I’ll Cry If I Want To

The Modernist Party is a Volume that quite literally wears its structuring principles on its sleeve, its festive yellow jacket announcing that, like ‘guests at a party’, its ‘chapters talk to and argue with each other’. Even the most cursory of glances over its contents reveals a substantial critical investment, on the part of editor – and self-styled host – Kate McLoughlin, in this simile, for while she refrains from explicitly addressing the party’s role in ‘modelling works of literature’ until the second part of her introduction, by selfconsciously framing her table of contents as ‘The Menu’, her acknowledgements as ‘A Note of Thanks’, and her catalogue of contributors as ‘The Guest List’, she insists, somewhat heavy-handedly, upon our reading the collection as organised social gathering. So minute a focus, on the part of the reviewer, on the peripherals of the text, might seem unwarranted were it not for the comparative reticence with which McLoughlin interrogates the terms of her title. The ‘modernist’ era she defines as ‘roughly the last years of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth’ and adds, by way of an endnote, the caveat that her application of the term ‘modernist’ to this period is in fact ‘fairly loose, and should be taken to include proto-modernist tendencies’. In dealing with ‘party’ as a signifier she is seemingly as – if not more – generous, asserting: ‘No attempt is made in the present volume to impose a definition’ of the term upon the reader, though ‘the collection’s emphasis is on individual, if recurrent, occasions rather than on more generalised salon culture or bohemian lifestyle’. Such statements suggest the volume as a whole fosters a certain liberty and expansiveness. This impression is, however, somewhat undermined by the temporal and canonical limitations we as readers might infer from indulging McLoughlin – as we are overtly encouraged to from the first – in her overarching conceit: if, as the definite article of the book’s title suggests, this gathering represents the definitive modernist party, both menu and guest list dictate for it a narrower scope than our host would imply. McLoughlin does admit that not everyone could be invited, explaining by way of a parenthetical aside that ‘a limited guest-list meant that there was no room for Mary Butts, Mina Loy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Green or Evelyn Waugh’, but without openly acknowledging just why these latter failed to make the list.

The beauty of her conceit, however, is that it allows us to make an educated guess. Those who did receive a golden ticket are, without exception, canonical moderns, ‘men of 1914’ such as T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Ford Madox Ford, or women – among them VirginiaWoolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Gertrude Stein – of that select group ushered into the modernist fold by the feminist critics of the 1980s and 1990s. All were at their most prolific during one or more of the first three decades of the twentieth century, limiting the volume’s chronology to the traditionally accepted span of ‘high’ modernism’s reign, a temporal bias that the presence of authors such as Mary Butts, Henry Green, and Evelyn Waugh would counteract. McLoughlin thus situates the collection within a critical narrative that is not only bound by outmoded notions of what constitutes ‘high’ and what ‘low’ modernism, but at the same time resists accounting for late modernism, for the majority of the parties and the writings – and indeed the Party writings – of the 1930s, and for those of what Marina MacKay termed ‘modernism beyond the Blitz’ in Modernism and World War II (2007). Geographically, too, while McLoughlin characterises The Modernist Party as ‘a diverse and international gathering’, the focus rarely shifts from the three established hubs of modernist activity – London, Paris, and New York – while most of the guests – scholars and subjects alike – hail from Britain, France, or the United States. Jean-Michel Rabaté’s chapter on the parties of James Joyce’s Dublin is of course the obvious exception to this...