Modernists in the Marketplace

ELT 41 : 2 1998 based fiction starting from the child's point of view, May Sinclair would be low (if not forgotten) and James Joyce the highest of the high? To talk about low writers meeting high writers is, to some extent, to risk anachronism. These categories are post-facto justifications of divisions that were never particularly logical to begin with, and certainly were not the lived realities of early-twentieth-century authors. They are, however, our categories. We have inherited a version of modernism that sternly separates the sheep from the goats, and DiBattista , McDiarmid, and their contributors deserve praise and admiration for revealing that they all lived in the same barnyard. At its best, High and Low Moderns offers persuasive and thorough historical research to make us rethink the literary landscape of the early twentieth century. This is not a new idea, and it is not carried through to its logical conclusions, but it is an eminently worthwhile project and it is often done well here. Anyone who is interested in rethinking modernism would learn something from this collection. Talia Schaffer __________________ San Francisco State University Modernists in the Marketplace Ian Willison, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik, eds. Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. New York: St. Martin's, 1996. xviii + 331 pp. $69.95 SAMUEL JOHNSON once opined that "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Using this standard and judging by Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, the major Modernists were not blockheads. But that self-styled "high-brow" artists knew "the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less," as Faulkner put it, hardly justifies an expensive volume of essays. The twelve essays in this collection do much more than that, however; they carefully detail the often painstaking efforts the major Modernists underwent to present and market their works—to posterity, in addition to their contemporaries —on their own exacting terms. While writers such as James, Yeats and Lawrence scratched to earn a living, they also struggled to secure the most favorable conditions possible for the reception and appreciation of their work, even if that often required adaptation to or compromise with the marketplace. It is not surprising that publishing a literary masterpiece can be almost as arduous as writing one when it first requires that the forces of l'art pour l'art and those of Grub Street come to terms. 192 BOOK REVIEWS The first essay, "Henry James and the Economy of the Short Story" by Philip Home, "considers some of the commercial and social constraints , and temptations, and opportunities, which affected James's writing of short fiction in the last half of his career; and tries to suggest something of what he learned, and suffered, from them." According to Home, James's efforts to capitalize on the bullish short story market taught, or compelled, him to economize, to curb his prodigious expatiatory propensities. This market-driven constraint induced James "to get the maximum into the minimum"; the resulting compression, or economy , of his prose constitutes, Home argues, a critical part of James's "legacy to Modernism." The next essay, '"Playing at Treason with Miss Maud Gonne': Yeats and his Publishers in 1900" by Warwick Gould, details the formidable complications that Yeats faced "by the need for an Irish writer to succeed in London." The villains of this piece are Mowbray Morris and John Morley, staunch, John Bullish readers for Macmillan, a publisher Yeats was trying to interest. Gould exposes, often to the point of redundancy, the role that bitter nationalist politics played in Yeats's struggles to acquire as much control as possible over "the means of production" of his work. This struggle was compounded by an "imperative" that Yeats shared with most other Modernists: "From the outset, Yeats had a coherent, idealised conception of how his various works, published, rewritten or projected, might fit together as a Collected Works. The imperative was constant.. .." Indeed, the inherent conflict between the artist's attempts to fashion his or her oeuvre into some kind of ideal order and publishers' insistence upon the bottom line recurs throughout Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. "Marketing Modernism: How Conrad Prospered" by Cedric Watts...