Chapter I: Front Matter

THE LITTLE REVIEW

A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS
MAKING NO COMPROMISE WITH THE PUBLIC TASTE

Margaret C. Anderson
Publisher

JULY, 1917

Imaginary Letters, III. Wyndham Lewis
Poems: T. S. Eliot
Le Directeur
Mélange adultère de tout
Lune de Miel
The Hippopotamus
Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden Ezra Pound
Three Nightpieces John Rodker
Improvisations Louis Gilmore
Poet’s Heart Maxwell Bodenheim
The Reader Critic

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The Little Review

VOL. IV.

JULY 1917

NO. 3

Copyright, 1917, by Margaret C. Anderson.

Imaginary Letters

(Six Letters of William Bland Burn to his Wife)

Wyndham Lewis

The Code of a Herdsman

(_A set of rules sent by Benjamin Richard Wing to his young friend Philip Seddon enclosed with a letter. Under the above title now edited._)

(1) Never maltreat your own intelligence with parables. It is a method of herd-hypnotism. Do not send yourself to sleep with the rhythm of the passes that you make.=As an example of herd-hypnotism, German literature is so virulently allegorized that the German really never knows whether he is a Kangaroo, a Scythian, or his own sweet self.=You, however, are a Herdsman. That is surely Parable enough!

(2) Do not admit _cleverness_, in any form, into your life. Observe the accomplishment of some people’s signatures! It is the herd-touch.

(3) Exploit Stupidity.=Introduce a flatness, where it is required into your commerce. Dull your eye as you fix it on a dull face.=Why do you think George Borrow used such idiotic clichés as “The beams of the descending luminary—?” He was a great writer and knew what he was doing.=Mock the herd perpetually with the grimance of its own garrulity or deadness. If it gets out of hand and stampedes towards you, leap on to the sea of mangy backs until the sea is still. That is: cast your mask aside, and spring above them. They cannot see or touch anything _above_ them: they have never realized that their backs—or rather their _tops_—exist! They will think that you have vanished into Heaven.

(4) As to language: eschew all clichés implying a herd personality. Never allow such terms as Top-Hole, Priceless, or Doggo to pass your lips. Go to the Dictionary if you want an epithet. If you feel eloquent, use that moment to produce a cliché of your own. Cherish your personal vocabulary, however small it is. Use your own epithet as though it were used by a whole nation, if people would have no good reason for otherwise accepting it.

_Examples of personal epithets._

That man is _abysmal_.

That is an _abysmal_ book.

_It was prestigious!_ } Borrowed from the French. Here comes that _sinister bird_! }

He is a _sinister card_. (Combination of French and 1890 Slang.)

He has a great deal of _sperm_.

I like a fellow with as much _sperm_ as that.

Borrow from all sides mannerisms of callings or classes to enrich your personal bastion of language. Borrow from the pulpit, from the clattering harangue of the auctioneer, the lawyer’s technicality, the pomposity of politicians.=Borrow grunts from the fisherman, solecisms from the inhabitant of Merioneth.=“He is a preux, ah, yes-a-preux!” You can say—“ah-yes-a-preux” as though it were one word, accent on the “yes.”

(5) In accusing yourself, stick to the Code of the Mountain. But crime is alien to a Herdsman’s nature.

(6) Yourself must be your Caste.

(7) Cherish and develop, side by side, your six most constant indications of different personalities. You will then acquire the potentiality of six men. Leave your front door one day as B.: The next march down the street as E. A variety of clothes, hats especially, are of help in this wider dramatisation of yourself. _Never_ fall into the vulgarity of being or assuming yourself to be one ego. Each trench must have another one behind it. Each single self—that you manage to be at any given time—must have five at least indifferent to it. You must have a power of indifference of _five_ to _one_. All the greatest actions in the world have been five parts out of six impersonal in the impulse of their origin. To follow this principle you need only cultivate your memory. You will avoid being the blind man of _any_ moment. B will see what is hidden to D.=(Who were Turgenev’s “Six Unknown”? Himself.)

(8) Never lie. You cannot be too fastidious about the truth. If you must lie, at least see that you lie so badly that it would not deceive a pea-hen.—The world is, however, full of pea-hens.

(9) Spend some of your spare time every day in hunting your weaknesses, caught from commerce with the herd, as methodically, solemnly and vindictively as a monkey his fleas. You will find yourself swarming with them while you are surrounded by humanity. But you must not bring them up on the mountain.=If you can get another man to assist you—one, that is, honest enough not to pass his own on to you—that is a good arrangement.

(10) Do not play with political notions, aristocratisms or the reverse, for that is a compromise with the herd. Do not allow yourself to imagine “a fine herd though still a herd.” There is no _fine herd_. The cattle that call themselves “gentlemen” you will observe to be a little cleaner. It is merely cunning and produced with a product called _soap_. But you will find no serious difference between them and those vast dismal herds they avoid. Some of them are very dangerous and treacherous.=Be on your guard with the small herd of gentlemen!

(11) You will meet with this pitfall: at moments, surrounded by the multitude of unsatisfactory replicas, you will grow confused by a similarity bringing them so near to us.=You will reason, where, from some points of view, the difference is so slight, whether that delicate margin is of the immense importance that we hold it to be: _the only thing of importance_ in fact.=That group of men talking by the fire in your club (you will still remain a member of your club), that party at the theatre, look good enough, you will say. Their skins are fresh, they are well-made, their manners are good. You must then consider what they really are. On closer inspection you _know_, from unpleasant experience, that they are _nothing_ but limitations and vulgarities of the most irritating description. The devil Nature has painted these sepulchres pink, and covered them with a blasphemous Bond Street distinction. Matter that has not sufficient mind to permeate it grows, as you know, gangrenous and rotten. Animal high spirits, a little, but easily exhausted, goodness, is all that they can claim.

What seduced you from your severity for a moment was the same thing as a dull woman’s good-looks.=This is _probably_ what you will have in front of you.=On the other hand, everywhere you will find a few people, who, although not a mountain people are not herd.=They may be herdsmen gone mad through contact with the herd, and strayed: or through inadequate energy for our task they may be found there: or they may be a hybrid, or they may even be herdsmen temporarily bored with the mountain. (I have a pipe below myself sometimes.)

There are numerous “other denominations.” Treat them as brothers. Employ them, as opportunity offers, as auxiliaries in your duties. Their society and help will render your task less arduous.

(12) As to women: wherever you can, substitute the society of men.=Treat them kindly, for they suffer from the herd, although of it, and have many of the same contempts as yourself. They are a sort of bastard mountain people.=There must be somewhere a female mountain, a sort of mirage-mountain. I should like to visit it.=But women, and the processes for which they exist, are the arch conjuring trick: and they have the cheap mystery and a good deal of the slipperiness, of the conjuror.=Sodomy should be avoided, as far as possible. It tends to add to the abominable confusion already existing.

(13) Wherever you meet a shyness that comes out of solitude, (although _all_ solitude is not _anti_-herd) naiveness, and a patent absence of contamination, the sweetness of mountain water, any of the signs of goodness, you must treat that as sacred, as portions of the mountain.

However much you suffer for it, you must defend and exalt it. On the other hand, _every_ child is not simple, and _every_ woman is not weak.=In many cases to champion a female would be like springing to the rescue of a rhinoceros when you notice that it had been attacked by a flea. Chivalrous manners, again, with many women are like tiptoeing into a shed where an ox is sleeping.=Some children, too, rival in nastiness their parents. But you have your orders in this matter. Indifference where there should be nothing but the _whole_ eagerness or compunction of your being, is the worst crime in the mountain’s eyes.

(14) Conquests have usually been divided from their antitheses, and defeats from conquests, by some casual event. Had Moscow not possessed a governor ready to burn the Kremlin and the hundreds of palaces accumulated there, peace would have been signed by the Czar at Bonaparte’s entrance.=Had the Llascans persevered for ten days against Cortés, the Aztecs would never have been troubled. Yet Montezuma was right to remain inactive, paralysed by prophecy. Napoleon was right when he felt that his star was at last a useless one. He had drained it of all its astonishing effulgence.=The hair’s breadth is only the virtuosity of Fate, guiding you along imaginary precipices.=And all the detail is make-believe, anyway. Watch your star soberly and without comment. Do not trouble about the paste-board cliffs!

(15) _There are very stringent regulations_ about the herd keeping off the sides of the mountain. In fact your chief function is to prevent their encroaching. Some, in moments of boredom or vindictiveness, are apt to make rushes for the higher regions. Their instinct always fortunately keeps them in crowds or bands, and their trespassing is soon noticed. Those traps and numerous devices you have seen on the edge of the plain are for use, of course, in the last resort. Do not apply them prematurely.=Not very many herdsmen lose their lives in dealing with the herds.

(16) Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.

(17) The teacher does not have to _be_, although he has to _know_: He is the mind imagining, not the executant. The executant, the young, svelte, miraculous athlete, the strapping virtuoso, really has to give the illusion of a perfection.=Do not expect _me_ to keep in sufficiently good training to perform the feats I recommend.=I usually remain up on the mountain.

(18) Above all this sad commerce with the herd, let something veritably remain “un peu sur la montagne.” Always come down with masks and thick clothing to the valley where we work.

Stagnant gasses from these Yahooesque and rotten herds are more dangerous often than the wandering cylinders that emit them. See you are not caught in them without your mask.=But once returned to our adorable height, forget your sallow task: with great freedom indulge your love.=The terrible processions beneath are not of our making, and are without our pity. Our sacred hill is a volcanic heaven. But the result of its violence is peace.=The unfortunate surge below, even, has moments of peace.

(_Next letter will appear in August number._)

Poems

T. S. Eliot

Le Directeur

Malheur à la malheureuse Tamise!
Qui coule si près du Spectateur.
Le directeur
Conservateur
Du Spectateur
Empeste la brise.
Les actionnaires
Réactionnaires
Du Spectateur
Conservateur
Bras dessus bras dessous
Font des tours
A pas de loup.
Dans un égout
Une petite fille
En guenilles
Camarde
Regarde
Le directeur
Du Spectateur
Conservateur
Et crève d’amour.

Mélange adultère de tout

En Amérique, professeur;
En Angleterre, journaliste;
C’est à grands pas et en sueur
Que vous suivrez à peine ma piste.
En Yorkshire, conférencier;
A Londres, un peu banquier,
Vous me paierez bien la tête.
C’est à Paris que je me coiffe
Casque noir de jemenfoutiste.
En Allemagne, philosophe
Surexcité par Emporheben
Au grand air de Bergsteigleben;
J’erre toujours de-ci de-là
À divers coups de tra la la
De Damas jusqu’à Omaha.
Je célébrai mon jour de fête
Dans une oasis d’Afrique
Vêtu d’une peau de girafe.

On montrera mon cénotaphe
Aux côtes brûlantes de Mozambique.

Lune de Miel

Ils ont vu les Pays-Bas, ils rentrent à Terre Haute;
Mais une nuit d’été, les voici à Ravenne,
À l’aise entre deux draps, chez deux centaines de punaises;
La sueur aestivale, et une forte odeur de chienne.
Ils restent sur le dos écartant les genoux
De quatre jambes molles tout gonflées de morsures.
On relève le drap pour mieux égratigner.
Moins d’une lieue d’ici est Saint Apollinaire
In Classe’ basilique connue des amateurs
De chapiteaux d’acanthe que tournoie le vent.

Ils vont prendre le train de huit heures
Prolonger leurs misères de Padoue à Milan
Où se trouvent le Cène, et un restaurant pas cher.
Lui pense aux pourboires, et rédige son bilan.
Ils auront vu la Suisse et traversé la France
Et Saint Apollinaire, raide et ascétique,
Vieille usine désaffectée de Dieu, tient encore
Dans ses pierres écroulantes la forme precise de Byzance.

The Hippopotamus

The broad backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
Yet he is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus’s day
Is past in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden

A. D. 1451

Ezra Pound

They entered between two fir trees. A path of irregular flat pentagonal stones led along between shrubbery. Halting by the central court in a sort of narrow gallery, the large tank was below them, and in it some thirty or forty blond nereïds for the most part well-muscled, with smooth flaxen hair and smooth faces—a generic resemblance. A slender brown wench sat at one end listlessly dabbling her feet from the spring-board. Here the water was deeper.

The rest of them, all being clothed in white linen shifts held up by one strap over the shoulder and reaching half way to the knees,—the rest of them waded waist- and breast-deep in the shallower end of the pool, their shifts bellied up by the air, spread out like huge bobbing cauliflowers.

The whole tank was sunken beneath the level of the gardens, and paved and pannelled with marble, a rather cheap marble. To the left of the little gallery, where the strangers had halted, an ample dowager sat in a perfectly circular tub formed rather like the third of an hogshead, behind her a small hemicycle of yew trees kept off any chance draught from the North. She likewise wore a shift of white linen. On a plank before her, reaching from the left to the right side of her tank-hogshead, were a salver with a large piece of raw smoked ham, a few leeks, a tankard of darkish beer, a back-scratcher, the ham-knife.

Before them, from some sheds, there arose a faint steam, the sound of grunts and squeals and an aroma of elderly bodies. From the opposite gallery a white-bearded town-councillor began to throw grapes to the nereïds.

Le Sieur de Maunsier: They have closed these places in Marseilles, causa flegitii, they were thought to be bad for our morals.

Poggio: And are your morals improved?

Maunsier: Nein, bin nicht verbessert.

Poggio: And are the morals of Marseilles any better?

Maunsier: Not that I know of. Assignations are equally frequent; the assignors less cleanly; their health, I presume, none the better. The Church has always been dead set against washing. St. Clement of Alexandria forbade all bathing by women. He made no exception. Baptism and the last oiling were enough, to his thinking. St. Augustine, more genial and human, took a bath to console himself for the death of his mother. I suspect that it was a hot one. Being clean is a pagan virtue, and no part of the light from Judaea.

Poggio: Say rather a Roman, the Greek philosophers died, for the most part, of lice. Only the system of empire, plus a dilettantism in luxuries, could have brought mankind to the wash-tub. The christians have made dirt a matter of morals: a son of God can have no need to be cleansed; a worm begotten in sin and foredoomed to eternal damnation in a bottle of the seven great stenches, would do ill to refine his nostrils and unfit himself for his future. For the elect and the rejected alike, washing is either noxious or useless—they must be transcendent at all costs. The rest of the world must be like them; they therefore look after our morals. Yet this last term is wholly elastic. There is no system which has not been tried, wedlock or unwedlock, a breeding on one mare or on many; all with equal success, with equal flaws, crimes, and discomforts.

Maunsier: I have heard there was no adultery found in Sparta.

Poggio: There was no adultery among the Lacedaemonians because they held all women in common. A rumour of Troy had reached the ears of Lycurgus: “So Lycurgus thought also there were many foolish vain joys and fancies, in the laws and orders of other nations, touching marriage: seeing they caused their bitches and mares to be lined and covered with the fairest dogs and goodliest stallions that might be gotten, praying and paying the maisters and owners of the same: and kept their wives notwithstanding shut up safe under lock and key, for fear lest other than themselves might get them with child, although themselves were sickly, feeble-brained, extreme old.” I think I quote rightly from Plutarch. The girls of Lacedaemon played naked before the young men, that their defects should be remedied rather than hidden. A man first went by stealth to his mistress, and this for a long space of time; thus learning address and silence. For better breeding Lycurgus would not have children the property of any one man, but sought only that they should be born of the lustiest women, begotten of the most vigorous seed.

Maunsier: Christianity would put an end to all that, yet I think there was some trace left in the _lex Germanica_, and in some of our Provençal love customs; for under the first a woman kept whatever man she liked, so long as she fancied: the children being brought up by her brothers, being a part of the female family, _cognati_. The chivalric system is smothered with mysticism, and is focussed all upon pleasure, but the habit of older folk-custom is at the base of its freedoms, its debates were on matters of modus.

These girls look very well in their shifts. They confound the precepts of temperance.

Poggio: I have walked and ridden through Europe, annotating, observing. I am interested in food and the animal.

There was, before I left Rome, a black woman for sale in the market. Her breasts stuck out like great funnels, her shoulders were rounded like basins, her biceps was that of a wheel-wright; these upper portions of her, to say nothing of her flattened-in face, were disgusting and hideous but, she had a belly like Venus. From below the breasts to the crotch she was like a splendid Greek fragment. She came of a tropical meat-eating tribe. I observe that gramenivorous and fruit-eating races have shrunken arms and shoulders, narrow backs and weakly distended stomachs. Much beer enlarges the girth in old age, at a time when the form in any case, might have ceased to give pleasure. The men of this nubian tribe were not lovely; they were shaped rather like almonds: the curious roundness in the front aspect, a gradual sloping-in toward the feet, a very great muscular power, a silhouette not unlike that of an egg, or perhaps more like that of a tadpole.

Civilized man grows more frog-like, his members become departmental.

Maunsier: But fixed. Man falls into a set gamut of types. His thoughts also. The informed and the uninformed, the clodhopper and the civilian are equally incapable of trusting an unwonted appearance. Last week I met an exception, and for that cause the matter is now in my mind, and I am, as they say “forming conclusions.” The exception, an Englishman, had found a parochial beauty in Savoia, in the inn of a mountain town, a “local character” as he called her. He could not describe her features with any minute precision, but she wore, he remembered, a dress tied up with innumerable small bits of ribbon in long narrow bow-knots, limp, hanging like grass-blades caught in the middle. She came in to him as a sort of exhibit. He kissed her hand. She sat by his bedside and conversed with him pleasantly. They were quite alone for some time. Nothing more happened. From something in his manner, I am inclined to believe him. He was convinced that nothing more ever did happen.

Poggio: Men have a curious desire for uniformity. Bawdry and religion are all one before it.

Maunsier: They call it the road to salvation.

Poggio: They ruin the shape of life for a dogmatic exterior. What dignity have we over the beasts, save to be once, and to be irreplaceable!

I myself am a rag-bag, a mass of sights and citations, but I will not beat down life for the sake of a model.

Maunsier: Would you be “without an ideal?”

Poggio: Is beauty an ideal like the rest? I confess I see the need of no other. When I read that from the breast of the Princess Hellene there was cast a cup of “white gold,” the sculptor finding no better model; and that this cup was long shown in the temple at Lyndos, which is in the island of Rhodes; or when I read, as I think is the textual order, first of the cup and then of its origin, there comes upon me a discontent with human imperfection. I am no longer left in the “slough of the senses,” but am full of heroic life, for the instant. The sap mounts in the twigs of my being.

The visions of the mystics give them like courage, it may be.

Maunsier: My poor uncle, he will talk of the slough of the senses and the “loathsome pit of contentment.” His “ideas” are with other men’s conduct. He seeks to set bounds to their actions.

I cannot make out the mystics; nor how far we may trust to our senses, and how far to sudden sights that come from within us, or at least seem to spring up within us: a mirage, an elf-music; and how far we are prey to the written word.

Poggio: I have seen many women in dreams, surpassing most mortal women, but I doubt if I have on their account been stirred to more thoughts of beauty, than I have had meditating upon that passage in latin, concerning the temple of Pallas at Lyndos and its memorial cup of white gold. I do not count myself among Plato’s disciples.

Maunsier: And yet it is forced upon us that all these things breed their fanatics; that even a style might become a religion and breed bigots as many, and pestilent.

Poggio: Our blessing is to live in an age when some can hold a fair balance. It can not last; many are half-drunk with freedom; a greed for taxes at Rome will raise up envy, a cultivated court will disappear in the ensuing reaction. We are fortunate to live in the wink, the eye of mankind is open; for an instant, hardly more than an instant. Men are prized for being unique. I do not mean merely fantastic. That is to say there are a few of us who can prize a man for thinking, in himself, rather than for a passion to make others think with him.

Perhaps you are right about style; an established style could be as much a nuisance as any other establishment. Yet there must be a reputable normal. Tacitus is too crabbed. The rhetoricians ruined the empire. Let us go on to our baths.

_Finis_

Three Nightpieces

John Rodker

I

Toward eight o’clock I begin to feel my pulses accelerating quietly. A little after, my heart begins to thump against its walls. I tremble all over, and leaving the room rapidly go out on the terrace of the house and look over the weald.

There is a shadowiness of outline and the air is crisp. The sky in one corner is a pale nostalgic rose. The trees look like weeds and a bird flies up through them like a fish lazily rising. The hills really look like breasts: and each moment I look for the head of the Titan negress to rise with the moon in the lobe of her ear.

I think of my youth and the intolerable legacy it left me.

I think of the crazy scaffolding of my youth and wonder why I should be surprised that the superstructure should be crazy too, wavering to every breeze and threatening ever to come down about my ears. I think too of wrongs done to this one and that one, and.... “Oh, my God,” I cry, “I did not know, I did not know,” and my heart thumps louder in my breast and my pulses throb like a tide thundering and sucking at some crumbling jetty.

I gulp deep breaths of air to steady myself, but it is of no good. I think of her whom I love and futility overwhelms me: for this too will have its common end, and our orbits grow ever remoter. And putting my head on my breast, faint and reminiscent—the smell from my armpits rises to my brain, and she stands before me vividly and the same smell comes from her; but it is more heady and more musky and she looks at me with intolerable humility.

And a minute after there is only the dark; a hoot-owl’s terrifying call and the queer yap that comes in reply; the frogs that thud through the grass like uncertain feet; the trees that talk to each other.

And I would willingly let my life out gurgling and sticky, and sink without a bubble into its metallic opacity.

II

I had gone to bed quietly at my wife’s side, kissing her casually as was my custom. I awoke about two in the morning with a start so sudden that it seemed I had been shot by a cannon out of the obscurity of sleep into the light of waking; at one moment I had been, as it were, gagged and bound by sleep; and the next I was wide awake and could distinctly sense the demarking line between sleep and waking. And this demarking line was like a rope made of human hair such as one sees in exhibitions of indigenous Japanese products.

In my ears still rang the after-waves of the shriek which had awakened me. The nerves governing my skin were still out of control as a result of the sudden fright, and portions of it continued twitching for a long time after; my scalp grew cold in patches and my hair stood on end.... In the dark I found myself trembling all over and bathed in a cold sweat.... And it was impossible to collect myself. My wife, I felt, was sitting up in bed and a minute afterward she began to weep quietly.

I was still trembling and her quiet weeping made me more afraid. I was angry with her too, but could not talk to her, I was so afraid. My voice, I knew, would have issued thin and quavering, and I was afraid of its hollow reverberations losing themselves uncertainly in the darkness. By the little light I saw her put her hands up to her head in despair ... as though still half asleep; and before I could stop her again the same piercing, incredibly terrifying shriek burst from her. Again I trembled all over, involuntarily gnashing my teeth and feeling my skin ripple like loathsome worms.

“Stop,” I cried, seizing her by the arms, “Stop,” afraid to wake her, yet more afraid to hear again that appalling shriek—and in a moment she was awake ... looking wildly round her, and the quiet weeping gave way to a wild and tempestuous sobbing.

I was afraid of her, afraid to go on sleeping with her, lest she should again shriek in that wild and unearthly fashion; afraid to fall asleep again lest I should be awakened by that appalling shriek dinning in my ears and my body quivering vilely under the impossible sound. I clung to her: “What is it, tell me at least what it is,” I said.

For a time she would not tell me. Trembling all over with anguish and fear of I knew not what, I insisted. When at last she did tell me it was as though the world had suddenly been cut away from under my feet. Helplessly and weeping I clung to her, with cold at my heart. That any human being could accuse another of devilry so sinister, so cold, so incredible even in dream, I had not conceived of. Loathing her, I clung the closer in my anguish and despair.

III

One night at supper I had eaten cucumber. Soon after I went to bed and on the first strokes of ten fell asleep.

After sleeping for a long time I awoke into a dimly lit room. I still lay on the bed and after a moment a figure entered, and after a few moments more, another, until in this fashion there were half a dozen people in the room. I could not distinguish who they were, and quietly and obscurely they moved round my bed. Now and then there was a hiss out of the corners of the room, or a chuckle in reply to some unheard obscenity.

A heavy weight oppressed me as though I knew they menaced me in some obscure and dreadful way. I could not move.

I could not move, and always the same obscure and dreadful procession encircled me and shadowy bodies pressed a little closer, then drew back again to join the sinister group.

And though I saw nothing save their shadowy forms, I knew their eyes gleamed down at me: their faces were lecherous: their hands clawed; and forever and through long ages they went round me in sinister procession.

Suddenly ... and how I do not know, I had broken the bonds of sleep and lay trembling in a cold sweat. Through my protecting blankets the last strokes of ten were fading.

Improvisations

Louis Gilmore

I

My thoughts are fish
That dwell in a twilight
Of green waters:

They are silver fish
That dart here and there
Streaking the still water
Of a pond.

My thoughts are birds
That have hung their nests
Near the sun:

They are yellow birds
That drift on stretched wings
Over a sea untroubled
By a sail.

My thoughts are beasts
That crouch and wait
In a black forest.

My thoughts are apes
That clamber through the tree-tops
Towards the moon.

II

In winter
People intensify
Their individuality
In houses.

In spring
By the side of lakes
Beneath trees
People walk
Vaguely sentimental.

In summer
Lying upon the warm earth
They hear the grass grow;
Or they become impersonal
In a contemplation
Of stars.

In autumn
People dispel
The characteristic
Melancholy of the season
With a cup of tea.

III

Rare delight,
That of hanging
By one’s tail
Over a pond.

Rare delight,
That of seeing
A green monkey
In the sky.

Rare delight,
That of reaching up
With one’s paw
To touch it.

Rare delight,
That of finding
The strange one
In the water.

Rare delight,
That of clasping
The belovèd
In death.

Poet’s Heart

Maxwell Bodenheim

The Mad Shepherd
The Narcissus Peddler
The Slender Nun
The Wine Jar Maiden
The Poet

A great window of palest purple light. The lower corner of the window is visible. A dark purple wall frames the window, and narrow rectangles of the wall, below and to the left of the window-corner, are visible. Before the window-corner is the portion of a pale pink floor. One tall thin white candle stands against the dark purple rectangle of wall to the left of the window-corner. It bears a narrow flame which remains stationary. Soft and clear light pours in from the window-corner and dim shapes stand behind it. The Mad Shepherd appears from the left. He holds a reed to his lips but does not blow into it. A long brown cloak drapes him: black sandals are on his feet. His black hair caresses his shoulders; his face is young. He pauses, three-fourths of his body framed by the palest purple window-corner.

The Mad Shepherd (addressing the palest purple window-corner):

I’ve lost a tune. It’s a spirit-rose, and a reed-limbed boy ran before me and whisked it past my ears before I could seize him. Have you seen him, window clearer than the clashing light bubbles in a woman’s eyes? (A pause). I sat on a rock in the midst of my sheep and smiled at the piping of my young soul, as it climbed a spirit-tree. Soon it would whirl joyously on the tip of the tree, and my heart would turn with it. Then the song brushed past me and made my head a burning feather dropping down. I stumbled after it, over the sun-dazed hills, and the reed-limbed boy would often stop, touch both of my eyes with the song-flower, and spring away. I saw him dance into this black palace. I followed, through high corridors, to you, palest purple window, towering over me like a silent mass of breath-clear souls. He has gone. Palest purple window, tell me where he is?

(There is a short silence. The Mad Shepherd stands despairingly fingering his reed. The Narcissus Peddler appears from the right. He is an old man, a huge basket of cut narcissus strapped to his back. His body is tall and slender; his face a bit yellow, with a long silver-brown beard. His head is bare. He wears a black velvet coat, pale yellow shirt, soft grey, loose trousers, and black sandals. He rests his basket upon the floor. The Mad Shepherd takes a step toward him, wearily).

The Narcissus Peddler:

A Voice walked into me, one day. How he found me, sleeping between two huge purple hills, I do not know. He said with a laugh that had ghosts of weeping in it that he knew a garden where narcissus flowers grew taller than myself. What was there to do?—my soul and I, we had to walk with him. He lead us to this palace, spinning the thread of a laugh behind him so that we could follow. But now he has gone, and there is no window—only a palest purple window.

The Mad Shepherd:

We can leap through this window, but it may be a trap.

The Narcissus Peddler:

Or a dream?

The Mad Shepherd:

Perhaps this is a dream that is true—an endless dream.

The Narcissus Peddler:

Can that be death?

Mad Shepherd (pointing to the other’s basket):

With death, you would have left your narcissus behind you, for fragrance itself.

Peddler:

If my life has melted to an endless dream, my chase is over. I shall sit here and my soul will become an endless thought of narcissus.

(He seats himself beside his basket; Shepherd stands despairingly; the Slender Nun appears from the right: She is small and her body like a thin drooping stem; she wears the black dress of a nun but her child face is uncovered. Her feet are bare. She stops, standing a step away from the Peddler.)

The Slender Nun:

I see a candle that is like an arm stiffened in prayer. (She pauses) Palest purple window, is my soul standing behind you and spreading to light that gently thrusts me down? A flamed-loosed angel lifted it from me. I ran after him. He seemed to touch you, window, like a vapor kiss dying upon pale purple silk. (a pause) Must I stand here always waiting for my soul like a flower petal pressed deep into the earth by passing feet?

The Shepherd:

You have lost a soul and I a tune. Let me make you the tune and you make me your soul. You could sit with me on my rock in the hills and make a soul of my reed—rippling and piping of you, I might weave a new tune.

The Nun:

Can you give me a soul that will be Christ floating out in clear music? Only then I would go with you.

Shepherd (sadly):

My music is like the wet, quick kiss of rain. It knows nothing of Christ.

(A short silence)

(The Wine jar maiden appears from the right. She is tall and pale brown; upon her head is a long pale green jar; her hair is black and spurts down. Her face is wide but delicately twisted. She wears a thin simple pale green gown, with a black girdle about her waist, one tasseled end hanging down. She stops a little behind the Slender Nun, and lowers her wine jar to the floor. The Nun turns and partly faces her. The Narcissus Peddler looks up from where he has sat, in a reverie, beside his basket.)

The Wine Jar Maiden:

My heart was a wine jar stained with the roses of frail dreams and filled with wine that had turned to shaking mist. One day I felt it wrenched from me, and mist drops that flew from it, as it left, sank into my breast and made me shrink. I could not see the thief, but I followed the scent of my heart trailing behind him. It brought me here, but at this palest purple window it died. Scent of my heart, have you spread over this huge window, and must I stand forever looking upon you?

(The Narcissus Peddler slowly rises and takes a stride toward the palest purple window)

The Narcissus Peddler:

That dim shape behind the window—I believe it is a huge narcissus. I am a rainbow-smeared knave to stand here juggling the little golden balls of dreams. I shall spring through the window.

The Slender Nun:

Take my hand when you spring. Perhaps this is God’s forehead, and we shall melt into it, like billows of rain washing into a cliff.

The Wine Jar Maiden:

If I leap through this window, a cloak of my heart-scent may hang to me. I shall touch the cloak, now and then, and that shall be my life.

The Mad Shepherd:

I must sit here, and whirl with my young spirit. If I cannot knit together strands of music better than the tune I ran after, then I should not have chased it.

(After a short silence the Narcissus Peddler and the Slender Nun, hand in hand, leap through the window-corner and vanish. The Wine Jar Maiden leaps after them, a moment later, and also disappears. The Mad Shepherd sits down and blows little fragments of piping into his reed, long pauses separating them. As he does this, he looks up at the window, his head motionless. The Narcissus Peddler, the Slender Nun and the Wine Jar Maiden appear from the left walking slowly, in single file, as though in a trance. The Narcissus Peddler stands beside his basket, which he left behind him; the Wine Jar Maiden beside her jar, and the Slender Nun between them)

The Mad Shepherd (looking up, astonished):

You return, like sleep-drooping poplar trees that have been given wings and after long journeyings fly back to their little blue-green hills.

The Narcissus Peddler:

After we sprang we found ourselves in a high corridor, whose air was like the breath of a dying maiden—the corridor we first walked down, before we came to this palest purple window.

The Mad Shepherd (wonderingly):

A dream with a strange, buried, quivering palace whose doors are closed.

(The poet quietly appears from the right. He is dressed in a deep crimson robe, pale brown turban and black sandals; his head is bare. He surveys the others a moment, then touches the shoulder of the Wine Jar Maiden. She turns and stares at him. The others turn also)

The Poet:

You are all in my heart—a wide space with many buried, black palaces, huge pale-purple windows; hills with rocks for mad shepherds, strolling flower venders, wine jar maidens dancing in high courtyards hushed with quilted star-light and sometimes a slender nun walking alone through the aisles of old reveries. I have woven you into a poem, and you were drawn on by me. But when my poems are made I take my people to a far-off garden in my heart. There we sit beneath one of the shining trees and talk. There I shall give you your soul, your heart, your song—and your huge narcissus flower. And out of them make other poems, perhaps? Come.

(He leads them away)

Spectrum

Emanuel Morgan

Opus 96

You are the Japan
Where cherries always blossom.
With you there is no meantime.

Your are the nightingale’s twenty-four hours of song,
The unbroken Parthenon,
The everlasting purring of the sphynx.

At the first footfall of an uncouth season,
You migrate with one wing-sweep
To beauty.

The Reader Critic

Indiscriminate Illusions

E. L. R., Bear Creek, Pa.:

After reading your article “Push Face” in your June number I have torn the magazine to pieces and burned it in the fire. You may discontinue my subscription.

[We have noticed with much amusement that whenever there is an article in the body of the magazine or a comment in the Reader Critic, no matter by whom signed, which seems “disgusting, ridiculous or immoral” to some struggling soul, in comes a letter addressed to Margaret Anderson, saying: “_Your_ article, _your_ comment.”... The only hope the editor can have out of so much generous accreditis that some one sometime will write in giving her credit for Yeats’s poems.—_jh._]

Critical Epilepsy