The Idea of a Colony: Eliot and Stevens in Australia

THAT MODERNIST LITERATURE encountered a frequently hostile reaction from its earliest audiences, whom we tend now to reproach in retrospect for their "shortsightedness" and "provincialism," is true just about everywhere. But in the antipodes, those reproaches have tended to be both more severe and more literal: "provincialism" isn't just a metaphor in the provinces, let alone the colonies, and therefore we—good, tasteful cosmopolitans—tend to round on our ancestors who expressed those "provincial" tastes with extra force. So much force, in fact, that we rarely pause to complicate reproach with explanation. Why would we, when the cultural prestige of what we now call literary modernism is at an all-time high? And yet, there is some circularity here: Australian readers rejected modernism because they were provincial, and the evidence of their provincialism is their rejection of modernism. In this essay, I will show that Australian anti-modernism has a livelier and more complex intellectual genealogy than the cliché of provincialism would suggest, and that this background helps to account for the very different receptions accorded to the poetry of two of the twentieth century's major modernists, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. I will begin by describing the Nietzscheaninflected anti-modernism of the Vision group in the 1920s, and suggest that their ambition should be read as an attempt to articulate a specific cultural project for Australia in the postwar world. Modernism, they concluded, was inimical to that project. Shortly thereafter, however, the site of modernism's reception shifted from the public sphere of practicing poets and critics to the academy, where the increasing influence of the Leavisites—whose own cultural mission dovetailed in some interesting, if accidental, ways with the Vision group—made a version of the modernist canon a fait accompli. But that canon was circumscribed in certain ways, notably by the availability of texts: in the first half of the twentieth century, Australian readers relied on London publishing houses for their imported reading matter. For an American writer's work to be disseminated widely in Australia, their work would have to be anthologized, or released by a British publisher. This is how Stevens's work came to be known in Australia during the 1950s. That Stevens's poetry was disseminated at a moment when Australia was shifting its cultural and political allegiances from Britain to the United States was its good fortune: against the intellectual backdrop of anti-modernist vitalism, it could be received and read as a potential escape from the Eliotic impasse.

One of the first expressions of modernism in the antipodes was, fittingly enough, a kind of anti-modernism: I am referring to Vision: A Literary Quarterly, edited by Frank C. Johnson, Jack Lindsay, and Kenneth Slessor, and published in four issues beginning in May 1923 and concluding in February 1924. Vision shares many of the essential characteristics of the modernist little magazine, not least the brevity of its lifespan and the pugnacity of its tone. Reflecting on his own experiences with little magazines, Ezra Pound famously recommended "a program—any program. A review that can't announce a program probably doesn't know what it thinks or where it is going" (703). On a rhetorical level, at least, Vision would not have disappointed:

The object of this Quarterly is primarily to provide an outlet for good poetry, or for any prose that liberates the imagination by gaiety or fantasy. Unless gaiety is added to realism, the pestilence of Zola or the locomotor ataxia of Flaubert must finally attack the mind. We would vindicate the youthfulness of Australia, not by being modern, but by being alive. Physical tiredness, jaded nerves and a complex superficiality are the stigmata of Modernism. We prefer to find Youth by responding to the image of beauty, to vitality of emotion.

("Foreword" I: 2)

Its contemptuous vision of "Modernism" sees the malign influence of Zola and Flaubert extending into the 1920s, alongside a host of contemporary offenders:

When Picasso hung a geometrical pattern in gold paint in the last Autumn Salon, or Satie put typewriters in the orchestra of "Parade," they were...