This Side of Paradise

"The dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol."
-- Matthew J. Bruccoli, A Brief Life of Fitzgerald

Having said this, Bruccoli tries to take the position that it does not matter how fascinating Fitzgerald's life was, nor how many parallels we find in the work--what matters is that work itself. In the case of This Side of Paradise, it seems very hard not to return to The Romantic Egoist (the rejected version of the novel) and the list provided above by Bruccoli as deeply explanatory of the novel that was eventually published in 1920. Yet, giving the book its right to exist independently of its author--which is a core principle of the "New Criticism" that was to achieve a decades-long supremacy starting in the late 1930s--one is struck by the immaturity and lostness of its protagonist, Amory Blaine.  He thinks of his sophomore year in college as the height of his life, and he is struck in the later pages of the novel by the realization that "modern life" has begun to change "year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before" (272).  Blaine seems often ironically presented, and his being labelled a "Romantic Egotist" suggests he has a way to travel.  How far does he really get by the end of the novel, beyond the realization just quoted?

Toomer, Cane, Anderson

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) grew up in Washington D.C. and attended six universities or colleges in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Illinois and New York (graduating from none), before returning to New York City in spring 1919. He claimed as his heritage "seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Italian" (letter in the Liberator of 1922). He was also, as Robert M. Crunden has said, in Body and Soul, a man of many enthusiasms: socialism, Buddhism, Theosophy, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Quakerism, Jungian psychoanalysis, and eventually Scientology (Crunden 27-28). He formed a close friendship with Hart Crane. He loved Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and one can see its influence in Cane (1923), (see below for more on this topic) which grew out of experiences he had as the substitute principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute, a co-educational African American institution founded in 1910 in Hancock County, Georgia (about 100 miles southeast of Atlanta), an area where his own father had been born into slavery. He had never been in the deep South before, and it made such an impression on him that he began writing the poetry and sketches that eventuated in Cane. He submitted the long story "Georgia Night" to the Liberator in New York while he was still in Sparta.
Before completing Cane, he returned to the South in 1922 with his friend, Jewish novelist, historian, literary and social critic, Waldo Frank. Toomer had light skin, often "passing" for white, but it had been darkening in the intense sun of the South, so they had to travel at times in Jim Crow rail cars, and since Frank was swarthy, they posed as black academics. Crunden says that Cane "remains a mélange of poems, meditations, and sketches and is not a novel," and that it "combined naturalism, realism, symbolism, and surrealism," and "excited Toomer about his black heritage" (29). However, when the publisher Horace Liveright wanted to advertise the book as by a black author, Toomer objected loudly: "My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine," he said, telling Liveright that he did not "expect to be told what I should consider myself to be, and further that any "statements I give will inevitably come from a synthetic human and art point of view, not from a racial one" (qtd. in Crunden 29). 

In a letter to Sherwood Anderson, dated 18 December 1922, Jean Toomer wrote about the travels that preceded his writing of Cane, and the influence of Anderson upon his work.  This passage bespeaks a closeness of the two writers, and it would seem as though Anderson's work is indispensable to understanding what Toomer tried top achieve in Cane--if Toomer can be taken at his word:

Just before I went down to Georgia I read Winesburg, Ohio. And while there, living in a cabin whose floorboards permitted the soil to come up between them, listening to the old folk melodies that Negro women sang at sun-down, The Triumph of the Egg [i.e., The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions from American Life in Tales and Poems (1921), by Anderson] came to me. The beauty, and the full sense of life that these books contain are natural elements, like the rain and sunshine, of my own sprouting. My seed was planted in the cane- and cotton-fields, and in the souls of black and white people in the small southern town. My seed was planted in myself down there. Roots have grown and strengthened. They have extended out. I spring up in Washington. Winesburg, Ohio, and The Triumph of the Egg are ele­ments of my growing. It is hard to think of myself as maturing without them.

Ther[e] is a golden strength about your art that can come from nothing less than a creative elevation of experience, however bitter or abortive the experience may have been. Your images are clean, glowing, healthy, vibrant. . . . . It seems to me that art in our day, other than in its purely aesthetic phase, has a sort of religious function. It is a religion, a spiritualization of the immediate. And ever since I first touched you, I have thought of you in this connection. . . .

Wont you write and tell me more in detail how my stuff strikes you? And at first opportunity I would certainly like to have a talk with you.

Crunden,  Robert M. Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
 A Jean Toomer Reader:  Selected Unpublished Writings, ed. Frederik L. Rusch. New York, Oxford:  Oxford UP, 1993. See pp. 17-18.

The Waste Land and Popular Song

As David Chinitz pointed out almost twenty years ago, the original manuscript of The Waste Land shows Eliot citing popular songs more than the Grail myth. For the poem’s title, he wanted a sentence from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend: “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” And for the opening of the poem he considered several lyrics from popular musicals, like "I'm proud of all the Irish blood that's in me / There's not a man can say a word agin me," from "Harrigan," a song in a 1907 George M. Cohan show titled Fifty Miles From Boston.  Out of two songs from the minstrel tradition he concocted "Meet me in the shadow of the watermelon Vine / Eva Iva Uva Emmaline." And from The Cubanola Glide he appropriated the lines "Tease, Squeeze lovin & wooin / Say Kid what're y’ doin’?"

As Chinitz says, Michael North pointed out that these lines are "the first examples in the draft of [Eliot's] famous techniques of quotation and juxtaposition," and suggested the miscellaneous format of the minstrel show--or, Chinitz adds, the English music hall--can help explain the form of The Waste Land. Thanks to the deletion of the original opening section, however, the first line ("April is. . . ") remakes the poem within English poetry’s main traditions. As Chinitz says, “One can only imagine the effect of a long poem called He Do the Police in Different Voices beginning, ‘First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place.’”

—David Chinitz, "T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide." PMLA 110.2 (March 1995).

See other comments on the composition of The Waste Land, including those synopsized above from Chinitz.

Sitwell & Stein?

On June 12, 1923,  Façade premiered at the Aeolian Hall in London.  There was (supposedly) hissing and booing, though nothing like when Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” was first performed, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913. Virginia Woolf attended the opening of Façade, and described a puzzled but polite audience. Reviews were rotten. A sample headline: “Drivel They Paid To Hear.” After this night, William Walton acquired a reputation as the enfant terrible of British music, probably because Sitwellspread stories that they were almost physically attacked by the audience.

Sitwell's early verse comprised  "abstract patterns in sounds" to overcome "verbal deadness" and "rhythmic flaccidity" in English poetry. They are experiments in rhyme, assonance and dissonance, and syllabic combinations. Belgian writer Emil Cammaerts said Sitwell's verses were "poetry gone mad, poetry on the verge of becoming music."

Walton treated the voice as just another instrument, and sometimes the orchestra overwhelms it. Sitwell put the orchestra behind a screen on one occasion, and spoke through a megaphone on another. The work changed as they added, subtracted, rewrote and reordered things. Another early change was the addition of a flute and saxophone to the quartet, giving a music-hall or dance-band flavor to things. Walton parodies popular and classical music, and also various dance styles, from tap-dance and waltz (as inherited from Tchaikovsky, Ravel and the Strausses), to folk reels ("Scotch Rhapsody"). The "Jodelling Song" quotes Rossini's William Tell. Most of the movements are a kind of extended word-painting, ideally suited to the extended onomatopoeia of the verses, and in most cases contain some more literal translation of the words into music. In this aspect, would you agree that Sitwell was following a path blazed by Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons?

The Modernism Lab at Yale is an ambitious project to pull together information and links relating to major modernist figures, with author-pages and a timeline. It is a Wiki, and not that easy to navigate, but there is some excellent material there.
On H.D.'s page the site defines Imagist poems as "austere in structure and diction, [blending] mythology and symbolist techniques to create a verse form that was classical yet modern, spare yet complex" [VIEW PAGE].
The timeline shows that Amy Lowell hosted a "rival" party on July 30, 1914, following the Blast celebration dinner on July 15. Lowell's party was attended not by Ezra Pound, but by H.D., Richard Aldington, D.H. Lawrence, and John Gould Fletcher  [VIEW PAGE].
The term "rival party" indicates a competition between Pound, Lewis, and the Blast gang on the one hand, and the others mentioned above.  Yet Pound had already published Des Imagistes in March 1914. He engaged in a skirmish with Lowell about who "invented" Imagism:

My dear Amy: Are you going to get onto the Band Wagon?
You tried to stampede me into accepting as my artistic equals various people whom it would have been rank hypocrisy for me to accept in any such manner. There is no democracy in the arts. And now what is this nonsense you write to Miss Anderson about "bitterest" enmities?

(from The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941)

Does Blast seem like it is putting forth ideas compatible with what comes to be known as "Imagism," which is later seemingly encapsulated in MacLeish's "Ars Poetica"? Does MacLeish's manifesto-poem seem consistent with the definition given above on the H.D. page of "Imagism" as blending "mythology and symbolist techniques"? n.b.: the term "symbolist" refers to the literary movement of Symbolisme, which published its own manifesto in 1886.