T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (review)

"The flats of Canada," T. E. Hulme declares in "Cinders," his first significant work, "are incomprehensible on any single theory" (95). As this collection demonstrates, the same may be said of Hulme's short, volcanic career, which spanned less than a decade and was so unlike his image of the vast, undifferentiated Canadian prairie. This book marks an important development in Hulmean scholarship. It is the first collection of its kind, and it builds on the crucial revisions made by Michael Levenson and Karen Csengeri to Hulme's place in modernism. It also clarifies the literal placing of Hulme, following on from Csengeri's The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme (1994), which straightened out the chronology that Herbert Read had so famously ignored when he put together Speculations (1924) and Further Speculations (1955). (Csengeri also made available previously uncollected writings, including the "War Notes" of 1915–16.) This collection, with its heterogeneous mix of essays, also mirrors Hulme's interdisciplinarity: in his short career, he made a habit of acquiring numerous mentors (Bergson, Lasserre, Worringer), subjects (language, ethics, Byzantine art), and occupations (poet, critic, philosopher). The broad church of part-time Hulmeans sheltered within this volume and the range of approaches they offer strike an appropriate chord with his pluralism and eclecticism.

Hulme's dynamic career, full of bold assertions and fitful starts, provides a wealth of opportunities for scholarly intervention. Titillating anecdotes of Hulme's personal life appear now and then, fed by Robert Ferguson's recent biography (2002), but more frequently these essays reveal Hulme's serious side. Hulme's reputation as a colorful character of prewar modernism, the man who hung Wyndham Lewis upside down by his trouser cuffs in Soho Square and carried a brass knuckleduster (a "toy" that he used more often in sex than violence), has influenced his critical reception almost as much as Read's careless editing of his work. Taking the self-proclaimed "amateur" seriously, however, has thankfully become acceptable practice. Similarly, Hulme's reputation for being "as politically incorrect, avant la lettre, as it was possible to be," in Richard Kimball's words, no longer seems to attract much interest (127).

Instead, other failures are identified. Alan Munton, for example, discusses Hulme's mistake in selecting the sculptor Jacob Epstein as the chief example of the new abstraction. It may surprise some readers to discover that abstraction was something of an aberration in Epstein's oeuvre, one that was later repudiated. Also surprising is Hulme's failure to substantially address Epstein's one truly modern work, Rock Drill, which seems a perfect representation of Hulme's theory of mechanized abstraction. Munton pinpoints the reason for Hulme's failure to complete his projected book, "The Sculpture of Epstein" (most likely exploded with Hulme in 1917), precisely in Epstein's failure to be sufficiently modern; Hulme's chosen example did not live up to his theory. In his essay on Hulme's use of Bergson, "Hulme's Compromise and The New Psychologism," Jesse Matz posits another failure: that Hulme was unable or unwilling to move "beyond the hasty, easy focus" on Bergson's "sentimental dualism" of "real time" and "public time" (121). Matz claims that a "compromise" engineered by Hulme might have resulted in no less than "a better theory of the artist" (124), one that leaned toward "a more engaged politics" rather than encouraging a retreat into pure duration (122). The book's final and most surprising essay, Comentale's study of "Hulme's Feelings," describes a failure of a different kind. Hulme is often associated with classical restraint and "dry hardness." Comentale's Hulme, by contrast, is a wild adolescent, full of "anger," "moodiness," and "beautiful idealism" (209). Hulme, the author admits, "is most captivating when hateful, most thrilling in his violence" (212). But the tragic-heroic modernism that Hulme represents, with its "shorthand" of Original Sin standing for a wider anti-humanist pessimism, is ultimately...