but moreover from human emotional experience would not stimulate sympathy and understanding, while on the other hand excessive self-reflection and involvement with the subjectivity of one’s interior psychological world would also fail to inspire sympathy. There had to be a balance; art needed to present universal human emotions and mental conditions through empathetic modern figures in order for the recipient to relate and sympathise. Pool’s art was a conjunction of ancient symbolism with new aesthetic form, of

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age-old and timeless all-human concerns and philosophical thought with modernity and highly avant-garde means of expression. Moreover, theirs was a life-affirming art that, while it celebrated the beauty of creation and intended to inspire universal sympathy, also embraced the conflict of life. Macpherson’s two complementary novels show how the two aesthetic categories of objectivity and classicism and romanticist passion and psychology correspond to the antagonistic energies of the Apollonian and the Dionysian within human nature. The brighter mood of happiness and tranquillity enters into a dynamic relationship with the darker mood of melancholy and emotional turmoil. Human mood is set in relation to natural forces of creation and destruction and works in analogy to a natural cycle of regeneration, as do the aesthetic art forms which express these psychological forces. Pool transformed the conflicting aesthetic tendencies within Modernism into antagonistic psychological energies within human nature and related the two poles of ‘high’ art and popular culture to the dialectical Apollonian and Dionysian principle and a natural cycle of regeneration. Pool’s success in resisting the mechanisms of the institutionalisation of art seems to have irritated the critics, who consequently did not raise their works to the Olympus of the modernist canon. Unlike the modernists who either defined their aesthetic as masculine or in opposition distinguished their aesthetic as feminine, Pool did not provide convenient categories for the critic but on the contrary their plurality defied limited academic interpretations and consequently classifications. Pool’s art rather set out to explode binary oppositional categories and opposed an all-human art rooted in the anthropological universality of emotions, moods, and sympathetic feeling to any gender specific concepts. Pooling a variety of different modernist influences that were considered conflicting and incompatible by former critical concepts of modernism, their works fell into disregard. Lately some studies on modernism have reconsidered the relation of modernism and modernity, ‘high’ art and popular culture, and a revision of the older, hegemonic concepts has paved the way for revaluating classical Modernism and its canonical figures and works, inviting new approaches and opening vistas on such an artistic collaboration as Pool’s. Recently Pool seem to be attracting increasingly more critical interest, considering the attention given to the villa Kenwin from the field of art history, the latest study from the field of film history on Pool’s visionary cinema, and Susan McCabe’s biographical work-in-progress on Bryher. Considering also that the early pioneering studies of Pool came from the field of media studies and film history and that the most recent study by Bovier comes again from the field of film history, it was time for literary and cultural studies to attend to the phenomenon of Pool and examine it in its literary and cultural context. It was also time

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to attend to Pool as a Gesamtkunstwerk and look at the synthesis of the different art forms and media and the various influences of modernism that the Pool oeuvre constitutes. Finally, it was necessary to take account of Pool as an artistic collaboration of diverse artistic energies in their synergetic entirety, which so far had usually been examined as isolated components. b In 1933 POOL Productions ceased its activity and the last Close Up quarterly was issued in December. Film was “the art that had died” (Bryher, Heart 309). The ‘talkies’ had succeeded silent film and destroyed its original artistic potential. Film now stated instead of suggested and silent cinema’s universal visual language was replaced by the old national language barriers, which in consequence led to national productions (ibid.). Moreover, the additional sound equipment rendered film too expensive for the amateur (ibid.) and the industry once more seized this art from the public. But the time of the termination of Close Up and Pool’s film activities also highlights once more their close association with Weimar Berlin’s modernist art and film culture. Pabst had left Nazi Germany for the United States, while the Nazis seized art and particularly film for their propaganda, “destroyed all forms of expression and drove the artists into exile” (Bryher, ibid. 296). With the rise of the Nazi regime, the German art movement that had promoted liberal thinking and engaged in educating the public to humanistic ideas was annihilated. The Nazis exploited art for their propaganda instead of utilising it to spread enlightened thought and humane knowledge, inspired rage and hate instead of sympathy and international understanding, blinded the public instead of making it see and encouraged the very mob-hysteria of which Pool had so warned. So with Pabst in the States, film firmly in the hands of the industry, the Nazis in Berlin, and the world steadily working towards another World War, Pool began to disintegrate. Their enterprise of an art that was to be taken into the midst of the public, for the public’s benefit and to stimulate a humane progress of mankind ended with the rise of political fascism in Europe. Did it indeed? Certainly the group broke up and their previous modes of artistic and aesthetic activities were discontinued, yet it seems the individual members of Pool continued to carry the spirit of art into life, each in their own particular way. They remained true to the spirit they had emphasised throughout as the driving force of all true art, the artistic spirit that acted for the benefit of humanity, worked towards humanitarian progress, and not least intended to comfort and delight. Similar to the art works and forms in Macpherson’s novels, it seems, the body of the Pool group dissolved but their humanistic spirit continued and took on new and different forms.

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Bryher became actively engaged in helping émigrés to leave Nazi Germany and re-directed much of her financial support to setting up funds in this direction, while warning the English of an impending war and called upon them to take action, “convinced that apathy is the greatest sin in life” (Heart 326). She continued to support artists throughout her life and later would write her historical novels. Forced to leave Switzerland eventually during the war she returned in 1946 to Kenwin, where she remained until her death. Macpherson left in 1935 for New York, where he first took a flat and finally settled two years later to continue a life devoted to and fed by art, collecting art and supporting artists, and associating especially with young black artists from Harlem. He furthermore benefited art by helping émigré artists escape the dangers and persecutions of fascism and a war-ridden Europe. Peggy Guggenheim even claims that he worked for the British Secret Service (Confessions 291), but then Guggenheim is a somewhat unreliable narrator and there is no further proof for her assertion. It is much more likely that he collaborated with Bryher in this matter and constituted an overseas post in her private but elaborate aid network. After the war he moved to Italy, where he later wrote his final novel Rome 12 Noon. H.D. left Kenwin in 1939 and remained in London during the war, writing her Trilogy (1946) in which she comes to terms with the war experience. She also gives her own poetic account of this modern-time version of an absurd ancient battle in Helen in Egypt (1961), removing the central figure of this epic conflict from the scene of place and transforming the famous heroic battle into a completely absurd enterprise since all the fighting is for nothing but a mirage. She used her artistic energies and her pen to revise canonical war history myth-making and reveal its misleading constructions and manipulations. Dorothy Richardson continued her journalist work and her life project Pilgrimage in England, Robert Herring became the editor of Bryher’s Life and Letters To-day, and Oswell Blakeston continued to write fiction, detective novels, travel literature and cook books. Hanns Sachs, who early on recognised the danger of National Socialism, had already moved to Boston in 1932, where he continued his psychoanalytical work. Although the heyday of their avant-garde film activism lay in the past and their POOL enterprise was discontinued, the Pool friends always continued to stay in touch (their compendious correspondence in the Beinecke collection gives testimony to this) and would reunite throughout the years.

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Index of names Aarne, Antti 214 Abaddon 216 Abraham, Karl 105 Adonis 146 Adorée, Renée 363 Aeschylus 152, 230, 250, 389 Aldington, Richard 7, 79 Alexandrov, Grigori 71, 116, 330, 358, 369 Allégret, Marc 168, 263, 265, 269 f., 357, 369 Andersen, Hans Christian 213 f., 236 Antheil, George 11, 39 Antoine, André 219 Aphrodite 82 f., 94 f., 178 f., 182, 192, 310 f., 329 f. Apollo 54, 65, 88, 91, 93, 96 f., 147 – 154, 156, 168, 171, 173, 176, 179 f., 193, 198, 204, 214, 232, 241, 243, 275, 289, 299 f., 308, 313, 321, 334, 348 – 350, 385 f., 388 f., 394, 411 – 413 Aquinas, Thomas 197 Ariosto, Ludovico 52 Aristotle 51, 59, 69, 133, 137, 220, 240 Arnold, Matthew 61 Arthur (King) 147 f., 167, 177, 216 f., 225, 238 f. Attis 146 Bacchus (see also Dionysos) 173, 176, 310, 312 Barnes, Djuna 8, 10 Barthes, Roland 138 Beach, Sylvia 7, 10, 39, 161, 252, 337, 379 Beardsley, Aubrey 171 Beethoven, Ludwig van 62, 100 f., 374 f. Benjamin, Walter 39 Bennett, Arnold 33, 358 Bergner, Elisabeth 11 Bergson, Henri 147 Birkenhead, Lord 393 Black, E.L. 37, 246, 250 – 253, 256, 262, 270, 273 Blakeston, Oswell 5 f., 104, 115, 117, 157, 204, 220, 246 f., 253 – 258, 266, 276,

278 – 280, 332, 364, 369, 378, 386, 399, 415 Bloom, Harold 54 f., 187, 197, 212 Blumenberg, Hans 137 Boccaccio, Giovanni 52 Böhme, Margarete 109 Borges, Jorge Louis 53 Botticelli, Sandro 94, 181 f., 218, 327 Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 23 – 26, 30 – 34, 46, 51, 55 – 60, 63, 98, 117, 164, 188 – 190, 198, 219, 251, 253, 371, 376 f., 410 Braque, George 70 Braunberger, Pierre 278 Brecht, Berthold 53, 74, 133 Brooks, Louise 109 Browning, Robert 239 Brugière, Francis 97, 280 Bryher 4 – 11, 13 – 15, 20, 27, 34, 36 – 42, 44 – 48, 56, 59 f., 62 – 65, 80, 82, 91, 96 f., 99, 101 – 106, 110, 113, 115 f., 121, 123 – 125, 127, 136, 146, 148, 153 f., 156 – 158, 162, 165 f., 168, 176, 182 f., 204, 246 – 250, 256 – 258, 266, 269 f., 276, 279, 281, 285, 289, 302, 315, 317, 327, 336 – 342, 344 – 346, 348, 350, 352 – 359, 362, 366 f., 372, 378, 382 f., 400, 402 – 404, 413 – 415 Buñuel, Luis 28, 278 Bürger, Gottfried August 206 Burke, Edmund 211 Burne-Jones, Edward 225 Burns, Robert 211 – 213, 229, 236 Byron, Gordon Lord 245, 336 f. Cage, John 172 Caliban 195 Carter, Elmer 290, 358 Cassirer, Ernst 136 – 138 Casson, Lewis 221 Castle, Hugh 267 Cavalcanti, Alberto 267 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 222 f. Cézanne, Paul 33, 264, 395 Chaucer, Geoffrey 214

450

Index of names

Chiron 91, 125 Chopin, Frédéric 165, 189, 323 Cicero 51 Circe 178, 216 Clair, René 278 Cleopatra 178, 297 Clever, Edith 356 Cocteau, Jean 10 Conrad, Joseph 221 Cooksey, Thomas 54 f. Coolidge, Calvin 393 Crevel, René 9, 358, 369 Cripps, Thomas 19, 281, 284 f., 287 f., 290, 294, 298 Cunard, Nancy 10, 290 da Vinci, Leonardo 374 Daedalus 196 – 198 Dante Alighieri 53, 178, 236 Daphnis 193 f. Darantière, Maurice 161 – 163, 165, 250, 366 f. Darwin, Charles 57, 128, 154, 181, 196, 223, 233 f., 238 f., 274 f., 303 de Chirico, Giorgio 47 de Montolieu, Isabelle 338 Debussy, Claude 85, 173, 375 Dekeukeleire, Charles 277 Delacroix, Eugène 246 della Robbia, Giovanni 208, 213, 218 Demeter 145 Deslaw, Eugen 278, 358 Dickens, Charles 27, 75 f., 107 Diderot, Denis 338 Dilthey, Wilhelm 135, 179 Dionysos 54, 61, 65, 88, 99 f., 113, 145 – 153, 156, 172 f., 175 – 178, 180, 182, 186, 198, 204, 215, 217, 224, 230 – 232, 234, 236, 238, 241 – 243, 272, 275, 299 f., 303, 305, 310 – 312, 323, 348 – 350, 380, 388 f., 411 – 413 – Dionysos Zagreus 84, 217 Döblin, Alfred 70 Doolittle, Hilda (see H.D.) Dos Passos, John 70 Douglas, Norman 47 Douglass, Frederick 293, 298

Dresser, Christopher 341 Du Bois, W.E.B. 289 Duchamp, Marcel 28, 172, 260 Dulac, Germaine 28, 260, 279, 281, 323 Durkheim, David Émile 147 Echo 186 Eggeling, Viking 28, 50, 280 Ehrenburg, Ilya 107 Eibl, Karl 4, 51, 55 – 60, 164, 206, 220, 275, 380 f., 386 Eisenstein, Sergei 4, 6 f., 10, 34 f., 46, 49, 69 – 78, 80, 82 f., 90, 101 f., 111 – 114, 116, 128, 248, 250, 254, 262, 265, 273, 278 f., 282 f., 286, 296, 308, 310 – 312, 316 – 318, 327, 330, 358 – 360, 363, 371, 379, 396, 412 Electra 140 Eliot, T.S. 9 f., 17 f., 31 f., 40, 43 f., 82 f., 87, 90, 121, 144, 146, 148, 235 – 240, 290, 314, 339 Ellerman, John (brother of Bryher, see also Black, E.L.) 37, 162, 246, 250, 252, 270, 273 Ellerman, Sir John Reeves (father of Bryher) 8 f., 36 f., 342 Elliott, Eric 12, 115 – 117, 155, 157, 184, 186, 347, 359, 369, 378 Ellis, Havelock 91, 123 – 125, 128, 136, 140, 143, 146, 149, 165, 171, 248, 357, 374 Ende, Michael 53 Epicurus 56, 154, 173, 175, 217, 225, 242 Epstein, Jacob 326, 378 Epstein, Jean 265 Ernst, Max 47, 172 Eros 43, 52, 83, 86, 88, 94, 102 f., 122, 131, 133, 140 f., 148, 169, 178, 210, 216, 225, 308, 314, 332 f. Escher, M.C. 353 Euripides 86 – 89, 152, 206, 230, 249 f., 389, 394 Fenollosa, Ernest 77 Ferenczy, Alexander 342 – 344, 346 Fischer, Ernst 54 Flint, F.S. 79 Forster, E.M. 174

Index of names

Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 308, 327 Frankl, Viktor 187 Frazer, James George 145 – 148 Freud, Sigmund 38, 56, 90 f., 104 f., 108, 115, 122 – 130, 132, 134 – 136, 140 – 142, 145 f., 148, 153 f., 156, 166, 168 f., 171, 174, 178 – 181, 193, 195, 217, 282, 308, 313, 315, 317 – 320, 411 Galsworthy, John 33 Ganymede 194 Garbo, Greta 102, 105, 327, 390 f., 399 Gaugin, Paul 121 Gibbons, Carroll 323 Gide, André 9 f., 40, 168, 170, 263, 269 f., 374, 378 f. Godwin, William 338 Goël, Véronique 257, 262, 344, 356 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 53, 205, 207, 211 Grierson, John 358 Griffith, David Llewelyn Wark 116 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 53, 213, 229, 236 Gropius, Walter 341, 343 f. Guggenheim, Peggy 41, 47, 351, 415 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 4 – 11, 15 f., 18 – 20, 38, 41 – 48, 59 f., 63 – 65, 79, 81 – 92, 94 f., 97, 102, 105 f., 109, 113 – 116, 123 f., 135, 145 – 148, 152 – 154, 156, 162, 164 f., 176 f., 180, 183 f., 217, 227, 250, 257 – 267, 269 – 272, 281, 283, 287, 291, 294, 297 – 300, 302 f., 306 – 311, 320–322, 324 – 328, 331, 336, 345, 347, 352 – 360, 372, 374, 380 f., 384 – 396, 398 – 400, 402, 404, 415 Harrison, Jane 147 f. Hathaway, Anne 190 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 174 Hecate 216 Hedyle 87 f. Hedylus 43, 87 f., 180 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 152 Helios 65, 88, 113, 300, 385 Hemingway, Ernest 3, 7, 9 f., 39 Henning, Uno 92, 105, 204

451

Henselmann, Hermann 339, 342 – 350, 352 – 354 Hercules 193 Herder, Johann Gottfried 139, 207 Hermes 95, 135, 193 f., 385 Herring, Robert 5 f., 10 f., 104, 266, 268, 415 Hessling, Catherine 267 Hitler, Adolf 39 Hogan, Patrick Colm 52, 55 Hogarth, William 327 Hokusai, Katsushika 85 Homer 43, 178, 207, 299 Horatius 52 Howard, Sydney 323 Hughes, Langston 290, 297, 322 Hulme, T.E. 31, 33, 43, 87, 144 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 170, 188 Hyacinth 91, 193 Hylas 193 Isherwood, Christopher Ivens, Joris 50, 269 f.

246, 255

James, C.R.L. 296, 298 James, William 127, 129, 396 Jehanne, Edith 106 Jesus Christ 145 f., 167, 193 – 195, 209 f., 216, 234, 237, 239, 331, 386 John, Augustus 378 Johnson, James Weldon 289 Johnson, Rosamond 289 Jonson, Ben 191 Joyce, James 7 – 10, 17 f., 31 – 34, 39 f., 70, 73, 99 f., 161, 163, 186, 188, 196 – 200, 203, 235, 319, 362, 379, 396 Jung, Carl Gustav 123, 135 f. Kaufman, Michail 267 Keats, John 170, 190, 228 King, Martin Luther 293 Kollwitz, Käthe 368 Kore 97 Kraszna-Krausz, Andor 104, 108 f., 358, 367, 369 Kuleshov, Lev 277

452

Index of names

Lang, Fritz 28, 309, 379 Lawrence, D.H. 9 f., 41, 203 Lawson, Gussy 277 Le Corbusier 339 f., 343 – 345, 350, 354, 398 Léger, Fernand 28, 172 Leighton, Frederic 171 Leni, Paul 279, 363 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 379 Lewin, Blanche 266 f. Lewis, Wyndham 15 f., 33, 78, 81, 144, 353, 362, 365 Lloyd Wright, Frank 354 Loos, Adolf 340 L’Ouverture, Toussaint 296 Low, Barbara 252 Lowell, Amy 39, 41, 81, 85 Loy, Mina 10 Lubitsch, Ernst 363 Luhmann, Niklas 58 Mackenzie, Henry 205, 212 Macpherson, James 207 Macpherson, Kenneth 4, 6 – 11, 13, 15 f., 19, 28, 35, 41, 44 – 49, 56, 59 – 62, 65, 82, 86 f., 91 – 95, 97, 101, 104 – 107, 109, 113, 115 f., 123 f., 140, 142, 144, 146 – 150, 152 – 157, 163 – 168, 170 – 172, 174 – 179, 181 – 189, 191 f., 194 – 207, 212 – 214, 218, 220, 222 – 224, 228 – 233, 234 – 240, 242 – 247, 253, 255 – 258, 260 – 271, 275 – 277, 281 – 286, 288 – 293, 297, 300–303, 306, 308 – 312, 314 – 320, 324 – 327, 329 – 331, 333 – 336, 341 – 348, 350 – 355, 357 f., 361 f., 364 – 367, 369, 370 – 386, 389, 394 f., 396, 399 – 401, 403–406, 413 – 415 Mallarmé, Stéphane 40, 63, 173, 354 Man Ray 9 f., 28, 50, 172, 260, 263 f., 267, 279, 311, 354, 358, 395, 398 Mann, Heinrich 176, 368 Mann, Thomas 175 – 177, 188, 379 Marx, Karl 54, 125, 348 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue 364 Matisse, Henri 33, 264, 395, 397 f. Mauthner, Fritz 72 McAlmon, Robert 5 – 8, 10 f., 37, 39, 41

McCarthy, Joseph 298 McKay, Claude 289, 305 Meisel, Edmund 278 Meleager 88 Metzner, Ernö 11, 110, 277, 315, 358 Meynell, Viola 42 Micheaux, Oscar 291 Michelangelo Buonarroti 181 – 183, 208, 218, 328 f. Milhaud, Darius 172 Milton, John 236, 374 Monmouth, Geoffrey of 214 Monnier, Adrienne 5, 10, 38 Monro, Harold 42 Monroe, Harriet 42 Montaigne, Michel de 190 Moore, Marianne 9 – 11, 20, 41 f., 63, 91, 358 Morpheus 177 Morris, William 125, 341, 351 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 208, 222, 229, 233, 236 Muray, Nickolas 296, 326 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 267 f., 274, 283, 363 Nachtlicht, Leo 344 Näcke, Paul 140, 143, 171 Narcissus 93, 97, 131 – 133, 140 – 144, 146, 148, 155, 157, 165 – 173, 175 – 177, 180 f., 185 – 187, 189, 192 – 195, 198, 200 – 203, 205, 241, 252, 300, 307, 313, 324, 333 f., 411 Nielson, Asta 254 Nietzsche, Friedrich 99 f., 127, 147 – 154, 175 f., 186, 198, 204, 231 f., 250, 299, 311 Nijinsky, Vaslav 173 f. Novalis 213 Oedipus 140, 143 Ortega y Gasset, José 16, 51 Osiris 145 f. Ossian 53, 206 f., 211, 230 Othello 291, 314 Ovid 166 f., 169, 185 f., 197 f., 201, 230

Index of names

Pabst, Georg Wilhelm 4, 6 f., 10 f., 34 f., 46, 70, 92, 101 – 113, 116, 124, 179, 186, 204, 247 f., 262, 264, 283, 288 f., 299, 305, 307, 312, 314 f., 317 f., 320, 323, 327, 332 f., 335, 341, 346, 351, 361, 368 f., 372, 378 f., 381 – 384, 390, 401, 412, 414 Pausanias 87 Paz, Octavio 264 Persephone 145, 177, 179 Petrarch, Francesco 187, 192, 334 Pezzoli, Giovanni 355 f. Pi, Cao 52 Picasso, Pablo 33, 70, 121, 264, 395 – 398 Pine, Courtney 323 f. Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 245 f. Pollock, Jackson 47 Potebnya, Alexander Afanasjewitsch 72 Potemkin, Harry Alan 358 Pound, Ezra 2, 7 – 10, 15 – 18, 30 – 34, 37, 40 – 43, 63, 69, 76 – 83, 85 – 87, 89 f., 111, 113, 144, 157, 183, 197, 199, 201, 256, 261, 273, 363, 365, 396, 412 Praxiteles 196, 208 Preobrashenskaya, Olga 254 Prometheus 300, 322 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 71, 116, 248 – 250, 254, 265, 327, 358, 369 Pygmalion 170, 173 Python, Henri 343 Rabelais, François 52 Rank, Otto 134 f. Redslob, Edwin 269 Reiniger, Lotte 11, 50 Rembrandt 183, 322 Renoir, Jean 278 Rhys, Ernest 42 Richardson, Dorothy 3, 5, 8, 10 f., 16, 20, 33, 39 f., 70, 99 – 101, 127, 158, 162, 232, 236, 247, 252, 319, 324, 338, 357 f., 360, 373 f., 378, 396, 398, 402 – 405, 415 Richter, Hans 172, 280, 335 Ricoeur, Paul 175 Robeson, Eslanda 287, 289 f., 314

453

Robeson, Paul 11, 19, 46, 105, 257, 281, 284, 287 – 299, 301 f., 311, 313 f., 321 f., 324, 326 f., 373 Rockefeller, John D. 8 Rodin, Auguste 174, 330 Room, Abram 7, 267 Rothschilds 8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 121, 169, 336 f. Rubens, Peter Paul 181 f., 225 f. Rushdie, Salman 53 Ruskin, John 341 Ruttmann, Walter 278 Sachs, Hanns 6, 11, 105, 112, 124, 126, 130 – 138, 142 – 144, 155, 157 f., 164, 166, 168, 171, 177, 179, 190, 203, 208, 238, 282, 300 f., 337, 359, 415 Salemme, Antonio 326 Salome 216 Sappho 43, 52, 82 – 89, 95 Sardanapalus 173 Sartoris, Alberto 343, 345 Schaffner, Perdita (daughter of H.D.) 6 f., 39, 45, 47, 60, 89, 91, 345, 350, 353, 356 Schami, Rafik 53 Scheherazade 52 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 138 f. Schlegel, August Wilhelm 169 Schlegel, Friedrich 139 Schwitters, Kurt 70 Scott, Sir Walter 236 Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley 298 Shakespeare, William 52, 108, 128, 165 f., 185, 187 – 195, 197, 209, 218, 221 f., 225, 237, 241, 308, 314, 317, 334, 374 Shaw, Bernhard 149 Shelley, Mary 170, 336, 338 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 211, 322, 336 f., 374 Sinclair, May 9, 16, 42, 99 Sinclair, Upton 358 Sitwell, Osbert and Edith 9 f., 374 Socrates 153, 299 Sokoloff, Vladimir 107 Sophocles 152, 389, 392

454

Index of names

Stein, Gertrude 2, 7 – 10, 15, 19 f., 33, 90, 127, 157, 264, 284, 358, 360, 374, 387, 394 – 402 Stephens, Leslie 33 Stesichorus 43 Stieglitz, Alfred 15, 395 Stoker, Bram 219 Stravinsky, Igor 121, 174, 314 Sullivan, Robert 53 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 148, 216, 225, 228, 239 Thanatos 140, 148 Thomson, James 239 Thorndike, Sybil 221 f. Toklas, Alice B. 10, 399 Tolstoy, Leo 52 Trotsky, Leon 379 Tzara, Tristan 9 Valéry, Paul 168, 170 Veitch, John 61 Vendrye, Joseph 72 Venus (see Aphrodite) Vico, Giambattista 121

Virgil 207 Voltaire 338 Wagner, Richard 100, 148, 152, 176, 186, 216, 232 f. Wedekind, Frank 109 Weiss, Gertrude 157, 162 Wells, H.G. 10, 30, 33 Werner, Richard Maria 72 West, Nathaniel 8 Weston, Jessie 147 f., 178, 217, 238 White, Walt 290 Whitman, Walt 116, 185, 189, 198, 322 Wilde, Oscar 43, 170 f., 188 f. Williams, William Carlos 7 – 9, 15, 63 Wodehouse, P.G. 279 Woolf, Leonard 123, 161 – 164 Woolf, Virginia 9 f., 15 f., 17 f., 31 – 34, 40, 43, 70, 90, 99 f., 123, 161–164, 196, 199 – 203, 235, 319, 358, 362, 379, 396, 412 Yeats, William Butler Zeus

194

42, 121, 149

Index of Subjects absolutes (film) 28 f., 270 abstraction 17, 48, 51, 59, 75, 94, 102, 273, 303, 354, 359, 381 aesthetics 3, 17, 19, 30, 41, 48 – 50, 69 – 70, 78, 87, 90, 121, 130, 132, 136, 143, 149, 164, 168 f., 195 – 200, 203, 237, 256, 266, 277, 280, 284, 296, 300, 327, 335, 345, 354, 370, 376, 381 f., 390 f., 410 – 412 – aesthete 30 f., 82, 167, 170, 172 f., 182, 196, 373, 380 – aesthetic experiment 2, 163, 260, 323, 409 f. – aesthetic stasis 80, 82, 85 f., 185, 197 – 199, 396 – aestheticism 48, 58 – 59, 81, 204, 242, 260, 325, 374 f., 389 – Aesteticism 373 – Aestheticist 31, 43, 168, 189 alchemy 180 – chymical wedding 179 f., 195, 331 amateur 38, 46, 49 f., 56, 59, 98, 115, 117, 157, 268, 357 f., 363, 369, 372 – 374, 392 – amateur art 23, 50, 254, 374, 409 f., 414 – amateur cinematography 367 – amateur film 49 f., 254, 257, 268, 372 f. Anatomy of Motion Picture Art (Elliott) 115 – 117, 162, 186, 347, 378 Anémic Cinéma (film) 260 anthropology 121, 123, 125, 137, 145, 154 – anthropological concerns 15, 137, 405 architecture 1, 4, 65, 74, 82, 92, 97, 326, 335 f., 339 – 348, 350 – 354, 356, 380, 391 art – abstract art 18, 23, 29, 49, 200 – amateur art (see amateur) – aristocratic conception of Art 3 – artistic collaboration 91, 105, 113, 287, 289 f., 293, 352, 357, 409, 413 f. – autonomy of art 3, 23, 32 f., 36, 42, 50 f., 55, 164, 214 – de-humanisation of art 16, 51 – democratic art (see democracy)

– humane art (see humanity) – international art (see internationalism) – necessity for art 4, 17, 23, 51, 54 f., 57, 164, 380, 386 – ‘pure’ art 25, 32, 34 f., 47 f., 50, 55, 60, 164, 199, 227, 322, 350, 373, 375, 377, 388 – representational art 17, 23, 49, 51, 412 – social function of art 54, 116, 129 f., 133 f., 155 – universal art (see universals) asceticism 325, 350 – ascesis 84 f., 87 – ascetic form 97, 350 – ascetic principle 95, 217, 224, 242, 348 association 40, 59, 70, 73, 99 – 101, 122 – 124, 126 – 128, 131, 134, 202, 231 f., 237, 264, 286, 303 f., 306, 320, 392, 397, 412 athlete 217, 227, 295 f., 405 – athletic body 84, 296 – athletic games 156 – athletic pose 94, 97, 326 avant-garde, the 3, 10, 14, 19, 30, 32 f., 35, 156, 219, 227, 289, 306, 362 – avant-garde artist 18, 26, 29, 34, 36, 40 f., 121, 263, 338, 344, 357, 376, 384, 394, 406 – avant-gardism 15, 112, 264, 280, 345, 359, 373, 403 Avenue Pavilion 254, 280, 404 Bacchanal 299, 307, 310 f., 314 f., 317, 325, 334 Battleship Potemkin (film) 110, 278, 371 Bauhaus 4, 65, 339, 341, 344, 350 – 352, 369, 377, 410 Beinecke Library 1, 92, 258, 269, 281, 351, 367, 415 Being Geniuses Together (McAlmon) 5 Berlin 4, 6, 11 f., 39, 41, 106, 124, 254, 281, 291, 342, 344, 346, 357, 361, 368 f., 372, 383, 404, 410, 414 Bett und Sofa (film) 381 biology 55 – 60, 88, 116, 122, 128, 155, 174, 179, 195, 198, 233, 274 f., 381

456

Index of Subjects

biosophy 153, 269, 275 BLAST (magazine) 365 f. Bloomsbury group 10, 29, 31, 33, 123 Blue Review, The (magazine) 365 Borderline (film) 3, 19, 46, 76, 104 f., 108, 129, 174, 257 – 261, 264, 266 f., 271, 274, 276, 280 – 283, 285 – 287, 289 – 294, 297 – 301, 303, 307 – 309, 311, 313, 315, 317 – 319, 323 – 326, 329 – 332, 334, 339, 357, 364, 373, 392, 403 British Board of Film Censors 378 British Film Institute (BFI) 281, 324, 373 British Museum 10, 79, 85, 255, 375 Bryher Island 38, 62 Bryn Mawr 42, 44 Bund der Filmamateure (BdFA) 367 f., 383 canon (literary) 2, 4 f., 32, 44, 54 f., 236, 413 Cantos, The (Pound) 8 Celt 94 – Celtic costume 92, 94, 351 – Celtic nature 61, 231, 233 – Celtic weather 205, 228 f. – Celticism 61, 92 censorship 9, 35, 101, 104, 106, 123, 161, 189, 338, 378 f. Chang (film) 384, 387, 389 cinema 6, 15, 17, 34, 38, 40, 48 f., 58, 76, 82 f., 102, 111, 114 – 117, 152, 155 f., 173, 176, 191, 198, 233, 253, 257, 263, 281, 291, 358, 360, 368, 371 f., 377, 380, 385 f., 388 – 392, 394, 396 – 398, 401, 405, 411 – 413 – cinematography 16, 71 f., 117 – cinépoèms 260, 263 f. Cinémathèque Suisse 281 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) 122 Civil Rights 289, 298 classics, the 17, 42 – 44, 48, 79, 389, 391, 412 Close Up (magazine) 1, 8, 15 f., 19, 28 f., 44, 46, 48, 50, 71 – 73, 76, 82, 101, 104 f., 110, 112 – 117, 124, 127, 152, 157, 183, 189, 202, 204, 247 f., 258 – 261, 263 – 265, 267 – 270, 276 – 278, 280, 282, 290 f., 298 f., 303 f., 315, 323, 344, 353 –

355, 357 – 365, 367 – 371, 373 – 375, 377 – 379, 382 – 385, 387, 389, 391 f., 394 f., 397, 399 – 403, 406, 414 collage 1, 343, 353 – 356, 395 collective, the 54, 98, 301, 321 – collective art 384 – collective daydream 131, 168 – collective experience 137, 202, 411 – collective voice (poetry) 89, 385, 388 f. commerce 2, 49, 364, 385 – commercial art 9, 46 f., 50, 172, 322, 364, 371, 377 – commercial enterprise, Pool as a 163 – commercial film 28, 30, 35, 49, 261, 293, 371, 374 f. – commercial publishers 161, 362 – commercialism 30, 324 community 56 f., 108, 110, 130, 190, 199, 203, 206, 275, 289, 291, 315, 338, 357 – communal experience 89, 98, 133, 156 f., 175, 198, 206, 380, 384, 405 – communal function of art 54, 225, 410 – communal life 133, 167, 171 – (ancient) communal spirit of art 156, 411 compassion (also sympathy) 14, 58, 99, 104 f., 107 f., 110 – 113, 134, 153, 158, 179 f., 192, 194 – 196, 199, 204 – 210, 217, 223 f., 232, 235, 238 – 240, 242, 244, 264, 299, 320, 331, 383 f., 394, 411 – 414 Contact Press 7, 39, 161 f. continuity editing (see cut-on-movement) conventions 28, 30 f., 33, 37, 48, 62, 77, 84, 163, 171, 183, 201, 219, 225 – 228, 241, 252, 261, 263, 280, 329, 334, 371 f., 375 f., 382, 385, 391, 410 Cubism 263, 395 f., 398 cultural capital 23, 25, 27, 30, 32, 46, 48, 59, 75, 236 f., 253, 325, 330, 363, 375 f., 386, 409 cut-on-movement (also continuity editing, ‘invisible cut’) 70, 98, 101, 106, 108, 112, 116, 186, 312, 317, 401 f. Dacho (Dachorganisation der filmschaffenden Künstler Deutschlands) 368 f. Dada 6, 338

Index of Subjects

Darwinism 57, 128 death 84, 103, 140, 144, 146, 148, 182, 191, 203 f., 210, 216 f., 226, 233 – 235, 237, 239 f., 242 f., 245, 285, 301, 304, 306, 308, 312, 316, 318, 321, 334 Debrie camera 257, 283 Delphi 93, 114 f., 156, 236, 299, 386 – Delphic oracle 93, 183 democracy 28, 368 – democratic art 79, 341 f., 381 – democratic artist 199 – democratic attitude 41, 89 – democratic concerns 3, 89 – democratic notion of art 3, 155 – democratic principle 81, 198 – democratic programme of Pool 12 – democratic readership policy of Pool 163 dialectic 144, 152, 234, 348, 350, 352, 354, 389 – dialectics 114, 144, 240, 324, 348, 353 Does Capital Punishment Exist? (Sachs) 124, 157 douracouli monkey 60, 274, 276 f. drama 58, 93, 106, 115, 147, 155 f., 176, 186, 191, 206, 218, 230, 232, 252, 303, 372, 380, 389, 393 f., 411 f. – comedy 107, 176, 204, 219, 323 – tragedy 89 f., 107, 132 – 134, 151 f., 176, 204, 232 f., 240, 245, 250, 390 dream 98, 104, 122, 125 – 131, 134 – 137, 141, 143, 145, 150, 153 – 156, 168, 172, 176, 178, 184, 203, 217, 240 – 242, 259 f., 280, 297 f., 307, 319 – 321, 332, 334, 411 – dream-work 126 – 128, 134, 187, 258, 303, 329 Dreams that Money Can Buy (film) 172, 335 editing 6, 16, 35, 46, 50, 70, 101, 248, 312 f., 334, 359, 361, 395, 401 – editorial 82, 101, 109, 270, 282 f., 315, 361, 363, 369 – 371, 373 – 376, 378 – 380, 389, 399 – 401, 403, 406 Egoist, The (magazine) 80 elitism 3, 48, 363, 410 – elitist attitude 3 Emak Bakia (film) 260, 279, 398

457

emotion 17, 25, 44, 53 – 55, 58 f., 61 f., 69, 71 – 76, 78 – 80, 83 – 86, 90 – 92, 97, 99, 101 – 103, 107, 111 f., 121 f., 125, 128, 132 – 134, 138, 143 f., 152 – 154, 158, 184, 196 – 199, 205 – 207, 220, 224, 228, 236, 238, 240 – 246, 249, 262, 266, 275, 285 f., 288, 290, 292 f., 302, 307, 309, 314 f., 330, 334, 351, 359, 372, 380, 382, 389, 393, 411 – 413 End of St. Petersburg, The (film) 247 – 250, 381 enlightenment 58, 71, 113 f., 116, 148, 156, 206, 299, 368, 410 – Enlightenment 121, 205 f., 214 – Scottish Enlightenment 206 entertainment 24, 48 f., 56 – 58, 98, 154 – 156, 163, 173, 175, 203, 210, 225 f., 228, 241 f., 252 – 254, 269 f., 275, 279 f., 304, 321 f., 324 f., 331, 374, 376, 380, 384, 405, 409, 411 eroticism 102, 122, 314, 333 ethos 3 f. 9, 251 f., 410 Etoile de Mer (film) 311 expatriates 5, 10, 32, 289 Expressionism 28, 102 Fabian Society 10 fairy tales 52, 61, 130, 204, 213 f., 224, 229, 241 fascism 15, 41, 81, 298, 313, 414 f. faun 166, 168, 172 – 175, 177, 180 – 183, 185, 191, 195 f., 208 f., 217, 223 – 225, 231, 233, 241 f., 244, 275, 300, 327 film 1, 3 – 6, 10 f., 14 – 17, 19, 26 – 30, 34 – 36, 45 – 50, 56, 58 f., 70 f., 73 f., 77 f., 82, 89 f., 92 f., 97, 100 – 113, 116 f., 128, 155 – 157, 172, 179, 183 f., 186, 191, 217 f., 220, 226 f., 246, 248 f., 253 – 261, 263 – 269, 271, 275 – 278, 280 – 283, 285 f., 291 f., 299, 303, 307 f., 318 – 324, 329, 331, 334, 345, 347, 352, 354, 357 f., 360 – 362, 366, 368 – 375, 377 – 383, 386, 393 – 395, 397 f., 400, 403 f., 409, 411 f., 414 – amateur film (see amateur) – film culture 4, 368, 370, 378

458

Index of Subjects

– film industry 9, 17, 28 f., 35, 48 – 50, 227, 247, 253 – 255, 264, 267, 323, 361, 370 – 372, 374, 377, 390 f., 409, 414 – film technique 28, 50, 69, 71, 76, 90, 101, 106, 108, 115, 259, 261, 263, 266, 283, 297, 310 – 312, 401, 412 – film technology 1, 155 f., 369, 371, 387, 392 – film theory 5, 19, 34, 71, 102 – film studies 3, 19 – intellectual film (see intellect) – international film (see internationalism) – talkies (sound film) 286, 335, 345, 392, 405, 414 Film für Alle (magazine) 267 f., 367, 369 Film Problems of Soviet Russia (Bryher) 115 f., 162, 378 First World War 5, 9, 13 f., 36, 41, 53, 56, 110, 122, 222, 239, 247 f., 262 Foothills (film) 257 f., 266 – 268, 271, 276 f., 357, 367 Form (magazine) 366 free verse 3, 77, 79, 81, 89, 261, 263 f. friendship 6, 9 – 11, 42, 45, 105, 190, 331, 348, 356 Futurism 15, 79 Gaunt Island (Macpherson) 65, 144, 146, 148 f., 152 f., 155, 162 – 164, 186, 198, 203 – 205, 209, 211, 218, 230 – 232, 235 – 237, 239 – 245, 248, 253, 263, 265, 290, 309, 323, 329, 332 f., 351, 376, 381 George Eastman House 281 Gerald Duckworth and Company 162 Golden Bough, The (Frazer) 145 f., 148 Golden Hind, The (magazine) 366 Grand Guignol 218 – 223, 236 habitus 23 – 26, 30, 33, 37, 40, 43 f., 46, 60, 117, 251 f., 343 f., 348, 352, 363 f. haiku 69 f., 72, 75 – 77, 79 – 83, 85 f., 102, 111, 114, 273, 312, 316, 322, 412 Harlem 11, 289 f., 415 – Harlem Renaissance 10 f., 47, 288 – 290, 294, 297, 358 Heart to Artemis, The (Bryher) 5, 153 Hedylus (H.D.) 87, 147, 165, 299

Helen in Egypt (H.D.) 43, 87, 415 hermaphrodite 88 f., 95 hieroglyphs 14, 75 f., 360 Highlands 45, 47, 60, 62, 205, 229, 241 – Hebrides 62, 206, 230, 234 f., 239, 241 Hogarth Press 33, 123, 161, 163, 201 Hollywood 17, 28, 48, 113, 253, 286, 291, 293, 361, 371 f., 382, 391 Holy Grail 114, 147 f., 167, 235 homo artes 58, 153 homoeroticism 171, 187 f. – homoerotic tone 166, 189 humanity 4, 14, 16, 51, 55, 57, 71, 76, 97, 103 f., 107 f., 116, 133, 135, 137, 154 – 157, 164, 170 f., 181, 187, 198, 203, 206 – 210, 239 f., 262, 287, 289, 297 f., 300, 302, 313, 320 – 322, 331, 380 f., 383, 386, 388, 392, 410 f., 414 – humane, the 107 f. – humane art 12, 198, 262, 293 – humane images 18 – humane knowledge 180, 414 – humane qualities 129, 292 – humanism 15 – 17, 121, 157, 182, 190, 382 – anti-humanist stance 16, 18 – humanitarianism 104 – humanitarian attitude of Pool 262 – humanitarian concerns 2, 379 – humanitarian Modernism 16 – humanitarian progress 410, 414 Illustrierter Filmkurier (magazine) 367 Imagism 30, 41, 43, 70, 77 – 79, 81 f., 86, 89 f., 184, 208, 227, 259, 261, 263, 273, 392 – Imagist manifesto 41, 79 – Imagists 3, 10, 29, 40, 42, 82, 261 intellect 71 – 74, 76, 83, 87 f., 90, 105, 121, 176, 179, 199, 286, 302 – intellectual film 73 – 77, 90, 102, 318 internationalism 27, 37, 293, 338, 365, 409 – international art 14 – international film 6 – international language 308 – international understanding 341, 368, 384, 393, 414 invisible cut (see cut-on-movement)

Index of Subjects

jazz 259, 281, 290, 321, 323 f., 373 joie de vivre 174, 215, 231, 245, 272 f., 300, 310, 312, 352 journalism 1, 9, 24, 29, 117, 359, 361, 367, 376, 384, 389, 401 f. Joyless Street (film) 102, 104, 106 f., 299, 305, 314 f., 323, 327, 368, 371, 390 f. Kenwin 6 f., 19, 60, 257, 280, 336, 338 – 346, 348 – 356, 391, 410, 413, 415 Kine Weekly (magazine) 361, 372 l’art pour l’art 23 – 25, 30, 42, 58, 132, 143, 150, 168, 170, 185, 390 leitmotif 186, 195, 229, 231 f., 401 liberalism – liberal left 41, 368 – liberal life-style 6 – liberal thinking 16 life-affirmation 152 – life-affirming art 262, 413 – life-affirming principle 176, 275 Lighthearted Student, The (Bryher and Weiss) 157, 163 literary field 9 f., 23 f., 33 – 36, 39, 45, 51, 58, 87, 161 f., 164, 219, 223 – 225, 228, 358, 360 – 362, 373, 409 little magazines 7, 29, 149, 358, 360 – 363, 366 – 369, 374, 394, 409 Little Review, The (magazine) 363, 365 London 6, 10 – 12, 30 f., 39, 41 f., 44, 78, 221 f., 231, 247, 249, 280 – 282, 291, 297, 342, 358, 366, 403 f., 415 love 44, 83, 85, 88 f., 92, 94, 102, 105 – 109, 111, 122, 132 f., 137, 140 f., 153 f., 165 – 168, 172, 178 – 181, 183, 185, 187 – 195, 202 – 205, 209 f., 223 – 226, 231, 242 – 246, 285, 287 f., 290, 299, 304, 307, 316, 320, 323, 332 – 334, 356, 393, 401, 412 Love of Jeanne Ney, The (film) 92, 104 – 107, 111, 179, 204, 248, 264, 288, 314 f., 332, 368, 381 Making of Americans, The (Stein) 7 Man of Feeling, The (Mackenzie) 212

459

mass culture 2, 15, 23, 36, 49, 156, 225, 379, 409 medium 5, 14, 27 f., 48 f., 54, 58, 63, 70, 77, 82, 89, 96 – 98, 115, 155 – 157, 170, 183, 191, 206, 218, 225, 227 f., 246, 254 f., 286, 320, 334, 352, 357, 368, 371 – 373, 375, 379, 381, 384, 386, 389, 392 – 395, 401, 411 f. – media 1, 3, 9, 16, 27, 36, 46, 117, 156, 223 – 225, 233, 253 f., 322, 395, 409, 414 – medium film (see film) melancholy 217, 231, 243, 413 metaphor 69, 72, 76, 82, 84, 108, 111, 114 – 116, 121, 127, 134, 136, 155, 166, 175, 178, 182, 191, 193, 202, 244, 272, 303, 306 f., 312, 314, 334, 376, 392, 411 f. Metropolis (film) 379 Modernism/modernism 1 – 6, 9 – 11, 14, 16 f., 20, 23, 26 f., 30, 33 f., 37 – 42, 51, 78, 90, 93, 113, 122 f., 132, 136, 138, 145, 155 f., 161, 164, 170, 174, 199, 203, 226 f., 290, 300, 338, 342 – 344, 355, 360, 362, 365, 391, 409, 412 – 414 – black modernism 290 – modernist language 98, 412 – modernist mentality 122, 176 – modernists 1 f., 4, 14 – 16, 27, 30, 34, 39, 51, 90, 99, 113, 156, 181, 279, 362, 370, 377, 393, 409 f., 412 f. modernity 1 – 3, 7, 10 f., 14 – 16, 34, 289, 290, 345, 391, 413 MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) 257, 259, 266 Monkey’s Moon (film) 19, 46, 153, 257 f., 269 – 271, 274 – 278, 281, 300, 303, 318, 335, 348, 352, 370 montage 34 f., 43, 69 f., 72 – 77, 80, 82, 84 – 86, 89 f., 92, 94 – 99, 102, 111 f., 114, 128, 155, 248, 273, 282 f., 286 f., 301 f., 306 f., 312, 316 – 318, 323, 330, 333, 349 – 353, 357, 359 f., 412 – clatter montage 283, 310, 312 – Russian montage 27, 70, 101, 116, 359 Montparnasse 10, 30, 32, 40 f., 47, 93, 106, 362 mood 62, 97, 100, 103, 107, 115, 122, 148, 153, 175, 186, 203, 205, 207, 211, 213,

460

Index of Subjects

218, 228 – 234, 236 – 239, 241 – 244, 270 – 277, 299 f., 304 f., 308 f., 323, 325, 330, 332, 334, 346 – 348, 352, 381, 386, 413 Moravianism 44 – Moravian belief 135 f. Moscow 11 f., 358 movement (art) 3, 5, 10 f., 29 – 31, 41 – 43, 79, 205 f., 213, 341, 351, 409 f., 414 movies (see film) Movietone 392 – 394 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare) 308 music 62, 99 – 101, 127, 151, 173, 186, 208, 222, 228 f., 230 – 234, 236, 259 f., 278, 298, 310, 321 – 324, 347, 356, 380, 404, 411 Mystères du Château du Dé, Les (film) 267, 354 mysticism 56, 84, 113, 135, 145, 150, 177, 179 f., 394 – Orphic mysticism 145, 386 narcissism 131, 133, 140 – 144, 148, 165, 168, 171, 181, 187, 189, 192 – 195, 198, 307, 313, 334 National Socialism 15, 415 – anti-Nazi activities of Bryher 39, 41 – Nazis 301, 313, 355, 369, 414 Negro (anthology) 290 New Age, The (magazine) 80 New York 6, 11 f., 39, 47, 172, 259, 266, 281, 289, 327, 358, 404, 415 Night and Day (Woolf) 162 Nights (H.D.) 89, 352 Notes on Thought and Vision (H.D.) 88, 113 – 115, 145, 177, 259, 386 novel, the 1, 3 – 5, 12, 19, 24, 32 f., 39, 42, 48, 61 f., 65, 70, 76, 99, 123, 130, 132, 134, 140, 152 f., 158, 161 – 166, 171, 175, 177, 180 – 189, 191 – 193, 195 – 201, 203 – 208, 210, 213, 215, 218, 220 – 225, 231, 234 – 238, 240 – 250, 253 – 256, 264, 357, 364, 375 f., 378, 389, 402, 413, 415 – cinematographic novel 1, 203 f., 248, 253, 256 – experimental novel 29, 244, 364, 375 f.

nude 63, 94, 97, 312, 326 – nudism 64, 125 objective correlative 90, 235, 237 – 239 objectivism 205, 228 – objectivity 17 f., 31, 78, 86, 90, 197, 205, 237, 249, 256, 409, 412 f. – New Objectivity 102, 249 Pandora’s Box (film) 108 f. Paradise (film) 370 Paris 10 – 12, 28 – 30, 32, 39 – 41., 45, 78, 93, 161, 163, 174, 218 f., 254, 257, 270, 276, 278, 289, 342 People on Sunday (film) 372 phoenix 210, 234, 239 Pilgrimage (Richardson) 3, 40, 99 f., 162, 232, 236, 247, 338, 402, 404, 415 pleasure factor (see pleasure principle) pleasure principle 55 – 57, 140, 148, 153 f., 156, 174, 204, 217, 411 poetry 1, 19, 24, 30 – 32, 41, 44, 48, 52 f., 61, 63, 69 f., 76 – 79, 82 – 84, 86, 89 – 91, 95, 102, 114, 126, 130, 132 f., 135 f., 139, 154, 156, 169, 184 f., 187, 191 f., 207, 209, 211, 224, 227 f., 235, 237, 239, 241, 255 f., 258, 261, 263 f., 290, 334, 356, 360, 369, 376, 384 – 386, 388 f., 392, 411 POOL Productions 7 f., 124, 157, 162, 244, 246, 250, 257 f., 277 f., 414 Poolreflection (Macpherson) 13, 65, 87, 123, 129, 140, 144, 147 – 150, 152 f., 162 – 167, 172, 174, 186, 196 – 198, 201, 203 – 205, 208 – 210, 215, 218, 223 – 226, 230 f., 233, 235, 239 – 243, 245, 263, 272, 290, 300, 307 f., 314, 318, 321 f., 325, 328 f., 331 – 334, 364, 395 Popular Association for Film Art (also People’s Association for Film Art) 368 popular culture (see also mass culture) 1 f., 5 f., 15, 23, 30, 44 f., 47, 49 f., 82, 164, 175, 178, 197 – 200, 225, 228, 230, 235, 237, 240, 269, 293, 322, 325, 334, 363, 373, 375, 381, 385, 389, 399, 401, 406, 409, 412 f.

Index of Subjects

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce) 32, 196 – 198 Pre-Raphaelites 171 primitivism 121, 146, 174, 181, 195, 226, 229, 286 – 289, 299 f., 321 projection 114 f., 126, 136, 145, 167, 180, 183, 189, 194, 202, 217 f., 315, 320, 346 – 348, 385, 392 psychoanalysis 1, 6, 37, 90 f., 104 f., 121 – 123, 129 f., 138 – 140, 145, 148, 156, 166, 168 f., 179, 258, 284 f., 305, 315, 318, 320, 358, 360, 369, 411 – psychoanalyst 11, 104 f., 124, 133, 136, 252 psychology 17, 55 f., 71, 73, 76, 90, 92, 102, 110 f., 121, 128, 132, 144, 148 f., 152 f., 158, 164, 172, 192, 201, 215, 219 f., 243, 260, 268, 270 – 272, 275 f., 285, 288, 314, 318, 346 f., 351 f., 358 f., 380 – 382, 393, 409 f., 412 f. – psychological realism 98, 107, 122, 262, 283, 289, 381 – 383 public, the 48 – 50, 104, 113, 116 f., 155 f., 158, 177, 199 f., 203, 210, 258, 268, 341, 357, 361, 369 f., 374, 376 – 379, 384, 389 f., 401, 405, 409 – 411, 414 publishing 23, 33, 50, 161, 163, 250, 359, 362 racism 281, 283, 285, 287, 289 f., 301 – 304, 306 f., 309 f., 313, 315, 320, 332 – lynching 292, 300 – 302, 305, 310 – 313, 320 Rain (film) 270 rebirth (see regeneration) regeneration 13, 15, 26, 56 f., 94, 144 – 147, 152, 177, 179, 182, 184 f., 187, 198, 210, 227, 235 – 240, 381, 386, 413 Renaissance 14, 94, 121, 182, 208, 210, 214 – 216, 218, 224, 263, 329, 391 restraint 271, 325, 365, 384, 391 f., 398, 402 Riant Chateau 7, 280, 395 Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky) 121 Romance Sentimentale (film) 330

461

Romanticism 31, 61, 80, 121, 138, 143, 169, 206, 211, 215, 224, 336, 338 – Romantic idealism 210 – Romantic imagination 213 – Romantic poet 170, 201, 212 – Romantics 61 f., 136, 138 f., 156, 170, 207, 213 f., 224, 228 Rome 6, 244, 246 Scottish culture 206 – Scottish pibroch 229, 233, 236 – Scottish poetry 61 – Scottish vernacular 211 Second World War 247, 258, 278, 281, 300, 313, 337, 355, 414 f. Secrets of a Soul (film) 104, 111, 124, 307, 315, 317 – 319, 379 senses, the 25 f., 59, 73, 99 f., 184, 205, 220, 254, 331 sensitivity 61, 94, 100 f., 106, 157, 182, 203, 205, 207 f., 210 f., 217, 224, 228, 231, 233, 237, 242, 255, 265, 287, 379 Shakespeare and Company 39, 161, 250, 252 small presses 23, 161 – 163 Sonnets, The (Shakespeare) 187 – 192, 194, 218, 241, 334 spirituals 321 f., 324 stream-of-consciousness 18, 70, 99, 113, 127, 156, 186, 232, 248, 319, 396, 401 subjectivism 17, 202, 205, 239 – subjectivity 24, 78, 80, 86, 168 f., 197, 202, 228, 252, 409, 412 sublimation 142, 167 f., 170, 189, 193 – 195, 200, 205, 213 f., 216, 223 f., 232 f., 238, 244, 298, 300, 302 sublime, the 97, 204, 210 f., 214, 216, 236, 287, 355 Sunrise (film) 267 f., 378 Surrealism 29, 260 Switzerland 6 f., 37, 59, 124, 280 f., 336, 338, 352, 415 Symbolists 168, 170 f., 196 sympathy (see compassion)

462

Index of Subjects

Ten Days that Shook the World (film) 74, 310, 379 theatre 24, 52, 57 f., 93, 111, 134, 155 f., 175, 190, 206, 218 – 222, 236, 295, 346, 372, 376, 380, 384, 386, 393, 412 – epic theatre 74, 133 Through a Yellow Glass (Blakeston) 115, 117 To the Lighthouse (Woolf) 199 f., 202 Tod in Venedig, Der (Mann) 177, 188 Tribute to Freud (H.D.) 320 Trilogy (H.D.) 415 Überfall (film) 315 Uffizi 62 Ulysses (Joyce) 7, 32, 40, 73, 161, 163, 188, 396 unconscious, the 90, 99, 122, 127 f., 130 f., 133 – 135, 139, 141, 145, 177, 186, 215 f., 223, 282, 302 – creative unconscious 124 universals 59, 94, 97, 112, 140, 166, 220, 238 – universal art 155 – universal creative potential in man 127, 129, 154 – universal language 14, 71, 76, 90, 308, 414 – universal man 91, 121 – universal symbol 74, 102, 134, 170, 179, 304, 381

– universal validity 134, 409, 412 – universality 57, 122, 134 – 136, 145, 153, 155, 181, 187, 288, 302, 379, 382 f., 393, 413 Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, The (Monnier) 5 Vienna 6, 11 f., 39, 103 f., 371, 390, 404 vision 18 f., 40, 44, 48, 63, 76, 83 – 85, 88, 93 f., 100 f., 111, 113 – 116, 126, 134, 136, 145, 152, 155 f., 167 f., 177, 179 – 181, 183, 200, 202, 205, 210, 213, 215, 224, 228, 237 f., 259 f., 302 f., 312 f., 317, 320 – 322, 324, 327, 347, 380, 385 f., 388 f., 393, 398, 411 Vorticism 15, 81 f., 86, 90 Voyage to the Congo (film) 269 f., 357, 384 Voyage Out, The (Woolf) 161 f. Walküre, Die (Wagner) 232 Waste Land, The (Eliot) 32, 40, 146, 235 – 240, 290, 339 Weimar Republic 28, 262, 269 White Gold (film) 378 Wing Beat (film) 3, 16, 115, 257 – 259, 261 – 267, 270 – 272, 276, 306, 323, 351 Wrecker, The (film) 370 zoo

60, 153, 340 f., 350