The Modernist party

241 Pages·2013·12.94 MB·English

by  McLoughlin

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Cover image: The Dance Club (aka Jazz and The Jazz Party), 1923 N
(also dated 1921) © Estate of John David Roberts. Reproduced by
permission of the William Roberts Society/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com ISBN 978-0-7486-4731-6 P A R T Y
www.euppublishing.com EDITED BY KAT E McLO UGHL IN
The Modernist Party
Edited by Kate McLoughlin
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For John and Brenda Shipman
© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2013
© in the individual contributions is retained by the authors
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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www.euppublishing.com
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by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4731 6 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 4732 3 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8130 3 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8131 0 (Amazon ebook)
The right of the contributors
to be identifi ed as authors of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust for permission
to reproduce material previously published elsewhere. Every effort has been made to trace
other copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be
pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the fi rst opportunity.
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The Menu
A Note of Thanks v
The Guest List vi
Introduction: A Welcome from the Host 1
Kate McLoughlin
1 ‘The dinner was indeed quiet’: Domestic Parties in the Work
of Joseph Conrad 25
Susan Jones
2 Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea 45
Kate McLoughlin
3 Party Joyce: From the ‘Dead’ to When We ‘Wake’ 64
Jean-Michel Rabaté
4 ‘Looking at the party with you’: Pivotal Moments in
Katherine Mansfi eld’s Party Stories 79
Angela Smith
5 Virginia Woolf’s Idea of a Party 95
Bryony Randall
6 Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After 112
David R. Ellison
7 ‘Ezra through the open door’: The Parties of Natalie Barney,
Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach as Lesbian Modernist
Cultural Production 127
Joanne Winning
8 ‘Indeed everybody did come’: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy
in Gertrude Stein’s Plays 147
Alex Goody
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iv The Menu
9 The Interracial Party of Modernist Primitivism and the Black
‘After-Party’ 164
Margo Natalie Crawford
10 The Party In Extremis in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love 178
Margot Norris
11 Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory
and the Cabaret Theatre Club 192
Nathan Waddell
12 ‘Pleasure too often repeated’: Aldous Huxley’s Modernity 210
Morag Shiach
Index 228
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A Note of Thanks
The Modernist Party began as a pedagogical idea. In the fi rst meeting of
a course on twentieth-century literature, I experimented with introduc-
ing the class to modernism through a discussion of parties (I have yet
to meet a student who hasn’t been to one). After exploring how people
might feel before, during and after attending a party, we moved on to
discuss the parties in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Woolf’s To The Lighthouse
and Mansfi eld’s ‘The Garden Party’, investigating how these scenes
work formally and thematically in the texts. The students had already
each researched a modernist fi gure of their choice – a writer, artist,
dancer, musician, philosopher – and I then asked them to role-play him
or her at an imagined party taking place in the 1920s. (I played Ernest
Hemingway and was asked why I’d written such a gloomy ending to A
Farewell to Arms.) The students and I mingled, introduced ourselves and
made small-talk (no refreshments were provided, alas, and costumes and
accents were not required). At the end, we discussed what we’d learned
about our modernist fellow guests and how the role-playing had felt.
‘Awkward’, ‘fun’, ‘embarrassing’, ‘hard to keep up the pretence’ were
among the responses: useful things to have learned about modernist
experiences.
I would like to thank the students at the University of Glasgow and
Birkbeck, University of London, who have played along with the mod-
ernist party experiment so sportingly. For their practical and intellectual
help in delivering this volume, I am very grateful to Jackie Jones and the
team at Edinburgh University Press, Anna Hartnell and Nick Trefethen.
Finally, I owe major thanks to the contributors, with whom it has been
a pleasure and a privilege to work.
Kate McLoughlin
Le Petit Pey, Périgord, 2012
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The Guest List
Margo Natalie Crawford is an Associate Professor of English Literature
at Cornell University. She is the author of Dilution Anxiety and the
Black Phallus (2008), a study of the body politics of lighter- and darker-
skinned blackness, and the co-editor, with Lisa Gail Collins, of New
Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006).
David R. Ellison is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the
University of Miami, Florida. His publications include The Reading of
Proust (1984), Understanding Albert Camus (1990), Of Words and the
World: Referential Anxiety in Contemporary French Fiction (1993),
Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the
Sublime to the Uncanny (2001) and A Reader’s Guide to Proust’s In
Search of Lost Time (2010).
Alex Goody is Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at Oxford
Brookes University. She is the author of Modernist Articulations: A
Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (2007)
and Technology, Literature and Culture (2011), and the co-editor of
American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009).
Susan Jones is Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at St Hilda’s
College, University of Oxford. She has published widely on Joseph
Conrad, including Conrad and Women (1999), and is editing Conrad’s
Chance for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad.
She has also written articles on modernism and dance and her mono-
graph Literature, Modernism and Dance is forthcoming from Oxford
University Press.
Kate McLoughlin is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birkbeck,
University of London. She is the author of Authoring War: The Literary
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The Guest List vii
Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011) and Martha
Gellhorn: The War Writer in the Field and in the Text (2007), editor
of The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (2009) and co-editor of
Memory, Mourning, Landscape: Interdisciplinary Essays (2010) and
Tove Jansson Rediscovered (2007).
Margot Norris is Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of English and
Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her
publications include Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses (2011),
Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners (2003), Writing War in the
Twentieth Century (2000), Joyce’s Web (1992), Beasts of the Modern
Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence (1985)
and The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (1976).
Jean-Michel Rabaté is Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at
the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder and curator of Slought
Foundation. He is an editor of the Journal of Modern Literature and a
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored
or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, art
and philosophy. Recent titles include 1913: The Cradle of Modernism
(2007), The Ethic of the Lie (2008) and Etant donnés: 1) l’art, 2) le
crime (2010).
Bryony Randall is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of
Glasgow. She is the author of Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday
Life (2007), co-editor of Virginia Woolf in Context (2012) and is co-
editing Woolf’s short fi ction for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of
Virginia Woolf.
Morag Shiach is Professor of Cultural History and Vice-Principal for
Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London.
Her most recent books are Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in
British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930 (2004) and, as editor, The
Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel (2007).
Angela Smith is Emerita Professor of English Literature at the University
of Stirling. She is the editor of Katherine Mansfi eld’s Selected Stories
for the Oxford World’s Classics. Her other publications include East
African Writing in English (1989), Katherine Mansfi eld and Virginia
Woolf: A Public of Two (1999) and Katherine Mansfi eld: A Literary
Life (2000).
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viii The Guest List
Nathan Waddell is Advance Research Fellow at the University of
Nottingham. He is the author of Modernist Nowheres: Politics and
Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900–1920 (2012) and Modern
John Buchan: A Critical Introduction (2009). He is co-editor of
Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (2011).
Joanne Winning is Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London.
Her publications include The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson (2000)
and the edited Bryher: Two Novels (2000).
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Introduction: A Welcome from the
Host
Kate McLoughlin
Immanuel Kant’s dinner-party
In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), Immanuel
Kant describes how to throw the perfect dinner-party. The company
must not number fewer than the graces or more than the muses: a
number from three to nine is ‘just enough to keep the conversation from
slackening or the guests from dividing into separate small groups with
those sitting next to them’.1 The conversation should proceed through
three stages: ‘narration’ (which concerns the news of the day), ‘arguing’
(the exchange of opinions, which ‘stirs up the appetite for food and
drink’) and ‘jesting’ (‘the mere play of wit’).2 Governing all three phases
are further injunctions: ‘to choose topics for conversation that interest
everyone’, ‘not to allow deadly silences to set in’, ‘not to change the topic
unnecessarily’, ‘not to let dogmatism arise’ and, should a serious confl ict
occur, ‘carefully to maintain discipline over oneself and one’s affects’.3
These matters observed, a dinner-party will combine both physical good
(‘good living’) and moral good (‘virtue’), the former derived from fi ne
food and wine, the latter from sociability and enlightenment. But, Kant
cautions, a balance must be maintained ‘whereby the inclination to good
living is limited by the law of virtue’.4 Have fun, that is, but not too
much fun.
This recipe for an enjoyable evening out in late eighteenth-century
Prussia provides a party paradigm. Kant presents his ideal dinner-party
as a forum of enlightenment, culture, taste and progress, a notion of
public–private5 social interaction that, in the twentieth and twenty-fi rst
centuries, has been associated, by Jürgen Habermas and others, with
the emergence of modernity.6 In this model, the party itself becomes
an art-form: the host a virtuoso conductor or choreographer (Kant
refers to himself as managing his dinner-party7), the guests players or
dancers. But haunting this event of intellectually stimulating discourse
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