Céline Mansanti

Eugene Jolas

Franco

John Perse

Hugo Ball

Henri Michaux

Rafael Alberti

Alfred Döblin

C G Jung

Kurt Schwitters

Hans Arp

Gottfried Benn

Kay Boyle

Constantin Brancusi

Georges Braque

André Breton

Robert Desnos

Marcel Duchamp

Paul Eluard

Carl Einstein

Alberto Giacometti

André Gide

Ernest Hemingway

Paul Klee

Valery Larbaud

Michel Leiris

Henri Matisse

Henry Miller

Anaïs Nin

Katherine Ann Porter

Francis Picabia

Pablo Picasso

Raymond Queneau

Laura Riding

Philippe Soupault

Tristan Tzara

William Carlos Williams

The Modalities of a « Blake Revival » in France during the 1920s and 1930s

German parents, published the artistic and literary magazine transition predominately in Paris between the years 1927 and 1938. The last great American exile periodical printed in Europe before WW2, transition is also one of the most important magazines of its generation. In the wake of the avant-garde modernists from the 1910s and early 1920s, it created a lesser-known yet seminal modernist current that spawned a coherent yet wide-ranging Anglo-American surrealist avant-garde 1 .

For eleven yearsan unusual amount of time for a little magazine -, transition

In light of this, William Blake's presence in transition is surprising on more than one account. First, transition was mainly concerned with the French, American and German cultures, and published very few British or even Irish writers. Second, this magazine, like many others of the same period, promoted unknown or little known contemporary artists and writers. Therefore, the publication of contributors such as Novalis, Schelling, Jean Paul, Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila can be considered as exceptional. As for William Blake, he appears in transition as the sole representative of the British literary past. The magazine quotes a fragment of his correspondence and also features him in an essay.

Moreover, his « Proverbs from Hell » plays a major role in the famous June 1929 « Revolution of the Word » manifesto; indeed, as we will see, the manifesto appears as a dialogue between its authors and the poet.

Therefore, the presence of William Blake within the pages of transition and the emphasis placed on his work invite us to contemplate the reasons why the author of The Marriage of Heaven and Earth finds a particular place in the magazine as well as in the broader cultural context of 1920's and 1930's France. Interestingly, the « Blake Revival » which takes place in France at the time is based on serious misconceptions of the poet that a close reading of transition reveals.

Although transition does not devote an inordinate number of pages to Blake (i. e. more or less 7 pages out of 5,600), the diversity of Blake's texts and of the texts related to him over time (October 1927 to July 1935) suggest the editors' strong interest in the English poet. The first reference to Blake appears in an October 1927 editorial entitled « Enter the Imagination », where Jolas sees in Lautréamont and his hymn to « evil » and « the satanic » a resurgence of Blake's « manichean spirit »:

The striking character of Lautréamont's work is the conscious preoccupation with so-called "evil" functions of life. (…) The "evil" has been neglected in poetry far too long. There are minds like Blake's in whom the sense of the Manichean is supreme. In Lautréamont, who, with magnificent courage chose to hymn the satanic, we find the gnostic philosophy transmuted into pure poetry. (t7, 159-60) Two months later, Marcel Brion, the young French writer, critic, historian and art expert born in 1895, pays homage to the poet on the hundredth anniversary of his death. Brion's article, simply entitled « William Blake Today », comes from a larger essay partially published in September 1925 in Adrienne Monnier's magazine Le Navire d'argent. Other references to Blake will follow. After placing the poet at the center of the « Revolution of the Word » manifesto in June 1929, transition publishes an excerpt from his famous letter of 1803 to Thomas Butts in its July 1935 issue:

I have written the poems from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study. 2 Placed at the head of a column entitled « Little Mantic Almageste », in which Jolas presents the reader with a « little selection of gnostic, mystic and romantic texts », this excerpt from Blake's correspondence precedes a series of eclectic quotations, from Saint John of the Cross to Bergson, with references to Lao Tzu, Søren Kierkegaard, Justinus Kerner, Jacob Boehme, Dionysius Areopagita, Emerson, Schelling, Pascal, Novalis, Plotinus, C. G. Jung, Saint Teresa of Avila, Swedenborg, etc. Eugene Jolas's introductory note to the « Little Mantic Almageste » underscores for the reader the importance of the Blakean philosophy in transition. Casting a backward glance at the magazine's editorials since its creation in April 1927, Jolas writes:

As I rejected the estheticism and naturalism of my age, I came to the conclusion, which today is an inner conviction, that poetry is identical with the ecstatic way of thinking, that it is the expression of a cosmic sense, that it manifests itself in liturgy and mythos. It is the eternal way of thinking (which was temporarily buried beneath the positivistic débris [sic] during the last century), an inner, subjective-objective thinking, a visionary striving for identity, the struggle for a phantasmagoric reality. This mantic or esoteric way of looking at life and nature is the aim of vertigralism. (t23, 44) Blake's testimony on his « immediate » writing practice in his letter to Thomas Butts contributes to transition's development of a conception of the world and of poetry which Jolas calls « vertigralism ». Although « vertigralism » traces its roots back to the first issue of the magazine, it develops more specifically with issue n°21, in March 1932. This issue opens with the publication of a manifesto called « Poetry is Vertical ». Poetry is defined as a vertical link between a dark, subliminal world (that of the Jungian collective unconscious) and a luminous, transcendental one. The object of verticalism (which is not yet called « vertigralism » at this point) is to encourage men to plunge into their unconscious and then rise up to the mystic heights. Or, to quote Léon-Paul Fargue as Jolas does at the beginning of the manifesto: « We have been too horizontal, I want to be vertical. » 3 From issue n°22 on, « verticalism » becomes « vertigralism », a portmanteau word that combines the vertical dynamics of poetic creation [« verticalism »] with the heroism of a sacred quest pursued by the Romantics [« Graal »]. The new concept reshapes the content of the magazine through the creation of a column entitled « Vertigral » (issues n°23, 24 and 25) which includes a wide variety of authors such as romantics (Franz von Baader, Jean Paul, William Blake, Novalis, Schelling), expressionnists (Franz Werfel, Franz Kafka), dadaist (Hugo Ball), mystics (Dionysius Areopagita, Saint John of the Cross, Madame Guyon, Saint Teresa of Avila) or neo-romantics (Georges Pelorson, Camille Schuwer). Jolas argues that the eclectic presentation of these texts illustrates « the aim of vertigralism », which he defines as a « mantic or esoteric way of looking at life and nature. » (t23, 44) A few years later, in 1938, « vertigralism » leads to the publication of Jolas's small volume Vertigralist Pamphlet, which mentions Blake again:

The mystics used numerous geometrical or architectonic metaphors to express the will to "ascent", "elevation", "levitation", "angelic flight" etc.

In this connection let us recall:

The desert saint, Joannes Climacus (the name alone is a program!) and his book: Scala Paradisi.

The entire gnostic movement with its liturgy of the celestial ladder. Seven years later, two academic publications presenting the poet and the artist appeared:

William Blake, un maître de l'art, by François Benoît, and above all Pierre Berger's doctoral thesis, William Blake, mysticisme et poésie, hailed by French and British critics alike as the best work on Blake ever published, and reprinted in 1936 as a consequence of its success outside the strictly scholarly field. At the same time, a few critical articles started to come out in the literary and cultural magazines of the time. Among Blake's early French proponents, Henry-David Davray, who was in charge of the English literature column of the Mercure de France, mentioned the English poet many times in the 1910s as well as in the 1920s.

However, Blake did not achieve wide recognition in France before the beginning of the 1920s, and undoubtedly, André Gide was instrumental in this "Blake Revival". In a 1921 letter to Jacques Rivière, the director of the NRF, the main French literary magazine of the and a certain lyrical and mystical conception of the world. In the first issue, as he reflects on « the nature and the form of the spirit's progress towards its liberation » 26 , Maurice Henry sees Blake as one of the leaders of « the rebellious spirit's progress towards its resorption in unity » 27 : « William Blake saw in the primordial night the last of the gods, the creative Madmen, who breathed out the worlds. They had been vomited by the motionless eternity.

Duration was not flowing yet. Endless, hopeless, sweating blood, screaming with fear, they hammered the void. » 28 The magazine's metaphysical and even mystical quest progressively becomes more pronounced. Thus, the chief editor states in issue n°3: « Clairvoyance is experimental metaphysics. » 29 The author clarifies this remark in a footnote: « What darkening of the thought has prevented man from taking into account the nature and universality of the mystical testimonies of Blake's "Prophetic Visions", Nerval's Aurélia, Poe's dialogues, and Rimbaud's"Illuminations"? » 30 In the same issue, another surrealist writer, André Delons, refers to the master and eventually quotes a fragment from The Book of Thel (from « Pourquoi l'oreille ne peut-elle être fermée à sa propre destruction ? (…) » to « Pourquoi un petit rideau de chair sur le lit de nos désirs ? » 31 ):

As he awakens to self-awareness, the individual is terrified by the squawking and raucous aviary of his own senses, an innate obstacle between the world and himself, between his desires and his accomplishments. The first stage of a human evolution which, if it is conscious, will have to be painful, will be the practice of a real dedifferentiation of the senses in order first to abolish their diversity, and then to aim at suppressing their intermediary. No expression of this agony and of this experience is as primitive and as loaded with immediate symbols as that given by William Blake in the following fragment. 32 Interestingly, the admiration and even the worship that transition, Les Cahiers du Sud and Le Grand Jeu show for Blake originates in a metaphysical quest which differentiates 26 « la nature et la forme de cette marche de l'esprit vers sa libération. » Maurice Henry, « La Force des renoncements », Le Grand Jeu, n°1, Summer 1928, 12. 27 « de l'esprit en révolte vers sa résorbtion [sic] en l'unité » Ibid., 14.

28 « William Blake a vu dans la nuit primordiale les derniers des dieux, les Fous créateurs, qui expiraient les mondes. L'éternité immobile les avait vomis. La durée ne coulait pas encore. Sans fin, sans espoir, suant du sang, hurlant d'angoisse, ils martelaient le vide. » Ibid., 13-4. 29 « La Voyance, c'est la métaphysique expérimentale. » Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, « L'Horrible Révélation… la seule », Le Grand Jeu, n°3, Fall 1930, 16. 30 « Quel obscurcissement de la pensée a-t-il empêché l'homme de tenir compte de l'identité et de l'universalité des témoignages mystiques des "Visions prophétiques" de Blake, de l'Aurélia de Nerval, des dialogues de Poe, des "Illuminations" de Rimbaud ? » Idem. 31 Delons quotes from « Why cannot the Hear be closed to its own destruction? (...) » to « Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire? ». 32 « L'individu, naissant à la conscience de soi, s'épouvante devant la volière criarde et rauque de ses propres sens, obstacle inné entre le monde et lui, entre ses désirs et ses prises. La première étape d'une évolution humaine qui, si elle est consciente, ne pourra être que douloureuse, sera la pratique d'une véritable dédifférenciation des sens afin d'abolir leur diversité d'abord, puis de tendre à supprimer leur intermédiaire. Nulle expression de ce tourment et de cette expérience n'est aussi primitive et chargée de symboles immédiats que celle qu'en donne William Blake dans le fragment qui suit. » André Delons, « De certains soleils fixes », Le Grand Jeu, n°3, Fall 1930, 36-7. those three magazines from Breton's official surrealism characterized, in the second half of the 1920s, by a dialectic between matter and spirit. Nevertheless, this opposition between « official » and « dissident » surrealisms was about to blur. As Robert Kanters writes about Le Grand Jeu, and as Dickran Tashjian also explains about transition: « These unfaithful disciples are in a way forerunners, they are ahead of the master. » 33 Indeed, Breton's surrealism evolved. Although in 1928 Breton was mainly concerned with historical materialism in his magazine La Révolution surréaliste, in 1930 he started developing interest in esoterism and occultism in his new magazine Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution.

But at the end of the 1920s, there was still a deep dividing line between the « dissidents » and the official surrealist group led by Breton. The fact that some of the surrealist writers showed great interest in Blake, whereas Breton never mentioned the poet exemplifies this division.

Indeed, the metaphysical quest of the dissidents clashed with the « materialism » of the official group. There were more grounds for conflict. The dissidents reproached the surrealist leader for his authoritarianism, especially after the publication in 1929 of the Second Manifeste du surréalisme. All three magazines also claimed, though at different degrees, a non-political and internationalist stand which separated them from communist sympathies and the predominant national concerns of the official group.

The result both of individual concerns and of larger editorial policies, Blake's revival in the 1920s and 1930s in France echoes a zeitgeist, so much so that it tends to turn into a trend. A 1929 letter from Saint-Georges de Bouhélier to Léon-Paul Fargue offers evidence of this: « You are the great visionary of our time. William Blake alone can be compared to you.

For Rimbaud is less deeply mystical, his hallucinations are of a different nature. » 34 Jean Lescure's testimony on the history of his magazine Messages published in Paris between 1939 and 1946 allows us to better assess the development of this trend. Reflecting on the history of the first issue of Messages, which was devoted to Blake, Lescure writes in a direct but somehow exaggerated way:

We took great interest in the poets whose work could be regarded as presenting a philosophical dimension. William Blake was fashionable. He was mentioned in every single article published. So the operator proposed Walter Uhl to take more resolutely the still underexplored paths of his poetry and philosophical thought. And since William Blake was so much 33 Ces disciples infidèles sont en un sens des précurseurs, ils devancent le maître. » Robert Kanters, « Ésotérisme et surréalisme », Mélusine (Paris, L'Âge d'Homme), « Occulte-Occultation », n°2, 1981, 15. See also Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950, London, Thames and Hudson, 1995, 26. 34 heard about while none of his books could be found in bookshops (where even Gide's translation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was rarely available), the operator was thrilled at the explorations he would have to engage in and at the minor miracles that the first issue, simply entitled William Blake, would require from him. 35 In spite of his determination to take advantage of Blake's success in order to launch his magazine, Lescure had to confront two seemingly paradoxical obstacles: first, Blake's poetry was still unavailable, second, he had trouble finding Blake scholars:

The operator had chosen the easy way out. Since everyone was talking about Blake, nothing should be simpler than putting together a nice issue. There was still another advantage in choosing Blake: since the operator hardly knew anyone from the republic of the Letters, Blake, who was known to everyone, would introduce him everywhere. I was soon disillusioned. While everyone was talking about Blake, almost no one had read him. Had we paid a little attention to the matter, we would have noticed that it was always the same halfdozen sentences that were quoted. « genuine poetry » (t9, 205) and « his childish simplicity » (t9, 205), as many characteristics that make of him a « marvelous child » (t9, 207), as stated at the end of the excerpt. This analysis puts a strong emphasis on purity and sincerity, two values associated with the world of children, natives and madmen that the French avant-gardes and particularly the surrealists brought about through their investigations. However, Brion goes beyond these laudatory remarks. He also proves to be very critical of Blake and more precisely of what he calls Blake's « awkward philosophy »: « Let us not hesitate to abandon the mortaland deadpart of the work, the useless emphasis, the prophetic pretensions, the mixture of simplistic evangelism and awkward philosophy. » (t9, 204) The reader soon realizes that Brion does not consider Blake's work as a whole, but on the contrary sees it as ambivalent, almost as if it had been produced by two different people. On one hand he sees « genuine poetry » (t9, 205), on the other « the darkness of theories badly understood and insufficiently assimilated by a quite uncultured brain » (t9, 205); on one hand he sees « simply a poet carried away by his desire (…) » (t9, 205), on the other « a messiah, a philosopher, a prophet » (t9, 205), three catagories to which Blake mistakenly thought he belonged (« His greatest error was to believe himself a messiah, a philosopher, a prophet »). The use of the adverb « simply » is quite relevant: Blake is praised for his simplicity because the critic wants him to « simply » be « a poet carried away by his desire (…) ». Everything in Blake's work that does not conform to the criteria of « simplicity » and « purity » by which Brion and others characterize him is discredited as useless, pretentious, awkward and obscure.

Such a reading of Blake's work is not uncommon. At about the same time, in The Dial, Robert Hillyer mocked the many critics who considered the poet a « half-mad dreamer » rather than a thinker able to expound « a carefully built up and clear-cut system of philosophy »:

It would seem, then, that although the legend of Blake the Madman has long since been done away with, Blake the shadowy, half-mad dreamer is still in vogue; and his finest work has served as a sort of mental thicket where visionaries may disport themselves according to their fancy, rather than an academe where a carefully built up and clear-cut system of philosophy is expounded. 38 As Hillyer shows, it is in the interest of Blake's critics to try to disseminate this stereotypical image of the poet, since it allows them the freedom to approximate Blake's views and to avoid producing a careful study of his aesthetics and philosophy. That is why Hillyer expresses unqualified admiration for S. Foster Damon's William Blake, His Philosophy and Symbols, published in 1924 in Boston by Houghton Mifflin:

It is clear that Mr Damon has written a book which must serve as a foundation to all future study of William Blake. He has discovered to us a figure as unlike the madman of popular fancy as the vague occultist of injudicious enthusiasts. The system of philosophy unveiled in these pages is of that highest type of mysticism, which, however deliberately obscure in its expression, is wholly simple in its significance: the union of the human soul with that God dwelling in it who must be released in eventual perfection by a struggle through the imperfections of material existence. 39 Aware of the difficulty of Blake's philosophy and determined to clarify its principle, Damon, through Hillyer's voice, seems to anticipate Brion's criticism and to respond to the peculiar rediscovery of Blake as it occurs across the Altantic. George Braziller, 1976, 48.

  surrealist texts that no other English-language magazine will be able to reach until the beginning of the 1940s and the foundation of VVV in New York. Moreover, unlike the selections in The Little Review, almost all the surrealist contributions published in transition are translated into English. Surrealism thus holds an exceptional place in Jolas's magazine. This is evident in transition's publication of surrealist literature and art as well as in its investigations of the unconscious, and, to a lesser extent, madness. Interestingly, Blake plays a role in the creation of this avant-garde. Even if the poet, unlike other British writers such as Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe, is never mentioned by Breton as one of the forerunners of surrealism, there is no question that the visionary, mystic, deeply imaginative and original English poet does represent an important reference for British and French surrealists alike. Art critic Herbert Read mentions Blake in his 1936 seminal study entitled Surrealism 9 . And as early as 1927, French surrealist writer Philippe Soupault, a great contributor to transition, translates Songs of Innocence and Experience into French, with the help of his wife Marie-Louise. These remarks invite us to look beyond transition's specific framework and to call into question the modalities of and the reasons for what appears to be a wider « Blake Revival » in 1920s and early 1930s France. The bibliography published at the end of the catalogue for the Blake exhibition held in Paris in 1947 and organized by the British Council and the René Drouin Gallery shows that out of twelve « French works » on Blake, four were published before 1920, two in the 1930s and 1940s, and no less than six in the 1920s alone. As for the French translations of the poet's work, seven were available in 1947, among which six were issued between 1923 and 1934. As the bibliography indicates, Blake is little known in France before the 1920s, even among the French cultural and literary intelligentsia. Whereas Blake managed from the 1860s to attract the attention of various British poets and critics such as Gilchrist, Rossetti or Swinburne, it took him more time to find a place in the French literary landscape. Although Joseph Milsand devoted a long essay to him in the Revue moderne in 1868, Blake did not become the center of much attention before the turn of the 20 th century. In 1900, Charles Grolleau was the first to translate a work by Blake, namely The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

  The Spanish mystics, especially St. John of the Cross, and his Ascent of Mt. Carmel.

	Baader are published, while a debate is devoted to Goethe on the hundredth anniversary of his
	death in 1932). Moreover, contemporary writers, who acknowledge their debt to Blake and
	other romantic predecessors, contribute to the magazine's neo-romanticism. Thus, as Jean-
	Michel Rabaté writes, Joyce develops an ambivalent relationship to romanticism and shows
	his interest and fascination with occultism, theosophy, and Blake's visionary powers 7 . Blake
	is also a central reference for Hart Crane, another major contributor to transition, whose
	aesthetic principles are very close to those of the magazine; Crane's correspondence and
	poetry such as White Building and The Bridge often mention Blake.
	The magazine's promotion of French surrealism, the major European avant-garde of
	the time and one that explicitly acknowledges its continuity with romanticism 8 , also explains
	why Blake features so prominently in transition. With about twenty-five surrealist writers,
	sixty literary and critical contributions, as well as numerous works of art, transition is the
	great Anglophone magazine of French surrealism. Of course, transition is not the first
	English-language magazine to publish surrealist productions. As early as 1921, The Little
	Review, based in Chicago and run by Margaret Anderson, offers poetry by Aragon and
	Soupault in French. But transition presents its readers with a quantity and a variety of
	Flemish and Rhenish mystics such as Ruysbroeck, Master Eckhart, Tauler, the
	Strasbourg Friends of God, etc.
	Boehme, Swedenborg, Blake. (…) 4
	Blake's work thus contributes to the creation of « vertigralism », but more
	importantly, it inspires transition's entire neo-romantic focus. When he assesses "Ten Years
	of transition" in the first issue of the Franco-American art magazine Plastique, which was
	published in Paris in 1938 and 1939, Jolas states: « This pan-romanticism [that of the
	atmosphere in which the magazine was born] has remained the principal line followed by
	transition during its decade of activity. » 5 Then, he writes in his autobiography: « I wanted to
	encourage the creation of a modern romanticism, a pan-romantic movement in literature and
	the arts. » 6 Indeed, most of the literary texts published in transition reveal a neo-romantic
	aesthetic whose outline eventually proves to be rather vague (as Jolas's mysterious « pan-
	romanticism » suggests), but which is nonetheless characterized by a desire to express the
	« self » and to set the imagination free. As we have seen, transition pays homage to Blake, but
	also salutes German romanticism and pre-romanticism (Hölderlin, Novalis, Jean Paul and von

  . » 10 Let's mention in passing that Blake's editorial fortunesor rather, misfortunesalso caused much ink to flow in the United States, even though his poetry, if only because it was in English, was much better known there than in France.In 1917, John Gould Fletcher wondered in an article written in Poetry for the publication of Fred E. Selections from the Symbolical Poems of William Blake: « When will the lovers of poetry and the students of Blake be given an adequate and a cheap edition of Vala -Blake's masterpiece? It is a disgrace to England and to America that nothing of the sort has been attempted. » 11 Gide did not stop at criticizing the terrible situation of Blake's work in France; he also took action by publishing a complete translation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in La NRF in August 1922 (Aveline reissued this translation the following year in volume form)12 . The introduction to this work, which is written by the translator, is somehowJanuary 1921, in André Gide and Jacques Rivière, Correspondance 1909-1925, ed. Pierre de Gaulmyn and Alain Rivière, Paris, Gallimard, 1998, 629. 11 John Gould Fletcher, « Yale Discovers Blake », Poetry, vol. IX, n°6, March 1917, 320 (the pagination is that of the reprint). 12 André Gide, Le Mariage du ciel etde l'enfer, La NRF, vol. XIX, n°107, August 1922, 129-47. The magazine Les Écrits nouveaux simultaneously published in its August-September 1922 issue some Songs of Innocence in French, without indicating the name of the translator. also shines. » 15 Interestingly, like Jolas in his October 1927 editorial « Enter the Imagination », Gide seems to reach Blake via another poète maudit who then held a considerable place in France, Lautréamont. Lautréamont, who died anonymously in 1870 at the age of 24, is the author of a single work, The Lay of Maldoror, published in 1869.Discovered in 1917 by Philippe Soupault, The Lay of Maldoror greatly influenced the surrealists who were as attracted to the work's extraordinary violence and poetic originality as they were to the mystery surrounding Lautréamont's life and character. The parallel between Lautréamont and Blake that Gide suggests clarifies the reasons for renewed interest in the British poet in a literary milieu that is heavily marked by surrealism and, more generally, by a certain neo-romanticism. In fact, the predominant areas where the French « Blake Revival » in the 1920s and 1930s took place were also the sites which promoted surrealism, and a neo-Blake's poetry is « all the more difficult because at first sight his work seems to suggest the quality of gentle, childlike simplicity. » 20 Writers such as Gide or Soupault were not the only responsibles for this renewed interest in Blake. Also, a wide range of little magazines open to foreign literatures and willing 15 « L'astre Blake étincelle dans cette reculée région du ciel où brille aussi l'astre Lautréamont. » André Gide, William Blake 1757-1827, catalogue of the 1947 exhibition organized in Paris by the British Council and the Galerie René Drouin, non-paginated. promote young contemporary writers as well as underestimated talents from past centuries played a prominent role. The « misunderstood messenger William Blake »21 thus found his place in Le Navire d'argent, the magazine that the famous bookseller of the rue de l'Odéon Adrienne Monnier distributed between June 1925 and May 1926. The fourth issue published in September 1925 presented the English poet in a greater literary landscape that Le Navire d'argent attempted to sketch. Indeed, in its short life, the magazine drew several panoramas of the foreign literature translated into French, starting with English literature in June 1925 and a solid bibliography entitled « From the Origins to the End of the Renaissance ». « Restauration and Classicism » (in the July issue), « The Survival of Classicism » (in August), and « Pre-Romanticism and Romanticism 1770-1832 » (in the September issue devoted to Blake) follow. The magazine's coverage over time and the diversity of documents in each issue both

	Pierce's romantic aesthetic.

time, Gide wrote about Blake: « It is a shame that in France we still hardly know anything about himsurprising; indeed, it suggests Gide's discriminating opinions of Blake's work. The French writer describes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as « the most significant and the least dense of the "prophetic books" of the great English mystic, who was at the same time a painter and a poet. »

13

Then, he articulates his interest in Blake with great tact: Swinburne was one of the firsts to point out its importance [that of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell]. Nothing was easier than picking the few sentences for the love of which I decided to translate it. Those careful enough may be able to discover them under the luxuriant foliage that protects them.

-But why giving the entire book? -Because I don't like stemless flowers.

14

Gide does not reveal the circumstances of his encounter or reencounter with Blake in the introduction to his translation, but he offers some indication in the 1947 Blake exhibition catalogue: « The Blake star twinkles in that remote region of the sky where the Lautréamont 10 « Il est honteux qu'en France on n'en connaisse encore à peu près rien. » Letter from Gide to Rivière, dated 6 13 « le plus significatif et le moins touffu des "livres prophétiques" du grand mystique anglais, à la fois peintre et poète. » André Gide, introduction to William Blake, Le Mariage du ciel et de l'enfer, Paris, Aveline, 1923, 9. 14 « Swinburne fut un des premiers à en signaler l'importance. Rien n'était plus aisé d'y cueillir les quelques phrases pour l'amour desquelles je décidai de la traduire. Quelques attentifs sauront peut-être les découvrir sous l'abondante frondaison qui les protège.

-Mais pourquoi donner le livre en entier ? -Parce que je n'aime pas les fleurs sans tige. » Ibid., 10. star One of Blake's most passionate defenders at the end of the 1920s in France is Philippe Soupault, the co-author, with André Breton, of The Magnetic Fields, the founding act of French surrealism in 1919. Philippe Soupault translated Songs of Innocence and Experience with his wife Marie-Louise in 1927

16

. A year later, he published William Blake, a biography distributed by the Parisian Rieder Press and reissued the same year in English by London publisher J. Lane. Blake's biography characterizes him as an exceptional being (he was not « a being of this world » 17 ), an idealist and solitary genius whose life and work cannot be separated. It is striking that Soupault repeatedly makes references to Blake's « simplicity », « purity », and « childishness »: as the French writer claims in his conclusion, the man who « preferred the company of children » 18 and worked « the stuff that dreams are made on, noble yet childlike » 19 developed an art both « simple » and « pure ». And, as he concludes, 16 Philippe Soupault, Chants d'expérience et d'innocence, Paris, Les Cahiers libres, 1927. An extract from this translation is published by La NRF

(vol. XXVI, n°152, May 1926, 537-42)

. 17 Philippe Soupault, William Blake, London, J. Lane, 1928, 10. Soupault will also write an introduction to the catalogue of the 1947 Blake exhibition held in Paris.

18

Ibid., 60.

19 Ibid., 58. 20 Ibid., 60.

to contribute to the eclecticism of Le Navire d'argent. Thus, the Blake special issue combines a selection of poems, a portrait of the poet, a previously unpublished drawing by the artist, as well as several essays written by prestigious personalities: Arthur Symons, Swinburne and Marcel Brion who, according to the editors, is the author of « an important and previously unpublished study on William Blake » 22 . But a close look at the 1920s and 1930s French magazines where Blake is given special attention reveals that such interest does not only spring from a common enthusiasm and curiosity that the little magazines' editors feel for the misunderstood genius. Indeed, Blake plays a particularly important role in the editorial policy of several neo-romantic magazines developing a specific interest in surrealism. transition is of course one of them, but we can also mention Les Cahiers du Sud, run from Marseilles by Jean Ballard and Le Grand Jeu, created in Paris by Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. Although Les Cahiers du Sud were founded in 1921, the magazine started gaining momentum only four years later, when it published almost all the surrealists (with the notable exception of Breton) as well as writers influenced by surrealism such as Michaux or Artaud. Marcel Brion, the long-time editor of the foreign literature column, published in February 1926 « Les Livres prophétiques de William Blake », a fragment from the larger essay already partially printed in Le Navire d'argent. In the fragment published in Les Cahiers du Sud, Brion discusses Tiriel, The Book of Thel, The 21 Charles Grolleau, « William Blake, Introduction », in William Blake, Le Mariage du ciel et de l'enfer, translation and introduction by Charles

Grolleau, Paris, Lucien Chamuel, 1900, 25. 22

Arthur Symons is the author of « La Place de William Blake » (« William Blake's Place »); Swinburne writes « Le Génie et la foi de William Blake » (« William Blake's Genius and Faith »); Marcel Brion « Vie de William Blake » (« William Blake's Life »).

  « Vous êtes le grand visionnaire de notre temps. William Blake seul peut vous être comparé. Car Rimbaud est moins profondément mystique, ses hallucinations sont d'un autre ordre. » Lettre de Saint-Georges de Bouhélier à Léon-Paul Fargue du25 février 1929, reproduite dans Louise Rypko Schub, Léon-Paul Fargue, Genève, Droz, 1973, 169.

  36 Although these circumstances opposed him, Lescure did shrink back: « We had no other choice but getting down to it, reading Blake, translating him and translating a few texts by British writers such as Geoffrey Keynes, Herbert Read and David Friedlander. »37 The issue eventually appeared with contributions from Jean Lescure, Jean Vagne, Jean Audard, Denis Saurat, Jean Wahl, Geoffrey Stutfield and Herbert Read.Gide's complete translation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in La NRF, Jean Lescure's acknowledged use of Blake in Messages, as well as transition's, Les Cahiers du Sud's and Le Grand Jeu's enthusiasm for the poet all point to Blake's unprecedented fame in 1920s and 1930s France. This renewed interest in Blake is not the result of mere chance: his spiritual and romantic poetry, his metaphysical quest and mystical impulses, the apocalyptic tone of his writings, as well as his image as a visionary and forgotten poète maudit resonate with the programs of many intellectuals whether French or based in France. Because these avant-gardes did not consider Blake's poetry and character per se, but in the light of their own 35 « On s'intéressait beaucoup aux poètes dont l'oeuvre pouvait passer pour présenter un aspect philosophique. William Blake était à la mode. Il ne paraissait pas d'article qui n'y fît référence. L'opérateur proposa donc à Walter Uhl de s'engager plus délibérément dans les voies encore mal explorées de sa poésie et de sa réflexion philosophique. Et puisqu'on parlait tant de William Blake alors qu'aucun ouvrage de lui ne se trouvait en librairie (où même la traduction de Gide du Mariage du ciel et de l'enfer était rare), l'opérateur se réjouit des explorations auxquelles il allait devoir se livrer, et l'outil des prouesses qu'allait réclamer de lui le premier numéro intitulé William Blake, simplement. » Jean Lescure, Poésie et liberté, Histoire deMessages 1939-1946, Paris, IMEC, 1998, 26. 36 « Il y avait de la facilité dans le choix de l'opérateur. Puisque tout le monde parlait de William Blake, rien ne , they reinterpreted the poet to the point that they sometimes misunderstood him, as was the case in transition.The interest and enthusiasm for Blake in the pages of transition shows in Marcel Brion's study, printed in part in December 1927, and, of course, in the dialogue the magazine offers with the poet in its famous June 1929 « Revolution of the Word » manifesto. Interestingly, both documents reveal a misinterpretation of the poet that sheds light on the meaning of Blake's rediscovery in 1920s and 1930s France.

devait être plus simple que de constituer un beau sommaire. Autre avantage de ce choix, c'est que l'opérateur ne connaissant à peu près personne de la république des Lettres, Blake, connu de tous, l'introduirait partout. Il fallut déchanter. Si tout le monde parlait de Blake, à peu près personne ne l'avait lu. Un peu d'attention aurait dû nous montrer que c'était toujours la même demi-douzaine de phrases qui en étaient citées. » Ibid., 27. 37 « Il ne nous restait plus qu'à nous y coller nous-mêmes, lire Blake, le traduire et traduire quelques textes d'auteurs anglais, Geoffrey Keynes, Herbert Read et David Friedlander. » Ibid., 28. aspirationsOn the hundredth anniversary of the poet's death, transition published under the title « William Blake Today » an excerpt from Marcel Brion's unpublished study. It is no surprise to find in this text the vision of the poet that already prevailed in Soupault's texts or in the minds of the Cahiers du Sud's editors. Brion's article, translated into English by editor Robert Sage, evokes « William Blake's exquisite naïveté and his ingenuousness in the company of men » (t9, 204), « the sincerity of his heart and the purity of his spirit » (t9, 205), his

  While Brion's study revealed a common misunderstanding of Blake in France in the 1920s and 1930s, the famous « Revolution of the Mot » manifesto added further evidence that his critics misread Blake. Probably written by Jolas 40 , the « Revolution of the Word » manifesto opened transition's issue n°16-17 in June 1929.

38

Robert Hillyer, « William Blake the Philosopher », The

Dial, vol. LXXVII, n°3, September 1924, 258. 39 Ibid., 259. 40

This is what Dougald McMillan indicates in Transition 1927-38, The History of a Literary Era, New York,

William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 25 April 1803, in The Letters of William Blake with Related Documents, ed. GeoffreyKeynes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980, 55. This extract is published without references in transition n°23,July 1935, 44.

« On a été trop horizontal, j'ai envie d'être vertical. » Léon-Paul Fargue, quoted without references in « Poetry is Vertical », t21, 148. A poet inspired by symbolism and desiring to escape the material world to reach the raptures of the cosmos,Léon-Paul Fargue (1876-1947) develops an aesthetic close to the Jolassian quest.

Eugene Jolas, Vertigralist Pamphlet, Paris, Transition Press, 1938, 8-9.

Eugene Jolas, « Ten Years of transition »,Plastique, n°1, Spring 1938, 23.

Eugene Jolas, Man from Babel, ed. Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold, New Haven and London, Yale UniversityPress, 1998, 93.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001,

8 « this romanticism (…) of which we agree, historically, to be considered today as the tail (...). » [« (…) ce romantisme dont nous voulons bien, historiquement, passer aujourd'hui pour la queue (…). » André Breton, Second Manifeste du surréalisme(1929), in OEuvres complètes, tome I, ed. Marguerite Bonnet, Paris, Gallimard, « bibliothèque de LaPléiade », 1988, 803. Two other major European avant-gardes discussed in transition, expressionism and dadaism, also show some continuity with romanticism. 9 Herbert Read, Surrealism, New York, Harcourt, 1936. Blake is also mentioned by Peter Quennell in a 1933 article for the New Statesman quoted by Paul C. Ray in The Surrealist Movement inEngland, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1971, 83.

As can be seen above, sobriety characterizes the whole document: published as a small poster, delicately framed with a double black line and accurately centered, the manifesto appeals to the eye by respecting traditional codes. The text itself is also carefully laid out: divided in twelve neatly numbered points evoking the twelve commandments, it is preceded by a short introduction and ends with the list of the signatories. The use of bold characters emphasizes this ternary construction: the twelve points are separated from the introductory paragraph, the list of the signatories as well as the quotations which come with the statements.

The form of this « proclamation » is thus characterized by a certain classicism which leads the reader to question its status: is this an avant-garde manifesto? Indeed, we are very far here from the typographic creativity of the dadaists or vorticists who turned the manifesto into the privileged expression of avant-gardism's symbolical violence. 41 The contents of the proclamation adds to this ambivalence. While the manifesto shows a certain continuity with surrealism (even though it also clearly breaks away from it, for example in statement n°2, or suggests further developments, in statements n°6 and 7), it also builds strong links with literary movements from the past, in particular with romanticism. The third statement is relevant: « Pure poetry is a lyrical absolute that seeks an a priori reality within ourselves alone. » (t16-17, 13) The supremacy of subjectivity is also established in statement n°10: « Time is a tyranny to be abolished. » (t16-17, 13) The eleventh statement follows the same line: « The writer expresses. He does not communicate. » (t16-17, 13) By asserting the primacy of the expressive function of language over its communicative one, transition places itself in a long literary and critical tradition, namely one that is marked by the work of German romantic Wilhelm von Humboldt and by the symbolist literary theories, of which strong echoes can be found in Valéry and more particulary in his 1928 « Propos sur la poésie » where he compares poetry with dancing and prose with walking 42 .

The contents of the manifesto thus reveal a certain propensity to continuity already suggested by the very form of the document. The first statement is a case in point: « The revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact. » (t16-17, 13) The authors of the manifesto include themselves in a tradition at the very moment when they proclaim a « revolution ». Although it came as a great shock at the time, the last statement does not suffice to dispel this tension. By stating « The plain reader be damned », transition certainly 41 See in particular Adrian Marino, « Le Manifeste », in Les Avant-Gardes littéraires au 20 e siècle, ed. Jean Weisberger, Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadó, 1986, vol. I, 825. 42 See in particular Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VII, Berlin, Prussia Academy, 1907, 44, translated and quoted by Tzvetan Todorov, Théories du symbole, Paris, Seuil, 1977, 206, and Paul Valéry, « Propos sur la poésie », Variété (1928), in OEuvres complètes, tome I, ed. Jean Hytier, Paris, Gallimard, « bibliothèque de La Pléiade », 1992, 1371. uses provocative language, but the idea is not new. In 1914, Pound was already writing in The Egoist: « Damn the man in the street, once and for all (...). » 43 But what reveals the manifesto's fundamental choice of continuity first and foremost are Blake's quotations, probably suggested by editor Stuart Gilbert 44 and scattered throughout the document. Indeed, six of the twelve statements are followed by a quotation from the English poet. A sort of dialogue thus takes place between the text of the manifesto itself and the long-dead poet.

Blake's omnipresence in this essential text is not, of course, the result of mere chance. First, Blake is a romantic. His interest in occultism and the Apocalypse, his reject of reason as well as his passion for the myth of Albion strongly link him to the magazine. Moreover, as we have seen, Blake is given special attention in France at the time when the manifesto is written.

All Blake quotations in the « Revolution of the Word » manifesto are taken from his « Proverbs from Hell ». As a genre, the proverb is a form of popular and cautious wisdom. But Blake's proverbs reverse this essential characteristic to advocate dissenssion. « The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom… » (t16-17, 13) « The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction... » (t16-17, 13) Thus, the manifesto's ambivalence, between revolution and continuity, shows not only in the form and the text of the proclamation, but also in the Blakean subtext. However, the « Proverbs from Hell » do not coincide with the manifesto; on the contrary, they are its inverted image: whereas the "Revolution of the Word" uses a revolutionary genre (the manifesto) to advocate continuity, Blake uses a conservative form (the proverb) to prone revolution. While highlighting common interests in the power of imagination and contributing to Blake's institutionalization as an established poet, transition's use of Blake adds to the magazine's complex relationship to revolution and continuity and reveals a deep misunderstanding of the poet's radical spirit. Ultimately, Blake's ambivalent status, as both an intellectual guarantee from the past and a recently discovered poète maudit, contributes to the manifesto's main dialectic between revolution and continuity. Blake's presence in transition magazine allows to better understand the modalities of a wider « Blake Revival » in the France of the 1920s and 1930s. The interest of contemporary intellectuals in the English poet mainly derives from the neo-romantic quest of the main European avant-gardes, among which surrealism plays a particular role. Blake's apocalyptic discourse, his interest in childhood, madness and the dream, as well as his image of a solitary and misunderstood genius, which echoes that of another poète maudit « discovered » by the 43 Ezra Pound, « Wyndham Lewis », The Egoist, vol. I, n°15, 15 June 1914, 233. 44 The information is given by Dougald McMillan, idem.

surrealists, Lautréamont, resonate with the expectations and concerns of a great part of the intelligentsia traumatized by the cataclysm of WW1 and the prospect of a new carnage. Blake's rereading thus takes place in a highly sensitive historical and cultural context, which may account in part for the serious errors made in interpretations of his poetry. Marcel Brion's article in the December 1927 issue of transition, as well as the « dialogue » between the poet and the magazine's editors in the famous « Revolution of the Word » manifesto in June 1929 suggest the extent of the ignorance of Blake's work and shed light on the misunderstandings of his poetry. Blake's rediscovery in 1920s and 1930s thus does not do justice to the poet; but maybe more importantly it does contribute to publicizing an heretofore little-known work and celebrating, even though partially, a poet who had largely fallen into oblivion at the time.


Clutch size, egg survival and migration distance in the agile frog (Rana dalmatina

in a floodplain

Introduction

In animals with complex life cycles, migration from one life habitat to another represents a cost with respect to both energetics and survival. Evolution of complex life cycles supposes this cost to be balanced by optimum fit of each life stage with its particular habitat, a more specialized ecological niche providing better growth and better survival [START_REF] Istock | The evolution of complex life cycle phenomena: an ecological perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Wassersug R | The evolution of anuran life cycles[END_REF][START_REF] Slade | On the evolution of complex life cycles[END_REF][START_REF] Slade | On the evolution of complex life cycles[END_REF]Wilbur, 1980). As a consequence, variation in the cost of migration is expected to influence population viability and the evolution of complex cycles. Because the modification of connectivity by human activities can contribute to sudden increase of the cost of migration, this problem of evolutionary biology appears also to be relevant in conservation ecology.

Most holartic anurans show a complex life cycle, with adults migrating from terrestrial towards aquatic habitats where they spawn and where larvae develop. While migrating, these animals have to cross environments which provide neither trophic resource nor high safety against predation. One can expected to be balanced by reproduction success in the site where breeding occurs.

In the holartic zone, such a complex life cycle with migration occurs in numerous species inhabiting forests. In the ponds located within forested areas, dead-leaf accumulation and shade induce hypoxia and low productivity [START_REF] Williams | The zoology of temporary waters[END_REF]. Conditions for tadpole development are then less favourable in these undergrowth aquatic sites than in sites in open environments. In fluvial forests that line the river, the presence of predatory fishes is more likely in undergrowth sites act as selective pressures which determine the species to breed in sites located outside the forested area.

Migration distance may be assumed to result in a trade-off between the cost of crossing non-habitats and the gain provided by the openness of the environment surrounding the breeding site. Because locomotory performances of an individual are generally related to its size [START_REF] Peters R | The ecological implications of body size[END_REF], the largest individuals are expected to breed in sites that are most distant from the fluvial forest.

Because of the patchy distribution of habitat types,the floodplains of large rivers represent a suitable environment for such a study (Townsend,1989[START_REF] Petts | Fluvial hydrosystems[END_REF]. The fluvial forest is inhabited by several anuran species (Joly, 1992). These species can breed either remaining within their terrestrial habitat and spawning in undergrowth ponds, or after migrating towards ponds located outside the forest in the open environment.

In this respect, Rana dalmatina is the most common brown frog inhabiting the alluvial forest of the Mid-Rhône floodplain [START_REF] Morand | Theoretical habitat templets, species traits, and species richeness: amphibians in the Upper-Rhône floodplain. -Freshwat[END_REF][START_REF] Morand | Habitat variability and space utilization by the amphibian communities of the French Upper-Rhône floodplain[END_REF][START_REF] Morand | Dynamique de la coexistence des espèces: de la théorie des perturbations à la théorie des traits d'histoire de vie. L'exemple du modèle amphibien dans l'[END_REF]. Its life cycle corresponds to the aim of this study, which is to test the hypothesis of a relationship between body size and distance of the breeding site from the forest [START_REF] Wederkinch | Polulation size, migration barriers and other observations of Rana dalmatina populations near Køge, Zeeland, Denmark[END_REF]. This study took place in the Lavours Marsh which is one of the largest fluvial marshes remaining in Western Europe. In this marsh,the aquatic sites were sampled in order to account for variation in substratum (alluvium or peat) which may act as confounding factor.

Material and method

Study site

The Lavours Marsh is located 70Km downstream from Geneva. It occupies a 1200 ha hallow between the Rivers Rhône and Seran just upstream from their confluence. The marsh originated in a post-glacial lake progressively filled with sediment. Water flow from the rivers to the marsh was checked by man-made embankments, mainly erected during the XIXth century. The marsh is now overflowed only in decennial floods. Whereas the floods have formed two side bars, mostly occupied by fluvial forest, the central zone of the mash is filled with peat, where the water table is level with the peat surface. The fluvial forest is characterized by Almus glutinosa, Acer campestre and Fraxinus excelsior. The peat-bog is occupied by Schoenus nigricans, Carex elata, Molinia caerulea and Cladium marscus. Detailed ecological descriptions of the Lavours Marsh are given in Ain & Pautou (1969), [START_REF] Bravard | Le Rhône, du Léman à Lyon -La Mnufacture[END_REF] and [START_REF] Pautou | Dynamique de la végétation et gestion de la réserve naturelle du marais de Lavours (Ain)[END_REF].

The ponds studied are located in the western part of the marsh near the Seran river ; this zone is managed as a natural reserve. Based on both substratum and openness of surroundings, the ponds studied belong to three types : alluvium and undergrowth (4 sites), peat and undergrowth (3 sites), peat and open surroundings (5 sites).

Egg number and survival

During the breeding periode of the first year (1994) of the study, 64 clutches were monitored in 12 ponds including representatives of the three habitat sites. Egg number was estimated by measuring the volume of each batch in a test tube. The relationship between egg number and batch volume was drawn from counting the egg in 30 batches. Eggs were counted by laying down the batch on the square-ruled bottom of a tank. The location of each batch in the pond was noted as one of three modalities : resting on the bottom, hangig under water from a support, or floating. Before hatching, egg survival in each batch was estimated by counting degenarative embryos.

Clutch size, female size and distance of site to the forest During the second year (1995), 28 ponds were sampled according to their distance to the forest and were checked for clutches. Area, depth, substrate and distance to forest were measurd. In these sites, 107 egg batches were collected and their volme estimated as previously described. In this study, because egg number is closely related to female body size in ranids [START_REF] Salthe | Quantitative constraints associated with reproductive modes in anurans[END_REF][START_REF] Cummins | Temporal and spatial variation in egg size and fecundity in Rana temporaria[END_REF][START_REF]Variation in size and fecundity between neighbouring populations in the common frog, Rana temporaria[END_REF], it is used as an indicator of female size.

Results

The volum (V) of 30 btchesvaried from 200 to 700ml (mean : 382 ± 26ml). Egg numbers (N) varied from 526 to 2086 eggs. These data fit the linear model N=2.35V+127.45 (r 2 = 0.81, p<0.0001). This model is very close to that found by Waringer-Löschenkohl (1991) in the same species (N=2.25V+134.97 ; n=10). It will be used hereafter for estimating egg number.

Clutch size did not vary significantly among the three habitat types (table 1) (ANOVA on clutch volume : p =0.10), nor did egg number of each clutch vary according to oviposition location (on the bottom : n=1007 ± 107 ; hangig 929 ± 81 ; floating : 888± 75 ; ANOVA, p=0.6). Egg survival varied significantly among habitat types (χ 2 =5673, p<0.0001) (table 2). Whereasit reached 100% in alluvium sites, egg survival varied from 66% to 100% in peat sites. In these sites, egg survival was significantly related to laying position with lower survival in batches resting on the bottom (67.7%) than in floating batches (86.1%) or hanging batches (88.1%) (χ 2 ; p<0.0001). The relationship between clutch size and adult migration distance was studied during the second year. Most of the batches (75%) were censused in open fields within 100m from the forest border. Batch density reached a maximum (1 batch per 4m 2 ) in sites located from 50 to 80m from the forest and lowest values (1 batch per 20m 2 ) for distances exceeding 100m (fig. 1). Clutch size was related to distance from the forest. Whereas the smallest batches were mainly recorded in sites within 100m (72.7% of >600ml batches ; n=20). Batches with inermediate size distributed on both sids of a 100m distance from the forest (59.4% of batches between 300 and 600ml in sites within 100m distance ; n=34) (fig. 1). This variation in batch distribution related to size was highly significant (χ 2 ; p<0.0001). Because egg number is strongly related to female size in ranids [START_REF] Salthe | Quantitative constraints associated with reproductive modes in anurans[END_REF][START_REF] Cummins | Temporal and spatial variation in egg size and fecundity in Rana temporaria[END_REF][START_REF]Variation in size and fecundity between neighbouring populations in the common frog, Rana temporaria[END_REF], migrations were longer in larger females than in smaller females (mean distance = 40.8±9.6m for batches<300ml) and led them to the most distant sites from the forest (mean distance 171±26m for batches > 600ml). Migration distances were intermediate for medium-size females (mean distance = 115.0±19.8m for batches from 300 to 600ml).

Discussion

As expected, most frogs spawned outside the undergrowth. This result confirms the former study of [START_REF] Wederkinch | Polulation size, migration barriers and other observations of Rana dalmatina populations near Køge, Zeeland, Denmark[END_REF], which showed that in an agricultural zone most eggclutches were laid within a 200m distance from the forest. However, in the present study, the distance covered by the larger females was greater than covered by the smaller ones.

Avoiding spawning in the undergrowth presents several advantages. Our results show that the presence of fish in pond is indeed more frequent within the fluvial forest where floods occur more often. Fish are among the most efficient predators of tadpoles (Semlitsch & Gibbons, 1988). The highest batch densities were recorded in a zone 50-100m from the forest border, just outsite the one where fish occurred. On the other hand, despite the lack of measures of oxygen concentration and algual productivity, we can assume that the accumulation of organic mater (dead leaves, dead wood) together with the shading in undergrowth ponds are causes for less food and less oxygen in thses sites than in the open environment.

However, the relationship between migration distance and frog size cannot be explained only by the probability of fish occurrence and variation in productivity. If we reasonably accept that medium-sized frogs can travel the minimum distance for reaching the suitable sites closest to the forest border, an optimality model would predict that the largest-sized frogs should also spawn in these closest sites (fig. 2A). Because this expectation was not validated, the model must be modified by incorporating a negative impact of tadpole density on habitat quality (fig. 2B). The negative effect of density on tadpole growth has been demonstrated in numerous studies [START_REF] Wilbur | Density-dependant aspects of growth and metamorphosis in Bufo americanus[END_REF][START_REF] Travis | Anuran size at metamorphosis: experimental test of a model based on intraspecific competition[END_REF][START_REF] Mahapatro | Density effect on growth and metamorphosis of Bufo stomaticus larvae[END_REF]Tejedo & Reques, 1992) and we can expect that reproductive success of a female is inversely related to density of tadpoles in the spawning site. Tadpole density is expected to reach its highest level in the sites closest to the forest border. This second model shows how such a decrease of medium-sized and large-sized frogs. Tadpole density and migration distance are expected to interact in sharing the decrease in habitat quality as show in Fig. 2C, thus separating the optimum migration distances for the three size classes. Fig. 2. Graphical optimization models explaining the relationship between migration distance and body size (expressed by clutch size). The model considers that habitat quality, and consequently expected fitness gain, increase with the distance to forest border until a limit beyond which habitat quality remains constant. Before reaching this limit, habitat quality is altered by accumulation of dead leaves, forest shade, and predation by fish. Migration potential represents the energetic investment in movement and mortality risk associated with movement. It is assumed to decrease linearly with the distance covered. The potential is higher in large-sized frogs because of higher movement capacity in largesized animals. The optimum migration distance is the shortest migration distance maximizing the trade of between migration cost and gain in reproduction. In A, the optimum distance is similar in medium-size (O m ) and large-sized (O l ) frogs. In B, habitat quality is assumed to be altered by high tadpole density at the optimum distance estimated in A. As a consequence, optimum migration distances of medium-sized and large-sized frogs diverge. In C, interactions of tadpole density an migration constraints share the impact of density on the habitat quality curve (shaded area), defining new migration distance optima for each size class (O s : optimum for the small-size frogs). If such graphical models are useful in identifying testable hypotheses, models using evolutionary stable strategy 5ESS) would predict more formally the fitness equilibrum under both constraints of tadpole density and migration distance.

If we expect a better survival and better growth rate of tadpoles in ponds far away from the forest border, a problem remains in the higher cost of the migration of the juveniles towards the forest than in closer sites. No data are available to evaluate such a cost, and we can assume that the benefits from growing in low density sites, such as reaching a greater body size than in high density sites, compensate for migration cost.

In contrast with these expectations, egg survival was lowest in the ponds furthest from the forest. We hypothesize that the peat substratum of these sites explains such mortality, because mortality was highest when the eggs were in contact with the peat. In single batches, only the lower eggs which were in direct contact with peat died. In this context, the spawning behaviour of the agile frogs that hung up their batches on midwater supports (stems, branches) proved to be adaptive. However, within the peat-bog of the Lavours Marsh, the ponds were not sufficiently deep to avoid contact of the batches hung up with the bottom. As a consequence, egg mortality was relatively high in these shallow sites (the mean depth where batches were laid was 25cm in the study of [START_REF] Kecskes | Spawning preference of the agile frog, Rana dalmatina[END_REF]. This result does not agree with the former conclusion according to which the frogs would benefit from spawning outside the fluvial forest. However, a conclusion to the advantage of migration would require a measure of tadpole growth and survival in the ponds where the frogs spawn. On the other hand, the presence of a large peat marsh in the vicinity of a fluvial forest is not very common in alluvial floodplains. More often ponds are the remnants of former channels and their bottom is made of alluvium rather than of peat.

Another difficulty results in disagreement between the hypothesis of optimization of migration distance and the hypotheses of philopatry or of site fidelity which are commonly accepted. However, philopatry still remains a matter of debate, because this concept has never been validated unequivocally in amphibians. Site fidelity has been experimentally evidenced only in few species [START_REF] Miaud | Fidelity to the breeding site in the Alpine newt Triturus alpestris[END_REF][START_REF] Sinsch | Sex-biassed site fidelity and orientation behaviour in reproductive natterjack toads (Bufo calamita)[END_REF] and nomadic behaviour has also been demonstrated in other species [START_REF] Fog | Migration in the tree frog Hyla arborea[END_REF]. Site fidelity is expected to occur in iteroparous species in which migration mechanisms can use information gathered from previous reproductive events. In species where most individuals breed only once, such as Rana dalmatina (Guarino et al., 1995), other criteria than previous experience may prevail in migration guidance. On the other hand, despite an indeterminate growth, a positive relationship between age and body size has never been evidenced in frogs of the genus Rana [START_REF] Gibbons | The reproductive output of frogs Rana temporaria L. with particular reference to body size and age[END_REF][START_REF] Augert | Variations de la structure démographique de populations voisines de grenouilles rousses (Rana temporaria L[END_REF]. As a consequence, a larger body size does not suggest a previous experience of breeding migration.

The agile frog has been listed as an endangered species in Appendix II of the Bern Convention. This study contributes to the conservation ecology of this species in demonstrating the necessity of preserving together the fluvial forest and the ponds located within several hundred metres from the forest. Moreover, migration success needs high connectivity between ponds and forest. When ponds are lacking, they can be restored by dredging provided a surficient connectivity with the forest is established.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Top : Relationship between batch density and distance to the forest. Black dots : fishless sites ; open dots : sites with fish. Circles : sites in alluvium ; squares : sites in peat. Bottom : distribution of batch numbers in relation with both batch size and distance to the forest.

  Arch.Hydrobiol., 142 (3), 343-352, June 1998

  Arch.Hydrobiol., 142 (3), 343-352, June 1998

Table 1 .

 1 Mean clutch size according to habitat type

	Habitat type	Number of	Mean clutch size	Estimated egg
		clutches	(ml)	number
	Alluvium and	21	315.7± 27.8	822.8± 59.1
	undergrowth
	Peat and	15	322.0± 18.3	842.4± 57.8
	undergrowth
	Peat and open field	28	406.0± 38.8	1066± 97.2

Arch.Hydrobiol., 142 (3), 343-352, June 1998

Table 2 .

 2 Relationship between survival and both habitat type and oviposition location.

	Habitat type	Batch location	N batches	Survival
	Undergrowth, alluvium	On the bottom	0	-
		hanging	3	100
		floating	18	100
	Undergrowth, peat	On the bottom	3	82.0± 1.3
		hanging	6	91.7± 3.8
		floating	6	100
	Open surrounding, peat	On the bottom	16	65.6± 9.2
		hanging	7	85.7± 12.7
		floating	5	73.0± 13.9

Arch.Hydrobiol., 142 (3), 343-352, June 1998


The "Moderns" and the Formation of an American Political Avant-Garde at the Turn of the 1920s and 1930s (transition, New Masses, Contact)

Céline Mansanti

Université de Picardie Jules Verne

In his book published in 1996, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, Michael Denning delineates three groups of intellectuals who participate in the formation of a proletarian avant-garde in the United States at the end of the 1920s and through the 1930s. These groups are the "plebeians" (such as Mike Gold, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, or Clifford Odets), the "immigrates" (like Fritz Lang, Bertolt Brecht, André Breton or Philip Rahv) and the previous generation of the "moderns", i.e. "the artists whose careers had begun under the sign of an oppositional European modernism, the "exiles" who returned." 1 (and we can think of Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson or Langston Hughes, among many others).

I would like to shed light on the role of these "moderns" in the formation of a distinctly American political avant-garde, by visiting three magazines that I will argue encapsulate three major moments of this collective history.

The first magazine I will evoke is transition, the American exile magazine published in Paris between 1927 and 1938 by poet and journalist Eugene Jolas. I will try to show that transition reveals an acute crisis for the moderns, partly because Europe no longer meets the exiles' expectations while the United States is still considered as synonymous with puritanism, conformism, and materialism. The second magazine I will deal with is New Masses. New Masses, I will argue, gathers during its first years many of the "exiles who returned" and crystallizes in this way a physical and symbolical return to the United States marked by open political commitment and party affiliation. I will then focus on the second series of Contact, also published in New York and edited in 1932 by William Carlos Williams, Robert McAlmon and Nathanael West. Contact constitutes a third moment in this collective history of the moderns, a moment characterized by the notion that literature alone is 1 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, London and New York, Verso, 1996, 121. able to express political commitment, inasmuch as "great poetry" involves for Williams "contact with a vulgar world"2 . I am not suggesting here that all moderns went from transition to New Masses and then Contact, or even that there is a strict chronological or intellectual progression from one magazine to another. These magazines overlapped, partially at least, they did not share exactly the same contributors, and even more importantly they had larger perspectives than the ones I am going to focus on.

1927, the year when transition started publication in Paris, represents a turning point for the American exiles, since it is the year when the American community in Paris peaked at 40, 000. What could appear at first as the mere happy continuation of a trend initiated at the beginning of the 1920s, when the Americans started sailing massively to Europe, turns out to be the symptom of a deep crisis. In an essay written in 1931 for Scribner's Magazine, F. S.

Fitzgerald writes: "by 1928 Paris had grown suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans spewed up by the boom the quality fell off, until toward the end there was something sinister about the crazy boatloads."3 Times have changed, and expatriation to Europe, once considered as a joyous and sane avant-garde rebellion against the Prohibition, has become somehow "sinister" and "crazy". But what most probably is truly sinister at the time is not the crazy boatloads themselves, as Fitzgerald confusedly suggests, but the apocalyptic atmosphere that prevails in Europe. Even transition, the last important exile magazine of its time, and one that globally keeps on celebrating Europe when no other magazine does anymore, starts suggesting that the old continent is dying. To take just one example, in the Fall of 1928, Jolas asks in a questionnaire entitled "Why do Americans live in Europe?": "How do you envisage the spiritual future of America in the face of a dying Europe (...)?" 4 This apocalyptic undertone reveals the impact on Jolas, but also on the Anglo-American intelligentsia at large, of Oswald Spengler's best-seller The Decline of the West.

The Decline of the West, interestingly, was first published in German between 1916 and 1920, but it was only translated into English between 1926 and 1928, taking on at the time new significance. The Decline of the West at the end of the 1920s of course resonates with the painful memory of WW1, but it also comes to crystallize present-day uneasiness, which for the intellectuals based in Europe, partly derived from the disintegration of the historical avantgardes. What we have at the end of the 1920s is in fact a double crisis. The United States is still considered as synonymous with puritanism, conformism and materialism, in the wake of Harold Stearn's 1922 landmark study, Civilization in the United States, which, according to critics, "inspired many dissatisfied young Americans to go abroad"5 . This negative outlook on the U. S. is very clear in the editorials published in transition. The first anniversary editorial of transition in March 1928 is a case in point: "We are disappointed to find the creative vision at such a low ebb in North America. Where are the college men, the obscure amateurs, the cynics, the rebels, the gadflies? Where are the poets? Where are the weavers of legends?" 6 The U. S. is still seen in a negative light, but Europe is not considered as a solution anymore.

There is a double bind here which is best exemplified in transition by a manifesto entitled "New York: 1928". In January 1928, Matthew Josephson, Kenneth Burke, William Slater Brown, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Myron Coates and Nathan Asch gather in a Broadway hotel to write up an eclectic manifesto denouncing both the materialism of the United States and the exiles' pretentiousness and supposed lack of virility. Among other texts, the first two poems of the manifesto were written by William Slater Brown, the third one is by Malcolm Cowley: The other text I would like to quote is about Americans at home, and it is equally sarcastic.

Entitled "SHE BOUGHT THE WRONG BOOK!", it is anonymous:

The evening was over. And she knew that what she had intended to be a brilliant success, not only for herself, but for her husband, had turned out a dismal failure. To be sure, John's boss had comeboth Mr. Cartwright and his wife had been there. The dinner had been perfect. But afterwards, when the conversation shifted to CULTURE, her humiliation had been complete.

For SHE HAD BOUGHT THE WRONG BOOK. There on the table lay the offending volume, written by a nobodywhereas not only Mr. Cartwright and his wife, but also the other men from the office (clerks getting the same salary as John himself) had read a different book.

For every one of them, except John and his wife, subscribed to the BOOK OF THE YEAR ASSOCIATION. They had bought the right book. 8

Even though both the aestheticism of the exiles and the materialism of the United States are equally ridiculed, the conclusion of the manifesto calls for a return to the United States.

We may become centurions of Soap for a time, pro-consuls of hydro-electricity; we may sing before the microphone; dance before the television box. A period of training, a phase of discipline will elapse, and in the end the force of mind will leaven this society which has known only material preoccupations. 9

It is not clear in this conclusion to which extent materialism and mass culture should be accepted, but the authors of this manifesto seem confident that the society can be reformed, and interestingly, whether it be Josephson, Cowley, William Slater Brown, Kenneth Burke or Nathan Asch, all of them will shortly afterwards turn to communism. What I am suggesting here is that the moderns' political commitment in the United States is going to be a way out of the double bind I was mentioning earlier. This is not to say that the moderns discover political The transition between the two magazines is all the easier for the contributors since transition and New Masses do not consider each other as enemies, at least until 1929; on the contrary, they read, respect and even admire each other, with transition periodically quoting and discussing New Masses, while New Masses pays homage to transition's constant enthusiasm and bold editorial choices. 1929 marks a break in the friendly relationships between the two magazines, with transition ironically reacting to New Masses' rampant criticism that the exiles and their literature are effeminate:

The new artist of Mr Gold's is going to hop out of his cot in the morning full of vigor, don his work-stained clothes and dash off to the job to work shoulder to shoulder with other Reds who are doing big vital things, things that count. At night he will return reeking with sweat, heavy with fatigue, but happily drunk with inspiration. He will sit down at his bare table and, writing at top speed, turn out page after page of virile lyric literaturethe real stuff. His words will come straight from the guts and he will scorn that attention to form and polish that those dilettantes over in Paris think so important. Here, says Mr Gold, is the future artist of America, the coming Jack London or Walt Whitman! 12

From then on, the relationship between both magazines only worsens, with New Masses like a bourgeois intellectual observer" and looked forward to a time when the New Masses' board of contributing editors, who were "vague, rootless people known as writers", would be replaced by "a staff of industrial correspondents"" 17 . With the magazine's official affiliation to the communist party in 1930, Gold's editorial line only became more rigid. In a 1932 issue, a short story by Meridel Lesueur, entitled "Women on the Breadlines", is followed by an "Editorial Note" in which an ideological standard for literary contributions to New Masses is implicitly defined :

reacting
This presentation of the plight of the unemployed woman, able as it is, and informative, is defeatest in attitude, lacking in revolutionary spirit and direction which characterize the usual contribution to New Masses. We feel it our duty to add, that there is a place for the unemployed woman, as well as man, in the ranks of the unemployed councils and in all branches of the organized revolutionary movement. Fight for your class, read The Working Woman, join the Communist Party. 18

In the light of such a comment, one can only assume that the next step into this aggressive editorial policy might have been sheer censorship. This editorial note is also stimulating in the light of Denning's thesis. In The Cultural Front, Denning brilliantly goes against the idea that the Popular Front was all politics and no art. He shows on the contrary that the art and literature of the 1930s were a continuation of historical modernism, and he suggests that the prevailing notion that the 1930s was the era of social realism is mainly a product of the 1960s and 1970s, and in particular of William Stott's very influential 1973 study, entitled "Documentary Expression and Thirties America." Much as I admire Denning's very convincing demonstration, I think, in the light of this editorial note in particular, that he tries a little too hard to rehabilitate Mike Gold, by introducing us only to the "good guy" who was friends with Dos Passos and Hughes, who was aware of William Carlos Williams' value for proletarian literature, and who was instrumental in creating a new form of writing that Denning calls the ghetto pastoral. In fact, as early as the end of the 1920s, Gold is criticized for his conception of the relationships between literature and politics. This criticism is demonstrated by the transition's editorial in 1929, where the editor makes fun of Gold's new proletarian writer, and is further developed by V. F. Calverton, the communist editor in chief of the Modern Quarterly, in a 1931 essay opening the first issue of The Left, and entitled "The Need for Revolutionary Criticism". In this essay, Calverton, who was a communist, and who was also deeply concerned with literary criticism, regrets the way Gold analyzed Thornton 17 Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, idem. First internal quote by Michael Gold, "Go Left, Young Writers", New Masses, January 1929, 3; following internal quotes by Michael Gold, "A New Program for Writers", New Masses, January 1930, 21. 18 Michael Gold, "Editorial Note", New Masses, January 1932, 7.

Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Calverton writes: "the literary qualities involved in Wilder's novels are scarcely touched upon at all. Mr Gold's criticism consequently is moral criticism, with a social emphasis (...)" 19 . Calverton adds: "Eisenstein's and Pudovkin's films are great not because they are Communistthere are many Communist films that are not greatbut because they are great first in their formal organization, and then greater still because of the social purpose which they serve." 20

This line of thought is carried on in William Carlos Williams' second series of Contact magazine in 1932. Contact should not be seen as a historical continuation of New Masses, if only because the two magazines usually do not share the same contributors; but from a critical perspective, Contact represents an alternative to New Masses, especially on the question of the relationships between literature and politics. Williams is even more radical than Calverton who said that a film is great first because of its formal organization, and then because of its ideological contents. For Williams, there is no possible division between form and contents.

The editorial line of Contact is based on the idea that the spirit of American writing is "contact with a vulgar world" 21 , and this broad political message works both for form and content, as the excellent contributions of the first issue suggest.

Ben Hecht, S. J. Perelman, who were both scriptwriters, Charles Reznikoff, Diego Rivera, Nathanael West and Williams himself work on closer "contact with a vulgar world", through content and form. With Reznikoff's supposedly historical testimonies made by slaves and southerners, Contact challenges the notion that American history is an oxymoron per se.

The magazine also pays "serious" attention to mass culture 22 , and I am thinking here of Diego Rivera's essay on "Mickey Mouse and American Art", whose clear-cut, positive statements on mass culture sharply contrast with transition's ambivalent position on the subject in "New York: 1928". Contact also considers experimental ways of writing mass culture, for example with S. J. Perelman's collage scenario taking place in a movie production office. In almost all contributions, "contact with a vulgar world" is also established through a recurring conception of violence as a truly American theme and writing form, thanks to the use of a vernacular and "virile" 23 language. Violence is even theorized as America's "idiomatic" 24 expression in 19 V. F. Calverton, "The Need for Revolutionary Criticism", The Left, n°1, Spring 1931, 8. 20 Ibid., 9. 21 William Carlos Williams, "Comment", Contact, vol. I, n°3, October 1932, 131. 22 According to Rivera, those things "are not taken seriously, not even by those who make them." Diego Rivera, "Mickey Mouse and American Art", Contact, vol. I, n°1, February 1932, 37. 23 See in particular William Carlos Williams' introductive note to his bibliography on "The Advance Guard Magazine": "The great national monthlies, under which heading all commercial magazines may well be grouped, I cannot swallow the half-alive poetry which knows nothing of totality. It is one of the reasons to welcome communism. Never, may it be said, has there ever been great poetry that was not born out of a communist intelligence.They have all been rebels, against nothing so much as scism that would have the spirit a lop sided affair of high and low. The unchristian sweep of Shakespeare, the cantless, unsectarian bitterness of Dante against his time, this is what is best in communism. The same for the words of St. Francis. The spirit is one. It is also one with the imagination. It will not down nor speak its piece to please, not even to please "communism". Nothing is beyond poetry. (...) 27 have had at least this virtue that by the disgust they occasioned in certain minds they stimulated the writing of more virile stuff than they could find it convenient to publish." (Contact, vol. I, n°1, February 1932, 86). 24 "In America violence is idiomatic." Nathanael West, "Some Notes on Violence", Contact, vol. transition, New Masses and Contact encapsulate three different conceptions of the relationship between literature and politics. transition is mostly apolitical and clearly chooses a revolution of the word over a revolution of the world; New Masses carries two separate agendas, literature on the one hand, and politics on the other hand, until politics eventually prevails on literature; Contact on the contrary intertwines the two notions in an almost organic way. Moreover, all three magazines reveal that the political avant-garde developing at the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s in the U. S. seems to take shape in reaction to Europe and as a means of building a specifically American identity. This is clear in the "New York: 1928" manifesto, as well as in the shift of many intellectuals from transition to New Masses, but it is also visible in Contact's aggressive subtitle and slogan. What is also interesting is that both New Masses and Contact partially define this Americaness through a common concern for mass culture and "virility", against transition's editorial line. In the final analysis though, these oppositions are not as clear-cut as they first seem to be. I have mentioned New Masses' interest in transition, at least until 1929. Similarly, Contact does use the European compass, and Parker Tyler's poem, or Perelman's scenario or Cummings' poems in the first issue of the magazine are evidence of this. Eventually, the exiles' European experience in the 1920s is not just a foil to their American political adventure in the 1930s: there is on the contrary between both avant-gardes a thread that speaks for the value of cultural exchanges.

  Though a few had ties to the Greenwich Village radicalism of the Masses, most of the moderns were apolitical. If they were critical of the commercialism and Babbittry of US culture, their alienation was expressed in expatriation to Europe and avant-garde formal experiment. The turning point came in the late 1920s" 10 , with the execution of Sacco and New Masses, founded in New York in 1926, at least four years before the bulk of the proletarian magazines of its generation, attracted an important number of the moderns and in particular of the exiles who used to contribute to European-based magazines, such as of course transition, but also Broom, Secession or the transatlantic review. Among the moderns who move physically and/or symbolically from Europe to the United States, from interest in the European avant-gardes to political commitment in the United States, from exile magazines to committed magazines back home, and, in many cases, from transition to New Masses, one can think for example of Matthew Josephson, Malcolm Cowley, John Herrmann, Josephine Herbst, Herman Spector, Norman Macleod, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Fearing, Louis Lozowick, William Slater Brown, Sherwood Anderson, James Agee, Stanley Burnshaw, Bob The continent is well able to take care of itself, but America needs help." 11 transition will never forget Europe, and New Masses will take care of America.

	Vanzetti in 1927, or the 1929 crash. There is a marked turning point in those years 1927-
	1928-1929, which correspond both to a growing cultural and political uneasiness towards
	Europe and to the emergence of massive political awareness in the United States.

commitment only at the end of the 1920sif only because the Masses or the Liberator date back to the 1910sbut it is in this moment at the end of the 1920s that political commitment takes on a new dimension among American intellectuals that eventually allows it to become the basis for a new avant-garde. In this respect I totally agree with Michael Denning who writes that: "8 Ibid., 94. 9 Ibid., 102.

10 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, op. cit., 59.

Brown, Isidor Schneider, Alfred Kreymborg, Katherine Ann Porter, William Closson Emory, Bernard Smith, and many others. The editorial board of the first issues of New Masses also suggests the extent to which the magazine crystallizes a revolution in the intellectual landscape of the United States. Among the first editors of New Masses, we unsurprisingly find the ex editors of Masses and the Liberator (like Eastman, Freeman, Gold, Gropper, Art Young), but we also find writers like Waldo Frank (who is the first editor in chief of New Masses), Lewis Mumford, Van Wyck Brooks, or Gorham B. Munson, who were all influential a decade earlier in denouncing the "civilization in America", to quote again the title of Harold Stearn's book, to which both Lewis Mumford and Van Wyck Brooks contributed. Even though these personalities sometimes come from very different backgrounds, if only because some of them actually emigrated while others stayed home, they all share the sense that the future now lies in America and in political commitment. As Bernard Smith writes in the American issue of transition in 1928: "transition must look again to the west and forget Europe.

  by condemning transition's "old experimentalism" and abstractions from which young writers should quickly disassociate themselves, "as many have long ago done from Pound, the dean of corpses that promenade in graveyards."

	the biographical sketches of contributors that used to emphasize contributors' professional
	standings now insist on their working-class backgrounds and associations. Similarly, "Gold
	urged the revolutionary writer to report on working-class life and industry "from first hand
	contacts" by spending several years in an industry, enabling him to write "like an insider, not
	12 Robert Sage, "Mr Gold's Spring Model", transition, n°15, February 1929, 185.

13

Interestingly, this evolution in the relations between transition and New Masses echoes a drastic change in New Masses' editorial line. With Michael Gold's appointment as editor in chief of New Masses in 1928, and the official affiliation of the magazine with the Communist Party in 1930, literature slowly disappears from the pages of New Masses, with the notable exceptions however of a few writers such as John Dos Passos and Langston Hughes. Contrasting a few quotes from the magazine allows for a sketch of this major editorial evolution. The first quote is from a 1926 editorial by Michael Gold entitled "Let It Be Really New". Gold explains that New Masses is "not a magazine of Communism or Moscow, but a magazine of American experiment."

14

In 1928, Gold's perspective has become slightly different. He now asserts that "EVERYONE knows how to write" 15 , and that "less literature, and more life is to be our slogan." 16 Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt points out in an insightful paper on the evolution of New

Masses and John Reed Club artists between 1926 and 1936, how Gold in 1928

undertakes a program to transform New Masses into a magazine exclusively produced for and by workers. Strikingly, 13 Joseph Vogel, "Literary Graveyards", New

Masses, vol. V, n°5, October 1929, 30. 14 Michael Gold, "Let It Be Really New", New Masses, June 1926, 20. 15

Michael Gold, "Brisbane, We Are Still Here!", New Masses,

August 1928, 2, quoted by Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, "New Masses and John Reed Club Artists, 1926-1936:

Evolution of Ideology, Subject Matter and Style", The Journal of

Decorative and Propaganda Arts, vol. XII, Spring 1989, 65. 16 Michael Gold, "Editorial Notes", New Masses, June 1928, 17, quoted by Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, idem.

  Nathanel West's famous essay "Somes Notes on Violence" published in the last issue of the magazine.Interestingly, Contact does not only oppose transition's Eurocentrism, even though, as Jay Martin rightly suggests, "both [Nathanael West] and Williams (...) regarded [their magazine] as the legitimate successor to transition" 25 . Contact's subtitle "An American Quarterly Review" and slogan "Contact will attempt to cut a trail through the American jungle without the use of a European compass" clearly reveal the editors' will to separate from the then long tradition of American exile magazines and in particular from transition whose interruption in June 1930 directly prompts Williams to launch Contact. But far from sticking to these rebellious slogans, Contact integrates the exiles' European experience into a rich combination of cultures: S. J. Perelman's interpretation of the surrealist film scenario

genre, a form of writing developed in English in transition; Parker Tyler's poem "idiot of love", whose peculiar portmanteau words are based on transition's "Revolution of the Word"; Cummings' bilingual poems; McAlmon's archetypal exile short story about the tribulations of a lesbian in Montparnasse; all point to Contact's close links with Europe, France, Paris, and more specifically transition to which Williams was a regular and enthusiastic contributor. In other words, Contact did not attempt to cut a trail through the American jungle without the use of a European compass as much as it did so WITH the use of a European compass.

Conveying its political message only through the distinctive forms of writing it wants to promote, Contact differs both from transition and New Masses. Politics for Williams is first and foremost the politics of literature, to quote the title of a recent essay by Jacques Rancière, Politique de la littérature 26 . This organic link between politics and literature probably explains these otherwise enigmatic sentences in the third and last editorial of Contact:

William Carlos Williams, "Comment", Contact, vol. I, n°3, February 1932, 131.

F. S. Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age", Scribner'sMagazine, n°90, November 1931,

459-65, reprinted in The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson, New York, New Directions Paperbook, 1956 [1945], 20.4 Eugene Jolas, "Why do Americans live in Europe?", transition, n°14, Fall 1928, 97.

Kerin R. Sarason & Ruth L. Strickland, "Harold E. Stearns", American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. IV, Detroit, Gale Research, 1980, 358.

Elliot Paul and Eugene Jolas, "A Review", transition, n°12,March 1928, 141-2.

"New York: 1928", transition, n°13, June 1928, 96.

Bernard Smith, "American Letter", transition, n°13, June 1928, 247.