Chapter L: R. Bonham

Bubbles, mist and visions
colored shapes winging against the sky
a sip from a brown Venetian glass.

Meseems
gauze drops are pulled upwards
and confetti flung into the past.
A fairy queen in a crystal coach
opens the door, she beckons,
the painted crest looks familiar.

Six little men with sticks
pass by, one taller than the rest
laughs and points at
a junkheap of keepsakes.
Distant music in the park
you and I at the bay window,
gossiping neighbors, a cool breeze,
old second hand furniture, ice cream and moonlight
all painted as in one stroke.

Spirals of smoke, crushed tissue paper,
colored ribbons and black masks,
floor sweepings after a ball—
I twirl a flower between thumb and index
I feel golden dust on the tip of my nose—
a futile occupation
yet something has happened.

And this one, which was among Helen Hoyt’s choices, belongs also in the exasperatingly “somehow good” school.

November Afternoon

Marjorie Allen Seiffert

Upon our heads
The oak-leaves fall
Like silent benedictions
Closing autumn’s gorgeous ritual,
And we
Upborne by warship
Lift our eyes to the altar of distant hills.

Beloved
How can I know
What gods are yours,
How can I guess the visions of your spirit,
Or hear
The silent prayers your heart has said—

Only by this I feel
Your gods akin to mine,
That when our lips have met
On this last golden autumn afternoon
They have confessed
In silence
Our kisses were less precious than our dreams.

To-day
Our passion drowned in beauty
We turn away our faces toward the hills
Where purple haze, like incense,
Spreads its veil.

Here, I think, are two very interesting ones, the first of which Dr. Williams considers worthy of special mention—“the image evoked is charmingly successful.” The authors are respectively Fritz Peters and his brother, Thomas Willing Peters.

The wind blows hard
No bird is there
And the smoke is drowning in the lake.

(_Dictated at the age of two years and ten months._)

When it rains it makes beautiful colors
It makes red and blue and white
And red and blue stripes on the water
And the pier goes out to get the sky.

(_Dictated at the age of three years and eight months._)

The following four were not mentioned by any of the judges, but in my judgment they are better than many of the “honorable mentions.”

The Soldiers

Horace Holley

Whom I long since had known,
Long since forgotten;
Who cast their names behind them like a dream,
Like stagnant water spitting
Their tasteless souls away;
These are the soldiers,
The nameless, the changelings,
Monstrous with slow tormenting Number,
Pestilent with unremitting Machine.

Soldiers ...
These are they whom I suspected, guilty and glorious,
Crouching in my own thought’s background,
Released by the whirlwind of fate
To move as winds that scream about the Pole,
As darkness of sea-depths,
As meeting of ice and flame.
Priests of the mystic sensual death,
When shall they return?
When shall they return, broken, from Hell?

The fuse of a thousand years has burned:
_Lord, quicken the groping hands of to-morrow!_

The Assault

John Cournos

You come—
black of wing,
black of beak,
flock on flock—
ravenous, cawing.

Your cries—arrows—
shrill, clamorous, strident,
pierce the heart.

O wounded reverie
on still water,
white in faint mist,
you spurt red drops.

O white swan,
shape of magnificent sadness,
spread out your wings,
flutter white through the air,
disperse the black—the raucous.

Girl of Jade and Ivory

Mitchell Dawson

Thru the dark arches of many nights
Your voice has led me,
Groping.
Across the echoing pavements
Of the nights that stretch before me
And past the niches
Where grotesque doubts
Mock me for seeking,
I shall follow
The impalpable strands of your voice—
Like thread fine-spun from melted pearls
Drawn singing
Thru the darkness,
Until at last I shall find you
In a deep hollow of that immeasurable rock
From which all nights are hewn;
And your eyes will bind me forever
While your long white fingers caress me.
I shall not heed the waiting days
As they gutter and die out.

The South

Witter Bynner

O the true difference!—
The sun at last
Gilds me again
And my face is no more a white stalk of celery
But a golden mango
And the foot-tracked mud of my heart
Is sunk deep down
In the blue waters and purified with a scouring
Of coral....
Cranes carry peace to the east and the west
And joy stands clear by the mangroves,
A torch,
A flamingo.

This last one may be printed as a sample of the rest of the contest, and speaks for itself. It came with a little note saying “I hope it may win one of the prizes in the contest, being original free verse and very patriotic.”

A Mother’s Sacrifice

The day has come, beloved son—
When duty’s call resound,
Your father fought, and laurels won
He firmly held the ground.
Now honor calls you to be true,
To the dear flag, red-white-and blue
Long may it wave o’er land and sea—
Thou sweet land of liberty.

I thank the God who gave to me,
So true, so brave a son—
Who on the field prefers to be,
Until the battle’s won.
The God on high alone doth know,
The torture and the nag—
In sacrificing all I own,
To help protect the flag.

Fare-well dear boy of loyalty,
To country and to home—
God will reward you royally,
Wherever you may roam.
And when the war is o’er—Oh joy,
How proud I then shall be—
To find my darling soldier boy,
Come home unscathed to me.

Announcement

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This is not merely a plan to sell you books through a kind of mail order system, which we tried once before and which did not work out very well, but a regular book shop in the large front room of our office where you can sit by a fire and choose your books and perhaps even drink a cup of tea during your selection.

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“Surprise”!

The “surprise” I promised in the last issue is this:

Ezra Pound is to become Foreign Editor of “The Little Review.”

This means that he and T. S. Eliot will have an American organ (horrible phrase) in which they can appear regularly once a month, where James Joyce can appear when he likes, and where Wyndham Lewis can appear if he comes back from the war. Also it means two or three other names of the “young blood” who will contribute from time to time, and altogether the most stunning plan that any magazine has had the good fortune to announce for a long, long time.

It means that a great deal of the most creative work of modern London and Paris will be published in these pages. So that by getting “The Little Review” and “The Egoist” you will be in touch with the two most important radical organs of contemporary literature.

It all goes into effect with the May issue, and I can promise that it will not be “delayed on account of the war,” because the copy is already here ready for the printer.

Now will all you subscribers help to bring in as many new subscriptions as possible right away, and will all of you whose subscriptions are overdue renew quickly, and will any of you who are overburdened with money contribute a little toward our next issue? It is so terribly hard to get started in a new city, though everything will go so much better once we are fully started here. And though I have been looking for a printer who would do our work for nothing, or even for a small amount,—incredible as it may sound, I have not yet found him.

The Reader Critic

The March Issue

Harold Bauer, New York:

The only trouble with the last number of _The Little Review_ is that there is not enough Bauer in it. Why drag in Mary?

Note

H., Cleveland:

I believe you have largely proved your contention that you are producing a magazine which has an understanding of what Art is by the splendid recognition you award Mary Garden. Clarity, in comprehending her, has been too frightfully rare.

To “jh”

Louise Gebhard Cann, Seattle:

I must love any one who can write as you write!

Even, if I were a revengeful soul I should be quite disarmed by your full-skinned satin prose-ecstasy. It is as seductive as the rice-eating women of Nippon. Such beauty brings tears to my eyes and I bend over it insatiate as over a flower whose perfume tortures me with too much delight and eludes the tentacles of my analysis.

I could have written like that once; but the indifference of editors and publishers has taken the bloom off my expression. My enthusiasms have turned cosmic. I love life’s bitterness; I love my critics. I love the grotesqueness that I used to abhor; and nothing is hideous. The sensuous airs of the world I have passed by. They are there but in them I taste aloes and I hear cacophony. My zest is of clangors, the strident battles of the intellect and the spirit, juiceless acrid food whose sweetness comes only after long crushing. The implacable witch-forces of life have put a spell upon me! I live through my own superabundance of being, not through the abundance of others; amid my friends I am a strong hermit. And so your luscious “Mary Garden” is my yesterday. I love it as I love those sunny fruits of my past....

I want to say, too, how much I enjoyed Amy Lowell’s poem in this number and how glad I am that you give us Richard Aldington. The more I read of Amy Lowell the more she conquers me. She does not give me ecstasy; she stabs me with wonder. She transfixes me with her polished swords, gem-hilted, cold, glittering. I stare amazed as at a comet. Aldington lifts me to the torment of too much bliss. I fear the spell he puts upon me; I approach each new piece of his with reluctance, trying to avert a devastating possession of my being. Then bravely I read and my head swims. His aftermood is a long delicious intoxication, a deep rich dream of a Hellas that never was.

Isadora Duncan

New York subscriber:

How we have looked forward to seeing Isadora Duncan dance! I was glad to see you advertise her in that first splendid New York edition of yours. I went to see her, of course. But——! It’s because I wonder if any people felt the way I did the night of March 6 at the Metropolitan that I am writing you....

I was grateful, of course, for the César-Franck—what human movements will express this, I wondered. A dark blue empty stage. I have seen darkness attempted on the stage before,—but the shadow thrown by the orchestra light made this floor a blacker black—and a light lit up a crouching figure. Redemption, a fragment from a César-Franck symphony. This was only the first—I was willing to wait. Then Ave Maria and the figure was standing with a too-brilliant glare accentuating something that was not beautiful. The music goes on; the figure assumes some rather striking statuesque poses: arms uplifted, one arm uplifted, head thrown back—that too-glaring light again. She turns, the line of her thigh and leg heavy—the modern sculptors have taught us to believe it good. Then a Giotto figure she seemed; a minute later Mrs. Flyn coming up from her wash-tub in the basement; a chord from the orchestra and the Statue of Liberty is before us. Encore; and Botticelli’s nymph hastens to Venus: she bows and a wilted Easter Lily bud which never knew full blossom is before us.

Tschaikowsky _Pathetique_: adagio, to an empty stage; scherzo, and—!! I wonder how many yards of cloth in that drop, are there two, or is it the lights that changed the color? This woman’s thigh is atrocious! Those must be real flowers she is using to scatter about; good pose there as the curtains fall,—nice line from ankle to shoulder; but that costume! Encore, and flowers. She trips in like a soubrette, the one whose place in the chorus is assured forever because she knows the manager. Second encore,—posing for the public with an uplifted white rose—this the great dancer!

But, with the strains of the _Marseillaise_ she appeared from the rear, right, in scarlet. And that part of the audience who claims France by birthright rose, as also did the other part, by the assumed insolence of pretense which says each man has two countries: the states and France! Well, the audience rose and Isadora (we’re feeling chummy by this time) pointed! At the finish of the air—which surmounted all despite the figure on the stage—she disclosed what we suspected was there: an American flag! And the orchestra played _Star Spangled Banner_ and she kissed the flag, and the audience sang; and after “Bravos” she “danced” the _Marseillaise_ again and the audience shrieked; and the orchestra played _America_ off key and swung to _Star Spangled Banner_ again and she unwound the flag from off her and danced the thing they were playing,—in that costume of dark red she had worn when she danced the Call to Battle and the Lamentations Following Triumph of the _Pathetique_; and trampling on the red which was France, waving the flag which was the U. S. A., in the costume representing Poland—she pointed! And because she had _pointed_ skyward earthward and battleward, all in the course of one evening, we left, saying: “Well, we have seen Isadora Duncan dance!”

_The
Novelist
of the
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J. HENRI
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_Author of “The Life of the Fly”, “The Life of the
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Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

[p. 3]:
... am dynamic but devastated, laid waste in spirit. ...
... I am dynamic but devastated, laid waste in spirit. ...

[p. 5]:
... Isadore Duncan’s Misfortune ...
... Isadora Duncan’s Misfortune ...

[p. 5]:
... Isadora Duncan ran jumped and skipped and stamped and swooned ...
... Isadora Duncan ran and jumped and skipped and stamped and
swooned ...

[p. 10]:
... peasants.... It would be lovely to to sleep ...
... peasants.... It would be lovely to sleep ...

[p. 14]:
... Helen Hoylt mentioned the following: ...
... Helen Hoyt mentioned the following: ...