The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats (review)

Miranda B. Hickman's The Geometry of Modernism observes that the Anglo-American authors featured in her book have a curious career-long tendency to draw "conspicuously . . . upon the language of geometric figures." This "preoccupation with geometrical patterns," she argues, serves for them as a "vocabulary with which they imagine and figure ideal cultural conditions, bodily states, philosophical attitudes, and epistemological methods" (xv). Tracking the permutations of this "vocabulary" allows Hickman to cover a wide range of material. She discusses a number of modernist texts: H. D.'s HERmione (1929), Nights (1935), Notes on Thought and Vision (1982), and Tribute to Freud (1956); Wyndham Lewis's Enemy of the Stars (1914) and Tarr (1918); and the 1925 and 1937 versions of W. B. Yeats's A Vision. Additionally, she recounts the history of Blast (1914–15); examines the changing look of Pound's Cantos as printed from the mid-1920s into the 1930s; and explores the Futuristic aesthetic of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (1932–34).

Her argument has two parts. First, she highlights "the crucial formative influence of the fin de siècle on early modernist work" (246). Claiming that vorticism "engaged in a sustained, phobic campaign against effeminacy, as the category was understood in its post-Aestheticist milieu" (245), she tracks the invocations of the Yellow Nineties in vorticist polemic, above all the attacks on Oscar Wilde, and shows how a certain cluster of values coded as masculine—"accuracy, hardness, and forceful action"—came to be associated with jagged shapes and oblique lines (66). This style provided a vivid contrast to the elegant curvilinear sensibility associated with Aubrey Beardsley and Art Nouveau. Artists such as Lewis, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were thereby able to distance themselves, in theory at least, from an "Aestheticism [that] had been rendered shameful through its links with male homosexuality." In actuality, the vorticists shared a number of values with their decadent predecessors, including such traits as high esteem for an artist's vocation and opposition to a popular culture perceived as debased. Many of them, Lewis in particular, also tended to idealize, even eroticize, the male bonding made possible by participation in a small "male homosocial sphere" united in common cause (73). Unable to overcome "anxiety" induced by "homophobia," vorticists responded to their subterranean kinship to Wilde and his compeers by ratcheting up their avant-garde rhetoric and zealously policing themselves for any hint of mauve (245).

The second part of Hickman's argument concerns the interwar years. In "an environment increasingly demanding decisive action and forceful responses to the brewing social and political crises," there was a sudden "upsurge of geometric vocabulary" in works by H. D., Pound, and Yeats (247). H. D. developed a "fantasy of the geometric body" as a "defensive maneuver," "an effort to find an image of invulnerability and transcendence that would help her face" the impending catastrophe (248). Moreover, she found scientific-seeming references to lines, shapes, and volumes more and more useful as she sought "legitimacy" for her "interest in mysticism and the occult" (219). Pound, as "his attraction to Italian fascism" deepened, began vociferously to promote "sleek material forms with geometrically clean lines" (247). And Yeats, who believed spiritualism provided a "worthwhile, if heterodox" resource capable of "alleviat[ing] the confusion of the times," started relying heavily on "geometric diagrams" communicated by "Spiritual Instructors" (208–209). In each case, mathematical discourse was seen as "connoting rigor, precision, and activity," in short, a cluster of attributes very similar to what "geometric forms" had been "associated with in the Vorticist context" (250).

The Geometry of Modernism runs into a bit of trouble when it tries to assert a direct causal link between the two halves of its argument. The study does not marshal enough evidence to prove satisfactorily that the works of the 1930s are "significantly influenced by" (242) or "deeply indebted to the...