Vortex: Pound, Eliot and Lewis by Timothy Materer (review)

BOOK REVIEWS73 Timothy Materer, Vortex: Pound, Eliot and Lewis. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979. 225 p. "Post-Utopians" is Susan Sontag's word for current-day intellectuals; that is, people unsure what to do with their idealistic urges now that belief in Utopian schemes is impossible. Perhaps post-Utopianism accounts for the continuing fascinations with the cultural revolutionaries of the preWWI period, endlessly sanguine about their ability to change around the world. Timothy Materer's study of the Vortex movement (roughly 1914-23; magazine, Blast) shows Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis setting out to give the Western World a new culture and a new language. T. S. Eliot's cautious involvement in this venture also receives consideration, as do the roles of James Joyce and Henri Gaudier-Breska, the legendary, short-lived sculptor-painter in whom Pound placed tremendous hopes. In addition, Materer traces the after effect of Vorticism, which continued to color its participants' thought long after they had moved away from their original program. Materer faces no small difficulty in abstracting the essential features of the movement from the writings of excitable (in some cases, crackpot) contemporaries. To give an idea, two of the three key sources on Gaudier are an account of his love life called Savage Messiah and a "memoir" in which "Pound's claims for Gaudier's Vorticism were so aggressive that his book at first did as much harm as good for the understanding of Gaudier's art" (p. 64). Especially troublesome is Pound's passionately expounded but garbled metaphysics. Here, Materer traces an overall pattern, an irrationalistic "implicit metaphysics. . .rooted in religious perceptions" (p. 138). The labor of explication might more profitably have been applied to Pound's linguistic theories — notions that, however extravagant, did help reshape modern poetic language. In sum, though, the work is a useful guide through the jungle of Vorticist and anti-Vorticist polemic to a recognizable set of principles. It also provides insight into the "pattern of hope" (p. 38) that seized the intellectual imagination of the world early in this century. NAOMI LINDSTROM, University of Texas at Austin Martha Mihalyi, Bloodflowers. Eau Claire: Red Weather Press, 1978. 18 p. $2.50. Bloodflowers by Martha Mihalyi is like a quiet person with explosive potential. The poems in this chapbook seem soft-spoken but the softness comes from a tone of mourning rather than a gentleness of perception, a pitch of grief edged with violence. Mihalyi's is a dark vision of the internal and personal that moves obsessively back and forth between that darkness and the environment which created it. Certain words recur — blades, nails, needles, broken glass — intensifying ...