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Category Archives: Best and Worst
The best and worst of December 1918: Book talk, strewn violets, a sad loss, and a magazine of the future
2018 is over!
I should have anticipated that this would happen eventually, leaving me with a blog title and tag line that make me look like I can't do simple arithmetic. (UPDATE 9/8/2020: At the time I wrote this, this blog was called My Year in 1918 and the tag line was "A journey to the world of 100 years ago.") When I started this project last January, though, the end of the year seemed so far off that it wasn't worth thinking about. To the extent that I envisioned 2019 rolling around, I imagined myself luxuriating in all the reading I'd missed out on—diving into the new books that have been waiting on my bookshelf
and reading frivolous lifestyle articles, which 1918 was woefully short of. Maybe taking a quiz to find out what Hogwarts house I belong in or what Jane Austen character I resemble.*
What actually happened: I got stuck, like someone in a science fiction story who invents a time machine that breaks down as the dinosaurs are descending. I couldn't bring myself to read any of those new books, not even the biography of food safety pioneer Harvey Wiley, one of my favorite 1918 people. (That's it at the top of the pile.) I did look at the New York Times headlines on my iPad on New Year's Day, but they freaked me out. "What is all this news?" I asked myself. "And what does it have to do with me?" So I retreated to the January 1, 1919 news and My Antonia.
It looks like it will take a while. Maybe I'll read The Waste Land and work my way gradually back to the present.
In the meantime, from my cozy perch in 1918, here are the December bests and worsts.
Best quiz contestants:
The winners of the "Are You a Stagnuck?" quiz: fellow blogger Deborah Kalb of Books Q&A with Deborah Kalb** and Barbara Dinerman. For their prizes, Deborah has chosen a copy of The Melting of Molly and Barbara has chosen My Antonia. Congratulations to both of these loyal readers! You are not Stagnucks at all. The answers will be posted below the quiz soon. (UPDATE 1/11/2019: You can find them here.)
Best magazine:
Up to now, four magazines have won the Best Magazine award: The Crisis (three times), The Little Review (twice), The Dial, and The American Journal of Insanity. But the magazine that I turned to most eagerly every month, the one that became my 1918 comfort read, never won the honor. In fact, I came close to naming it Worst Magazine one month, after an ownership change that seemed likely to send it down the tubes.
I'm happy to say that The Bookman's wonderful December 1918 issue richly deserves the honor.
It began unpromisingly, with a profile of the editor of The Saturday Evening Post and a 15-page article called "The Amazing Story of the Government Printing Office."*** But then things started looking up, with a Sara Teasdale poem and an interesting article by British war poet Robert Nichols called "To the Young Writers of America," in which he discusses British taste in American books and vice versa, and notes that up-and-coming poets Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot**** were published in England before they were published in the United States. The highlight for me was when he said that
a certain American poet, come to live among us, antagonized the majority of those who were longing to hear what the real American poets were doing. I will not advertise his name. He does not need my help. He is an adept.
Well, I'll advertise it: it must be Ezra Pound. I love feeling like a 1918 insider.
Then there was Margaret Ashmun's Christmas round-up, including several gorgeously illustrated children's books I mentioned in the 1918 Holiday Shopping Guide,
Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (1916)
and a fascinating set of articles on children's literature around the world by writers from England, France, Holland, Spain, and Scandinavia. I was so riveted by the history of children's books in the Netherlands that I looked up the writer, Hendrik Willem van Loon, who turns out to be the author of The Story of Mankind, which won the first-ever Newbery Award in 1921.
Frontispiece, Twin Travellers in South America, by Mary H. Wade
In an article about children's holiday books, Annie Carroll Moore test-drives them on an actual child, nine-year-old Edouard–an ingenious gimmick in an era when gimmicks were sorely lacking.
"Twin Travellers in South America" looked promising but failed to hold his interest for more than a hasty glance at the pictures. "I think my teacher would like that book because it seems like a geography trying to be a story."*****
And there's a review of Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons by H.W. Boynton, who feels exactly as I do about it:
I take pleasure in the book, I suspect, because it covers vividly the range of my own generation and yields the atmosphere of and color of that "middle distance" which, as one emerges from it, is wont to be as blurred and insignificant to the backward eye. And I close the book with the queer feeling that everything about it is true except the central figure.
He reviews My Antonia too, but I'm saving that until I finish the book.
Okay, enough Bookman love–on to rest of the best (and worst).
Worst loss to criticism
Randolph Bourne, date unknown
One of the highlights of my 1918 reading has been Randolph Bourne's criticism in The Dial. He was modern without (like Ezra Pound) descending into incoherence, hard-headed without (like H.L. Mencken) crossing the line to nastiness. At 32, he had a bright future ahead of him. Or he would have, if he hadn't fallen victim, after suffering from chronic health problems and disabilities throughout his life, to the influenza epidemic. He died on December 22, 1918. His last essay for The Dial, published on December 28, was a rapturous review of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. It ends as follows:
The book runs over with good things. One closes it with a new sense of the delicious violence of sheer thought. If there were more Gideons like this, at the sound of such trumpets all the walls of the Victorian Jerichos would certainly fall.
I wish he had lived to leave us his thoughts on the explosion of literary talent that would emerge after the war.
On a more cheerful note…
Best nostalgia-inducing headline:
President Wilson arrives in France, and the crowds go wild. Like, strewn violets wild. Sigh.
Best Christmas present:
Because what says "Christmas" better than not executing someone for exercising their First Amendment rights?
Worst Christmas present:
Because what says "Red Cross" better than a basket of tobacco?
Best judicial decision:
Most 1918 judicial decisions were pretty appalling, but I can get behind Johnson v. Johnson.
Worst praise for a leader during a political campaign:
Best sinister stratagem:
Cordiality! Those dastards!
Worst journalistic flat-footedness:
World War I, as you undoubtedly know, ended on November 11, 1918. Some monthly magazines were on it, like The Crisis
and Poetry.
Others missed the boat. The Atlantic Monthly was full of war articles with titles like "Morale" and "Impressions of the Fifth Year." St. Nicholas published its monthly update on how the war was going, with one line at the top saying, oh, wait, we won.
St. Nicholas, December 1918
And if you look closely at these festive stamps in the Ladies' Home Journal to paste onto your letter to your boy or girl in service
Ladies' Home Journal, December 1918
you'll find this
and this.
Best caption on an illustration:
Phillisy sidled up to her Aunt Marion, intent on a Red Cross sweater. "So," she asked, "can people come alive when they're dead?"
Sunset, December 1918
Best cartoons:
I love both of these Christmas-Eve-in-the-village scenes by Johnny Gruelle of Judge (the creator of Raggedy Ann and Andy) and Harrison Cady at rival humor magazine Life.
Judge, December 28, 1918
Life, December 5, 1918
Curious about who drew this charming Life cartoon, I blew it up to to 800% of its size and managed to read the signature: Rea Irvin, who later became a New Yorker cartoonist and created the magazine's mascot, Eustace Tilley.
Worst cartoon:
With the Huns out of the picture, the cartoonists need a new scary-looking villain. Sounds like a job for…the Bolsheviki!
Judge, December 7, 1918
Best ad (magazine)
Murad generally owns this category******
Life, December 19, 1918
but is edged out this month by rival Turkish cigarette Helmar.
Best ad (newspaper)
Newspaper ads are rarely interesting, but I did like this one. I'm unclear on the purpose of the electric vibrator that the woman on the right in the second row is using on her head.
Worst ad:
In another month it might have been this,
or this,
but this was the month of
so it was no contest.
Best magazine covers:
There was surprisingly little Yuletide festiveness on the December magazine covers, perhaps due to bet-hedging on the war.
Vogue upheld its usual high standard with two beautiful covers.
Vogue, December 15, 1918
Vogue Christmas Gifts Number, 1918
Erté finally turned up again after several months of covers that are lost to history, or at least to the internet.*******
Harper's Bazar cover illustration, December 1918, Erté
House & Garden featured this snowy scene.
Artist William Edouard Scott was back with another luminous painting on the cover of The Crisis.
And I loved this Vanity Fair cover,
which might have won, but then I remembered this Dada 3 cover, which was featured in the post on my sad 1918 love life. With the war over, it's a new era, with a new, sometimes anarchic, aesthetic emerging. And nothing looks more like that future than
On to…1919!!!!!!
*Although I don't need to; I know I'm a Ravenclaw and, like everyone else, Lizzie.
**You should check out her website, which features interviews with a huge number of authors (although none from 1918).
***Which, it turns out, is so amazing that the story continues in the January 1919 issue.
****What The Bookman had to say about Eliot under the previous ownership: "There is such a display of cynical cleverness in the verse of T.S. Eliot that I think he might be able to write almost anything except poetry."
*****Edouard was right. A sample of the twins' childish prattle: "'Why, that must be a mataco,' he said. 'It's a kind of armadillo. See, it has rolled itself into a ball for safety. Matacos always do that when they think danger is near. With its head hidden and its jointed shell curled around, it now feels quite safe.'"
******Fun fact: cartoonist Rea Irvin was a Murad illustrator.
*******I couldn't find an undamaged copy of the actual cover–this is a reproduction of the illustration.
New review on the Book List:
December 31: Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1917).
This entry was posted in Best and Worst, Books, Fiction and Poetry, In the News, Magazines, World War I and tagged 1918, 1919, advertising, Annie Carroll Moore, Booth Tarkington, cartoons, Dada, Ezra Pound, Harrison Cady, Harvey Wiley, Hendrik Willem van Loon, Johnny Gruelle, Margaret Ashmun, Randolph Bourne, Rea Irvin, Robert Nichols, Stagnuck, T.S. Eliot, The Bookman, The Magnificent Ambersons, Woodrow Wilson on January 6, 2019 by Mary Grace McGeehan.
The best and worst of November 1918: Fake and real armistices, osculation, and meat we'll learn to like
With the centenary of the Armistice approaching, I wanted to celebrate, but how? I couldn't find any planned events for Remembrance Day (as it's called in the Commonwealth) here in Cape Town.* But I knew that veterans lay a wreath at the war memorial every year, so I figured they'd be doing something special for this one. I arrived at 10:30 and found marching bands marching, bagpipers piping (oddly, "Sarie Marais," an anti-British song from the Boer War) and a big tent full of people. A young woman gave me a paper poppy.
There were prayers, hymns, and a speech by Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson, my old friend from Pretoria in the late eighties. (South Africa can be small-towny like that.) How to celebrate an event like this, in the presence of both current soldiers and elderly white veterans who won their medals doing who knows what, is always a fraught question in South Africa. Ian hit just the right note, highlighting the contributions of black soldiers in South Africa and the United States for whom the Allied victory didn't bring freedom.
At 11:00, the hour of the Armistice, there was a two-minute silence, a tradition that, it turns out, originated in Cape Town. Representatives of diplomatic missions and veterans' groups laid wreaths on the monument, and afterwards the rest of us were given white roses. Here's where I placed mine, thinking about the soldiers I've gotten to know in my year of 1918 reading, many of whom who didn't make it home.
Now on to the best and worst of November.
Best fake news: Allies win the war!
New York Evening World, November 7, 1918 (Library of Congress)
What's fake about that, you may be asking. Well, check the date.
In one of the most monumental screw-ups in the history of journalism, the United Press Association (which later became the UPI) reported on November 7 that the war had ended. According to a gloating report in the New York Times, which didn't run the erroneous story, reporters mistook a ceasefire in an area where French and German officials were meeting for the end of the war. The censors, who were responsible for weeding out secrets, not errors, OK'd the story, and the agency cabled its headquarters. Which didn't bother to check with officials in Washington, the attitude being "What do they know?" Newspapers rushed out extra editions.
New York Times, November 8, 1918
Secretary of War Baker said this was news to him, and Secretary of State Lansing checked with Paris and issued a denial, but no one cared. New Yorkers poured onto the streets. In Washington, newspapers were dropped from helicopters. (CORRECTION: From an airplane. As an alert reader has pointed out, helicopters weren't invented yet.) 1,500 women workers from the State and War Departments, who apparently didn't take their bosses any more seriously than anyone else did, rushed over to the White House, where they waved American flags and cheered President Wilson.**
Later that night, when word spread that the war was in fact still going on, a lot of people were too drunk to care.
Luckily, only four days passed before the…
Best real news: Allies win the war!
Or, more succinctly and colorfully,
I worried about the fake victory celebration putting a damper on the real victory celebration, but that was just me being a gloom:
New York Times, November 12, 1918
People went wild with joy all over again.
What persons were these, I wondered. Three-day-old persons? But the premature celebration had vanished from everyone's heads, apparently.
Osculation ensued!
Best cartoon:
I only kind of get this Harry Gant Dart cartoon–something about the Germans not being in control of their own country anymore–but the drawing is amazing and it's a refreshing change from all the cartoons about people hanging and strangling the Kaiser.
Judge, November 30, 1918
Best illustration:
Amid the celebration, a reminder of the conflict's cost.
Frank E. Schoonover, Ladies' Home Journal, November 1918
Worst Thanksgiving celebration:
According to the New York Times, New Yorkers were eager to entertain the troops, including 750 convalescent and wounded soldiers who had returned from France during the week and were quartered at Debarkation Hospital No. 3 at 18th Street and 6th Avenue. Between them, they had received 1,400 invitations–two each! Lavish dinners and theater tickets had been laid on. But, when their uniforms returned from the sterilization department and the soldiers "prepared to don them to sally forth to the feasts," it turned out that they had shrunk beyond recognition. A "big soldier," presented with his outfit, declared it a "Boy Scout uniform."
Many unsuccessful efforts were made by others to wear the shrunken military garb, and, of course, regulations barred them from appearing on the streets in any other clothes.
An emergency order went out, and 125 uniforms were procured. What to do with the rest of the soldiers? Waive the regulations in appreciation of the sacrifices they had made in securing the biggest military victory of all time? Don't make me laugh!
The fortunate wearers of these went forth, while the others, grumbling at their ill-luck, reclothed themselves in pajamas and hospital blankets.
Thank you for your service, boys!
Worst Meats:
The headline had me worried
Ladies' Home Journal, November 1918
and the illustrations confirmed my worst fears.
Since you didn't die in the war…
Judge, November 9, 1918
Worst magazine cover:
Like I said, not a fan of the Kaisercide trope.
Best magazine cover:
I like this George Wolfe Plank Vanity Fair cover a lot,***
and also the crisp, clear lines of this one from Golfers Magazine,
but the best cover award has to have something to do with what happened during this momentous month.
This J. C. Leyendecker Saturday Evening Post cover is wonderful, but I've already given it enough love.****
I was just about to bestow the award on Norman Rockwell's joyful soldiers on the cover of Life
Life, November 28, 1918
when I thought, "Wait, what about Vogue?", and found the winner, this gorgeous, understated Georges Lepape cover:
Vogue, November 15, 1918
On to—can it be?—December!
*Of course, only reading news from 100 years ago didn't help.
**This item, which I cribbed from Whatever It Is, I'm Against It, makes me blush on behalf of my fellow women State Department workers.
***If you're wondering what's happened to Erté, there aren't any copies of the October and November 1918 issues of Harper's Bazar, or even the covers, anywhere on the internet as far as I can tell.
****Fun fact: the soldier is Neil Hamilton, who later played Police Commissioner Gordon on Batman.
This entry was posted in Best and Worst, In the News, Magazines, My Life in 1918, World War I and tagged 1918, advertising, armistice, Cape Town, cartoons, False Armistice, food, illustration, South Africa, Thanksgiving on November 30, 2018 by Mary Grace McGeehan.
The best and worst of October 1918: Beautiful children, dubious remedies, and (sigh) fall colors
In the past, I've reflected cheerfully on how fast 1918 is flying by. Now, with two months to go, I do so with a sense of panic. I haven't read The Magnificent Ambersons, or The Education of Henry Adams,* or any South African books, or anything in a foreign language except some French poems in The Little Review, or any children's books except E. Nesbit's disappointing The Railway Children. I blithely promised in my first post that "I'll read magazines, watch movies, listen to music, and cook recipes from that time." Well, I've read a lot of magazines. Much to be done in the next sixty days!
But first, the best and worst of October.
Best news:
It's a tie among pretty much all of the front-page New York Times headlines of the month, with the Germans retreating so fast that in some places the Allies can't keep up with them.
New York Times, October 31, 1918
Worst news:
Authorities keep saying that the worst of the Spanish influenza epidemic is over, but they keep being wrong. This is a hard story to follow if you're not reading historical accounts, but my fellow 100-years-ago blogger Whatever It Is, I'm Against It is on the job. He's been tracking the coverage of the epidemic in the New York Times from the beginning, as well as highlighting the ridiculous ads touting the purported flu-preventing qualities of various products, like this one, which I saw in the Times and was going to use myself so it isn't copying:
Best magazine: The Crisis
For its annual children's issue, The Crisis asked readers to send in pictures of their children. 70 of them appear in the magazine. Under one group of pictures is the caption, "Would not the world be richer if the Gates of Opportunity were flung wide before these children as they grow?"
The Crisis, October 1918
In a story called "Race Purity," a little boy, apparently African-American, hits a little girl, apparently white, in the face. A man passing by calls him a "d-mn little [n-word]" and gently tells the girl to go home, saying, "I'd like to see that mother of yours that allows you to play with—." The girl gasps through her tears, "he's my bru-vv-er."
W.E.B. du Bois, his wife Nina, and their son Burghardt, ca. 1898
Du Bois imagines his only son, Burghardt, who died as an infant, as "a ghost boy—just twenty-one he would have been last May," gone off to the war. "It was not given to this my boy nor yet to me to go in the flesh; but he went dead, yet dreaming, and I dream-drunk, and yet alive, albeit with twitching, hanging hands."
Best-sounding new novel: Strayed Revellers, by Allan Updegraff
The Bookman says of this book by Updegraff, a college buddy of Sinclair Lewis, that
his theme is very new, showing what the war did to a group of Greenwich villagers, extremely gay ones, who kill themselves, admit carelessly to illegitimate parents, get drunk on water and gelatin and lead a wild life generally.
I'm sold!
Worst new novel: Strayed Revellers, by Allan Updegraff
But then I pulled up the book on Hathitrust and flipped to the last page, which features a guy mansplaining anarchism to our heroine, Clothilde:
"The name's filthied by men who care more for their individual stomachs and unwashed hides than they do for No-Rule. And it's Socialism, too,–since they have a regard for the social will, as well as for their own individual wills—even though the name 'Socialist' has been so dirtied by men whose social instincts stop with the attainment of personal safety and a two-cent drop in the price of soup-meat, not to mention the dirtying done by rank pro-Germans, that real Socialists will probably take a new name after the war."
No amount of getting drunk on gelatin is worth this. Run, Clothilde!
Worst headline:
Woman's Home Companion, October 1918
So smack them!
Best ad:
This is one of the least attractive ads I saw all month. But it caught my attention, all right. And it represents the direction advertising is moving in–good-bye beautiful artwork, hello gimmicks!**
Delineator, October 1918
Hey, little kids! Murder! Rape!***
St. Nicholas magazine, October 1918
Lots of worthy candidates.
I always have a weakness for a hardworking farmerette.
An appeal to kids' patriotism at a time when the government seemed worried that the Allies were winning the war so fast that people wouldn't want to fund it.
This because it's, well, beautiful:
As is this.
In the end, I had to declare a tie, because I couldn't bear to choose between this one
and this one, which makes me wistful from my perch in Cape Town, where it's spring now. And even our backwards April autumns don't have colors like this.
Worst magazine cover: Maclean's
Not doing much to counter the boringness image, Canada!****
On to November!
*Not my fault because, annoyingly, both of these American classics were published in late October.
**This is also, as it turns out, the cover image on the Spanish translation of Ring Lardner, Jr.'s memoir I'd Hate Myself in the Morning.
***Besides, the ad is all about how horrible the Turks are. It's as if the copywriter forgot that that the U.S. never declared war on Turkey and then when he remembered hastily stuck something at the end about how the Germans are even worse.
****Especially since the most prominently featured boring story isn't even in this issue, it just "starts soon."
This entry was posted in Best and Worst, Books, Fiction and Poetry, In the News, Magazines, World War I and tagged advertising, Allan Updegraff, children, illustration, W.E.B. Du Bois on November 2, 2018 by Mary Grace McGeehan.
The best and worst of August and September 1918: Modernist all-stars, predictions, and red scarves
Three-quarters of the way through 1918, everything seems normal to me now.* Appalling a lot of the time (racism, eugenics, anti-Semitism, class snobbery), but normal. Nine months of immersion have broken down the barriers of aesthetics and language use. I now think of people as being the age they were in 1918. Happy August/September birthdays to Dorothy Parker (25), T.S. Eliot (30), and William Carlos Williams (35), youngsters all!
I didn't do a Best and Worst for August because I was back in the United States, socializing nonstop. I don't know how those 1918 rich people did it—it's exhausting!** By the time I got back to Cape Town and emerged from the fog of jet lag, September was halfway gone. Which October will be too if I don't hurry up. So, without further ado, the best and worst of August and September 1918!
Best Magazine: The Little Review, September 1918
Just look at the table of contents of the Little Review's September issue. It's the literary equivalent of the Yankees' 1927 starting lineup.***
Of course, another possible analogy is to one of those movies so overstuffed with stars that you just know it's going to be horrible.
So which is it?
Somewhere in between. Yeats's "In Memory of Robert Gregory," mourning the death of the son of close friends in an aviation accident in Italy (or maybe it was friendly fire), sounds like outtakes from "Easter 1916," but so-so Yeats is better than just about anyone else at the top of their game. The Eliot poems include his notoriously anti-Semitic "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" ("Rachel née Rabinovitch/Tears at the grapes with murderous paws"), but also a poem in French, "Dans le Restaurant," part of which eventually made its way, in English, into "The Wasteland." I confess that I haven't kept up with the Ulysses serialization, but, hey, it's Ulysses.
So more 1927 Yankees than New Year's Eve. And there are more accolades for this issue to come—keep on reading!
Worst Magazine: Current Opinion, September 1918
Halfway through the September issue of The Bookman, I was convinced we had a winner. The magazine, under a new owner, had undergone its second major revamp of the year, and 1918 magazines revamps are never a good thing. They just make the magazine more like all the other magazines. The old Bookman was fusty, but it was entertaining. In the new Bookman, most of the article aren't even about books. If they are, they're about old books like Tom Jones or boring books about "Sea Power Past and Present." But then the magazine redeems itself with an Amy Lowell love poem**** and an excerpt from the upcoming sequel to Christopher Morley's fun 1917 novel Parnassus on Wheels. And they kept "The Gossip Shop," which, although most of the gossip is about which writer got his commission and is shipping off to France, is still kind of fun. So I felt better about The Bookman but was left without a worst magazine.
Then I came across the September issue of Current Opinion, featuring an article called "Why the Jew is Too Neurotic." The reason is explained in the sub-head: "Because his Extraordinary Resemblance to the Average Spoiled Child Causes Mental Strain." The rest of the article isn't as bad as that makes it sound. Something about how the Jews were the favorite children of God, and were isolated from the rest of society, and…I'll spare you the psychoanalytic logic. And there's sympathetic discussion of anti-Jewish discrimination throughout the ages. But the article epitomizes what's worst about 1918: the tendency to lump together entire "races" (African-Americans, Jews, Germans, Czechoslovakians, whoever) and ascribe a common set of qualities to them. Inconsistency alert: the issue also includes an admiring profile of New York Times owner Adolph Ochs, who comes across as a gee-whiz regular guy and not neurotic at all.
Best Line in an Editorial: "Vardaman Falls," New York Times, August 22
I'm not a fan of 1918 NYT editorials, which are generally narrow-minded, prejudiced, and smug. But this one, a gloating account of the primary election defeat of Senator James Vardaman, one of the worst racists in congressional history (although that didn't bother the Times nearly as much as his antiwar stance), has my favorite 1918 sentence so far:
Was he the victim of his own singularity, grown megalomaniacal, or did he simply overestimate the hillbilliness of his state?
Least Prescient Literary Criticism: Louis Untermeyer, "The Georgians," The Dial, August 15
Louis Untermeyer, ca. 1910-1915, Library of Congress
It's not really fair, with the benefit of hindsight, to poke fun at predictions by past critics about how future critics will regard their own times. But it's fun! So let's!
Louis Untermeyer, who was actually one of the best critics of the era as well as being a noted poet himself, ruminates on this topic in a review of the anthology Georgian Poetry: 1916-1917. He says of the anthologized poets that "these men of what he [the future critic] will doubtless call the 1920s" will say that the Georgians "produced a literature as distinctive and even more human than their [Elizabethan and Victorian] predecessors."
No they won't, Louis. And we don't call the 1910s the 1920s. We call them the 1910s.
Specifically, Untermeyer predicts that the future critic
will have a vigorous chapter on the invigorating vulgarisms of Mansfield and an interesting essay on Lascelles Abercrombie, who he will find, in spite of the latter's too packed blank verse, to be even more "modern" than the author of "The Everlasting Mercy."
Um, not quite. What's really going to happen, Louis, is that T.S. Eliot***** and the modernists are going to wipe these guys off of the map. Which brings us to…
Most Prescient Literary Criticism: Edgar Jepson, "The Western School," The Little Review, September
National Magazine, April-September 1915
Continuing our September 1918 Little Review/1927 Yankees starting lineup analogy, Edgar Jepson is, say, Tony Lazzeri to Eliot's and Joyce's Ruth and Gehrig. In his article "The Western School," Jepson, a British writer of detective and adventure fiction, complains about the undue accolades being given to subpar work by prominent poets. He makes his case convincingly by quoting these lines by Vachel Lindsay:
And kettle-drums rattle
And hide the shame
With a swish and a swirk
and dead Love's name
and these from "All Life in a Life" by Edgar Lee Masters:
He had a rich man or two
Who took up with him against the powerful frown
That looked him down
For you'll always find a rich man or two
To take up with anything–
There are those who want to get into society, or bring
Their riches to a social recognition
and these from "Snow," a long poem by Robert Frost about some monks having a conversation in the middle of the night:
That leaf there in your open book! It moved
Just then, I thought. It's stood erect like that,
There on the table, ever since I came,
Trying to turn itself backward or forward—
I've had my eye on it to make out which…
But don't despair for poetry! For, Jepson says,
the queer and delightful thing is that in the scores of yards of pleasant verse and wamblings and yawpings which have been recently published in the Great Pure Republic I have found a poet, a real poet, who possesses in the highest degree the qualities the new school demands.
None other than…T.S. Eliot!
Could anything be more United States, more of the soul of that modern land than "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?… Never has the shrinking of the modern spirit of life been expressed with such exquisiteness, fullness, and truth.
Jepson also praises Eliot's "La Figlia Che Piange" ("Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair"), saying that
it is hardly to be believed that this lovely poem should have been published in Poetry in the year in which the school awarded the prize [Poetry magazine's Levinson prize] to that lumbering fakement "All Life in a Life."
Jepson may be overstating his role in the discovery of Eliot, who, after all, is in plain sight in that very issue. But he deserves credit for his prescience, especially since he also complains about Lindsay's "Booker Washington Trilogy" in language straight out of the #OwnVoices movement:
I have a feeling that it is rather an impertinence. Why should a white man set out to become the poetic mouth-piece of the United States blacks? These blacks have already made the only distinctively United States contributions to the arts—ragtime and buck-dancing. Surely it would be well to leave them to make the distinctively United States contribution to poetry.
Home run for Tony Lazzeri!
Best Magazine Cover of a Woman Swimming with a Red Scarf on Her Head:
In this surprisingly competitive category, here are the runner up
and the winner.
Best Ad Depicting the Advertised Item as Humongous
Harper's Bazar, September 1918
Good Housekeeping, August 1918
At the risk of sounding like a Boche sympathizer, this is just mean.
Everybody's, September 1918
There are a lot of worthy contenders, like this
St. Nicholas, August 1918
and this
Vanity Fair, August 1918
and this startlingly modern-looking one
House & Garden, August 1918
and this, which, in another month, might have won.
Vogue, August 1, 1918
But the war was intensifying, American casualties were mounting, and it seems wrong not to recognize that. So here's the winner, a soldier saying good-bye to his farmerette sweetheart.
On to October!
*Of course, I might feel differently if I had to wear a corset.
**Although not as exhausting as working in a Lower East Side textile factory all day and then going to night school.
***Ford Madox Hueffer is Ford Madox Ford, remember.
****To her female lover. Which may not have been clear to her audience, although does "quiet like the garden/And white like the alyssum flowers/And beautiful as the silent spark of the fireflies" sound like a man to you?
*****Whom, to be fair, Untermeyer mentions later in the article. He says that the future critic will realize "in the light of the new psychology" how much prose writers like J.D. Beresford, Gilbert Cannan, A. Neil Lyons, Rebecca West and Thomas Burke had in common with "such seemingly opposed verse craftsmen" as Edward Thomas, W.W. Gibson, Rupert Brooke, James Stephens, and T.S. Eliot. If you blah-blah-blah out the writers no one reads today, we're left with "Rebecca West has something in common with Rupert Brooke and T.S. Eliot." I'll give him that. Kind of.
This entry was posted in Best and Worst, Fiction and Poetry, In the News, Magazines, World War I and tagged advertising, illustration, Little Review, Louis Untermeyer, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats on October 6, 2018 by Mary Grace McGeehan.
The best and worst of June and July 1918: Insanity, proto-flappers, and octopus eyes
I'm not in much of a mood to wax philosophical, having recently made my second trip from Cape Town to Washington, D.C. in two months. So I'll just say that I feel really, really sorry for all those people out there who aren't spending the year reading as if they were living in 1918. Check out these bests and worsts of June and July to see why.
Best Magazine: The American Journal of Insanity
The American Journal of Insanity is so good that its name isn't even the best thing about it. It's full of case histories of various psychological conditions that read like novels.* The saddest is the story, in an article titled "The Insane Psychoneurotic," of a Romanian Jewish immigrant who studied to become a lawyer while working (like Marcus Eli Ravage and every other Romanian Jewish immigrant) in a Lower East Side textile factory. He fell into a depression after failing the bar exam three times, became elated when he passed on his fourth try, and then went blind. A doctor restored his sight by pressing a pencil against his eye and telling him that he would be able to see when he opened his eyes. He lost the ability to talk and recovered it when a woman volunteer agreed to his (written) request that she allow him to use her first name. He was institutionalized for a while and released to outpatient care when he seemed to be getting better. Twelve days after his release, though, he hanged himself.
There's also an article on shell shock by a French doctor that deals in a sympathetic and nuanced manner with the often-dismissed condition, and that in no way justifies the discussion of his and his colleagues' research in the New York Times under this headline:**
Before awarding it the prestigious "Best Magazine" title, I figured I should check whether The American Journal of Insanity, like many other erstwhile subjects of my 1918 admiration (I'm looking at you, Marie Carmichael Stopes!), was a fan of eugenics, and in particular of the forced sterilization of "defectives." So I did a word search of the 1918-1919 volume, cheated a little to glance at the 1919 article that came up, and found out that they were absolutely appalled by it. Way to go, AJI!
Best quote from a book in a review:
Ambrose Bierce, 1892
"They had a child which they named Joseph and dearly loved, as was then the fashion among parents in all that region." (From the Ambrose Bierce short story "A Baby Tramp" (1893), quoted in a retrospective on Bierce in The Dial, July 18, 1918.)
Worst Editorial: "Their Hope Doomed to Disappointment," New York Times, July 27, 1918
A German newspaper has, according to a July 27 Times editorial, proposed that the German army undermine morale among American prisoners of war by making black and white soldiers live together in close quarters.
This, the deviser of the scheme thinks, would give keenest pain both to those thus united in misfortune and to Americans in general…His basis of belief is some vague knowledge he has of the negro's place in the United States and an exaggerated and distorted notion of an antagonism existing here between the white and black races.
Which, the Times says, is totally not the case!***
Someone should tell the German editor that negroes are not hated in this country—that in innumerable white families they occupy positions that bring them into daily and intimate contact with the other members, especially the children, and it is the Americans who know the negro best that in proper place and season are most forgetful of racial differences or make most kindly allowance for them.
Really, you can't make this stuff up.
I wish I could honor a more healthy product, but Murad owns this category.
Scribner's, July 1918
…Although not all Murad ads are created equal. This one looks like their regular artist was off sick so they hired a failed Italian Futurist as a temp.
I love this Georges Lepape portrait of a short-haired, drop-waisted proto-flapper.
Vanity Fair, July 1918
My favorite thing about this Erté Harper's Bazar cover, called "Surprises of the Sea," is the octopus eye.
On to August!
*Although they don't seem, at this point in the history of psychiatry, to ever actually cure anyone. Which could explain why the case histories read like novels.
**Which first came to my attention as a "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It" Headline of the Day.
***Even though the very same issue has an article and an editorial about lynching.
This entry was posted in Best and Worst, Books, Fiction and Poetry, In the News, Magazines, World War I and tagged advertising, African-Americans, Ambrose Bierce, Erté, illustration, New York Times, Psychiatry, World War I on July 31, 2018 by Mary Grace McGeehan.
The best and worst of May 1918: Short stories, cover art, ads, and cartoons
I'm back! I've been traveling during the past few weeks–from Cape Town to DC to Boston to DC to Boston again and back to DC. Now, belatedly, for the best and worst of May 1918.
Best short story: "The Man Who Came Back," from Buttered Side Down: Stories, by Edna Ferber (1912)
I decided to expand this category to include any short story I read, not just magazine stories from the "current" month. Just in time, because I'm loving this Edna Ferber collection. Ferber, who is best known for later novels like Show Boat and Cimarron and Giant—or, more accurately, for the movies and shows adapted from them—was twenty-seven when Buttered Side Down was published. She writes about ambitious young people from small towns whose big dreams haven't panned out. They're the most real people I've come across in my 1918 reading.
In "The Man Who Came Back," Ted Terrill, our handsome hero, has returned to his small town after spending three years in prison. Here's how, trying to keep up with the smart set, he met his downfall:
In a mad moment he had attempted a little sleight-of-hand act in which certain Citizens' National funds were to be transformed into certain glittering shares and back again so quickly that the examiners couldn't follow it with their eyes. But Ted was unaccustomed to these now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't feats and his hand slipped. The trick dropped to the floor with an awful clatter.
Ted is planning to stop in town just long enough to visit his mother's grave—she died of heartbreak while he was in prison—and make a new start in Chicago, but on the train he runs into Joe Haley, the owner of a fashionable hotel. Joe offers him a job as a bookkeeper, saying that he'd be better off facing up to his crime at home than living in fear of discovery in a new place.
Illustration from "The Man Who Came Back," American Magazine, April 1911
Ted is trained by his predecessor, Minnie Wenzel, who is marrying a "swell fellow." His family's former servant, Birdie, whose face "looked like a huge mistake," works at the hotel as a waitress. All goes well until one day Joe tells Ted $300 is missing. "Ted, old kid," he says sadly, "what'n'ell made you do it again?'" Birdie bursts in and unmasks the real culprit, Minnie, who has been pocketing the money for her trousseau. Ted asks Birdie if he can walk her home. But Birdie—and this is what elevates the story from good to great—turns him down. If she let him, she says,
"inside half a year, if yuh was lonesome enough, yuh'd ask me to marry yuh. And b'gorra," she said softly, looking down at her unlovely red hands, "I'm dead scared I'd do it. Get back to work, Ted Terrill, and hold yer head up high, and when yuh say your prayers to-night, thank your lucky stars I ain't a hussy."
Edna Ferber, date unknown
Two favorites in indigo: this one from Woman's Home Companion, artist unknown,
…and, as always, Erté. This one's called "Fireflies."
Also, a paean to spring from The Liberator's wonderful Hugo Gellert.
May wasn't a sensational month ad-wise, but I always have a soft spot for Old Dutch Cleanser.
Ladies' Home Journal, May 1918
Even without the benefit of hindsight, this ad for asbestos looks ominous.
Literary Digest, May 11, 1918
(Although not as ominous as this 1917 ad I came across in Scientific American.)
Scientific American, April 28, 1917
Cartooning was in its infancy in 1918, but I don't think the artistry of that era has ever been surpassed.
"The Mail from Home Arrives," H.C. Greening, Judge magazine, May 11, 1918
Captions, though, still left a lot to be desired.
"Will you tell me what time the train that starts for Louisville reaches Glenside, and where I can change cars for Caldwell?"
"Madam, I just told you all that."
"Yes, but I have a friend who wants to know."
Arthur Young, The Liberator, May 1918
On to (okay, the middle of) June!
*UPDATE 12/7/2019: It's Coles Phillips, most famous for his Fadeaway Girl illustrations. I wrote about him here.
This entry was posted in Best and Worst, Books, Fiction and Poetry, In the News, Magazines, World War I and tagged advertising, cartoons, Edna Ferber, illustration, short stories on June 12, 2018 by Mary Grace McGeehan.
The best and worst of April 1918: Magazines, stories, faint praise, and neologisms
A third of the way through!
After four months in 1918, I've become both more optimistic and more pessimistic about our present world. More optimistic because so many problems that seemed intractable back then, like the acceptability in mainstream circles of overt racism, sexism, and antisemitism, are gone now. More pessimistic because of all the new problems, like global warming, that people back then couldn't have conceived of.
Okay, enough philosophizing. On to the best and worst of April 1918.
Best magazine: The Dial
The Dial is one of the most reliably interesting reads of 1918. It started out in 1840 as an outlet for the Transcendentalists (Louisa May Alcott's father came up with the name) and was now a Chicago-based political and literary journal. H.L. Mencken wasn't a fan—he ridiculed the "insane labeling and pigeon-holing that passes for criticism among the gifted Harvard boys of the Dial and the Nation"—but staff writer Randolph Bourne gave as good as he got, saying that Mencken and Theodore Dreiser "beat at a straw man of puritanism which, for the younger generation, has not even the vitality to be interesting."*
The Dial did have a tendency to review seemingly every book that showed up on its doorstep, like Colorado, the Queen Jewel of the Rockies. But when a single (April 11) issue includes John Dewey on education, historian Charles Beard (who had recently resigned in protest from Columbia) on universities and democracy, Conrad Aiken on poetry,** and Bourne on immigrant fiction, I can forgive a lot.
Best short story: "The Swimming Pool" by Evelyn Campbell, Smart Set
I haven't read many magazine short stories this month. In fact, I've read just one: this one. And I wouldn't call it a great story. So this might strike you as a shoddy bit of best-and-worst selecting. But something about this story by Evelyn Campbell, a 22-year-old screenwriter and Ziegfeld Follies girl, got to me.
A woman, swimming in a pool as darkness falls, strikes up a conversation with a man. They're both natural swimmers, creatures of the water, and during their brief conversation they fall a little in love.
Suddenly it was dusk. Not in the enclosure made brilliant by white bulbs, but up above in the oblong of dark blue sky where newly awakened stars began to show timid faces to their bolder rivals. They were in the deep water which lay densely beneath them. Again they turned upon their backs and floated.
As the woman leaves the country club with her horrible rich husband and their children, she passes the man, who's wearing an ill-cut suit. Her daughter says, Oh, look, the new janitor. A typical Smart Set snappy ending. In most stories, though, the twist at the end is the point—the rest is just setup. Here, the spell that the water casts on the swimmers is the point, and the ending is just the resolution.
Some of Campbell's descriptions work better than others—I can't picture what "in the middle of the pool a big golden square turned the water to bright emerald" looks like—but she's trying something other writers just weren't doing in 1918. That is, Imagist poets were, but not magazine short story writers.
Best magazine cover: The Crisis
Even by 1918's high standards, this was an exceptional month for magazine covers. I've posted pictures of several of them already (here and here and here). The standout, though, is the cover of the April issue of The Crisis, the NAACP magazine edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. It features a copy of a painting called "Lead Kindly Light," made for the magazine by 34-year-old William Edouard Scott (and now owned by the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia).
Here's how the magazine's editorial, probably written by Du Bois, interprets the painting.
It is just an old lantern, filled with grimy oil. It cannot lead anywhere, yet its light leads. Its golden light streams through the night.
Whose is the light?
It is not the lantern's. It simply seems to be the lantern's radiance. It is the Light of the World and it leads not toward the millennium in the North, but out of the insult and prostitution and ignorance and lies and lynchings of the South—up toward a chance, a new chance,—nothing more. But thank God for that…
Lead, Kindly Light.
Worst magazine cover: Ladies' Home Journal
This is a repeat, but nothing was going to beat this Ladies' Home Journal cover, titled (by me) "Oh, how sweet! My boyfriend killed someone!"
Best poem: "Is It Worth While," Violet Hunt, Poetry
Violet Hunt, ca. 1900
Reading Poetry magazine, you can see how living in 1918 was like living in two worlds. In the April 1918 issue, there's page after page of purple mountains, and it could be 1868, and suddenly there's Violet Hunt mourning her relationship with Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), and it could be 1968.
You can read the rest of the poem here.
Faintest praise in a book review: T.S. Eliot, The Egoist
This was a surprisingly competitive category. At first, this unsigned review in the April 11 Dial, of Lorinda Munson Bryant's American Pictures and their Painters, looked like a shoo-in:
One sincerely wishes that Mrs. Bryant in her enthusiasm for nature, both inanimate and human, had focused her numerous descriptions of the subject matter of the paintings. That the painter has chosen to paint a wintry landscape…is surely no excuse for a genteel panegyric on winter, or that the artist has selected a human being…is no excuse for a general eulogy of mankind. In the family circle a little girl, it is true, may be a "darling," but in a painting that may be the least interesting of her attributes….If the subject is a woman, and a thin one at that, the author thinks the artist would have been wiser to select a plumper and rosier model…Aside from these minor defects the book is a handy and valuable compendium.
From "Hearts of Controversy," by Alice Meynell, second edition, 1918
But then I came across this review of Alice Meynell's Hearts of Controversy by Apteryx, AKA T.S. Eliot, in the April issue of The Egoist, and we had a winner.
In its peculiar anti-style, Mrs. Meynell's book, like all her books, is extremely well written, and she can incidentally pick out good bits from authors. If we can accept this attitude, we shall enjoy the book very much. And people who have a taste for that antiquated genre, that parlour-game, the Polite Essay—which consists in taking a tiny point and cutting figure eights around it, without ever uttering one's meaning in plain words—will find in Mrs. Meynell's last essay ("Charmain") an almost perfect example of a forgotten craft which indeed had its attractions.
But we must learn to take literature seriously.
(Asterixes Apteryx's.)
Best neologism: Surréaliste
Study for a portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Metzinger, 1911
"SURRÉALISTE is the denomination M. Guillaume Apollinaire—there is no doubt his astounding name continues to have good reason for keeping well in evidence—has attached to his play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias," the Paris correspondent for The Egoist tells us. I knew that the surrealist movement was just getting underway in 1918, but it seemed strange to think of the word itself being a novelty. So I crunched some big data—that is, did a Google Books N-Gram***—and it's true, surreal and its variants were pretty much non-existent at that point. So what did people say when things were, you know, surreal? (UPDATE 1/16/2021: It turns out that "stream of consciousness" in a literary context was also coined this month, by May Sinclair in an article about novelist Dorothy Richardson in The Egoist, which I actually read without realizing "stream of consciousness" was making its debut.)
Best humor:
In The Bookman, there's a report about the mystery surrounding the identity of the author of The Book of Artemas, a bestselling British spoof relating current events in biblical style. Was it G.K. Chesterton? J.M. Barrie? Hilaire Belloc? George Bernard Shaw? (It would turn out to be someone no one ever heard of named Arthur Telford Mason.) Here's an excerpt:
5. Whilst Wudro, the son of Wyl, was tending his flock of young men in the pasture that is knowledge, and after he had taught them how they should go and what things they should know,
6. Behold, the men of Amer came unto him, saying, We have chosen thee for to rule over us; and we have brought thee an high hat for to wear as the badge of thine office; and the size of the hat, it is six and seven-eights.
7. And because he knew not what he was letting himself in for, he gave way to their importuning, and did put on the high hat, the size whereof was six and seven-eights.
8. And it came to pass that when the men of En fought against the men of Hu, they did send messengers unto the land of Amer for to buy them munitions for the war. And they took with them gold in great quantity wherewith to satisfy the merchants that did sell unto them. Therefor did the land of Amer prosper exceedingly.
Worst joke:
Judge, April 27, 1918
On to May!
*Kind of harsh, since Bourne was only six years younger than Mencken.
**He agrees with me about Christopher Morley's goopiness.
***Which is really fun—you should try if you're off Facebook and looking for new ways to waste time.
This entry was posted in Best and Worst, Books, Fiction and Poetry, In the News, Magazines, My Life in 1918, Nonfiction, World War I and tagged Art, humor, Smart Set, surrealism, T.S. Eliot, The Crisis, The Dial, Violet Hunt, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Edouard Scott on April 28, 2018 by Mary Grace McGeehan.
The best and worst of March 1918: Magazines, essays, cover art, and humor
When I was in the Foreign Service, living in Cambodia or Honduras or wherever, people used to ask, "But don't you miss home?" I never knew what to say. The honest answer was, "I miss some things, sometimes, but it's way more interesting here. Don't you get bored living in the same place all the time?" That seemed kind of rude, though.
A quarter of the way through, that's how I feel about my life in 1918. I'll see, for example, that Meg Wolitzer, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Rebecca Harrington all have books coming out, and for a second I'll wish that I could read them, but then I'll pick up Mrs. Spring Fragrance or the latest issue of The Dial, and the feeling goes away. I can read those books next year. In the meantime, it's way more interesting here.
Now for the best and worst of March 1918:
Best Magazine: The Little Review
Ulysses, as I wrote earlier this month, made its first appearance in the Little Review in March 1918. The issue also includes Ezra Pound writing on Marianne Moore, fiction by Wyndham Lewis, and an essay by Ford Madox Hueffer (a.k.a. Ford) that contains the sentence "The Englishman's mind is of course made up entirely of quotations." But the rest of the issue could have been blank (which wouldn't have been unprecedented—the first thirteen pages of the September 1916 issue were blank, an expression of editor Margaret Anderson's frustration over the lack of quality submissions) and it still would have been the best magazine of the month, if not the year.
Worst Magazine: The Art World
The Art World, as I noted last week, had nothing good to say about impressionism or anything that came after. To put that into perspective, the first major exhibition of impressionist art was in 1874. So an art magazine taking this stance in 1918 is like Rolling Stone saying in 2018 that this rock-and-roll music is just a lot of noise.
Statue of Lincoln, George Grey Barnard, Lytle Park, Cincinnati (1917)
In its March 1918 issue, the last before it merged into another magazine, The Art World criticized George Grey Barnard's statue of Lincoln in Cincinnati, saying that Barnard
does not show the majestic Lincoln at the bar of history being judged and admired, but a slave Lincoln at the block, being sold and pitied…let us hope that Mr. Barnard will now deign to accept the advice we gave him in June 1917 and make a new Lincoln—virile, heroic, and majestic.
The magazine approvingly quotes portraitist Cecilia Beaux saying of the 1913 Armory Show in New York, the first large exhibition of modern art in the United States, that
"It was like a sudden windstorm that raises no little dust, noise, and confusion for the moment; when the wind dies down you discover that much that was of no real value has blown away, leaving a clearer, wholesome atmosphere."
The Art World branches out to the written word in this issue, calling a modernist poem "speech worthy of a yapping maniac."
Best humorous essay: "Making the Nursery Safe for Democracy," by Harold Kellock, The Bookman
Essays about family life in 1918 are generally steeped in sarcasm (if they're by men) or sentimentality (if they're by women). It's hard to find a family that seems real. Then I came across Harold Kellock's essay about his four-year-old son being bombarded with royalist propaganda through his nursery reading. Every night, Kellock is forced to read his son a story about some heroic king. "In a world wherein we are pouring out our blood and treasure that democracy may live safely," he complains, "our children scarcely out of the cradle are being made into staunch little monarchists." He takes a stab at democratizing the stories, but it doesn't work, and he resigns himself to nursery royalism.
"Then," I read, "the king took Gretel to his palace and celebrated the marriage in great state. And she told the king all her story, and he sent for the fairy and punished her." Think of having the power of punishment over fairies! The King und Gott! But my son swallows it complacently. He does not question the divine right of kings.
Faery Tales from Hans Christian Andersen, Maxwell Armfield, 1910
Kellock reassures himself that, when the time comes, he can turn his child into a democrat by showing him photographs "of some vacuous king, discreetly bearded to hide his recessional features," or "a typical princess, whose hat and features alike seem so unfortunately chosen, opening a Red Cross bazaar."
But not for a while, he says.
Worst humorous essay: "I Must Have Been A Little Too Rough," by George B. Jenkins, Jr., Smart Set
I hope this is the worst thing I read all year. There must be an anti-gender violence message hidden somewhere, but…well, read it for yourself.
I must have been a little too rough.
"Women," her father had told me, "are tired of the courteous treatment of the average man. They are bored by the vapid compliments, the silly lies, the stupid chatter of pale youths with gardenias in their lapels. If you want to be a success with women, be rude! Be violent! Overpower them, assert your physical superiority! If necessary, beat them!" He became quite excited. "Pound them! Assault them! Half-murder them!"
I listened to him respectfully, though I did not care for him at all. Yet I believed him, for he is notoriously successful in his affaires.
I decided to test his theories. Striding into the next room, I grasped his daughter about the waist.
"I love you!" I roared, squeezing her until her face was purple.
"You belong to me!" I shouted, dragging her around the room by her hair, and overturning several chairs in our progress.
"Damn you!" I shrieked, striking her on the shoulder, where the blow left a blue welt, "I will fight the world for you."
She began to whimper.
"Shut up!" I ordered, in my rudest manner, and slung her across the room.
But I must have been a little too rough, for she fell out the window.
Best magazine cover: The Liberator
The first issue of The Liberator was published in March 1918. Its predecessor, The Masses, had closed down in 1917 after being declared treasonous by the government for its anti-war stance. The debut issue included reporting from Russia by John Reed, whose Ten Days that Shook the World was published the next year (and who died in Russia in 1920 at the age of 32). I'll write more about The Liberator later. For now, here's its inaugural cover, by Hungarian-American artist Hugo Gellert.
Worst magazine cover: Collier's
I'm imagining the meeting where this cover was conceived.
Art director: How about…the President?
Editor: What would he be doing?
Art director: Nothing, just a picture of his face, in black and white. With a caption that says [stretches his hand into the air dramatically], "The President."
Editor: I like it!
As I've noted before, there are no good jokes in 1918 magazines. But I liked this Cornelia Barns Liberator cartoon, featuring the world's most coldhearted mother seeing her son off to war.
Worst humor:
First dog: How is brother collie over there? Is he in your set?
Second: Oh, yes; we visit the same garbage pails.
(Life magazine, March 28, 1918)
And, in honor of Women's History Month, the most inspiring women:
I came across so many! Novelists Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Mary Roberts Rinehart; artist Elizabeth Gardner; dancer Irene Castle; Little Review editor Margaret Anderson; suffragist Anna Kelton Wiley; prosecutor Annette Abbott Adams; rebellious housewife Julia Clark Hallam; and the anonymous woman who wrote about how divorce saved her sanity.
But every month is Women's History month at My Year in 1918, and there are lots more inspiring women to come. (Sneak preview: a pioneering British sexologist and a witty Chinese-American writer.) On to April!
This entry was posted in Best and Worst, In the News, Magazines, My Life in 1918, World War I and tagged 1918, Art, cartoons, humor, Modernism, Ulysses, Women's History Month on March 30, 2018 by Mary Grace McGeehan.
The best and worst of February 1918: Magazines, stories, cover art, and jokes
Two months into My Year in 1918, I feel like I used to feel two months into a Foreign Service posting: completely at home in some ways but totally bewildered in others. I know who Viscount Morley was*, and which author every critic trots out to bemoan the sad state of fiction**, but there are references that go right over my head. Who is Baron Munchausen? What is Fletcherizing? And the jokes. I'll never get the jokes.
The Crisis, February 1918
This is a repeat, but no other magazine approaches The Crisis in terms of quality of writing and importance of subject matter. Aside from W.E.B. Du Bois' autobiographical essay, which I wrote about last week on the 150th anniversary of his birth, the February issue includes Du Bois' scathing take-down of a government-sponsored study on "Negro Education" that advocated the replacement of higher education institutions with manual, industrial, and educational training. There's a horrifying account of the mob murder of an African-American man in Dyersburg, Tennessee—so brutal, the magazine reports, that some white townspeople felt he should have had a "decent lynching." On the literary side, there's "Leonora's Conversion," a slight but engaging story about a wealthy young black woman's brief flirtation with the church.
I'm not awarding a Worst Magazine this month. Good Housekeeping was a contender again—dialect-talking black maid Mirandy has the month off, but Japanese manservant Hashimura Togo*** expounds on his employer's marital problems in equally fractured English. ("'You have left off kissing me as usually,' she dib. 'O.' He march and deliver slight lip.") The magazine redeems itself somewhat, though, with an article by suffragist Anna Kelton Wiley called "Why We Picketed the White House."
Good Housekeeping, February 1918
Best short story: "A Sordid Story," by J., The Egoist
February wasn't a great month for short stories. Most of the ones I read, including two that made it into The Best American Short Stories of 1918, started out promisingly but ended with pathos or a gimmicky twist. "A Sordid Story," in the January**** Egoist, isn't great literature, but it has daring subject matter and lots of atmosphere. It features a Cambridge student named Alphonse, whose life is described in the most British sentence I've ever read:
He made friends easily and took friendship seriously; so seriously that he spent nearly the whole of the Michaelmas term following the taking of his degree in reading Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and The Gospel according to St. Luke in the Greek with a much younger man—a certain Roderick Gregory—who was in his second year, but had hitherto failed to pass his Little-Go.
Maxwell Armfield, from "Cambridge and its History," 1912
Alphonse falls for Roderick's sister Beatrice, who "used to have a pet pig, and she called him Shakespeare, because he would be Bacon after his death." But he spends the night with a working-class girl who grabs his arm as he's walking near Midsummer Common and says, giggling, "Can yer tell me what o'clock it is?" Horrified with himself the next day, he goes back to her lodgings to pay her off. She tells him that he was her first lover, then, when he tells her it's over, says, "Yer weren't the first, then!" Relieved "not to be the first to help send a woman downward," he goes back to his rooms, where Roderick is playing the cello and twenty-five copies of the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, in which he has published a paper, await him. It's only years later that he figures out that he was, in fact, the first.
Worst short story: "A Verdict in the Air," J.A. Waldron, Judge
Lawrence Fellows, Judge, February 9, 1918
Harwood, on leave from aviation training, goes to a cabaret in Chicago. To his surprise, one of the singers is his childhood sweetheart Bessie Dean, who left their Ohio hometown to pursue a career in opera. She introduces Harwood to her husband Grindel, who takes a dislike to him. A few days later, Harwood is training on the Pacific Coast, when who should show up as a mechanic but Grindel! Harwood has a series of flying accidents, and Grindel is suspected, but he goes AWOL. Harwood is sent to fight with the French army. He visits a friend at a field hospital, where the nurse is none other than Bessie, who has escaped her husband. Back at the front, there's a heated battle. Harwood pursues the last remaining German plane and hits its rudder after a lively skirmish. As the plane plunges to the ground, he sees that the pilot is—you guessed it—Grindel!
Well, the illustration is kind of cool.
February was a great month for magazine covers. I just wish that the insides of the magazines were half as good. Besides the ones from Harper's Bazar and Vanity Fair that I've mentioned already, there's this Helen Dryden cover from Vogue,
Helen Dryden, February 1918
and this one, which Norman Rockwell sold to Judge after the Saturday Evening Post turned it down. I can kind of see why.
Norman Rockwell, Judge, February 9, 1918
Best joke:
This isn't exactly a joke, but it made me laugh. It's the opening of Louis Untermeyer's review of poetry collections by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Samuel Roth, and Edwin Curran in the February 14 issue of The Dial.
These three first volumes, with their curious kinship and even more curious contrasts, furnish a variety of themes. They offer material for several essays: on "What Constitutes Rapture"; on "The Desire of the Moth for the Star"; on "The Growing Tendency among Certain Publishers to Ask One Dollar and Fifty Cents for Seventy Pages of Verse"; on "A Bill for the Conservation of Conservative Poetry"; on "Life, Literature, and the Last Analysis"; on "Why a Poet Should Never be Educated."
The Growing Tendency among Certain Publishers to Ask One Dollar and Fifty Cents for Seventy Pages of Verse! That Louis Untermeyer is such a card!
Not amused? Okay, then, you go back to 1918 and try to find something funnier.
Judge magazine, February 9, 1918
Once again, hard to choose. Maybe this, from the February 9 issue of Judge:
"You don't—know me, do you, Bobby?" asked a lady who had recently been baptized.
"Sure I do," piped the youth. "You're the lady what went in swimming with the preacher, last Sunday."
On to March!
*A British diplomat
**Mrs. Humphrey Ward
***Really Wallace Irwin, who made a career of writing about Togo. Mark Twain was a fan.
****I was reading The Egoist a month late on the principle that it would have taken time for the magazine to get to the United States, which I've since decided is ridiculous.
This entry was posted in Best and Worst, Books, Fiction and Poetry, Magazines, My Life in 1918 and tagged 1910s, 1918, Good Housekeeping, Helen Dryden, humor, Judge, Louis Untermeyer, Norman Rockwell, The Crisis, The Dial, The Egoist, W.E.B. Du Bois on February 28, 2018 by Mary Grace McGeehan.
The best and worst of January 1918: Magazines, stories, thinkers, and jokes
I made it! One month of reading books, magazines, and the news as if I were living in 1918. It's been even more fun than I expected. The 1918 New York Times at breakfast, printouts of The Dial and The Egoist for on-the-go reading, and Edith Wharton at bedtime. I don't miss 2018 at all.
Here are some of the month's highs and lows.
The Crisis, January 1918, Frank Walts
I expected the NAACP's magazine, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, to be historically interesting. It was–and it also turned out to be the month's most compelling read, full of top-quality explanatory journalism, social criticism, personal essays, and fiction.
Runner-up: The New Republic. When I'm befuddled by something I read about in the New York Times—like, was the American war effort as pathetic as Wilson's critics make it sound, or did Harry Garfield really have to shut down the entire East Coast—all I have to do is wait a few days and the New Republic will provide a clear, convincing explanation. And then explain it again. And then, in case I still don't get it, spend another couple of pages making the same point. Illuminating? Yes. Concise? No.
Worst magazine: Good Housekeeping
Good Housekeeping, January 1918, Jessie Willcox Smith
Good Housekeeping was already in the lead for this category because of the horrible Marie Corelli article about cleansing the world through eugenics. Then I read "Mirandy on the One We Didn't Marry," by Dorothy Dix. I knew of Dix as a pioneering advice columnist. I'm a big fan of advice columns, and I was eager to find out what she had to say to the women of 1918. But Mirandy turns out to be Dix's monthly impersonation of an African-American woman who provides her views on life in heavy dialect. "Ef you 'grees wid a woman 'bout her husban's faults an' weaknesses she is lak enough to up an' lambast you wid de fust thing dat is handy," Mirandy says. There's an illustration of a kerchiefed woman with an umbrella giving a talking-to to her pop-eyed friend. If you want to hear a real African-American woman's take on family life, check out the lovely "A Mother's New Year's Resolutions" by Josephine T. Washington, in, where else, The Crisis.
Best short story: "The Way of the Transgressor," by Wallace Green
The Crisis, January 1918
I wrote about this story, which ran in the January 1918 issue of The Crisis, earlier this month. It's vivid, unformulaic, funny, and moving. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out anything about Green (if that was his real name), or to find anything else that he wrote. I'll keep looking.
Runner up: "The Policewoman's Daughter," by Ben Hecht (Smart Set, January 1918). Agatha is an innocent young woman with a domineering mother (a figurative, not a literal, policewoman), and the story takes place entirely in her head as she waits in the parlor of a seedy hotel for an assignation with a violinist. As the minutes tick by and it becomes clear that he isn't going to show up, she falls into a state of anguish, followed by relief that God has saved her from ruin. Then she realizes that she got the date wrong, and her joyful anticipation returns. Hecht, who was twenty-three when this story was written, would go on to be one of Hollywood's top screenwriters. His many credits include His Girl Friday, which is one of the talkiest films ever made. In "The Policewoman's Daughter," no one says a word. Talk about versatility!
Worst short story: "A Palm Beach Honeymoon," author unknown
I opened up Vanity Fair and, after 23 pages of ads, seven of them for dogs, finally got to some editorial copy. Or so I thought. "A Palm Beach Honeymoon" is the story of, well, a Palm Beach honeymoon. Robert is smitten with Mabel, his stunning bride, but he gradually becomes aware that, from her perspective, something in the marriage is amiss. Desperate to find out what it is, he asks his friend, who has been flirting with Mabel's maid, to see what he can find out. His friend reveals that, during the train ride down, the porter threw away Mabel's copy of Vanity Fair. Really, Vanity Fair? That's what I get after all those ads? An advertorial?
Most famous thinker no one cares about today: G.K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton, date unknown
1918 was a bad year, great thinker-wise. Mark Twain died in 1910. So did William James, followed by his brother Henry in 1916. Walter Lippmann was starting to make his mark, but he was still in his twenties in 1918, and in any case he was on hiatus from journalism, working as an assistant to the Secretary of War. So that leaves…G.K. Chesterton. He's probably best known today for his Father Brown detective stories, but back then he was known for, well, everything. He was a critic and a historian and a theologian and a bunch of other things. Everyone was always quoting him or criticizing him or reviewing his books. There could be a reading-in-1918 drinking game where you take a shot every time someone mentions him. Luckily there isn't, because I'd be sozzled all the time.
Least famous thinker everyone cares about today: T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot, 1923 (Lady Ottoline Morrell)
Okay, Eliot, who was 30 in 1918, wasn't completely unknown. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" had been published in Poetry magazine in 1915, and The Egoist, where he was assistant editor, put together a small collection of his poems in 1917. He was publishing reviews in The Egoist and elsewhere. But he was still working as a banker, and no one, except maybe Ezra Pound, suspected that he'd end up as the century's most important poet and critic.
Geraldine—Why didn't you enlist?
Gerald—I had trouble with my feet.
Geraldine—Flat, or cold?
(Judge, January 5, 1918)
Judge magazine, January 5, 1918
I know what you're thinking: "This joke is not funny at all. I wish I could go back in time and never have heard this joke." But, believe me, this is the best joke I could find. I know. It's sad.
It's pretty much a tie between all the other jokes I read this month. They're either corny, like this one:
"I'd like to have Simpkins' yellow streak."
"Why you coward!"
"It's in a gold mine."
or incomprehensible, like this one:
He—What music are you going to have at your dance?
Other he—The fraternity hat-band.
(Both from Judge, January 5, 1918)
Okay, I can't end on that note. As I've noted before, Judge did have excellent illustrators. I'll close out the month with another Yapp's Crossing illustration from John Gruelle, who, it turns out, was the creator of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy.
On to February!
This entry was posted in Best and Worst, Fiction and Poetry, Magazines, My Life in 1918 and tagged 1910s, 1918, humor, T.S. Eliot, W.E.B. Du Bois on January 31, 2018 by Mary Grace McGeehan.

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