Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars

3. Modernism with an Accent

BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 62 / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [62], (1) Lines: 0 to 53 ——— -0.28299pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [62], (1) 3. Modernism with an Accent Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, and Josephina Niggli [A] beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire Émigrés, exiles, expatriates, refugees, nomads, cosmopolitans the meanings of those words wary,as do their connotations. Expatriates can go home any time they like, while exiles cannot. Cosmopolitan can be a term of self-affirmation, straight or postmodernly ironic, or else an anti-Semitic slur. Over and above their fine distinctions, however, these words all designate a state of being“not home”(or of being“everywhere at home,”the flip side of the same coin), which means, in most cases, at a distance from one’s native tongue. Is this distance a falling away from some original wholeness and source of creativity, or is it on the contrary a spur to creativity? Is exile a cause for optimism (celebration, even) or its opposite? Susan Rubin Suleiman, Exile and Creativity Most immigrants put on their finest clothing for their arrival in America. One photographer observed, “At times the Island looked like a costume ball with the multicolored, many-styled national costumes.” Barbara Benton, Ellis Island My mother and father came from a small town in Poland. They had three sons. My father decided to go to America, to 1. stay out of the army, 2. stay out of jail, 3. save his children from everyday wars and pogroms. Grace Paley,“The Immigrant Story” And besides, he [Ezra Pound] comes out with one fairly lipped cornet blast: the only distinctive U.S. contributions to the arts have been ragtime and buckdancing . William Carlos Williams,“Preface,” Kora in Hell: Improvisations BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 63 / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [63], (2) Lines: 53 to 82 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [63], (2) The Adobe Indian hag sings her lullaby: The beetle is blind The beetle is blind The beetle is blind The beetle is blind, etc., etc. and Kandinsky in his, Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst, sets down the following axiom for the artist: Every artist has to express himself. Every artist has to express his epoch. Every artist has to express the pure and eternal qualities of the art of all men. So we have the fish and the bait, but the last rule holds three hooks at once not for the fish, however. William Carlos Williams,“Preface,” Kora in Hell: Improvisations I n Hugh Kenner’s definition, internationalism is mandatory for modernism . For him the prototypical American modernist is Ezra Pound, the expatriate artist who claims “world citizenship” for himself. On the other end of the spectrum then are those deemed provincial and mere regionalists, such as William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner (see Kenner, The Pound Era; Hallberg, Canons). Against the cosmopolitan internationalism of the expatriate modernists standsWilliam CarlosWilliams,who saw Eurocentric bias against thingsAmerican and an elitist privileging of the erudite and learned in the self-imposed exiles of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and H.D. In his 1918 preface to Kora in Hell: Improvisations, William Carlos Williams launches a vitriolic attack onAmerican expatriatism that calls for anAmerican modernism based in indigenous American culture as opposed to the “great tradition” of Europe. Thus he favors the imagination of his mother, African American work songs, and Native American lullabies the art of the marginalized as opposed to the“pure and eternal qualities of the art of all men”(Imaginations 26). The disagreement between Pound and Williams addresses geographical, class, gender, and cultural preferences (the...