Uncharted Modernism: Surrealist Literature and Cinema

Céline Mansanti

Université de Picardie Jules Verne

Even though American Surrealism is still mainly associated today with the visual arts and with the 1960s, American Surrealist literary experimentations did exist in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of them appeared in transition, the American expatriate magazine published in Paris between 1927 and 1938, which, among many other texts, famously published Joyce's Work in Progress, numerous pieces by Gertrude Stein, as well as the first translations into English of countless French surrealist texts. Some of these American experimentations are still remembered today (William Carlos Williams' Novelette, Nathanael West's Dream Life of Balso Snell). Together, however, these texts shape a distinctive American response to French surrealism.

It is my goal here to define the main features of this aesthetic, as well as to consider its significance within the broader framework of transatlantic modernism. In order to do so, we will examine a selection of American surrealist texts published in transition, as well as two film excerpts included by Bruce Posner on the "American surrealism" DVD of his collection of Early American Avant-Garde Films released in 2005. I will also make references to West's

The Dream Life of Balso Snell, published in France in 1931.

The first striking feature of the American surrealist texts published in transition is their massive use of the fantastic, sometimes verging on the grotesque. Extraordinary worlds are created. In The Dream Life of Balso Snell, the hero climbs up the intestine of the Trojan Horse starting from its anus. The grotesque in the novel relies primarily on the festive, iconoclastic, scatological atmosphere created by West. Very often, the American surrealist texts in transition curiously rely on personifications of animals, plants and objects. In Love in the West, by William Closson Emory, "orchids and sweet peas wander about chatting together. Dandelions carry luggage here and there and do odd jobs. " (t13, 34). Examples of such personifications in this short story are countless. Let's mention the "colored easter eggs carrying arm loads of luggage" while "turnips and asparagus accompany them from train" and "A bologna sausage paces up and down in front of the night club yawning (t13, 37). "Home Edition", published in the same issue, in 1928, is a story by Whit Burnett 1 . It opens on this sentence: "Enter, bowing, Page One, followed by Mr. Calvin Coolidge in high hat, the Average Citizen with abashed look, Crime, Coal Strikers, Chicago Riots, Missing Clue, Police in Hot Pursuit, Miss America, and other Atlantic City Beauty Contestants who play leap frog gracefully over a series of headline-hurdles up to the point of arriving gracefully, with legs crossed, on the Statue of Liberty." (t13,199) In the following issue, another narrative by Whit Burnett stages "A pair of ear muffs bow[ing] and do[ing] a polka" while "Two pairs of black rimmed spectacles do a hesitation waltz." (t14, 121). In "Work on Sidetrack", by Murray Godwin, a Pford car, I quote "gave birth to a tinfant totter, motor Number I-U, who cannounced her gladvent with a sounding hoot from her tinny horn. » (t15, 45). Harry Crosby, in 1930, writes : "I do not find it strange that a blue bird should fall in love with a playing card because the playing card in question happens to be the queen of hearts" (t19-20, 34). In 1935, Wayne Andrews writes of "innumerable headless heads of hair, billowing" before "the entry, rather 'solemn' to be sure, of 449 golden doorknobs" (t23, 7-8).

Charles Tracy, in 1936, opens his poem "Portrait of Our House" with "Egg-noggs agog jog.

Laughing/ pegs jagg acrest to our nest" (t24, 32), and George Whitsett, in the same issue, offers this Joyce-inspired nursery rhyme: "Lice night/ And the nice before./ Lambs and cuttlefish came to my door,/ The lambs wore plumes,/ The cuttlefish said,/ And a spray of almond over their head " (t24, 38). This is a lot of examples, but I think it is essential to have an idea of the importance of personifications in these texts.

Of course, a question that immediately comes to mind is : why would these texts be considered as surrealist? The answer is given by their authors themselves, who in many cases describe them as such. In his preface to The Surrealist Parade, written the year of his death in 1987, Wayne Andrews writes: « I did not meet Breton until the summer of 1934 when he won my eternal loyalty by putting his stamp of approval on my prose poem "The Evocative Treason of 449 Golden Doorknobs" ». Some of the texts are explicitly called "scenarios" by their authors. This is the case for "Love in the West" by William Closson Emory, and "Home Edition" by Whit Burnett. The reference to this genre, half-way between literature and cinema, shows the influence of surrealism. Indeed, while the "scenario" genre was invented 1 who was to become three years later the editor of the successful magazine Story devoted to the short story 1931.

by Cendrars, Romains and Albert-Birot around 1915, the surrealists were the ones who developed it in the 20s 2 .

The American surrealist texts, heavily based on the creation of a fantastic world, are different from French surrealist experimentations, relying on the "merveilleux". In 1962, Breton remarks that « The fantastic almost always derives from some unimportant fiction, whereas the marvelous glimmers at the extreme end of the vital movement and entirely engages affectivity ». In other terms, the marvelous emerges from reality, whereas the fantastic opposes reality. Whereas the fantastic relies on visual shock, the marvelous comes from language : « the earth is blue like an orange » is a case in point. An illustration of this difference in our American texts is that the fantasmagorias created by the authors are usually safely contained within the limits of a parallel world, whether it's a dream (The Dream Life of Balso Snell for example) or a scenario. Reality itself is not radically put into question.

In this respect, an importance influence on these texts is Alice in Wonderland. Wonderland is what Alice experiences while she's asleep. Wonderland is also a fantastic world where animals, plants, and objects are personified. Across the Channel, the surrealists were actually the first to acknowledge the importance of Carroll. Between 1929 and 1952, Carroll was claimed by the Surrealist Movement as one of their own. But that was not before 1929. And texts like "Love in the West" and "Home edition" were published in transition as early as 1928, just after the Alice Comedies series which launched Walt Disney's career in the animation business. When studying American surrealism, it's therefore important to consider Anglo-American popular culture, and not just French surrealism.

If Breton lowers down the fantastic in opposition to the marvelous, it doesn't mean that American surrealist experimentations are not interesting. Personifications tend to create a playful, essentially joyful world. Spectacular images abound, making the reader stagger with visual overdose. Sometimes the fantastic verges on the grotesque, in The Dream Life of Balso Snell or in « Love in the West ». The grotesque in these texts tends to be Bakhtinian inasmuch as it is warm, festive, full of life, in other terms, it is more comic than it is threatening. The scatological body is a recurrent element of this American grotesque. We've already mentioned the situation of West's narrator, making his way up the intestine of the Trojan Horse. Godwin shares West's taste for the scatological, as in this short story published in 1927:

The coprojectile contacted with a flask of soup for nightwork in the pocket of the foreman. (...) The bozo on guard at the entrance was lashed to the north column by a whirling lower intestine. (t4, 174) Humour, whether scatological or not, is a recurrent feature of these experimentations (« O Beer! O Meyerbeer! O Bach! O Offenbach! » exclaims the hero of The Dream Life of Balso Snell). The worlds created and the language used are very dynamic. Personifications contribute to the dynamism of the texts, but so do accumulations, the semi-telegraphic style of the scenarios, and the frequent use of onomatopeias such as « dynami-dr-r-r-r-ing-ng-ngng... », « wham » and « bam » in Murray Godwin's « Work on Sidetrack ». Sequences unfold very quickly, in « Work on Sidetrack », « Home Edition », The Dream Life of Balso Snell, as well as in Williams' Novelette. Here's an example from A Novelette.

My child has swallowed a mouse. -Tell him to swallow a cat then. Bam! This is the second paragraph of the second chapter of some writing on the influenza epidemic in the region of New York City (…).

The use of a familiar tone and of American vernacular language adds to the dynamism of the language. « What the hell do I care about art! » exclaims John Gilson in The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Likewise, Murray Godwin dismisses highbrow visions of art: « "Art demands -" says Mr Josephson. Well, art can demand what it damned pleases, or bay at the moon; it does not matter the kink of gnatsneck to me. » (t15, 119) Social criticism, and an emphasis on violence and experience also characterize these texts.

And here is where we get: these American surrealist experimentations are not only interesting in themselves. They are also interesting because of their political and aesthetic stance against French surrealism and high expatriate modernism. Williams is the one who pushed the theorization of American surrealism the furthest. His definition of American surrealism in "How to Write", in 1936, is based on the reading of two seminal essays published in transition. The first one is Jung's "Psychology and Poetry", published in 1930. Jung's concept of the collective unconscious allows him to dismiss Breton's automatic writing, which he uses however as a counterpoint to define what he calls "spontaneous writing". Unlike automatic writing, "spontaneous writing" leaves space for rationality and is compatible with Williams' conception of the poem as an object. In order to write "How to write", Williams relies on another essay published in transition. "The Structure of the Personality", by Gottfried Benn, was published in 1932. According to Benn, the structure of the personality is not only cerebral but also corporal. Williams uses this idea to connect spontaneous writing with the most physiological, humble functions of the body. Unfortunately, I don't have time to develop this idea, which I discuss in a chapter of my book on transition magazine. Let's just say that Williams' surrealist writing, as exemplified in A Novelette, written the winter of 1929-1930, is much less solemn, much less conceptual, much more concrete and corporal than French surrealist writing. Spontaneous writing is associated to physiological relief, whether sexual or excremential, and explicitly opposes the symbolic, allegorical patterns of many French surrealist texts. On the whole, American surrealism contributes to shaping a lower form of modernism, by contrast with the high modernism of the European avant-gardes, and mostly aims at stimulating sensation and producing signs, or objects rather than creating meaning.

This specificity of American surrealism is important to understand when considering Bruce Posner's DVD collection released in 2005. Unseen cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1894-1941 is a collection of 7 DVDs, aiming at showing that an early American film avant-garde did exist before Maya Deren. It brings together American modernist films as diverse and essential as Ballet mécanique, Manhatta, The Love of Zero, Pie in the Sky and many others. On its release, the collection received enthusiastic critical acclaim from magazines such as Cineaste and Modernism/ Modernity. However, both were disappointed with the "American Surrealism" disc, "the only one", as the reviewer of Modernism/modernity rightly argues, "to name explicitly an ag movement, and thus the disc most likely to court controversy." In particular, both critics question the inclusion of "the visual fanfares" extracted from Douglas Fairbank's When the Clouds roll by (1919) and James Cruze's Beggar on Horseback (1925). These selections, according to one of them, "don't summon the hallucinatory violence of the surrealist sensibility", "nor do they deploy the power of surrealist incongruity". My contention is that these two film extracts fully belong, on the contrary, on this DVD, as they're representative of the American surrealist aesthetic at work in the pages of transition.

The first short extract we'll watch is from Beggar on Horseback, a 1925 film by James Cruze, that has since been lost, like most films by this director. 37'10-38'37. Two elements seem particularly relevant for our discussion. First, the fantastic and grotesque atmosphere of this extract, relying ONE on the Bakhtinian carnavalesque (all the guests are half brides and grooms, and the traditional wedding theme is jazzified) and TWO on the animalization of musicians disguised as frogs (which echoes the personifications of animals in transition's surrealist texts). And second, another interesting element is the inscription of the fantastic within the well-established structure of the dream or in this case the nightmare.

We find the same structure not only in most surrealist texts in transition, but also in the second extract we're going to watch, taken from Victor Fleming's first movie, When the Clouds Roll By. The film almost opens on Douglas Fairbanks dining on onion, lobster, welsh rarebit and pie. Show 29'28-30'02. This heavy meal triggers a nightmare, and here's an extract of it: 33'31-35'31. It's a pity we don't have time to screen the whole sequence, because it includes every gymnastic feat in the F's repertoire.3 There's a dynamism there, in F's acting but also in the use of slow and fast motion, that recalls the textual dynamism of many surrealist texts in transition. And of course, the fantastic, the comic, the grotesque, the personification of food, echo both the extract from Beggar on Horseback and transition surrealism.

So in the end, these films are very different from what we acknowledge as canonical surrealist films, like Un Chien andalou for example, in 1929 and The Seashell and the Clergyman, in 1928. I'd like to make 2 remarks to conclude. First, these American films come first, chronologically, before the French classics. They were made in the late teens and early twenties, at a time when a French surrealist like Robert Desnos dreamed of a surrealist cinema, and saw in When the Clouds Roll By, in a 1923 article for the Paris-Journal, an interesting attempt to represent a dream on the screen. Second, and I hope it's something I managed to convey throughout this presentation, there is a real, rich, interesting, selfsufficient esthetic in these American surrealist proposals, both literary and cinematographic.

By linking together Alice in Wonderland, French surrealism, Gottfried Benn, Carl Jung, James Joyce, Walt Disney and the Hollywoodian comedies of the 20s, American surrealism speaks for the transatlantic, interdisciplinary dialogue of high modernism and popular culture.

2

  Souvent impossibles à filmer, la plupart des scénarios surréalistes sont aujourd'hui tombés dans l'oubli. Ce n'est d'ailleurs peut-être pas un hasard si « Un chien andalou » de Luis Buñuel et « La Coquille et le clergyman » d'Antonin Artaud sont restés dans les mémoires : ce sont aussi les seuls à avoir été tournés. La revue publie des scénarios surréalistes, dont, à l'automne 1928, « Midnight at Two O'Clock » de Robert Desnos et, en juin 1930, « La Coquille et le clergyman », « The Eighth Day of the Week » de Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes et « The Mill » de Philippe Soupault.

This was an enormous amount of action for such a brief sequence. The most visually stunning of these eventsthe sequence in which F climbs up the wall and across the ceilingwas so memorable that Fred Astaire and the director Stanley Donen reused the idea over thirty years later for the celebrated "dancing on the ceiling" sequence in Royal Wedding(1951).


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Editors Vladimir Ivanov Innopolis University Innopolis, Russia Artem Kruglov Innopolis University Innopolis, Russia Sergey Masyagin Innopolis University Innopolis, Russia Alberto Sillitti Innopolis University Innopolis, Russia Giancarlo Succi Innopolis University Innopolis, Russia ISSN 1868-4238 ISSN 1868-422X (electronic) IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology ISBN 978-3-030-47239-9 ISBN 978-3-030-47240-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47240-5 Organization Program Committee Antonios Andreatos Hellenic Air Force Academy, Greece Lefteris Angelis Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Matina Bibi University of Ioannina, Greece Timofey Bryksin Saint Petersburg State University, Russia Javier Luis Canovas Izquierdo IN3, UOC, Spain Andrea Capiluppi Brunel University, UK Kevin Crowston Syracuse University, USA Minas Dasygenis University of Western Macedonia, Greece Breno de França UNICAMP, Brazil Khalid Elbaamrani ENSA of Marrakech, Morocco Alexander Elizarov Kazan Federal University, Russia Stefane Fermigier Nuxeo, France Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Imed Hammouda Mediterranean Institute of Technology, Tunsia Akinori Ihara Wakayama University, Japan Vladimir Ivanov Innopolis University, Russia George Kakarontzas University of Thessaly, Greece Daniel S. Katz University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA Fabio Kon University of São Paulo, Brazil Artem Kruglov Innopolis University, Russia Ignasi Labastida Universitat de Barcelona, Spain Filippo Lanubile University of Bari, Italy Luigi Lavazza Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Italy Valentina Lenarduzzi LUT University, Finland Panos Louridas Athens University of Economics and Business and Greek Research and Technology Network, Greece Bjorn Lundell University of Skövde, Sweden Konstantinos Margaritis University of Macedonia, Greece Manuel Mazzara Innopolis University, Russia Dimitrios Michail Harokopio University of Athens, Greece Sandro Morasca Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Italy Dmitry Mouromtsev NRU ITMO, Russia Mohammad Ashraf Ottom Yarmouk University, Jordan Nikolaos Papaspyrou National Technical University of Athens, Greece Peter Rigby Concordia University, Canada Panagiotis Rizomiliotis Harokopio University of Athens, Greece Gregorio Robles Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Alolita Sharma AWS, USA Alberto Sillitti Innopolis University, Russia Ioannis Stamelos Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Giancarlo Succi Innopolis University, Russia Konstantinos Tserpes Harokopio University of Athens, Greece Dmitry Ustalov Yandex, Russia Iraklis Varlamis Harokopio University of Athens, Greece Costas Vassilakis University of the Peloponnese, Greece Manolis Vavalis University of Thessaly, Greece Anthony Wasserman Carnegie Mellon University, USA Jens Weber University of Victoria, Canada Stefano Zacchiroli Université de Paris and Inria, France Denis Zuev Kazan Federal University, Russia viii Organization

Contents

The Ecosystem of openKONSEQUENZ, A User-Led Open Source Foundation . . . .


Céline Mansanti

H D Made

William Carlos

Williams Collection

Scattering and Gathering: H.D. and Little Magazines

Like many modernist writers,

most substantial outlet for her poetry. 3 Poetry remained faithful to H.D. until the end, and her poems opened her last three publications in the magazine, in 1950, 1957 and 1959 4 . Pound was also behind H.D.'s important contribution to The Egoist. From February 1914 to July 1917, H.D. contributed 17 times, 18 poems (over 18 pages), one review (2 pages), an essay on Marianne Moore (2 pages) and a translation of Euripides (3 pages). H.D. did not only contribute to The Egoist as a writer; she also acted as an assistant editor, officially from June 1916 to May 1917in fact, for longer5 taking over for her husband, Richard Aldington, after he enlisted in the army (Barnstone 203). However, both their names were credited on The Egoist's front page, and H.D.'s was always second, even when she was the only one of the two actually working for the magazine.

Pound was a key promoter of modernist literature and played a decisive role in pushing the careers of countless writers, particularly through little magazines. In this respect, H.D.'s case is far from unique. Like many others, she benefited from Pound's mentorship. Pound's involvement with H.D.'s career is impressive, since Pound was partly responsible for H.D.'s publication in Poetry, The Egoist, but also The New Freewoman, The Little Review, The Dial, Pagany, and possibly other little magazines. But what truly distinguishes H.D.'s situation from that of other modernist writers is that she received the protection of a second agent, her friend and partner Bryher, who was directly responsible for H.D.'s special involvement with two other periodicals, Close Up and Life and Letters To-day. Bryher, who was a modernist poet herself, and a wealthy patron of modernism, funded Close Up, a cinematographic magazine founded by H.D., Bryher, and their partner Kenneth Macpherson. 6Although H.D. never played an official role in the magazine (the editor was Macpherson and Bryher was assistant editor), she was one of its central animators from July to December 1927, before stepping down. From July 1927 to December 1929, H.D. contributed 15 times, mostly essays (5 over 63 pages) and film reviews (8 over 77 pages). She also published 2 "cinematographic" poems, "Projector" and "Projector II", over 16 pages. Close Up was the magazine that published the greatest bulk of H.D.'s essays. Her enthusiastic exploration of the possibilities of a new medium, cinema, allowed her to express and maybe refine her aesthetic principles. A three-part essay on "Cinema and the Classics" published in July, August and November 1927 gave her the opportunity to reflect on beauty (in the July issue): "Beauty was made to endure, in men, in flowers, in hearts, in spirits, in minds. That flame, in spite of the highbrow detractors, exists at the very centre, the very heart of the multitude" ("The Cinema and the Classics, I. Beauty" 27-8). This democratic vision of beauty and art fueled by her reflection on the cinema was further developed in her essay on German actor Conrad Veidt (the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) in the September 1927 issue, concluding with this prophecy: "it must come soon: a universal language, a universal art open alike to the pleb and the initiate" ("Conrad Veidt" 44). In the second part of "The Cinema and the Classics", in August 1927, H.D. addressed other favorite themes, applied to the cinema: restraint, precision, movement and lightalso at the core of "Projector" and "Projector II".

The last part of the essay, published in November, explored the tension between mechanical perfection and spiritual hunger.

But it was in Life and Letters To-day that H.D. found the most important outlet for her work. Life and Letters To-day was a British literary magazine formerly known under the title Life and Letters, and edited by Desmond MacCarthy. "Frustrated and bored by her life at remote Kenwin," (Guest 232) Bryher bought it in 1935, choosing Robert Herring, a friend of the Pool Group, as its chief editor. Although Life and Letters To-day "only" lasted 15 years, from 1935 to 1950 (an impressive lifespan for a little magazine, but a short one compared to that of Poetry, founded in 1912 and still running today), it published 23 contributions by H.D., mostly poems (25 over 54 pages, compared to 31 over 67 pages for Poetry), with a 13page short story ("Ear-ring", only recently republished by Michael Boughn in Narthex and Other Stories), the entirety of "Writing on the Wall" (107 pages published in 4 instalments, in May, June, and August 1945 as well as January 1946) later republished in Tribute to Freud, and 4 reviews over 14 pages. As Barbara Guest has suggested, Bryher's decision to revive Life and Letters took place at a time when H.D. might have felt neglected by the literary scene; "recently she had been excluded from the 1930s anthology by Graves and Riding" (232). Life and Letters To-day, H.D.'s new shelter, was all the more precious since Bryher's new magazine was "one of the few ventures to continue to provide opportunities for publication during WW2" as Cyrena Pondrom has remarked (37).

H.D.'s relationship to little magazines was therefore strongly marked by the influence of her two major "protectors", Pound and Bryher. The question of her agencyand eventually of the nature of her presence in little magazineswas further enhanced by her flexibility as a contributor and by the marginalization she experienced as a woman. The variety of H.D.'s contributions to little magazines and the richness of her poetry allowed her to adapt to various editorial contexts, and some of them did not do justice to the quality of her work. Not only did the total number of her contributions greatly vary from one magazine to the next. The nature and length of the texts she published differed widely as well, from very short poems to very long prose pieces reaching over 30 pages. H.D. also published in very different kinds of periodicals, from the most literary venues to those interested in politics, from the most radical little magazines of her time to conservative publishing institutions, from the most humble to the most elegant. Because she mostly contributed poems, and because many of her poems can be read as both classic and modernas Pound suggested to Harriet Monroe7 -H.D. took her place in a wide range of periodicals, from The Chapbook and The Nation, to Close Up and The Little Review. In some cases, her shorter poems were printed at the bottom of a page, as if to fill the remaining space. This is the case for "At Athens", in the December 1924 issue of The Adelphi; "Antipather of Sidon" in the June 1925 issue; and "Sigil", published in The New Republic, on January 21, 1931, at the very bottom of a long essay on "Hard-Boiled Radicalism", by George Soule. By contrast, the November 1920 issue of The Dial gave much more space to H.D.'s poems "Phaedra Rebukes Hippolyta", "Phaedra Remembers Crete", and "Helios".

H.D.'s marginalization as a writer is perceptible both in some critical reviews and in the way she was introduced to the reader in some of the bio-bibliographical notes of the magazines 8 . The description of H.D.'s poetry as fragile is clearly negative in Harold Monro's reactionary criticism of Imagism in the special Imagist number of The Egoist in May 1915: "H.D. is the truest "Imagist" of the group. But its future work will scarcely develop along the lines of her example. Her poems have a slight flavor of brine; they are as fragile as sea-shells. If I came too near them I should be afraid of crushing them into the sand with my clumsy feet" (Monro 79). Not only does Monro not take responsibility for the violence he displays, he also blames it on H.D. F. S. Flint's critical remarks on H.D., in the same issue of The Egoist, are all the more disturbing since they are meant to be positive. In this case, H.D.'s poetry is presented as "a kind of 'accurate mystery'". The classic argument of women's irrationality is made a few lines down: "In fact, the more you attempt to reason about it the less will you get out of it." And it is further developed as his fantasy takes over. About H.D.'s poem "Sitalkas" he wrote: "You may see a woman in white muslin who has waited, not long, but long enough, in the long grass of June, under the shade of a large elm by a river's bank, the Thames; and if you are a male you will lean over her and listen to the sound of her voice, without troubling much about the purport of her words (...)" (Flint 72). Occasionally, magazine editors themselves contributed to reduce H.D.'s autonomous identity. In The North American Review in January 1920, she was introduced as "Mrs Richard Aldington". Although her contribution starts on the right-hand page (the better of the two), it immediately follows Richard Aldington's, raising the question of her autonomy. Even in Poetry, which always showed admiration for her, she is stuck between her father and her husband in two bio-bibliographical notes: "Mrs Aldington was Hilda Doolittle of Philadelphia, the daughter of Dr Charles L. Doolittle, the distinguished astronomer of the University of Pennsylvania" ("Notes" 173). 9 In this context, the signature "H.D." represented a way out of this identity imposed on her by patriarchal tradition,10 even though it was bestowed on her by a third man.

The fact that H.D. benefited from the double protection of Pound and Bryher might not have helped the "inferiority complex" she detected in herself.11 However, it was certainly helpful for her artistic and intellectual production. Her editorial contribution to magazines such as The Egoist and Close Up allowed her to articulate some of her aesthetic principles.12 Unlike Bryher, who acted as her "guardian angel," (Barnstone 203) Pound developed a more ambiguous relationship towards his protégé, making space for her as long as she did not compete with his own work. Helen Carr has related how "In the October [1916] Egoist, H.D. included a poem by Williams, entitled "March" (…) She had made some changes, [which infuriated Williams.] (...) Williams passed on the story to Pound. (…) Improving other people's verses was his prerogative. H.D.'s boldness in seizing the editorial pencil possibly increased Pound's desire to move back into a position of influence at the Egoist" . But, as Cyrena Pondrom points out, H.D. "was deeply committed to her own writing career and never wished to make editing and publishing the work of others her dominant literary contribution" (Pondrom 37). Moreover, her writing career was certainly boosted by the editorial protection she received from Pound and Bryher. Barbara Guest wrote that Life and Letters To-day "presented H.D. with that providential shelter every writer longs for. H.D. was now able to emerge from her seclusion and publish again" (Guest 233). In short, the level of editorial protection that H.D. experienced was uncommon at the time; only a handful of writers, among them stars, like Joyce or Stein, managed to create temporary shelters around their "work in progress" out of some of the little magazines to which they contributed.

Apart from stimulating her production and allowing her to develop her poetic doctrines, H.D.'s association with little magazines had another, more unusual advantage. It was a way of maintaining different professional and private personalities, keeping them separate thanks to the use of various pseudonyms. Interestingly, H.D.'s creation of pen names throughout her lifetime was linked to her appearance in little magazines, as if the fragmented nature of periodical publication mirrored and encouraged the fragmentation of her own self. The signature "H.D., 'Imagiste'" in Poetry is the best known example of this, though it is not completely representative inasmuch as it was partially imposed on her. One of H.D.'s first pseudonyms was Edith Gray, a name she used for the first time in December 1909 in the Boston Globethe first periodical she officially contributed to, according to Michael Boughn. She kept this pseudonym until September 1913, using it for various contributions to the Boston Globe, and for appearances in Forward ("a weekly illustrated paper for young people" published by the Presbyterian Board of Publication and work) and Comrade (a Philadelphia Presbyterian Church paper). Ironically, later in her life, Gray turned out to be the family name of her daughter's fatherfurther strengthening the link between H.D.'s men and her complex relationship to her own identity. In this case, the name Gray might come from the title of the first literary magazine she supposedly contributed to in 1905, Blue and Gray (also with an "a"), the literary magazine of the Friend's Central School in Philadelphia (Boughn 95).

The other pseudonyms that H.D. later created for pieces published in periodicals never replaced "H.D.", but worked as alternatives which she mostly used for non-literary purposes such as the writing of book reviews. In Life and Letters To-day, she used the pseudonym "Sylvania Penn", which ma[de] [her] laugh", as she wrote to Jean Untermeyer (Boughn 103). Both "Sylvania Penn" and "S. Penn" were used twice in Life and Letters To-day between 1937 and 1940. Aside from the comic aspects of the name (Penn-Sylvania for a pen name), the reference to her birthplace might be inspired by the contents of the first book review she used it for, a review of Whitman by Edgar Lee Masters. This practice followed another policy she had chosen for her book reviews in The Adelphi (and maybe two film reviews in Close Up), consisting in not signing them at all. H.D.'s decision to separate her identity as a writer and as a critic was taken a step further when she chose to separate her identity as a poet and as a short-story writerprobably emphasizing her self-perception as a poet. Although "Narthex" was published under the name "H.D." in The Second American Caravan in September 1928, "Pontikinisi" was published in the July-September 1932 issue of Pagany under the name "Rhoda Peter" and "Ear-ring" in Life and Letters To-day in Summer 1936 under the name "D.A. Hill". In both cases, H.D. was playing with the letters "h" and "d"a recurrent game, as Antoine Cazé has shown -and "D. A. Hill" further worked in an inversion of "Hilda". A letter to Richard Johns, the editor of Pagany, on March 14, 1932 shed light on the importance of keeping her identities separate: Ezra Pound suggesting my sending you something, I enclose some H.D. poetry. Robert McAlmon also, some time ago, said you might look at some of my prose. I am sending a 1920 Greek sketch to you, under the name, Rhoda Peter. It is rather important to me that the H.D. and the Rhoda Peter are not confused as I find it increasingly difficult to remain MYSELF when writing; the two manners and personalities are quite distinct. However, as I am anxious NOT to have Rhoda Peter incriminated with H.D., will you please, if you want this PONTIKONISI (Mouse Island) keep Rhoda Peter apart from H.D. (A Return to Pagany 444).

As if to add further confusion, the letter was signed "H.D. Aldington". Interestingly, remaining herself meant for H.D. being able to develop different writing personalities, to follow different threads. The use of "incriminated" is also fascinating for it associates H.D.'s activity as a poet with crime and guilt. In this context, the use of another pseudonym would allow H.D. to recover her innocence. The letter also suggests distance towards "H.D.". H.D. (the person) is and is not "H.D." (the signature).

If little magazines helped H.D. work on the fragmentation of her identity, they also probably helped her gather her scattered limbs. Life and Letters To-day was a place of scatteringit was the magazine where she used the greatest number of pen names (Sylvania Penn, S. Penn, D. A. Hill and of course H.D.), but it was also a place of gathering. Between 1935 and1950, H.D. published almost exclusively in Life andLetters To-day. Only 4 other contributions, apart from her 23 contributions to Bryher's magazine, were published elsewhere. 13 Reading her poems in Life and Letters To-day therefore makes it possible to follow her aesthetic evolution, and more particularly to notice the poetic continuity between her isolated poems and the poems later republished as part of Trilogy. In Thought and Vision, Angela DiPace Fritz has made it clear that poems like "The Dancer" (in the September 1935 issue of Life and Letters To-day), "The Poet" (in December 1935), "In Our Town", "Star by Day", "Wooden Animal" (in the Winter 1937 issue), "Saturn" and "Zeus-Provider" (published in May 1939) , 4, 5, 15, 18, 19 and 20 of Tribute to the Angels. The double movement of scattering and gathering is at its most intense in various sections published in Life and Letters To-day, in particular sections 1, 4, 6 and 21 of The Walls Do Not Fall, as well as section 1 of Tribute to the Angels. More than ever, H.D. seemed to correlate her writing practice with the answer she gave to The Little Review when asked in the 1929 questionnaire what was her attitude toward art today: "There has never, I am certain, been a more vibrant, a more exciting era for the pure artist, to anyone who wants to make something out of nothing, something (to be more explicit) out of Chaos" (The Little Review, 39-40).

Chaos, in London in 1942, was of course embodied by World War II. The publication of parts of Trilogy in Life and Letters Today reveals both the omnipresence of the war and the will to build "out of Chaos"a double emphasis shared by H.D. and editor Robert Herring. As Susan Stanford Friedman wrote, "violence [w]as the material condition of the poem's production" (Stanford Friedman 136). The first lines of Trilogyalso the first lines published in Life and Letters To-daystrongly insist on the materiality of the war: "An incident here and there, / and rails gone (for guns) / from your (and my) old town square:". 14 A double materiality, in fact, since "Rails gone (for guns)" evoke both the abstract and concrete materiality of the war: the war has an impact on you (and I), and this impact is first expressed through the reference to a material (the metal of the rails). Such materiality reflects Life and Letters To-day's material concern with the war. Here as well, materiality is two-fold. It is material, physical, and, paradoxically, more abstract. First, it is material because in 1942, when sections of The Walls Do Not Fall appeared in the magazine, Life and Letters Today was very thin. Not just rails, but paper was gone, or at least going, a matter of life and death for letters. With a severe diet, Life and Letters To-day managed to survive. Barbara Guest explained that: "Providentially, Bryher had bought enough paper to last throughout the war when other magazines were forced out. During the war the sales were unexpectedly high. The explanation is that there were few magazines left to buy" (Guest 232). Through its title as well, Life and Letters To-day has to do with materiality. The word "letters"which itself has both an abstract and a concrete meaning -is framed by "life" and "to-day", two words pointing towards materialityespecially in wartime. The editorial of the first issue of Life and Letters To-day, published in September 1935, included a discussion on the word "today", added to the former title of the magazine, simply called Life and Letters. Robert Herring commented on the choice of "today" over "modern": "We chose that word rather than 'modern' so as to be free of time-label. Modern is so often the mode of yesterday that never had a to-morrow. To-day is continuous. If we sever from the recent years, it will be to make a clean join with the earlier past, and to add to it a present from which the future may spring" ("Editorial" September 1935 1). Unlike "modern", "today" also pointed out to everydayness, to a non-literary, non-aesthetic dimension.

The overwhelming material presence of war in Life and Letters To-day is also reflected by the number of texts centered on war. Reading excerpts of Trilogy in Life and Letters To-day allows the reader to feel the omnipresence of the war, and the continuity between H.D.'s work and the editor's and the other contributors' concerns. H.D. did not only gather her own limbs, she contributed to binding together pieces as different as literary contributions, economic and political tribunes, editorials and even advertisements. When opening the April 1942 issue, the first issue featuring excerpts of Trilogy, the reader is confronted with an advertisement for the next issue of the magazine, entitled "an R. A. F. number" and, on the right-hand page, with a pressing call from the Church Army:

The Forces ask for YOUR help! (...) The Church Army asks your service in this cause, not your charity. Will you use your cheque book, your money order, your postal order in the service of freedom, for that is what it amounts to?

Herring's editorial on the following page also deals with the war and its consequences to the magazine. Warning us that "readers must not expect me to explain any of the slight changes they may notice during coming months in the format and feel of this paper", Herring justifies his decision: "A host does not parade before his guestseven in wartimethe marketing minutiae of his meals, and an editor has similar obligation, inasmuch as all that matters with difficulties is the ingenuity to which they give challenge" ("Editorial" April 1942 1-2). Other contributions in this issue also directly refer to the war: a book review by Herring entitled "Poetry in War", an economic paper on "the Fourth Budget and Finance Act of the war" and "future budgets", and a piece by Osbert Sitwellto whom H.D. dedicated Tribute to the Angelsstrongly echoing H.D.'s project in Trilogy:

Now that all the talk is of new worlds (…), I feel that I myself am bound for the old, a Columbus in a hurry to reach home. I have caught glimpse of a new heaven and earth fashioned by Woolworth's and the BBC from the wreckage of tanks and the spidery carcases of aircraft, and I prefer that which grew out of the fallen porphyry pillars of the Forum and of the temples that had been cast down. It is, you will tell me, a matter of taste, or, perhaps of morality (Sitwell 19).

All this creates an immense introduction and contextualization for H.D.'s text, which immediately follows. The reading of the October and November 1942 issues, where other pieces of The Walls Do Not Fall were published, generates the same type of experience. In the October 1942 issue, section 4 is framed by a "War Writing" section featuring poems by Diana Gardner, Walter Allen and A. E. Edwards, as well as an editorial by Robert Herring playfully describing the London premises of the magazine, until then relocated "somewhere in Sussex" to escape the worst of the war: "The walls in the disused rooms are a bit bitten by blast, but the tatters are played by ripples from the open-air swimming-pool where once was a shop; the two effects cancel out" ("Editorial" October 1942 1). The walls are a bit bitten by blast, but they do not fall... In the November 1942 issue, section 6 of The Walls Do Not Fall is published under the section "American Poetry" and gathers two other poems, one by Horace Gregory, and one by Richard Eberhart. Gregory's poem "The Well" immediately follows H.D.'s, on the same page, and starts: "When the air-raid warden came to put out the light, / I could feel the waters of the well, Miranda". And section 6 is immediately preceded by a critical text on the war entitled "Democratic Planning". Herring's long editorial is about the reconstruction of London. Life and Letters To-day shares with Trilogy both the will to address the materiality of the war and the will to build out of chaos. The interaction between the magazine and the poem is interesting. It underlines the importance of materiality in Trilogyand particularly the importance of presenting the materiality of the war, an angle already discussed by Bryher in a 1927 essay for Close Up. 15 But it also enshrines the spiritual dimension of Trilogy, as do most of the neighbouring contributions, which often deal with the war from a non-literary, matter-of-fact perspective. H.D.'s necessity to counterbalance chaos with order is further evidenced by the rewriting of sections 21 and 22 of The Walls Do Not Fall for book publication. 16 These sections in Life and Letters To-day are composed of couplets, tercets and quatrains. In the book version of Trilogy, they are replaced by couplets alone; the effect is more regularity and order, and greater emphasis paradoxically both on discontinuity and continuity, on scattering and gathering, as continuity, gathering, are achieved by the reading of the poem. Whereas the initial version of Section 22 in Life and Letters To-day was composed of two tercets, one couplet and three quatrains, the new version in Trilogy was reorganized in couplets only, putting more emphasis on the dual activity of scattering and gathering.

In 1929, H.D. was asked in The Little Review questionnaire: "What do you look forward to?" She answered: "I look forward to freedom as I grow older, more freedom as I grow still older, strength and strength and more and more and more freedom as I get still older" (The Little Review, 39-40). Little magazines were complicated places of freedom for H.D. Her special relationship to Pound and, to a certain extent, to Bryher raised the question of her agencyso did, in some cases, her marginalization as a woman, and possibly her selfmarginalization as a non-competitive person. However, little magazines were also places where H.D. played with her identity/ies, evolving from the constrained identity that characterizes the beginning of her career in Poetry in 1913 to the relative freedom she developed thirty years later in the pages of Life and Letters To-day. Life and Letters To-day, the most protective "shell"ter she ever had, was also the magazine where she experimented most with her self, using various pen names, publishing the memoirs of her psychoanalysis with Freud, and, in a time of chaos, experimenting with communion; both with the community of Life and Letters To-day (including its editor and other contributors) and with the reader of the periodicalwho is also a figure of Isis, an agent of gathering. Scattering and gathering, a fruitful dynamic at the core of Trilogy, is a fitting description of H.D.'s freed presence in Life and Letters To-day, and more generally constitutes an interesting interaction between her aesthetic and the way periodicals work.

  functioned as prologues to Trilogy. Of course, Trilogy itself is a place of scattering and gathering, as many critics have remarked. Aside from the construction of the poem itself (3 times 43 sections composing one long poem), the Isis-Osiris myth plays a central role throughout the text. Between April 1942 and July 1944, the magazine published 12 sections of Trilogy. Sections 1, 21 and 22 of The Walls Do Not Fall appeared in April 1942; section 4 in October 1942; section 6 in November 1942. In July 1944, the magazine published sections 1

Those figures and subsequent figures are based on Boughn's bibliography. Of course, trying to measure H.D.'s quantitative presence in magazines is of debatable relevance, and page counting is not the best way to assess quantitative presence, if only because some very short poems do not fill a page, while other contributions are displayed on two columns (in The Egoist for example). However, I do believe that such indications are relatively helpful.

"Last Winter" opened the December 1950 issue; "In Time of Gold" the December 1957 issue; and "Regents of the Night" the May 1959 issue.

On this subject, and for substantial discussion of H.D.'s involvement with The Egoist, see Pondrom, 38 and seq.

Together, they formed the Pool Group, whose major production was the avant-garde movie Borderline, released in 1930.

Pound's enthusiastic letter to Monroe is quoted by Helen Carr (491): "I've had luck again, and am sending you some modern stuff by an American, I say modern, for it is in the laconic speech of the Imagistes, even if the subject is classic…".

Of course, H.D. was not marginalized by all critics and magazines. To take but a few examples, she was acknowledged as one of the leading modernist writers by Henri J. Felton in Coterie (40-3); Ford Madox Ford in The Saturday Review of Literature (121-2); and May Sinclair in The Egoist (88).

The names of both her husband and her father are also mentioned in the June 1927 issue.

Helen Carr writes that "after her marriage, she said, the initials ensured that she and Aldington kept their poetic identities separate."(Carr 531).

Asked "What do you consider your weakest characteristics?" in The Little Review's May 1929 questionnaire, H.D. answered: "I am very vain and have an inordinate inferiority complex." (39-40).

See above about Close Up. About The Egoist, Helen Carr writes: "What H.D. says of Moore's poetry in the 1 June 1916 issue of The Egoist could be read as an oblique manifesto for her own collection, Sea Garden, which came out in September."(Carr 829).

One was published in Caravel, one in the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin -Bryn Mawr was her alma mater -, one in the Times Literary Supplement, and one in Poetry.

In Life and Letters To-day, "incident" is between inverted commas, further suggesting this materiality, since, as Aliki Barnstone writes in her notes, "During World War II, the newspapers called the air battles over the UK "incidents"." (Barnstone 173).

In "The War from More Angles", Bryher wrote: "What I and many others (...) object to in the Somme and the Battle of The Falklands is that war is presented entirely from a romantic boy-adventure book angle, divorced from everyday emotions (...). By all means let us have war films. Only let us have war straight and as it is; mainly disease and discomfort, almost always destructive (even in after civil life) in its effects" (45).

The comparison of the text published in Life and Letters To-day and later in Trilogy shows very little rewriting. The reorganization of sections 21 and 22 is the most obvious difference. The other differences I have noticed are: 1) The use of a title for the sections published in April 1942 ("Introduction to THE COMING ONE"), which might echo Yeats' post-WWI poem "The Second Coming" and its emphasis on chaos and order; 2) The use of "incident" in between inverted commas; 3) The use of "Tree" instead of "Tyre" in section 18 of Tribute to theAngels, published in July 1944 (42.83, 50).


Murray Godwin

Nathanael West

William Carlos Williams

published or not. The documents may come   L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire

Céline Mansanti

A Counterproposal to French Surrealism: transition's American Surrealist Experimentations (Murray Godwin, Nathanael West, William Carlos Williams, and others) American Surrealism is still mainly associated today with the visual arts (through passing figures such as Julien Levy, James Johnson Sweeney and Alfred H. Barr) or with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960sand the creation of an American surrealist group in Chicago.

However, American Surrealist literary experimentations did exist in the 1920s and 1930s.

Many of them appeared in transition, the American expatriate magazine published in Paris between 1927 and 1938. Among many other texts, transition famously published Joyce's

Work in Progress, numerous pieces by Gertrude Stein, as well as the first translations into English of countless French surrealist texts. Some of these American experimentations are still remembered today (such as William Carlos Williams' Novelette, and Nathanael West's Dream Life of Balso Snell), while many others have been forgotten. Together, however, these texts shape a distinctive American response to French surrealism. It is my goal here to define the main features of this aesthetic, in order to reveal its significance within the broader framework of transatlantic modernism. In order to do so, we will examine a selection of American surrealist texts published in transition, as well as West's The Dream Life of Balso Snell, published in France in 1931. Special attention will be given to Williams' Novelette, which has been little analyzed, even though it has been considered as "the work by Williams that was most influenced by surrealism"1 .

The first striking feature of the American surrealist texts published in transition is their massive use of the fantastic, sometimes verging on the grotesque. Extraordinary worlds are created. In The Dream Life of Balso Snell, the hero climbs up the intestine of the Trojan Horse. The grotesque in the novel relies primarily on the festive, iconoclastic, scatological atmosphere created by West. Very often, the American surrealist texts in transition curiously rely on personifications of animals, plants and objects. In "Love in the West", by William Of course, a question that immediately comes to mind is: why would these texts be considered

surrealist? The answer is given by the authors themselves, who in many cases describe them as such. Wayne Andrews remembers, I quote: "I did not meet Breton until the summer of 1934 when he won my eternal loyalty by putting his stamp of approval on my prose poem "The Evocative Treason of 449 Golden Doorknobs"". Moreover, some of the texts are explicitly called "scenarios" by their authors; for example "Love in the West" by William Closson Emory, and "Home Edition" by Whit Burnett. The reference to this genre, half-way between literature and cinema, shows the influence of surrealism, since the surrealists were the ones who developed it in the 20s 2 .

The American surrealist texts, heavily based on the creation of a fantastic world, are different from French surrealist experimentations, relying on the "merveilleux". In 1962, Breton remarked that "The fantastic almost always derives from some unimportant fiction, whereas the marvellous glimmers at the extreme end of the vital movement and entirely engages affectivity". [START_REF] Breton | Le Miroir du merveilleux[END_REF] To Breton, the fantastic is mere fiction, unlike the marvellous, which springs from a poetic confrontation (an example of this could be Éluard's "The Earth is blue like an orange.") Unlike the marvellous, the fantastic doesn't radically put reality into question, since the phantasmagorias it produces are safely contained within the limits of a parallel world, whether it is a dream or a scenario.

In this respect, an important influence on these texts is The coprojectile contacted with a flask of soup for nightwork in the pocket of the foreman. (...)

The bozo on guard at the entrance was lashed to the north column by a whirling lower intestine. (t4, 174)

Humour, whether scatological or not, is a recurrent feature of these experimentations: "O Beer! O Meyerbeer! O Bach! O Offenbach!" exclaims Balso Snell. The worlds created and the language used are very dynamic. Personifications contribute to the dynamism of the texts, but so do accumulations, the semi-telegraphic style of the scenarios, and the frequent use of onomatopeias such as "dynami-dr-r-r-r-ing-ng-ng-ng...", "wham" and "bam" in Murray Godwin's "Work on Sidetrack". Sequences unfold very quickly. Here's an example from A Novelette.

My child has swallowed a mouse. -Tell him to swallow a cat then. Bam! This is the second paragraph of the second chapter of some writing on the influenza epidemic in the region of New York City (…).

The use of a familiar tone and of American vernacular language adds to the dynamism of the shaped what West, in the same letter, saw as an "American superrrealism" characterized by humor, dynamism, American vernacular language, an emphasis on experience and violenceconsidered as idiomatic to American culture, and a fascination for the physiological, and even scatological body. In passing, let's mention that 'Superrealism' was not a movement distinct from Surrealism; the word merely constituted an early translation of the French. On another side note, one might be surprised to see an unknown writer such as Murray Godwin listed along with West and Williams. However, the phrase "American superrealism" was first used by West to describe Godwin's stories in transition6 .

Of the three writers though, Williams was the one who pushed the theorization of American signature themes (the city, night time, strolling, the Woman, mystery, chance, etc), he is eager to rethink surrealist writing according to three main lines. First, he opposes French automatic writing with an American type of spontaneous writing, much less solemn, much less conceptual, much more concrete and corporal. A case in point is Williams' straightforward question, put both to the reader and to himself: "And what is a beautiful woman?". 9 Now, we know that women's beauty is of central interest to the surrealists. But all surrealists don't treat the question the same way. At the end of Communicating Vessels, published in 1932the same year as A Novelette, Breton abstractly reflects on the nature of 'female beauty':

Female beauty is melting yet again in the crucible of all the rare stones. It is never more moving, more inspiring, or more crazed than in this instant in which it is possible to imagine it unanimously detached from the desire to please this one or that one, these or those. Beauty with no immediate destination, with no destination known to itself [etc, etc] 10

By contrast, Williams bluntly declares: "Look at her bare feet. You will see the effects of wearing shoes  unless she be used to going barefoot. Sometimes the toenails will be round, sometimes square and at others long." He goes on: "Let us describe the thighs of a beautiful woman. Most literature is now silent." 11 must be tapped into the subconscious, the unconscious …" (quoted from Hugh Whitemeyer, ed., William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 97). 8 This point is made by Williams in "How to Write": "But once the writing is on the paper it becomes an object.

It is no longer a fluid speaking through a symbolism of ritualistic forms but definite words on a piece of paper. Write" which read: "One takes a piece of paper, anything, the flat of a shingle, slate, cardboard and with anything handy to the purpose begins to put down the words after the desired expression in mind." 16 Rather than "cutting a trail through the American jungle without the use of a European compass"17 , as he announced in his Contact magazine in 1932, Williamsas well as Godwin and Westused the compass of French surrealism to cut a different, subversive American path, one less solemn, less conceptual, less symbolic and less psychological than the one taken by the French. Through their experiments, surrealism eventually appeared as a concrete, dynamic, idiomatic form of writing, relying on vernacular language and the physiological body to express its specificity. Another striking characteristic of this American surrealismalthough absent from Williams' experimentsis its strong reliance on the fantastic, at work in almost all the American surrealist texts published by transitionas well as in The Dream Life of Balso Snell. While complying with the "Revolution of the Word" manifesto published by transition in 1929, which encouraged writers to create a "fabulous world", this aesthetic of the fantastic contributes to the playful, light, "low" take on surrealism that characterizes all the American surrealist contributions to transition, and, by producing vivid images, echoes the development of Anglo-American popular cultureas represented by the work of Walt Disney, among others. Together, transition's American surrealist experimentations offer a stimulating and seminal response to French surrealism and evidence the crucial role of the magazine in generating a specific, American literary surrealist current years before Breton's exile to the US during WW2.

  surrealism the furthest. Williams' definition of surrealism in his manifesto "How to Write", in 1936, is based on the reading of two seminal essays published in transition. The first one is Jung's "Psychology and Poetry", an important text first published in English in the June 1930 issue. Jung's concept of the collective unconscious allows him to see the work of art not as the result of the personal characteristics of the artist, but as a product of the heart and mind of humanity at large. This leads Williams to criticize Freud's emphasis on the biographical and psychological links between the writer and his work. In order to write "How to write", Williams relied on another essay published in 1932 in transition. "The Structure of the Personality" was written by Gottfried Benn, a poet and a doctor, just like Williams. According to Benn, the structure of the personality is made of strata relying on the workings of both the mind and the body. Benn underlines the importance of the physiological strata by designating them as the site of the collective unconscious. Together, both essays helped Williams to define his own relationship to surrealist writing. In particular, they allowed him to dismiss Breton's automatic writing, too much based on Freud to his taste. Instead, Williams shaped what we can call "spontaneous writing" 7 . Spontaneous writing, unlike automatic writing, is compatible with Williams' interest in rationality and with his conception of the poem as an object 8 . On the other end of the spectrum, spontaneous writing can be easily connected with Williams' concern for the most physiological, humble functions of the body.The point I would like to make now is that six years before "How to Write" was published, Williams already posed a critical challenge to French surrealism with A Novelette, the surrealist piece he wrote in the winter of 1929-1930, and partially published in transition in June 1930. Although Williams does not show any particular interest in the French surrealists'

  Closson Emory, "orchids and sweet peas wander about chatting together. Dandelions carry luggage here and there and do odd jobs." (t13, 34). Examples of such personifications in this short story are countless. "Colored easter eggs [are seen] carrying arm loads of luggage" while "turnips and asparagus accompany them from train". A few lines down, "A bologna sausage paces up and down in front of the night club yawning" (t13, 37). "Home Edition", published in the same issue, in 1928, is a story by Whit Burnett opening on this sentence: "Enter, bowing, Page One, followed by Mr. Calvin Coolidge in high hat, the Average Citizen with abashed look, Crime, Coal Strikers, Chicago Riots, Missing Clue, Police in Hot Pursuit, Miss America, and other Atlantic City Beauty Contestants who play leap frog gracefully over a series of headline-hurdles up to the point of arriving gracefully, with legs crossed, on the

	of black rimmed
	spectacles do a hesitation waltz." (t14, 121). In "Work on Sidetrack", by Murray Godwin, a
	Pford car "gave birth to a tinfant totter, motor Number I-U, who cannounced her gladvent
	with a sounding hoot from her tinny horn. » (t15, 45). In 1930, Harry Crosby claimed: "I do
	not find it strange that a blue bird should fall in love with a playing card because the playing
	card in question happens to be the queen of hearts" (t19-20, 34). Five years later, Wayne
	Andrews imagined "innumerable headless heads of hair, billowing" before "the entry, rather
	'solemn' to be sure, of 449 golden doorknobs" (t23, 7-8). Charles Tracy, in 1936, opened his
	poem "Portrait of Our House" with these two lines: "Egg-noggs agog jog. Laughing/ pegs
	jagg acrest to our nest" (t24, 32), while George Whitsett, in the same issue, offered this Joyce-
	inspired nursery rhyme: "Lice night/ And the nice before./ Lambs and cuttlefish came to my
	door,/ The lambs wore plumes,/ The cuttlefish said,/ And a spray of almond over their head"
	(t24, 38). This is a lot of examples, but it is essential to see how recurrent these
	personifications are.

Statue of Liberty." (t13, 199) In the following issue, another narrative by Whit Burnett stages "A pair of ear muffs bow[ing] and do[ing] a polka" while "Two pairs

  Love in the West". The grotesque in these texts tends to be Bakhtinian inasmuch as it is warm, festive, full of life, in other terms, it is more comic than it is threatening. The scatological body is a recurrent element of this American grotesque. We've already mentioned the situation of West's narrator, making his way up the intestine of the Trojan Horse. Godwin shares West's taste for the scatological, as in this short story published in 1927:

Alice in Wonderland. Wonderland is what Alice experiences while she's asleep. Wonderland is also a fantastic world where animals, plants, and objects are personified. Across the Channel, the surrealists were actually the first to acknowledge the importance of Carroll. Between 1929 and 1952, Carroll was

claimed by the Surrealist movement as one of their own. But that was not before 1929. And texts like "Love in the West" and "Home Edition" were published in transition as early as 1928, just after the realease of the "Alice Comedies" series

(1923-1927)

which launched Walt Disney's career in the animation business. When studying American surrealism, it is therefore important to take into account Anglo-American popular culture, and not just French surrealism.

If Breton lowers down the fantastic in opposition to the marvellous, it doesn't mean that American surrealist experimentations are not interesting. Personifications tend to create a playful, joyful world. Spectacular images abound, making the reader stagger with visual overdose. Sometimes the fantastic verges on the grotesque, as in The Dream Life of Balso Snell or in "

  These American surrealist experimentations are not only interesting in themselves. They are also interesting because of their political and aesthetic stance against French surrealism and high expatriate modernism. Among the writers mentioned, Murray Godwin, Nathanael West and William Carlos Williams played a special role. They explicitly rebelled against French and expatriate bookish sophistication and the so-called superiority of the artist, safely shut in his ivory tower. An example of this rebellious attitude is Balso Snell's aggressiveness towards Take cold showers. Eat more meat."4 Against what West called "the Frenchified symbolist stuff" in a 1931 letter to Williams 5 , both writers and Murray Godwin

texts. "What the hell do I care about art!" exclaims John Gilson in The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Likewise, Murray Godwin dismisses highbrow visions of art: ""Art demands -" says Mr Josephson. Well, art can demand what it damned pleases, or bay at the moon; it does not matter the kink of gnatsneck to me." (t15, 119) Social criticism, and an emphasis on violence and experience also characterize these texts.

Saint Puce, one of the countless self-defined writers that he encounters in the intestine of the Trojan Horse: "I think you're morbid," he said. "Don't be morbid. Take your eyes off your navel. Take your head from under your armpit. Stop sniffing mortality. Play games. Don't read so many books.

  It has now left the region of the formative past and come up to the present. It has entered now a new field, that of intelligence."William Carlos Williams, "How to Write" (1936) in Linda Wagner, ed., Interviews with William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1976), 98. 9 A Novelette, 282 [t19-20, 283]. 10 André Breton, Communicating Vessels, translated by Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1990, 144. 11 A Novelette, 282 [t19-20, 283].Another characteristic of Williams' spontaneous writing is its association with physiological relief, whether sexual or excremential. One can follow the evolution of such writing through the works compiled in Imaginations, and more precisely from The Great American Novel to A Novelette. In 1923, in The Great American Novel, the European avant-gardes of the time, expressionism and Dadaism, are seen as a release: "(…) expressionism is the release of SOMETHING." 12 A Novelette pushes this point one step further, since Williams makes this writing of relief his own: "Why do you write?" 13 the poet wonders. And this is the answer he gives: "For relaxation, relief. To have nothing in my head,  to freshen my eye by that till I see, smell, know and can reason and be." 14 Interestingly, the emphasis on physiological relief is made before Williams could read Jung's or Benn's essays, therefore stressing the importance of A Novelette in Williams' evolutive definition of spontaneous writing. So much so that more than ten years later, in an essay published in View, Williams reasserted this point: To me Surrealism is to disclose without trying.(...) OMIT the deductions. There's a nice word, OMIT. It looks odd. Truncated. Rather close to VOMIT. It might save the world. Kora in Hell in 1918 to The Descent of Winter in 1927, as the doctor often used spontaneous writing to write despite a busy schedule. But only in A Novelette does Williams explicitly show the relevance of spontaneous writing by expressing his feeling of urgency through various thematic and stylistic devices, such as the use of short and noun sentences, or the creation of constant

	interruptions (from the ringing of the telephone to the involuntary remembering of a patient's
	words). A theorization of the link between urgency and spontaneous writing is already at
	work, although it will find full expression only 6 years later in the first lines of "How to

15

On the whole, American surrealism as defined by Williams contributes to shaping a lower form of modernism, by contrast with the high modernism of the European avant-gardes, and mostly aims at stimulating sensation and producing signs or objects rather than creating, adding, meaning.

A third characteristic of Williams' surrealist writingand the last point I will developis the fact that, unlike the French surrealists with automatic writing, he does not consider spontaneous writing as an end in itself, but gives it a goal, that of expressing urgency.

Williams' sense of urgency implicitly informs his writing, from

12

William Carlos Williams, The Great American

Novel (1923)

in Imaginations, 174. 13 A Novelette, 289 [t19-20, 286]. 14 A Novelette, 289 [t19-20, 286]. 15 William Carlos Williams, "Surrealism and the Moment", View 2, n°2 (May 1942): 13.

Jacqueline Saunier-Ollier, William Carlos Williams, l'homme et l'oeuvre poétique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1979),

Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, in Novels and Other Writings, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, New York, The Library of America, 1997, 13.

Novels and Other Writings, 771.

This is what he wrote to Williams: "Do you remember his dream factory stories in transitionwhat I meant by an American superrealism (?)"

Unlike Dickran Tashjian and Jeffrey Peterson, I argue that Williams' experiments are not "automatic writing" but "spontaneous writing". Indeed, Williams dismisses outright the psychological work that "automatic writing" entails. For example, in this passage of a letter to James Laughlin on January 14, 1944 he writes: "To hell with them. I'm afraid the Freudian influence has been the trigger to all this. The Surrealists followed him. Everything

Williams, "How to Write", Interviews with William Carlos Williams, ed. Linda Wagner, New York, New Directions, 1976, 97.

William Carlos Williams, "Comment by the editor", Contact 1, n°1 (February 1932), reprinted in New York by Kraus Reprint, 1967: 7-9.