I went looking for Pound again. He showed up indirectly all over Bruno’s Weekly. The most interesting issue was from 7.29.1916, where I found a book review of Pound’s memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska.

It wasn’t very nice. Dedicating an entire section of his review to “Mr. Pound’s Failings,” W. G. Blaikie Murdoch asserts that “nearly every page of his writing is slipshod” (880), then proceeds to compare the book to what he considers much more effective biographies. Because Murdoch has no taste for the way that “ Mr. Pound has preferred to fling things down at random” (880), he spends the second half of his review trying to lay out a “disentangled” narrative of “facts” about the sculptor. As you might imagine, his version was pretty boring—the most interesting part of the review was the inclusion of sketches Gaudier drew for Major Macfall’s Splendid Wayfaring.

More thought-provoking parts of this issue provide more intriguing glimpses into the world of Art During Wartime. The issue opens with an excerpt from a chapbook (published by Bruno in 1915) by Sadakichi Hartmann—early secretary to Walt Whitman, sometime friend to Stieglitz, and rather opinionated art critic—called “Permanent Peace: Is It a Dream?” In the piece, Hartmann reflects on humankind’s ongoing tendency to glorify and idealize war, from art museums to everyday life. He outlines a history of the ways that society has justified fighting through various means, concluding that “it is capitalism that instigates war, just as the Church and Imperialism in former centuries. The casus belli, like the assassination of the Austrian archduke, at Serajevo, the Ems despatch, the firing in Fort Sumter, the blowing up of the Maine, is never more than an incident” (872). His major claim is that “wars are invariably fought for strictly material reasons” (872, emphasis mine), and they are often driven by economics or national political prominence; Hartmann is skeptical that idealistic justifications for war are as pure as they appear. He also breaks down the idea of “civilized warfare,” instead arguing that “warfare, premedidated [sic] wholesale slaughter can not be civilized” (873). From his perspective, then, “There is no diffrence [sic] whether one is clubbed down with a morning star and pierced by a halberd, or torn to pieces by shrapnel and throttled by asphyxiating gas. One is as barbarous as the other. Only modern war has become more scientifically cruel. The mucular [sic] strength has dwindled down to naught” (873).

This is a far cry from the glories of war that other people in the art world bled out their pens for, but it is not to say that Hartmann and others no longer have faith in art. The issue also dedicates plenty of space to poetry and poets, including a section dedicated to “Books and Magazines of the Week.” Their analysis of The Egoist is particularly telling—so, at the risk of doing what I have to tell my students not to do on a weekly basis, I will reproduce the passage in full:

“This excellent journal, the only one from English shores at present bearing the stigma of the big times Europe is passing through has of late somehow changed radically in its contents. Not in its excellence, but the idealism which one could read between the lines of its page has given way to a bit of philosophy of hopelessness, and then there is Mr. Ezra Pound again among the contributors and that might have something to do with it. Richard Aldington, the assistant editor, is doing military service and his ‘A solemn Dialogue’ in the current issue expresses very little martial enthusiasm, but some very clear views of what military service means to the individual: slavery.”

This “radical” shift in “content” speaks to the already deep awareness during wartime of the different ways that thinkers responded to the war and tried to incarnate it in their work, all the while preserving the experience of it through art in a way that could make it persist (even if only for a short time). The sheer continual effort to produce these little magazines and to redefine art shows how this “philosophy of hopelessness” and lack of “martial enthusiasm” did not prevent people from creating something out of the destruction of the time. It’s important to remember that wartime contained many varieties of perspectives about the value of the war throughout the period, but one idea largely remained the same in the cultural world: the world we knew is ending, and art must embody the apocalypse.