Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (review)

Literary modernism can be and has always been a fraught topic of discussion. Its progenitors, high-water marks, and even dates of periodization are as disputed as the volumes of commentary on its own contents and figures. Jane Goldman's volley into the fray makes many formidable strides into the discussion worthy of note and attention by drawing the reader's eyes into fixed particulars of the radical intersection of gender, culture, and art in the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, while she does make a grand start of particulars, her focus becomes so compact that the generalities she raises, while fascinating, come with severe collateral damage to the Williams scholar.

At the center of Goldman's study is her recurring focus on Virginia Woolf and Nathanael West, which is not so much a criticism as it is a limiting factor in a project situating itself as yet another study of periodization. That having been said, Goldman's construction of an Anglo-American modernist period set around a largely European (admittedly Parisian) epicenter in terms of culture, art, history, and most importantly—gender—is replete in its detail and otherwise illuminating on the back end of her periodization: the apocalypse years. For, while volumes of scholarship have been bound on what Hugh Kenner once contentiously termed the Pound Era, few have put forth the energy into exploring and expanding upon modernism's oscillations through the realism of the 1930s and 40s leading into the Second World War. Goldman does so by investing her energies into a tripartite narrative chrono/topally focused around the literary achievements of three of the great so-called little magazines of the period: The Egoist, Blast, and transition.

Such an approach would seem to trumpet a discussion of Williams, and, yet, within the context of Williams studies, he becomes a relatively minor, even vestigial, figure in the work's survey. Indeed, what we come to learn about him relative to the modernist period, we see mainly by his traces and connections to others. The heft of Goldman's consideration of Williams is found in the latter third of the book in its "Apocalypse" section. As such, scholars of Williams's earlier years might be heartily disappointed with the glancing coverage of him in the hierarchy of high modernism, which if we are to work on Goldman's assertion that "the literature of the 'the twenties' [was] high modernist and aesthetic, and the literature of 'the thirties' [was] realist reportage" (xv), would seem to discount Williams's later material. This would not be nearly as contentious if it were not for the fact that Goldman places Williams among her later guard of Apocalyptic authors of the 1940s.

Though Goldman groups Williams in this study by his later materials, she mainly refers to his earlier work, and even that discussion serves primarily as context for addressing larger points in the work of other modernist authors. Kora in Hell, for example, becomes couched within a discussion of Gertrude Stein and H. D., among other imagists, as being participant to a "gender war in Hell" (208) offering the Williams scholar little more than Williams's own well-established connections to Ezra Pound. Likewise, "The Red Wheelbarrow" contributes only as a minor exemplum Imagist piece in comparison to the work of Angelina Grimke. As Goldman's study is focused on expanding the eye of literary modernism to encompass a greater gendered playing field, in itself a noble and stalwart project, to do so with such a cursory use of Williams's most-renowned materials seems suspect at best, short-sighted at worst—particularly given the amount of space devoted to Eliot's and Pound's own polemics and manifestos.

No, where Williams seems to buoy to the surface at last comes in the final chapter and primarily concerns itself only with 1944's The Wedge and its "Paterson: The Falls." Her examination of Williams's polemical assaults on the shortcomings of psychoanalytical and Marxist readings of poetry are admirable...