Cold War Modernists by Barnhisel Greg

Author:Barnhisel, Greg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004020, Literary Criticism/American/General, LIT004130, Literary Criticism/European/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

Master, mammoth mumbler, tell me why

The bales of your left-over novels buy

Less than a bandage for your gouty foot.113

(Interestingly, Lowell enclosed this poem in a letter he sent to Pound in March 1954.114) Excerpts from Yeats’s diaries appeared in the first issue, and of course Eliot’s influence was everywhere, as I explain more fully later.

In The Program Era, Mark McGurl argues that modernism’s most enduring legacy in fiction is its primary attention to narrative perspective, with what a narrator can and cannot see or know.115 Much of Encounter’s short fiction uses such modernist narrative techniques (one might look at Elizabeth Montagu’s “From Me to You” from September 1957, a mix of first- and second-person perspective, and Ann Chadwick’s “The Story” from February 1957, which is almost parodically Hemingwayesque). Themes of these works also gesture to modernist preoccupations. Edmund Wilson’s “The Messiah at the Seder,” which employs a Jamesian third-person modernist narrator, describes the ancient Haggadah in terms that could almost be an idealized blueprint for the modernist epic itself: “excreted, as it is, by the anonymous process of centuries, it concentrates in one vibrant poem the despairs and the hopes of millennia.”116 Although not a work of fiction, William Faulkner’s long historical/personal narrative “Mississippi,” leading off the October 1954 issue, employs Faulkner’s characteristic transhistorical narrative technique and paratactic style.117

Encounter’s literary critics reinforced the message that modernism had become the dominant tradition, but that contemporary writers writing in that tradition could not hope to measure up to their predecessors. For Herbert Read, the “clear line of progress” of twentieth-century poetry was “the isolation and clarification of the image, and the perfecting of a diction that would leave the image unclouded by rhetoric or sentiment”—and “Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and [Dylan] Thomas” had led the way in that development.118 (Spender, writing in 1963, agreed that imagism and the imagistic method were the very “archetype of a modern creative procedure” and “the basic unit of the modern poem.”119) Imagistic poetry in the 1950s “[is] exhausted,” Graham Hough wrote, but contemporary poetry “is not moving in any interesting direction; mostly it appears to be marking time.”120 (Alberto de Lacerda’s imagistic poem “Lago,” from issue 1, might illustrate this “exhaustion” of the imagist imperative.121) The stale dominance of the imagistic mode was only a microcosm of the larger cultural moment. “It sometimes seems at the moment as if the modern movement … [is] coming to an end,” Anthony Cronin wrote in 1956.122 Lowell’s poem on Ford, referred to earlier, memorializes the greatness of the modernist moment of the 1910s, as does George Aldis’s “Portrait of D. H. Lawrence,” which celebrates Lawrence’s earthy sexual essentialism that was so revolutionary in its time:

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