Kenneth Burke: A Flaubert in Greenwich Village, 1915-1931

by Jack Selzer

On September 17, 1917, James Light wrote a desperate letter from Columbus, Ohio, to his close friend Kenneth Burke in Weehawken, New Jersey. "We [Light and his companion Sue Jenkins] must get to New York, and you must make it possible," he wrote. "I beg you by everything that's between us to help me and help me quickly. . . . Send your answer by special delivery." There was plenty "between them." Light, who had met Burke in high school and then briefly studied architecture and painting at Carnegie Tech, had spent the previous two academic years at Ohio State, and during the spring semester of 1916 was Burke's roommate there. Indeed, it was Light who had persuaded Burke, suspicious about dress codes, chapel, and mandatory, uniformed drill,1 to give Ohio State a try in the first place, and Light who persisted in encouraging Burke (albeit unsuccessfully) to return even after a semester of "clean, healthy liberal Protestant Philistinism . . . , clean, healthy living, 'extracurricular activities,' [and] provincially uncritical mores" (Warren, 227).2 With Burke's support Light had initiated an irreverent experimental literary magazine Sansculotte (its title, derived from a term for French Revolutionaries, was meant to imply the equivalent of "mooning" the genteel establishment), and he published some of Burke's earliest stories and poems in it in 1917. When Burke dropped out of Ohio State after the one semester and enrolled instead at Columbia early in 1917, Light continued to solicit Burke's further submissions to Sansculotte and to share news and reading lists: Light reported on Symons, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche; Burke offered descriptions of Floyd Dell and Polly Holliday's famous Greenwich Village restaurant.3

Now, having arrived in Columbus for his junior year, Light learned that his favorite professor--Ludwig Lewisohn, a German-born naturalized citizen and Columbia University PhD who taught German, who had mentored one of Burke's high school instructors,4 who had introduced Light and Burke to Thomas Mann and other contemporary Continental writers, who had contributed to Sansculotte, who was soon to be recognized as a distinguished intellectual, artist, writer and critic, and who already had two books, a play, and several stories to his credit--had just been forced from his position on account of his heritage amid the hysteria surrounding American entry into World War I.5 Outraged, Light wrote Burke:

If you can possibly help me, do so now. I am here at Columbus, Sue and I, and have found on our arrival at the university that Lewisohn and Keidel6 have been dismissed. All the hate of Columbus, all the disgust--all that wearying deadening killing disgust is upon us. We are in an impossible condition. The place is filled with soldiers, the damn few good course[s] are up the spout--Lewisohn's lyric course of course with the rest. Remember how you have raged here and help me get out. If you can invite me to your home for a few weeks I'll come to New York and enter Columbia.

Burke apparently did encourage Light to come to New York, join him at Columbia, and find living quarters in Greenwich Village, for a week later he and Jenkins were living in New York.7 Too late to enter Columbia for the fall term, however--he never did enroll--Light by chance fell in instead with a small group of people trying to establish an experimental theatre in the Village. Light, it seems, while looking for an apartment had run into Charles Ellis, an artist acquaintance from Ohio State who had also contributed to Sansculotte, and the two took shelter together above a small playhouse at 139 MacDougal Street, near the Village landmarks Polly's, The Liberal Club, and the Washington Square Bookstore. Ellis began to paint scenery for the group, which was beginning the process of moving to larger quarters at 133 MacDougal. For lack of anything better to do, Light began to offer his services as well, first as a general aide and then, later in the year, as an actor. Next Light, Jenkins, and Ellis--and, early in 1918, Kenneth Burke, who had by now resolved to drop out of Columbia himself--moved to a tenement building a short walk from the theatre, at 86 Greenwich Avenue. Frequent visitors were the leaders of the theatre group: George Cram "Jig" Cook, Susan Glaspell, and Eugene O'Neill.8

The theater company called themselves The Provincetown Players. Cook and Glaspell, midwesterners fresh from the Chicago modernist scene, had arrived in Greenwich Village and been married in 1913, about the time of the Patterson pageant. Socialists as well as writers, Cook and Glaspell were repelled by the commercialism of the prevailing Broadway theatre scene, then dominated by genteel musicals by Irving Berlin, sentimental comedies like Peg 'O My Heart, and melodramas like The Count of Monte Cristo (which starred O'Neill's father James), so they became active in the little theatre movement then taking shape in Greenwich Village. Taking part of their inspiration from the Abbey Players of Dublin, who visited New York in 1911, as well as from experimental theatres in Paris, Berlin, Chicago, and Moscow,9 Villagers had patronized The Thimble Theatre presentations of Strindberg and Chekhov in 1911 as well as The Waverly Place Players (1911-12) and the Washington Square Players, who produced plays by Schnitzler, Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, and Chekhov, in addition to ones by Americans John Reed and Theodore Dreiser, at various Village locations after February, 1915. The Washington Square Players even produced Glaspell's Trifles, but then refused to offer her spoof of Freudianism, Suppressed Desires. Consequently, while living at Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, in the summer of 1915, Cook, Glaspell, and a few of their friends (Reed, Mabel Dodge, Hutchins Hapgood and his wife Neith Boyce, and the anarchist Hippolyte Havel) decided to present Suppressed Desires and a few other plays in a small, cooperative, non-commercial setting they called The Wharf Theatre. In the summer of 1916, the group (supplemented now by Reed's fiance Louise Bryant, Max Eastman and his wife Ida Rauh, and the artists Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley) experimented with additional plays, and when several of the plays seemed successful--particularly one called Bound East for Cardiff by the young man who joined them at Provincetown that summer, Eugene O'Neill--they all resolved to present their plays in Greenwich Village in the fall and winter of 1916-1917. During that season the group presented not only Trifles, Bryant's The Game, and Bound East for Cardiff, but Floyd Dell's King Arthur's Socks and Alfred Kreymborg's Lima Beans; in two poorly lit rooms of a house at 139 MacDougal, one room set up for the audience, the other for the performers, the Players featured impressionistic set designs by Robert Edmond Jones, a repertory of one-act plays novel in form and content, unpaid performers working at odds with the Broadway star system, cooperative decision-making, and, in the words of the Players' manifesto, "the writing of American plays of real artistic, literary, and dramatic--as opposed to Broadway--merit." In the summer of 1917, the group repaired once again to Provincetown, where O'Neill wrote four more plays, and planned their 1917-1918 fall and winter season.

When Light arrived in the fall of 1917 and Burke in the first days of 1918, therefore, the Provincetown Players were in the midst of one of the most productive and vigorous enterprises in American theatre history. The group now included Light, Jenkins, Ellis, the Village sensation Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Millay's sister Norma (who, having arrived late in 1917 with her sister, soon moved into 86 Greenwich Avenue with Ellis, later her husband). Together, and in somewhat larger space at 133 MacDougal, they offered Glaspell's Close the Book, O'Neill's In the Zone and The Long Voyage Home, James Oppenheim's Night, Max Bodenheim's The Gentle Furniture Shop, Cook's The Athenian Woman, and Dell's Angel Intruders and Sweet and Twenty. The creative vigor sustained itself. In the next two years the Players would produce, among other things, Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo, Edna Ferber's The Eldest, Reed's The Peace That Passeth Understanding, Djuna Barnes's Kurzy of the Sea and Three from the Earth, and other plays by Schnitzler and Kreymborg (all of which Light appeared in and/or directed)--as well as their greatest success, O'Neill's expressionistic The Emperor Jones, which opened November 1, 1920, featuring the African-American actor Charles Gilpin in the title role. Maintaining their experimental momentum proved difficult for the Players: Cook and O'Neill had a falling out, other members left the group for one reason or another, Cook and Glaspell in March, 1922, finally decided to leave New York and visit Greece, where he passed away two years later, and no plays at all were produced in the 1922-23 season.10 But it is still easy to understand why Josephson could claim that during the time when Burke came to live "at 86 Greenwich Avenue the little theatre movement bloomed" (Josephson 42). And it is easy to understand why, recalling the period with pleasure late in his life, Burke could understate, "I got a good education in the drama that way [from the Provincetown Players]" (Iowa tapes:give proper ref). Though there is no evidence that Burke himself acted in any production, he established or deepened friendships with Players such as Foster Damon, Pierre Loving (whose The Stick-Up was produced by the Players in 1922), and Percy Winner (who acted in O'Neill's Moon of the Caribbees and other plays in 1918 before going to France and establishing an extensive correspondence with Burke). And he of course remained in contact with Light, who directed many later Provincetown Players productions, notably O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (March, 1922) and All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924, featuring Paul Robeson), and Cummings's obscure, experimental, and sensational Him (1928).

The Provincetown Players were not the only moderns that Burke was meeting, of course. Also living at 86 Greenwich Avenue, besides Light, Jenkins, Ellis, and Norma Millay, were Djuna Barnes, a painter, poet, essayist, and playwright who played an important role from 1919-1931 among the Paris expatriots11; the painter Stuart Davis, who illustrated the cover of Williams's Kora in Hell and whose work would appear often in The Dial in the early 1920s; and the occasional Provincetown actress Berenice Abbott, who was painting and serving as an apprentice to the American modernist painter and photographer and proto-Dadaist Man Ray and who was soon to become an eminent photographer herself. Among the other frequent visitors recalled by Burke, Jenkins, and Josephson were Edna St. Vincent Millay; Jim Butler, a young naturalist and painter who had learned about art back home in Giverny, France, from his stepgrandfather Claude Monet; and the social activists Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, and Dorothy Day (a reporter for radical periodicals, a sometime companion of Eugene O'Neill, an actress in Provincetown productions, and later the first editor of The Catholic Worker and the founder of New York City mission houses).12

Day, Dell, Eastman, and Davis all were associated with The Masses, Day and Davis as frequent contributors, Day as an acting editor, Eastman (who had studied and taught under Dewey at Columbia) as editor, and Dell (who had known Cook and Glaspell back in Iowa and in Chicago) as associate editor. The famous leftist publication from the time Eastman took over as editor in 1912 until its final issue in December, 1917, circulated 15,000 copies on the average each month, copies that cost its readers a dime for 24-30 pages of political commentary, literature, and art (cartoons, lithographs, drawings). Relentlessly socialist in perspective, the periodical can also be understood as part of the early modernist revolt against genteel conventions in art, religion, politics, and social mores. Cooperatively owned by the artists, writers, and office workers who produced it, The Masses not only championed workers' cooperatives and strikes, but it also called for and published working-class art and (countering modernist aesthetes) fostered the conviction that art could be a lever for social change. Eastman, Dell, Reed, John Sloan, Art Young, and the others associated with The Masses supported successful experiments in theatre, art, and poetry;13 consistently portrayed middle-class capitalists as grasping, hypocritical, and tasteless dupes of the rich; and ridiculed conventional religion by depicting Christ as a longshoreman or fisherman sympathetic to unions, by encouraging a "new paganism" that looked backwards to a pre-Christian, pre-industrial Dionysian sensuality, and by depicting conventional Americans as the overly sanctimonious and industrious rotarians soon to be satirized in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920). The Massescircle also shocked the respectably genteel by taking very early to Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams was translated into English in 1913) and Freudian psychoanalysis. Dell, Eastman, and Mabel Dodge all underwent analysis before 1913 in the belief that it could encourage social amelioration, and Dell even believed Freud to be more important to leftist politics than Marx. They also used Freud, somewhat questionably, to champion sexual liberation: sexual experimentation, respect for the libido, and the pursuit of the "instinctive" and "primitive" (both commonly associated, unfortunately, with African-Americans and immigrants) all were pervasive Masses. themes.

Ever on the lookout for novelty, The Masseseditorialized on behalf of everything from progressive education, pacifism, and women's suffrage to Emma Goldman's worker's agenda and Margaret Sanger's program on birth control, which was presented as a means of furthering the class struggle. Refreshingly free of dogma, able to laugh even at itself--its masthead proclaimed The Masses' resolve "to do what pleases and conciliates nobody, not even its readers," and to help raise funds it sponsored wild entertainments that Dell dubbed "Pagan Routs"--The Masses was nevertheless revolutionary enough to be systematically repressed. First the keepers of conventional public morality, Anthony Comstock and his successor John Sumner in the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, tried to get The Masses suppressed for corrupting public mores. Then librarians cancelled subscriptions. And finally the government itself under the aegis of the Espionage Act put Eastman, Dell, Young, and later John Reed on trial in April, 1918, and then again in October, 1918, for conspiring to obstruct war recruitment and conscription.14 Both trials blended farce with the spectacular and both ended in hung juries, but because the Postal Service wouldn't handle The Masses after August, 1917, and because contributors were split over American entry into World War I, the publication ceased in December of that year, to be resurrected in tamer form as The Liberator, and still later as The New Masses.

Burke certainly came under the spell of The Masses and knew many of the people who produced it. As early as July, 1915, Light had advised Burke to "look up The Masses" now that he had arrived in the New York City area, to go to the offices and meet Reed and other Masses writers.15 Other letters reveal Burke's intimacy with "Max," with Dell, and with Masses articles.16 And if Burke, who took up formal residencey in Greenwich Village only after its final issue appeared, never wrote for The Masses, he did publish one of his first poems, a lyric complaint entitled "Spring Song," in a shortlived offshoot of The Masses known as Slate. A voice of the progressive movement in education as well as of the new literature and art that was edited by Jess Perelman, a New York City elementary teacher, Slate in 1917 offered five issues worth of articles, poems, stories and drawings by many of the same people who appeared in The Masses.17 Sue Jenkins worked for a time on Slate, introduced Burke to "Jess," and solicited Burke's (and Cowley's) contributions; though "Spring Song" appeared, and the ironically titled "Hymn of Hope" did as well three months later, the equally ironic Burke poem "Revolt" was rejected.18 All in all Burke was influenced enough by The Massescircle that in September, 1917, while still studying at Columbia and while settling Light in Greenwich Village, Burke could report to Cowley that he and Josephson were "both socialists now more or less."19 Of course Burke wasn't just a socialist, for he had been accepted into other modernist circles as well. Leftists like Cook, Glaspell, Reed, Bryant, Dell, and Eastman were associated with the Provincetown Players, but so were moderns of more moderate political persuasion, including the artists associated with the poetry magazine Others. The Others group and its relation to Burke's poetry will be the subject of the next chapter, but it is worth introducing here the people who produced Others from July, 1915, just as Burke was arriving in New York, to May, 1919, when its final issue appeared, and who socialized together frequently through 1921, when the expatriot exodus distributed them in various places. Just as a flood of experimental verse was emerging from Americans in Britain at the time of the Great War--John Gould Fletcher published several books of poetry in 1913, H. D.'s original lyrics were pouring out at the same time, Pound's Des Imagistes appeared in 1914, and Robert Frost's poetry was first published in Britain in 1915--so too a new poetry began to appear in America itself: e.g., in Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renascence" in 1912; in Amy Lowell's annual anthology of imagist poetry from 1915 to 1917; in Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology in 1916; in Alfred Kreymborg's imagist Mushrooms in 1916; in Carl Sandburg's Chicago poems. Harriet Monroe's Chicago magazine Poetry was founded in 1912 to carry experimental verse. To encourage experimental writers in the New York area, Kreymborg in 1913, from an artists' colony in Grantwood, New Jersey, began publishing Glebe, a short-lived (ten-month) series of inexpensive editions of plays, fiction, and poetry by Joyce, Pound, H.D., Lowell, Williams, Hueffer, Aldington, and so forth.

Then in 1915 Kreymborg met a fellow poet, Walter Arensburg, and decided to produce Others, a magazine whose title and whose motto ("The old expressions are always with us, and then there are others") suggests their intention to offer an experimental alternative to the poetry of the genteel tradition. Kreymborg and Arensburg had also befriended a New York insurance executive named Wallace Stevens, and, especially because Arensburg was an avid patron of modern art, an informal circle of moderns soon grew up around the three of them that included Williams, Mina Loy, and Lola Ridge, all of whom placed poems in the first issue of Others,20 and Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Joseph Stella. According to accounts by Kreymborg (Troubadour), Williams (Autobiography), and Munson (Awakening),21 over the next few years "the Others" also included Hart Crane, Robert McAlmon, Malcolm Cowley, Peggy Johns (soon to become Cowley's first wife), Edna St. Vincent Millay, Kay Boyle, Max Bodenheim, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings; "miscellaneous members," claims Richard Whelan, included Isadora Duncan, Max Eastman, and the composer Edgard Varese (347). The group met informally but regularly for conversations at Mabel Dodge's salon or at Arensberg's home, for picnics at Grantwood, or for parties at Kreymborg's loft on East 14th Street. Not only did various members of the circle produce Others and participate in Provincetown Players productions, but they published anthologies (under the imprint of Alfred Knopf), developed an Others Lecture Bureau, and presented their own Others Players experiments in poetic drama. (Williams appeared, for instance, in Kreymborg's 1916-1917 Provincetown play Lima Beans and later wrote some plays for the Others set; Loy also appeared in plays; and Kreymborg and Millay wrote poetic dramas that were produced in 1918.22)

Letters from Sue Jenkins and Louis Wilkinson establish that Burke was reading Others in 1915, and that Wilkinson was encouraging Burke to meet the members of the Others crowd late that same year.23 Wilkinson reported to Burke on December 19, 1915, that Kreymborg had written, "I am keeping Kenneth Burke's 'Revolt.' It is excellent. . . . [I] should like to meet him one of these days"; and on December 31, 1915, Wilkinson reiterated that Kreymborg wished to meet Burke. Kreymborg never did in fact publish "Revolt"--he scheduled it for an Others anthology, but Alfred Knopf refused to permit it to be printed24--but he did publish "Adam's Song and Mine" in Others in March, 1916. It was Burke's first publication. And Kreymborg (Troubadour, 370), Munson (Awakening, 36), Thirlwall (William Carlos Williams, Selected Letters, 44), James Breslin (33), and Donald Hall (27) all place Burke in the Others circle. But it was probably on the fringes of that circle. Burke was just eighteen when Others began appearing, the members of the community were for the most part a generation older, and his interests after 1920 shifted somewhat away from writing poetry. However, through the Others set Burke did establish longterm relationships with Hart Crane (whose special intimacy with Burke is suggested by Burke's letters to and from Cowley in 1958 [Jay, 331-35]), with Marianne Moore (who worked closely with Burke at The Dial and remained in touch after The Dial folded in 1929), and of course with William Carlos Williams, who exchanged hundreds and hundreds of letters with Burke from January, 1921, until Williams's death in 1963.25

Several of "the Others," including Ray, Duchamp, Picabia, Williams, Kreymborg, Arensberg, Crane, Demuth, Stella, Cummings, and Sheeler, were also associated with Alfred Stieglitz's famous "291" art gallery, located at 291 Fifth Avenue. (A number of moderns worked in several artistic media: Cummings, for instance, wrote poetry, produced a play and the war memoir The Enormous Room, and painted; Williams wrote poetry and plays and fiction, and painted as well; Hartley painted and published poetry; Barnes painted and wrote poems and plays and fiction; Dos Passos published poetry as well as fiction, tried his hand at drama, and painted too; and Burke of course wrote poetry, fiction, and criticism.) Stieglitz himself was born in 1864 in Hoboken, so he was perhaps the oldest of the Village moderns. He was raised in New York and studied optics and photography while living as a bohemian in Germany and environs from 1881-1890. Back in New York he subsequently helped form the New York Camera Club in 1897 as well as the world's foremost photography magazines, Camera Notes and later Camera Work, and began photographing scenes of New York City life that were increasingly abstract, non-representational, and experimental. In his revolt against realism and in seeking to impose a personal vision on his subjects, Stieglitz was moved by a number of modernist influences: first the members of the late nineteenth-century German and Austrian avant-garde, who were confirmed "secessionists" from convention; then the Symbolists and their artistic rejection of bourgeois society and their pursuit of emotional states and forbidden topics; Bergson's emphasis on emotion and intuition; and, later, modernist vogues such as Italian Futurism (particularly its celebration of technology), primitivism, and Dadaism.26 Stieglitz, in short, made photography an instrument of personal expression and experimentation, and he explored the implications of modern painting for photography, and of photography for modern painting.

But it was as a collector of art and as a patron of artists that Stieglitz left most of his mark on Burke and "the Others." He opened his small Village gallery in 1905 as a showplace for modern art--photography, but also painting and sculpture--and was soon displaying Rodin and Matisse (1908), Cezanne and Picasso (1910-1911), Arthur Dove and John Marin, African "primitives" (1914) and Duchamp's infamous readymade "Fountain" (a 1917 urinal inscribed pseudononymously "R. Mutt," the name of a local plumber). But just as important, Stieglitz's gallery, like the Others gatherings, offered an opportunity for writers, painters, and photographers to converse about their craft. Historians of 29127 comment at length on Stieglitz's role as a promoter of modern art and on his ability to converse prophetically (and prodigiously) on the possibilities that modern art could realize.28 Burke's friends Williams (Autobiography, xii-xiii) and Munson (Awakening, 47-50) recall 291 as a gathering place for conversation and Stieglitz as someone who would intone for hours on contemporary art. Particularly after Duchamp, Ray, and the Mexican-born caricaturist Marius de Zayas arrived in 1915, and particularly in the magazine 291 (which appeared in twelve issues from March, 1915, to February, 1916,29 and which juxtaposed satires, manifestos, and stunning visual and verbal experiments), Stieglitz's circle percolated modernist theory and practice, European as well as American--just as Burke was establishing himself in New York and Greenwich Village.

After the 291 gallery closed in 1917, its pioneer work accomplished, and Camera Work and 291 ceased publication, Stieglitz became involved with Georgia O'Keeffe, who came to New York permanently in 1918; the two married in 1924 and opened "The Intimate Gallery" from 1925-1929 in order to feature O'Keeffe, Demuth, Dove, Hartley, Marin and Paul Strand, all of whom were working closely together in a non-commercial art community dedicated to furthering American art. Even before "The Intimate Gallery" opened, Burke had through The Dial (which employed Paul Rosenfeld as music critic) and perhaps through Williams and Crane certainly established personal relations with Stieglitz, O'Keeffe, and their friends30; he also knew their work very well. After 1925, Burke was certainly well acquainted with Stieglitz and O'Keeffe and many of the other artists associated with Stieglitz.31 Through Stieglitz and his circle, then, Burke was immersed in the ferment in modern art that was taking place on the Continent and in America.

The artistic nationalists that Burke encountered in the Stieglitz circle were also affiliated in various ways with the literary nationalists who produced Contact after World War I, Seven Arts and Soil before it, and The New Republic and Smart Set both before and after. Soil was a nationalistic monthly which operated from December, 1916, to July, 1917. Founded and edited by Robert Coady, Soil aggressively promoted the "young, robust, energetic, immature, daring, and big spirited" aspects of American culture: it printed photographs of steam engines, bridges, and tall buildings; celebrated in articles prizefighting, football, and baseball; defended ragtime, vaudeville, movies, and the dime novel; and published work by Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens.32 In his Whitmanesque catalogues of readymade American art, Coady "exhorted American artists to strip away every preconceived notion of art that might block the expression of American life" (Tashjian, Skyscraper, 74).

Burke never published in Soil, and I have discovered only indirect references to it in his correspondence.33 But he was very intimate with what might be called its "successor," Contact, the medium through which William Carlos Williams and his friend Robert McAlmon attempted to promulgate a distinctly American art. Williams had been enthusiastic about Soil, but he also expressed reservations about "Coady's preoccupation with the surface of American phenomena and came out in favor of exploring their psychological implications" (Tashjian, Skyscraper, 72). Rather like the artists sponsored by Stieglitz whom he knew so well--as poems like "The Wildflower" and "The Great Figure" indicate, he was extremely close to O'Keeffe and Demuth and Hartley34--Williams was a committed artistic nationalist who sought the means to steer American art away from European traditions and conventions and subjects. He and McAlmon insisted on the American artist's need for "contact" with his or her cultural environment: "We, Contact, aim to emphasize the local phase of the game of writing," Williams wrote in a "Comment" in the second number. "We want to give all our energy to the setting up of new vigors of artistic perception, invention, and expression in the United States." In opposition to Eliot, on the one hand, Williams wished to distance American writers from worn European traditions, from "the classroom" and "the library," by rooting art "in the locality which should give it fruit" (Autobiography, 174). In opposition to late-nineteenth-century American writers, on the other hand, Williams stood for "direct, uncompromised writing" indigenous and primitive and new, intensely in contact with the objective, seeable, contemporary American world (Autobiography, Chapter 30).35 From December, 1920, to early 1921, Williams and McAlmon produced four issues of Contact, the first two mimeographed and stapled together, the last two somewhat more elaborately produced.36 These issues included essays by Williams, McAlmon, and Marianne Moore, reviews by Pound and Moore, poetry by Williams, Bryher, Mina Loy, Hartley, Stevens, and Kay Boyle--and Burke's essay "The Armour of Jules Laforg[u]e" as well as Burke's poem "Ver Renatus Orbis Est."

For the genesis of Burke's friendship with Williams seems to have coincided with the genesis of Contact. A November, 1920, letter from Josephson to Burke mentions that Williams has "expressed a desire to meet you," and Josephson's Life among the Surrealists describes the ensuing introduction (72-75). Williams's first and second letters to Burke (January 12 and 26, 1921) and Burke's first letters to Williams (January 24 and 27, 1921) concern Burke's encouraging words about Contact and discuss the possibility of contributions by Burke and Cowley; the January 27 letter also indicates Burke's acquaintanceship with McAlmon and an upcoming meeting "on Friday" at McSorley's restaurant to discuss Contact.37 Williams's letters in February and April also comment on Burke's prospective contributions to Contact. And for the next several years in the letters Williams comments now and again on Burke's submissions or on Williams's attempts to get Burke to submit to an international issue of Contact that McAlmon was putting together in London (apparently it never appeared).38 The early correspondence is filled with indicators of Williams's passion for artistic nationalism. He accepted for Contact Burke's essay on the French Symbolist writer Laforgue, for example, but with nationalist reservations: "I suppose I am somewhat influenced in my shyness toward Laforg[u]e by a knowledge of what a too close study of his work has done to Eliot--and others, even Pound" (January 12, 1921). He noted as obvious Burke's designation of him as a "Whitmanite" ("Jezus Christus what lightening-like penetration!"--February 24, 1921). And he expressed his misgivings about Burke's respect for the writing of Remy de Gourmont (March 22, 1921), his admiration for American painters, and his disdain for French literature in general (March 31, 1921): "The two most useful things I can think of right now would be to destroy Freud and the French by some capable Manifesto" (April 27, 1921). Williams furthered his nationalistic goals by writing Spring and All and The Great American Novel (1923), and in 1925 he brought out In the American Grain, a vision of the American past built around Williams's very personal histories of Eric the Red, Columbus, de Soto, Cortez, Daniel Boone, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Paul Jones, Benjamin Franklin, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, Lincoln, and others, all written in the style of each person as Williams imagined it. In reinventing the American past, ridiculing "puritans," and characterizing Franklin as grasping and avaristic, In the American Grain is in sympathy with the efforts to reinvigorate the American past that were called for by Seven Arts's Van Wyck Brooks.39

Seven Arts--another competitor and companion of Soil--was founded in November, 1916, by socialists James Oppenheim, the editor, and his close associates Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, and Randolph Bourne, the spiritual center of the venture. Brooks as early as 1908 in The Wine of the Puritans had anatomized the Puritans as the prototype of the overly industrious, commercial, sanctimonious, conformist, anti-artistic, and anti-intellectual Americans of the late nineteenth century who were still (in Brooks's opinion) dominating American culture. He thereby established the term "puritan" for the moderns as an epithet of anti-genteel scorn. In 1915, in America's Coming-of-Age, Brooks continued the critique, blaming Jonathan Edwards, the Transcendentalists, and the Boston Brahmins for inhospitability towards art and for just about everything else wrong with American culture, and commending the simpler, more primitive past that existed in America before industrialization. Then in the April 11, 1918 issue of The Dial, Brooks published his famous modernist manifesto "On Creating a Usable Past": in it he attacked the professoriat for "disparag[ing] almost everything that comes out of the contemporary mind" and for "reaffirm[ing] the values established by the commercial tradition [in American literature] . . . that crowns everything that has passed the censorship of the commercial and moralistic mind." He called on Americans to create a new, anti-puritan orthodoxy after the example of writers such as Melville, Dreiser, Whitman, and London--to "invent a usable past" with "new ideals" and "finer attitudes" than those in "our existing travesty of a civilization." Along similar lines Frank in 1919 published Our America, a book whose very title opposed it to the values of the genteel representatives of "their America"). Our America was a nationalistic call to arms for a new generation of writers and artists--Brooks, Stieglitz, Sandburg, Amy Lowell, Rosenfeld, Charlie Chaplin, and others--who, Frank hoped, could together counter the problems tabulated by Brooks and who might continue the anti-puritan, anti-genteel sentiments Frank observed in Huck Finn, Abraham Lincoln, and H. D. Thoreau. Bourne, a charismatic "cultural radical who wanted to redesign society along socialist lines in order . . . to make it more responsive to the needs of the individual" (Abrahams, 35), was disillusioned with European culture even before the Great War broke out. As a critic of culture he vigorously promoted progressive education, women's emancipation, and socialism through a series of books and essays that he published before he fell victim, at the age of 32, to the flu epidemic in December, 1918.

Seven Arts promoted economic equality and optimistically heralded the creation of an American cultural renaissance: "We are living in the first days of a renascent period," the first issue proclaimed. Bourne, Frank, Brooks, Rosenfeld, and the others felt they could encourage a new and indigenous American culture that would combine radical politics with artistic experiment. Accordingly Seven Arts published poetry by Frost, Sandburg, Kreymborg, Amy Lowell, and Vachel Lindsay; fiction by Sherwood Anderson (including the first Winesburg, Ohio stories), Eugene O'Neill, and Frank; a play by Dreiser; and articles by Rosenfeld, Dell, Dreiser, Hartley, John Dos Passos, Mencken, Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Brooks, and Bourne. Wishing to sever nearly all cultural ties with Europe, Seven Arts opposed vigorously American involvement in the Great War; once America did join the Allies, in April of 1917, Bourne and Reed continued to publish anti-war articles like "This Unpopular War" (Reed) and "The Collapse of American Strategy" and "Twilight of Idols" (both by Bourne). These articles, however, succeeded only in undoing Seven Arts, for the magazine's patron was so incensed by them that she withdraw her financial support. Seven Arts passed away, but its principles and personnel, as we shall see, passed on.40

The New Republic became a rival of Seven Arts even before America entered the war, for it took a distinctly liberal as opposed to radical approach to social amelioration. As early as 1914 the Villager Walter Lippmann renounced radical socialism and Mabel Dodge's salon in favor of political liberalism and The New Republic, whose first issue appeared in November. The New Republic remained closely associated with the radical left through 1917--Bourne published a great many essays in the weekly, for instance--but it finally parted ways with radicalism (and hence helped to inspire Seven Arts) when it adopted a progressive line, attacked John Reed and The Masses group for personal irresponsibility, and firmly supported American entry into the war, on the grounds that the war offered an opportunity for lasting social reform. Henceforth liberal rather than radical, produced in Chelsea rather than Greenwich Village, carrying Dewey rather than Bourne, supporting Wilson and not the Wobblies, The New Republic held that domestic tranquility was necessary for social progress. Lippmann, his co-editor Herbert Croly (whose nationalistic Promise of American Life had appeared in 1909), and the others associated with The New Republic were troubled by the increasing fragmentation of American life, particularly under the pressures of immigration, and by the appalling conditions they observed in the cities. To counter those conditions and to restore a cohesive American culture, they proposed not the solutions advocated by The Masses or Seven Arts--socialism mixed with personal freedoms, and social and artistic experimentation--but rationalist and scientific control of industrial capitalism and personal self-discipline.41 A public affairs magazine more than a literary one, The New Republic nevertheless remained committed to establishing a vigorous and coherent and anti-genteel American culture, supported civil liberties and free speech during the increasingly repressive 1920s,42 praised new literary heroes (e.g., Sandburg, Masters, Dreiser, Lewis, Cather), and published numerous articles on art and culture--many of them reinforcing Croly's program for American artistic nationalism (e.g., in December, 1920, D. H. Lawrence contributed an essay exhorting Americans to follow American, not European, traditions).

The Smart Set was as committed to cultural nationalism as Seven Arts and The New Republic. Its famous editor, H. L. Mencken, came to the magazine in 1908, became co-editor with George Jean Nathan in 1914, and henceforth commuted to New York every third week until the end of 1923. Mencken joined the critics of Seven Arts in ridiculing genteel American culture and in promoting indigenous writers who promised to reinvent American life. Taking their cue from Nietzsche's disdain for "the herd," Mencken, Nathan, and the contributors that they permitted into Smart Set satirized "puritanism," the "booboisee," and their instruments and institutions: evangelical Christianity, "Comstockery," prohibition, women's clubs, the middle class, and the small town. No admirer of European culture (although he esteemed Shaw, Nietzsche, and many aspects of German culture), the Anglophobic Mencken praised Twain and other users of the American vernacular, published in 1919 his famous The American Language (an effort to distance American usages from English rule), and supported realists and naturalists like Norris, London, Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and particularly Dreiser, who may have first recommended Mencken to The Smart Set, who lived for long periods in Greenwich Village, and who published his most famous work while closely associated with Mencken: Sister Carrie (reissued in 1907); Jennie Gerhardt (1911); The Financier (1912); The Titan (1914); The "Genius" (whose publication in 1916 was fought by Sumner's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice); and An American Tragedy (1925). Since Bourne, Brooks, and the other members of the Seven Arts group similarly touted Dreiser and other anti-puritan American writers, in one sense The Smart Set and Seven Arts shared an agenda.

But unlike the radical and socialist Seven Arts and the liberal New Republic, The Smart Set was more iconoclastic in its politics. For all his admiration for Nietzsche the arch-modernist, Mencken himself was far from a socialist and more of a politically conservative laissez-faire capitalist. He believed that only an intellectual and cultural elite could change American cultural tastes, and some of the owners of his magazine were members of the wealthy elite. Unlike the idealists of Seven Arts, who held that Americans were "living in the first days of a renascent period, a time which means for America the coming of that national self-consciousness which is the beginning of greatness,"43 and unlike the social and cultural engineers who ran The New Republic, Mencken was a realist and pessimist who ultimately lacked confidence that mainstream American life could be fundamentally reformed. Smart Set, accordingly, took a somewhat more conservative approach to expressing opinions and publishing literary texts. It took fewer chances than its friskier competitors, maintained a lighter political tone (its subtitle was "A Magazine of Cleverness"), betrayed an ambivalence toward experimental verse (it lauded Pound but carried little free verse), and, more anxious for commercial success than willing to challenge too fervently the establishment, avoided the kinds of political controversy and forbidden subjects that could have aroused the ire of Sumner and his sympathizers. Smart Set retained a sharp satiric edge and offered little that could be seen by the genteel as morally uplifting, to be sure; it praised O'Neill and carried Fitzgerald, Lawrence, Joyce, and Cather; but neither did it publish anything sexually frank or politically heretical. Dreiser himself accused Mencken of making the magazine into "a light, non-disturbing periodical of persiflage and badinage, which now and then is amusing but which not even the preachers of Keokuk will resent seriously. It is as innocent as The Ladies' Home Journal."44 The more established The Smart Set became, the more it seemed to distance itself as much from the rebellious Villagers as from the sober Methodists that it baited so relentlessly. In the first days in 1924, Mencken and Nathan left the Smart Set for their own new magazine, The American Mercury, a less literary and more cultural-political magazine published by Alfred Knopf, which continued to trade on satiric irreverence toward genteel America for a mass audience well into the 1930s (Singleton).

Burke associated with and knew the work of just about all the literary nationalists, left, right, and center. I have already indicated his proximity to Williams and Contact, and there is ample reason to believe that he was well acquainted with Seven Arts as well. For example, in January, 1917 (precise date unknown), Cowley wrote to Burke about Seven Arts and mentioned that he had submitted something to it for publication--unsuccessfully as it turned out; on June 7, 1917, Cowley from France (where he was serving as an ambulance driver) asked Burke to send him issues of Seven Arts; Cowley again mentioned Seven Arts familiarly to Burke on May 25, 1918; Light refers to Seven Arts in a letter to Burke from Columbus (June 5, 1917); and Burke's friend and fellow contributor to Sansculotte Nan Apotheker published a poem in Seven Arts in 1917. After Seven Arts folded, Burke's relationships with the Seven Arts group grew personal. Burke worked amicably with Rosenfeld at The Dial, where Rosenfeld was music critic during most of the 1920s,45 and he corresponded with Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank.46 Burke in a January 23, 1923, letter to Cowley reports on dinner and socializing with Brooks, who has "been with [Burke] several times lately" and who Burke calls "an awfully likable man." Burke's relationship with Frank grew close enough, especially under the sponsorship of Burke's close professional friend Gorham Munson, that the two socialized on occasion,47 and Frank offered compliments and commentary on Burke's writing (some of it still in draft form), advice on finding a publisher for Burke's collection of short stories, and lengthy discussions of aesthetics and metaphysics.48 Burke clearly was also familiar with the content of The New Republic because he spoke of it to Cowley (e.g., August 28, 1921; February 6, 1922; etc.), because Munson's exchanges with Burke mention it, and because Burke in 1930 and 1931 himself published a handful of articles and reviews there, as well as a rejoinder to a New Republic review of Counter-Statement, after the demise of The Dial (Burke's preferred venue) and after Cowley joined The New Republic at the invitation of Edmund Wilson in late October, 1929. As for Mencken and The Smart Set, Burke was reading it even before arriving in New York City, for a Peabody High School teacher had introduced him to it back in Pittsburgh (Parker and Herenden, 88). Louis Wilkinson occasionally exchanged observations with Burke about Smart Set before World War I, Burke published two of his first stories there--"Idylls" (November, 1918) and "A Man of Forethought" (May, 1919)--and he and Cowley were rejected other times.49 And the record of his celebrated meeting with Dreiser suggests how much Burke respected Dreiser, Mencken, and that circle through the end of the war.

But by the early 1920s, Burke was keeping a respectful intellectual distance from the literary nationalists. I have already indicated that Burke's essay on the French writer Laforgue in Contact raised nationalist misgivings in Williams. Burke's own misgivings about Williams's nationalism come out in his humorous letter to Cowley of September 12, 1921, a letter concerning a Sunday conversation at Williams's place and some subsequent correspondence in which "Doc answered me in the capacity of a vigorous young American." In his exchanges with Williams, Burke tried to rescue Williams's aesthetics from a narrow nationalism:

For a whole summer, Malcolm, I patiently poured my most valuable discoveries into the sewer. Then recently I sent him some stories, and God bless me if he didn't begin at the beginning again, and complain that they were too cerebral. I was remarkably self-possessed, Malcolm. I counted ten, walked around the house, smoked a pipe, and then sent him a questionnaire. This questionnaire was introduced by rehearsing the above facts about a literary correspondence. Then I wrote down a list of topics to be answered by yes or no, so that in this way no one could accuse him of lacking opinions. Needless to say, the answer was rather sharp. I am now waiting for his issue of Contact to appear so that I can write and congratulate him that there is not a cerebral line in it. [. . .] I have just decided that: 1. His moi and my moi are irreconcilable. 2. Neither of us has gained by our contact, and certainly I have not gained by his Contact.

Over time Burke also became impatient with the Smart Set and Seven Arts groups. As early as March 26, 1916, Cowley could say, "I'll never be any good unless I quit reading Smart Set." By 1921, Burke could write that "you can hardly blame us for ignoring a rampant impressionist like H. L. Mencken."50 By February, 1924, Burke's friend Munson was referring to Mencken's latest venture as "the American Murkwry."51 And by the end of 1924, of course, Burke himself would be ridiculing Mencken and his American Mercury as a co-conspirator in the Aesthete 1925 plot. In his correspondence with Frank, Burke was respectful but also careful to keep his distance from Frank's aesthetic nationalism and from particular nationalists (in one exasperated moment on November 23, 1922, he called Rosenfeld "damned stupid"52). In a late 1922 Vanity Fair commentary on Brooks, Burke took issue with his elder's Freudian criticism,53 and in a carefully crafted letter to Brooks a year earlier, he had already declared his independence--his broad "classicism" in opposition to American nationalism: "If we should rather linger with Matthew Arnold than H. L. Mencken, with Mallarme rather than with [the American] Louis Untermeyer, that is simply our choice." He found the American artists trumpeted by Brooks to be aesthetically flawed: "We find in them no concern with conscious structure. . . . [Their works] are unripe . . . in matters of presentation, of organization. [They] are written without discipline." In a letter to Cowley (January 18, 1923), Burke restated his opposition to Brooks and Frank and their "skyscraper primitivism" in spite of their personal generosity to him:

Yes, you are right in looking to America as 'a land of promise, something barbaric, and rich.' But alas! I feel that in your admiration (theoretical, gained from Harold Stearns54 and faugh! strengthened by Matthew Josephson) you have neglected to distinguish between a qualitative and a quantitative richness. Broadway is quantitatively rich; not a single light on it is worth a damn, but the aggregate of so many million lights demands attention. The same is true of our buildings downtown. It is the old fight against mass, a fight which you used to combat along with me: the fight for quality. [. . .] America is the purest concentration point for the vices and vulgarities of the world.55

These sentiments found their way into Burke's writings, perhaps most explicitly in a lead essay in The Bookman published in July, 1923 (but completed in the spring of 1921: see Burke to Cowley, May 10, 1921). Entitled "Chicago and Our National Gesture," the article is Burke's most measured commentary on the debate over literary nationalism. In it Burke inquired "whether there is anything exclusively American to represent, any American essence distinct from that of Europe." He concluded:

The characteristic fallacy which our nationalists have made is their confusion between the pioneer spirit and the promise of a distinct national entity. That is, they have taken the unmistakably un-European qualities of a passing phase of our national life as the evidence of a unique contribution which we shall offer as a completely ripe nation.

No such possibility for a distinct national culture exists, wrote Burke. America and Europe are inextricably bound together culturally; "the country itself is developing entirely in accordance with its own possibilities, and these possibilities are almost exclusively European":

The thing I cannot understand is why we should expect America to develop some distinctly un-European art expression. Fighting the same wars, selling the same goods, reading the same books, seeing the same plays, hearing the same music . . . it almost seems incredible that in the face of such normal interchange there are critics who can go on trumpeting the birth of a new culture. [. . . ] Politically, economically, socially, racially, traditionally . . . in almost every consideration we are intimately linked up in the great thought currents of Europe.

The article goes on to explain why Whitman is not always an ideal literary model and to answer those who would blackball writers for not being sufficiently "American."56

It was appropriate that Burke's critique of the nationalists appeared in The Bookman, for The Bookman was the magazine of the great rivals of the literary nationalists, the New Humanists. Led by Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, and Norman Foerster, the New Humanists shared the modernists' negative assessment of contemporary American art and society and strove to reinvigorate American culture; they criticized the materialism, industrialism, and cultural philistinism that in their eyes dominated the American scene. Like the literary nationalists, they sought a "usable past" that would renew contemporary culture. But unlike the literary nationalists, whose usable past was in the American tradition and who sought to ameliorate American society through forward-looking artistic innovation, the New Humanists pursued the same goal as their sixteenth-century English namesakes: the recovery and rehabilitation of the "timeless" moral and aesthetic values present in classical texts and cultures. Rather like the southern Agrarians who were simultaneously producing The Fugitive and I'll Take My Stand,57 the New Humanists opposed the moral and epistemological relativism of many of the moderns and cultivated instead a disciplined natural aristocracy, a cultural elite (Babbitt taught at Harvard, More at Princeton), who might return American culture to grounded aesthetic and moral standards rooted in tradition rather than invented by each new generation. More, Babbitt, and their admirers (one of whom was Babbitt's student T. S. Eliot, who accepted New Humanist essays for his Criterion and who once said that Babbitt and More "seem to me the wisest men that I have ever known"58) were the original conservative American culture warriors of the twentieth century. Suspicious of socialism, organized labor, artistic novelty, and most contemporary writing, they tried to recover instead pre-Romantic, classical texts and social mores. They even defended the Puritans of colonial America and attacked writers dear to the literary nationalists--Whitman, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis. As a result, the New Humanists drew withering abuse from the literary nationalists within American modernism, particularly from Mencken in The American Mercury, who throughout the 1920s lumped More and Babbitt in with the contemporary "puritans" and scorned their pedantry, prudery, and resistance to the new.59

Burke flirted with aspects of the New Humanism in the first years of the 1920s. In the May, 1922, issue of The Dial, he reviewed sympathetically More's The Religion of Plato, which traces Plato's influence on Christianity and combats the sophistic relativism of "man as the measure of all"; Burke approved of More's "capacity to touch on permanent standards . . . when his facile contemporaries could see nothing but flux" and avowed "the existence of permanent principles of beauty."60 Burke also argued New Humanist ideology with his friends--with Light (see Light to Burke, September 27, 1922), with Cowley (on February 5, 1924, Burke claimed to Cowley that More "is more our contemporary than, say, Mencken"), and with Frank:

You are perfectly right in saying that there is one part of me in rebellion against another part. For I have accepted that much of Paul Elmer More: I believe that we should operate in dualisms rather than monisms. The whole modern aesthetic is one of a single channel, of one-mindedness, rather than one of balance. . . . I am really being seduced by More's book [on Plato] after all these months--that there is another type of consistency, the consistency of blocking one weight with another. (Burke to Frank, October 7, 1922)

The passage alludes to a central More dogma--the dual nature of the soul, one part fallen and evil, the other part potentially regenerative.61

The "rebellion" within Burke describes very well Burke's attitude towards More and the New Humanism. On the one hand, Burke appreciated More's dualism and was yearning for grounded assumptions and fixed standards. Even while his friends were experimenting with the Dada avant garde (see below, pages xx), Burke was experimenting with a "new classicism," in stories like "First Pastoral" for instance, that would be equally radical in its opposition to mainstream contemporary artistic practice. In their war with the genteel, Williams and most of the other nationalists rushed to embrace the new, but while equally committed to seeking artistic novelty and while "wish[ing] to war against impressionism and subjectivism [in criticism], Contact, and emotion . . . [and] the lice of H. L. Mencken," Burke turned "quite naturally . . . to the Golden Ages of European literature. . . . Philosophically I turn to Spinoza; critically, to the dogmatism of Aristotle." One of Burke's tutors at the time was Richard McKeon, then a young graduate student working on a dissertation on Spinoza. McKeon had befriended Burke on their ferry rides from New Jersey to Columbia a half dozen years before and now was himself looking to philosophy to find "the scientific foundations of the aesthetic experience" (McKeon 6). Wrote Burke: "The one bright spot in my intellectual life is Richard McKeon, whom I see every couple of weeks, and who is a consolation to me because he knows things."62

On the other hand, Burke increased his distance from the rest of the New Humanist program even as the movement grew more popular in the increasingly conservative 1920s, particularly after 1928 when More published his Demon of the Absolute, Munson his essay on More in Destinations, and Foerster his American Criticism. Although Burke continued to publish on occasion in The Bookman--"A Decade of American Fiction" in August, 1929; "Thomas Mann and Andre Gide" in June, 1930--he also remained very independent of the New Humanist program for reform. In the July, 1923, issue of The Dial, Burke contributed an editorial "Comment" which praised classicism and predicted the advent of a new "classical era, a turn away from the recent religion of 'pure creation'," but it wasn't exactly the classicism of the New Humanists: "Classical eras heretofore have always glorified the powers that be. Yet in these gnarled times, the classical spirit would be so inimical to the spirit of modern business that when all its ramifications have been followed through we learn that classicism would be nothing other than howling rebellion. [Classicism] would, in the present state of society, be much more radical than Bolshevism." He also mentioned being "a bit discomforted" by More in a letter to Cowley on February 5, 1924, and elsewhere claimed that "More had not worked out his aesthetic" (Munson, Awakening 171). And he contributed to Aesthete, 1925 which took as one of its targets New Humanism. Early in 1930 he was asked by Hartley Grattan to be one of the contributors to the Critique of Humanism63, thirteen essays that together exposed various shortcomings of the New Humanism; Burke's essay, "The Allies of Humanism Abroad," contended that "Mr. Paul Elmer More . . . is something to be wrathful about. . . . We should not be forced to conclude that an anti-Rousseau, anti-romantic, and anti-humanitarian policy is required for righting . . . the unsatisfactory elements in the life of today. . . . The loss of authoritarian principles, so decried by the Humanists, may be a healing process, a stage in readjustment, admittedly an impoverishment in itself, as with the razing of an old structure, but necessary to new building" (169, 189). In sum, Austin Warren's 1933 assessment seems accurate:

[His] philosophical turn of mind would seem to relate [Burke] to the New Humanists, who also refuse to report flux; and indeed Mr. Burke has been milder and more temperate in his dissent from the New Humanism [e.g., in The Critique of Humanism] than any other of its critics.64 Like the Humanists, Burke holds that to exonerate art, as "unmoral," from relation to "life" or conduct, is, in reality, to doom it to weakness and futility, while he would dissent from their identification of the moral with the ethic of nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. (Warren 7)

An important motive for Burke's desire to remain independent of the literary nationalists and the New Humanists alike was that he felt himself to be part of another generation--the "Youngest Generation," to be precise. On October 15, 1921, Cowley contributed from Paris a lead essay, "This Youngest Generation," to The Literary Review, a weekly supplement to the New York Evening Post. Cowley's title and topic were meant to be incendiary: the title parodied a well known essay by the late nationalist saint Randolph Bourne, "This Older Generation," which had defined a "younger generation" in "guerilla warfare" against a puritan, genteel, "older" one; and the article in turn offered yet another, "youngest generation," an avant garde setting themselves in opposition to Bourne's "younger" one.65 Indeed, Cowley's essay is a sort of declaration of independence from the literary nationalists associated with Bourne, Brooks, and Mencken. It identifies "certain characteristics, held in common, [that] unify the work of the youngest writers, that generation which has just turned twenty"--the generation that included Cowley himself, Burke, Cummings, Dos Passos, Slater Brown, and Foster Damon.66 One characteristic was that "they are not gathered in a solid phalanx behind H. L. Mencken"; no puritans themselves, "they are willing to leave this battle [against puritanism] to their elder cousins and to occupy themselves elsewhere"--"elsewhere" to be understood as aesthetic territory more than nationalist: "Form, simplification, strangeness, respect for literature as an art with traditions, abstractness--these are the catchwords that are repeated most often by the younger writers," who are as likely to be inspired by French writers (like Flaubert or Gourmont) or Continentals (Slavs or Scandinavians) or classic English writers (e.g., Shakespeare, Jonson, Swift) as by American ones. Cowley's manifesto was noticed by Brooks, who responded directly in his regular "Reviewer's Notebook" column in the issue of the radical weekly The Freeman dated November 9, 1921.67 Brooks paternalistically dismissed "this youngest generation" as artistically naive ("they have no sense of proportion"), artistically ignorant ("present them with a truly magisterial American writer and I warrant they would refuse to look at the man twice"), conceptually preposterous ("from the standpoint of the youngest writers, Mr. Mencken is a back number, while Mr. Dreiser was a back number before the star of Mr. Mencken rose, [and] Seven Arts is enveloped in the haze of a middle distance; . . . thus we appear to have had four generations during a period when England, for example, has hardly exhausted one"), and faddishly superficial: "One draught from any spring is enough for them; their stomachs are not stout enough for prolonged potations. . . . It is an incorrigible infantile frivolity that possesses our writers; they digest nothing, they do not even swallow anything, they are like little boys who have eaten too many sweets."68 Burke, declaring his allegiance to "this youngest generation," then immediately seconded Cowley's riposte in a personal letter to Brooks on November 5, 1921 that I have already quoted; the letter defended his generation's appreciation for the classics and for form: "It is precisely that condition of chaos you ascribe to present America [in America's Coming-of-Age and other works] which is leading us to renounce the contemporary gods," wrote Burke. "I can only stress that we are looking for some sound structure; and that we have omitted contemporary guidance simply because it has nothing of this nature to offer. . . . The [American] men we ignore are ignored not because of their popularity . . . [but because] we find in them no concern with conscious structure." Gorham Munson later used the generational analysis offered by Cowley and Burke as a means to organize his account of recent American literature in his 1928 book Destinations. The book divides contemporary writers into four groups--the Elder Generation (More and Babbitt), the Middle Generation (Dreiser, Edward Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay), the In-Between Generation (Stevens, Moore, Williams), and the Younger Generation (Burke, Hart Crane, Jean Toomer)--and then discusses their work in generational terms that might today fall under the term "the anxiety of influence."

But more important, Munson took up the banner of "the youngest generation" by founding a literary review early in 1922 that would feature their work.69 Since Secession--and its better known rival Broom--are such remarkable publications and since they were so important to Burke, I have reserved a fuller account of them for Chapter 4. But here it is worth outlining how Secession was indeed invented as a vehicle for Burke and his "youngest" contemporaries, and how through it and through Broom Burke became identified and conversant with the modernist avant garde in America, in France, and elsewhere on the Continent.

Munson, a year older than Burke, came to Greenwich Village after the Great War and befriended Hart Crane, Waldo Frank, and other literary nationalists. He too encountered the Others group, Stieglitz's circle, the little theatres, and the other sources of modernist ferment in New York, and he became acquainted with Burke's writing if not Burke himself. In July of 1921, Munson went with other expatriots to Paris, where he became part of the Left Bank scene and met Burke's closest friends, Matthew Josephson and Malcolm Cowley.70 When Munson mentioned his desire to found a literary journal, Cowley provided its concept: it would feature the "youngest generation" of American writers that Cowley had just identified. By the spring of 1922, the first issue of the quarterly Secession was in print, its name alluding to the Secession Art Gallery in Vienna, to the "sezession" group of German artists in Munich, to the Secession Club of London poets frequented for a time by Pound in 1909, and to Stieglitz's Photo-Secession in New York, all of these associated with the extreme advance guard in art.71 That Munson had indeed determined to sponsor the "youngest" group is evident from the list of contributors: Burke, Cowley, Cummings, Brown, and Damon all showed up in one or more issues of the eight numbers that appeared before Secession ended in April, 1924, and they were joined by close associates of the "youngest" crowd such as Josephson, Robert Coates, Hart Crane, Ivor Winters, John Brooks Wheelwright, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. Allen Tate and Jean Toomer also submitted work, but were rejected.72 Josephson quickly became officially attached to Secession, particularly to issues two, three, and four, and under his sponsorship French Dada writers Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, and Tristan Tzara also contributed experimental poetry. The magazine was produced in Vienna in order to take advantage of the cheaper printing costs available there and distributed mostly in America.

Munson adopted a militant editorial tone in order to cast Secession as a prototypical avant garde publication. In a letter to Burke (February 19, 1922), he wondered about Burke's suggested name for the review, Massacre, and proclaimed a desire to make it in any case "a hard two fisted affair out for the massacre of imbecilities and any little slaughtering you wish to do will be very welcome at my desk." In the first issue he announced that "Secession exists for those writers who are preoccupied with researches for new forms," writers in the generation after Sherwood Anderson, Rosenfeld, Sinclair Lewis, and Untermeyer, and he mocked The Dial for being unfocused, old-fashioned, and unadventurous. In the second issue, he placed Secession between The Little Review and Broom on the list of publishers of experimental forms. In later issues he mocked Mencken, Brooks, and Vanity Fair. Secession was indeed "an organ for the youngest generation of American writers . . . [who] were defining a new position from which to assault the last decade and to launch the next" (Munson, "Fledgling" 31).73

Josephson was not the only one who helped Munson on an official basis. In late December, 1921, Munson solicited from France Burke's artistic contributions to Secession and his "behind-the-scenes assistance" in attracting contributors.74 Then on May 20, 1922, Munson arrived at Burke's Andover farm fresh off his steamer in order to offer Burke a place among the three "Directors" who together would select contents for the magazine. Among them Munson, Burke, and Josephson did choose nearly everything for issues three through six (the exceptions and the causes for those exceptions will be detailed in Chapter 4), and Burke was actively involved in setting editorial direction and managing contents.75 And of course Burke was contributing poetry ("Eroticon," to the third number), a review (to the fourth), and his fiction as well: "The Book of Yul" to the second issue, "First Pastoral" to the third, "In Quest of Olympus" to the fourth, "A Progression" to the seventh. Each issue of Secession was short--the longest was thirty-two pages--and its appearance was neat but unremarkable; only about five hundred copies of each number were printed, distributed, and sold. But Secession was extremely successful in putting compelling new work into print. In a post mortem Munson summarized its accomplishments:

The stories of Kenneth Burke in which an important theory of fiction is worked to unprecedented discoveries; several poems by Malcolm Cowley which are assured of preservation in anthologies; "Faustus and Helen" by Hart Crane; the verse doctrine of Ivor Winters; a manifesto by Waldo Frank . . . ; these are some of the claims of Secession to distinction. . . . Our clippings recall that in the Little Review jh [Jane Heap] attempted to wreck Secession; the Dial issued a brief evasion of our attack; Edith Sitwell wrote a long commentary in the New Age; Van Wyck Brooks published an editorial on Secession in The Freeman; Louis Untermeyer wrote tentatively and Amy Lowell fearsomely of us in the New Republic; the New York Times ran an idiotic column on its editorial page; S4N raised a racket, con and pro; the Criterion reviewed each number. There were boosts, hoots, or notes in the Double Dealer, American Mercury, Nation, London Mercury, Life and Letters, Playboy, Chicago Literary Times, etc. . . . [It was] the most remarkable stirring-up that any small magazine has achieved in America.76

Broom, more distinguished and more famous, was a few months senior to Secession. Founded in New York and in Europe during 1921 by Harold Loeb, a former New York bookshop owner with an inheritance that he was willing to put into a new literary venture (Loeb later served as the prototype of Hemingway's Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises), Broom was published in Rome, Berlin, and New York, monthly from November, 1921, through November, 1923, and then quarterly through January, 1924, when it expired. Broom sought to publish the most interesting things being produced by the extreme avant garde, whose members were determined, broom-like, to make a "clean sweep" of the past. It began as something of an American nationalist publication--indeed, its title seems to have derived from a passage in Moby Dick: "what of it, if an old sea captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks!"77--because Loeb had secured as his associate editor the nationalist Alfred Kreymborg, who was then under the profound influence of Brooks and Rosenfeld and who "deplored the obeisance to Europe prevalent among Americans who aspired to culture" (Loeb 7-8). The 1921 issues thus include Sherwood Anderson's "The Contract" and poetry by Amy Lowell, Conrad Aiken, Untermeyer, Lola Ridge, and Oppenheim. When Loeb reached Paris, however, the nationalist agenda was soon overwhelmed by the broader, eclectic versions of modernism there, particularly after Kreymborg left the magazine after a couple of issues and after Loeb early in 1922 secured as his associate editors the committed Dadaists Malcolm Cowley and Matthew Josephson. Especially during 1922, while Loeb's money supply lasted, and during most of 1923, when Cowley and Josephson had useful ties with the Dadaist and expatriot sets in Europe, Broom magnificently packaged some of the most arresting and experimental writing ever produced on the Continent and in the United States for a readership of over 4000 people. With reason, Cowley called it "probably the most interesting magazine which Americans ever produced" (Loeb 156).78 From the first issues of 1922, Broom truly committed itself to excellence and innovation, and its contents include some of the most spectacular and innovative art works of the era: Gertrude Stein's prose experiment "If You Had Three Husbands" from Tender Buttons; Dos Passos's story "Two University Professors"; Man Ray's surreal para-photo "Seguidilla"; Picasso's drawings of Stravinsky and of dancers; Joseph Stella's "Brooklyn Bridge"; Fernand Leger's abstract cubist drawings of Chaplin; Virginia Woolf's story "In the Orchard"; Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (serialized over several issues in 1922); Dostoevsky's "Stravrogin's Confession" (a segment of The Possessed); Toomer's "Seventh Street" and "Kabnis" (from Cane); sculpture by Lipchitz; art by Gris, Gropper, Matisse, Sheeler, and Capek; poetry by Marianne Moore, Cummings, Cowley, Soupault, Crane, Stevens, Winters, and Williams; pictures of Gontcharova's costumes for Ravel's "Rhapsodie Espagnole"; essays on Mayan art, Russian poetry, Dada, and modern music; and a great deal more besides. Quintessentially modernist, ruthlessly avant garde, Broom sought to ally itself with everything new--cinema, skyscrapers, jazz, advertisements. Even the covers contributed to the effect: designed by a variety of artists, they "constitute an anthology of modernist styles . . . from the cool phenomenological intimacy of Alice Halicka's domestic scene to the warm tones of Edward Nagle's cubist collage . . . to the austere but playful abstraction of the three-dimensional numbers and letters arrayed in space in El Lissitsky's constructivist-influenced cover . . . [to] the most famous cover, [by Edward Gordon Craig, for the February, 1922 issue, in which] a sexually ambiguous figure, stylistically evoking both contemporary taste and primitive myth, sits on its haunches and thumbs its nose at tradition and bourgeois values" (Nelson 223). Magnificently produced on oversized, beautiful paper with wide margins, juxtaposing the already-nearly-canonical artist with the unknown, each issue of Broom was an art object itself--as arresting and unfixed and exploratory as modernism was itself in 1922.

Burke followed Broom closely from its inception. From the beginning he kept up a spirited correspondence with both Cowley and Josephson about the contents of the magazine.79 He took up the invitation of his friends and contributed his work to Broom: "The Olympians" (later renamed "A Progression") and "The Book of Yul" were rejected in September, 1921 (Broom Files, Princeton; Cowley to Burke, September 28, 1921); "My Dear Mrs. Wurtelbach" was accepted in November, 1922, for the January, 1923 issue; and "Prince Llan" appeared in the final issue, in January, 1924. (Indeed, a passage describing copulation in the most abstract terms and references to "breasts [that] stood out firm like pegs" and "sitters [that] undulated" in "Prince Llan" may have been the cause of its suppression by the United States Postal Service, a development that contributed to the final demise of the magazine.) Burke wrote to Loeb late in 1922 to congratulate him for Loeb's Broom essay "The Mysticism of Money," and the two then exchanged other letters on the contents of Broom; they probably also met in New York in January, 1923, to discuss Broom's future prospects (Cowley to Burke, January 6, 1923). Burke was cited by Loeb in his August, 1923, history of Broom as among the new writers that Broom, like Secession, was then committed to championing (Broom 5, #1, 55-58). Burke was also among those who frequented the American offices of Broom, staffed by Lola Ridge and her assistant, Kay Boyle: the two held open houses each Thursday afternoon and one evening a month at the Broom offices at 3 East 9th Street.80 Burke was one of the contributors to Aesthete 1925, which was conceived in part as a continuation of Broom. And finally, when Broom was winding down, when Loeb, now broke, in 1923 had entrusted it to Josephson and Cowley to run as they saw fit and Josephson and Cowley had returned to America, Burke was among those who were included in the small group of people charged with keeping the magazine afloat. As I say, some of the details of these activities will be fleshed out in Chapter 4; what is relevant here is that through Broom Burke was immersed in modernist discourse, modernist theory and art. Through Broom and Secession Burke became intimate with the theory and practice of modernism.

Through Broom and Secession and The Dial, that is. For even while he was closely involved with Broom and Secession, Burke even more intimately involved with an even more important modernist magazine, The Dial. During those marvelous years of 1922 and 1923, years when Burke was publishing his fiction and criticism everywhere and earning a reputation as "the most formidible of the younger Americans" writing then,81 as well as for most of the remainder of the decade, Burke was affiliated in several ways with what called at the time "the one magazine in America where the study of letters may occasionally be pursued in public" (Burke to Cowley, February 21, 1924) and what he later remembered as "a magic place, just wild, a transcendent place" (Iowa tapes): The Dial. Beginning in 1920 he placed several stories there, and in 1928 and 1929 he serialized a half-dozen sections of Towards a Better Life there. He also published much of his criticism there (see chapter 6); Wasserman, in fact, calls Burke The Dial's "representative critic" (115) on the basis of "Psychology and Form," his essays on Gourmont and Flaubert, and the score of reviews he published there. Burke also translated a great many things for publication in The Dial, including Mann's Death in Venice and other stories, a section of Spengler's Decline of the West, and works by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, and a number of others. And he worked on and off at The Dial in a number of production capacities--as an assistant editor from 1922 to 1925 (in which role he prepared "The Waste Land" for its first publication in the November, 1922, Dial), as acting managing editor (in 1922 and 1923), and as acting editor (while editor Marianne Moore vacationed in 1925, 1926, and 1927). From fall, 1927, until the demise of The Dial in July, 1929, Burke served as its Music Critic, an office which gave him an opportunity to write about Stravinsky, Ravel, and Toscanini, Gerschwin and Copland and The Hall Johnson Jubilee Singers, as well as new music from the continent. For his various contributions to literature, criticism, and the arts he was given the eighth Dial Award; previous winners had been Sherwood Anderson (1921), T. S. Eliot (1922), Van Wyck Brooks (1923), Marianne Moore (1924), E. E. Cummings (1925), William Carlos Williams (1926), and Ezra Pound (1927).

The Dial in the 1920s was in some ways a better heeled, more respectable relative of Seven Arts and The Little Review. Not that it was an absolutely brand new publication: The Dial had been published in Chicago from 1880 to 1918 as a weekly and fortnightly review of art, politics, and opinion. In 1916 its editor set it on a more liberal, even radical course in politics and the arts, presenting Randolph Bourne, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and Charles Beard, spirited debates on vers libre, little theatres, the war, the League of Nations, and Eric Satie, and publicity for Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World and Trotsky's The Bolsheviks and World Peace. In mid-1918, in the aftermath of the demise of Seven Arts, new managers and financial backers brought the financially struggling journal to Greenwich Village. Two of those backers were Scofield Thayer and Sibley Watson, wealthy recent Harvard graduates who had been contributing to the magazine (despite some political misgivings) while it was still in Chicago. Thayer, whose uncle Ernest wrote "Casey at the Bat," was an enthusiast and patron of Joyce; Watson, a medical student with interests in the avant garde film and poetry. When financial exigencies at The Dial only intensified in New York, Thayer and Watson purchased the magazine late in 1919, determined to excise the politics from the magazine and to establish it as a leading modernist monthly magazine of the arts, no matter the cost.

At first The Dial drew on the Seven Arts tradition. Thayer and Watson apparently had hoped originally that they could save Seven Arts (which finally was officially absorbed by The Dial when it folded in 1917) or that Bourne might be the first editor of a new Dial (Joost, Transition 187), and their first issue of the new magazine in January, 1920, opened with a tribute to Bourne and a story by him. Alyse Gregory, a close friend of Bourne, was appointed assistant and later managing editor. The new owners also named Rosenfeld as music critic, published Seven Arts's other leaders Brooks and Frank, and soon reviewed works by Brooks and Frank and Oppenheim.

The new Dial quickly outgrew Seven Arts, however. From its beginning it looked more like an elegant and less political Little Review anyway in its internationalism and its patronage of new poetry, experimental theatre, and modern art; and in fact the history of the two journals was intertwined until they both ceased publication in mid-1929. Margaret Anderson, the editor of The Little Review, learned her trade working for the old Dial in Chicago, and in 1914, supported by Frank Lloyd Wright, Emma Goldman, Floyd Dell, Ezra Pound, and other moderns, she founded her own quarterly in order to sponsor "the best conversation the world has to offer" (Anderson 35) on avant-garde works and causes--Futurism, anarchism, Bergsonism, imagism. In 1917 Pound officially became foreign editor, and Anderson and her associate Jane Heap moved to Greenwich Village, where they continued to publish--on a shoestring--criticism of books, music, art, and theatre, as well as poetry and some art and fiction, until they moved on to Paris at the end of 1921. During those years in New York The Little Review consistently printed Pound, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, William B. Yeats, and Eliot, and reproduced Brancusi's sculpture, among many significant other items. In 1918 Anderson and Heap began serializing Joyce's Ulysses, a move which got The Little Review into some celebrated trouble with New York censors. The Little Review also published Burke's stories "David Wasserman" (in the fall of 1921) and "The Death of Tragedy" (fall, 1922), as well as two Burke translations in 1925 and 1926; and Burke was an interested follower of the magazine throughout its Chicago, New York, and Paris phases until it failed in May, 1929.82 After Thayer and Watson purchased The Dial, they published many of the same people appearing in The Little Review--Sherwood Anderson, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Brancusi, Eliot, Pound, Ford Madox Hueffer, Wyndham Lewis, Burke, and Joyce had all appeared in both magazines by the end of 1921--but The Dial was far better financed and avoided the experimental literary oddities and the liberal politics of The Little Review.

By paying contributors handsomely and by sparing no expenses on production, Thayer and Watson succeeded in attracting wonderful contributions, particularly in the first half of the decade. Beginning with its first issue in January, 1920, through 1924--its contents became less exciting beginning in 1925 (when Watson went to Rochester and Thayer to Europe) only in contrast to The Dial of the first four years of the decade--The Dial offered its many readers unmatched excellence in about 100 pages per issue: Eliot's "The Waste Land," Cummings "Buffalo Bill's defunct" and "In just spring," several cantos by Pound and an excerpt from "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly," Sandburg's "Jazz Fantasia," Yeats's "Easter 1916" and "The Second Coming," Marianne Moore's "Picking and Choosing,"83 Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Bantams in the Pinewoods," and "Hightoned Old Christian Woman," and a great deal of other poetry, including works by Williams, H. D., and Kreymborg. Excerpts from autobiographies by Yeats and Anatole France appearing over several issues. Pirandello's play "The Man with a Flower in His Mouth." Sherwood Anderson's "I'm a Fool," Mann's "Tristan" and Death in Venice, Lawrence's novella "The Fox," an excerpt from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and other work by her, and more fiction by Dos Passos, Conrad, Valery, Gorki, Unamuno, Schnitzler, and any number of others. Art reproductions of Demuth, Van Gogh, Picasso, Marin, Wyndham Lewis, Matisse, Chagal, Cummings, O'Keeffe, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Lachaise. Reviews of Bergson (by Slater Brown), Virginia Woolf (by Burke), Ulysses (by Eliot: "I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found"), Moore (by Eliot), and Eliot (by Cummings and Moore), as well as of Cook's The Provincetown Plays, Chaplin, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Al Jolson, Stein, Stokowski, Pirandello, Hemingway, and jazz. Essays such as Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell" and "Illuminations," Spengler's "Decline of the West," and Edmund Wilson's explication of "The Waste Land"; other essays by Pound, Santayana, Hesse, Yeats, and Bertrand Russell; and still others on Dada, on baseball, on London (by Ford Madox Hueffer), and on other subjects. Obviously its contents were diverse and eclectic; the magazine stood for no specific school, although the artists associated with Alfred Stieglitz were frequently reproduced and the poets Williams, Moore, Cummings, Eliot, Stevens, and Crane were frequently published. Obviously The Dial concentrated on publishing relatively well known and established writers and artists somewhat at the expense of turning up new talent. And obviously the magazine was politically conservative during a conservative, censorious decade, despite its Seven Arts heritage and in contrast to the liberal Little Review.84 Not only was political discussion missing from the pages of The Dial, but its criticism tended toward the aesthetic, emphasizing not the cultural contexts of a work but its aesthetic characteristics, especially "form"; not the social effects of literature but the aesthetic impact and significance of the isolated, autonomous art work as encountered by the isolated individual. In these senses some of the criticism of The Dial in Secession was justified.

But what The Dial was mostly was thrilling. Even now, seventy-five years later, the contents of each issue are exciting. Like Broom, The Dial was a work of modern art itself, particularly of what has come to be known as "high" modern art, art that is aesthetically self-conscious and formally sophisticated and innovative. Through The Dial, then, and through his other contacts--this is no exaggeration--Kenneth Burke became one of the best informed students and practitioners of modernist art in the world. Before the end of World War I Burke was already part of a web of interrelated groups that together through their written and oral, artistic and nonartistic, formal and informal exchanges composed the modernist conversation in Greenwich Village. Through periodicals like The Masses, Slate, Seven Arts, 291, Soil, and Smart Set, through the plays of the Provincetown Players and other experimental theatre groups, through Stieglitz's art gallery and the Others group picnics, Burke and the other New York moderns discussed politics, poetry, sculpture, music, fiction, and their interrelationships. Greenwich Village in 1918 already had a reputation as an intellectual haven and artistic bohemia, famous for Mabel Dodge's salon, political societies and meetings, bookstores and art galleries, teahouses and restaurants that all traded heavily on Villagers' needs for talk about politics and art. Burke patronized The Dutch Oven and Polly Holliday's restaurant and the cafe in the Brevoort Hotel, gathering places proximate to the Provincetown Playhouse and the Liberal Club and Washington Square Book Shop, places as celebrated and as important as the Dome and Rotonde were to expatriot Parisians. He no doubt frequented Arensberg's studio as well as Stieglitz's, and certainly he indulged in small talk at O'Neill's hangout, the Hell Hole bar (Josephson, Life 64-65), and at Masses parties, and listened to lectures at the Liberal Club. Burke also watched as new publishers emerged to take advantage of the modernist ferment: Maxwell Perkins became an editor at Scribner's in 1914 (a position he held until 1947); Harcourt, Brace, founded about the same time, later brought out Burke's Counter-Statement and Towards a Better Life; Boni and Liveright (the Boni brothers owned the Washington Square Book Shop) published The White Oxen, and Other Stories and invented The Modern Library, which later included Burke's translation of Death in Venice; and Alfred Knopf in 1915 began publishing a variety of experimental moderns--O'Neill and other Provincetown Players, Pound, Gibran, Eastman, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson (Munson, Awakening, chapter 10). In short, Greenwich Village before 1918 was a residential island in New York of about 45,000 people (Ware 19), an intellectual and artistic bohemia at once a part of the most vibrant American city--two million of the five million residents of New York City were immigrants, many of them constructing bridges and subways or the Flatiron or the Woolworth or the Singer or some other skyscraper--and at once separate enough from it (an improved Seventh Avenue and the West Side Subway connected the Village with the rest of the city only after 1917) to permit its citizens to discuss openly and freely sexual mores, women's rights, birth control, Freud, leftist politics, trade unionism, and experimental art. Most people lived cheaply in small rooms or apartments in tenements or converted houses on crooked, intimate old streets, all of which encouraged people to congregate and converse together in parks and bars and tearooms and other public spaces.85

After the Great War the talk continued, though not so frequently about politics in a Village disillusioned by the war and its aftermath and by the turn to the right in national political affairs. In the leading modernist magazines, Broom and The Dial and The Little Review, in more mainstream publications like The New Republic, Vanity Fair, and The American Mercury, as well as in more fleeting publications such as Contact, Secession, 1924, S4N, and The Freeman, versions of modern art were presented, defended, and debated. When many of the moderns went off to Paris and Berlin, they stayed in touch with people back in New York through extensive correspondences. Prohibition seems to have been one motive for the expatriot exodus, but in fact Prohibition seems to have only driven the bars and restaurants of Greenwich Village underground; speakeasies and Italian restaurants serving wine especially flourished after the New York State Enforcement Act was repealed in 1923. "Talking and tippling clubs" (as Burke called them) gave people an opportunity to get together for literary and critical exchange; one that met weekly in the winter of 1924-1925 included Burke, Wilson, Toomer, Kreymborg, Brooks, and Lewis Mumford (letter to Wheelwright, September 9, 1927), and another the previous winter included Burke, Cowley, Brown, Crane, Tate, Josephson, and Wheelwright (Josephson, Life, 290; Bak, 328-331).86 Occasions to organize more formally may have became less political, but they were no less frequent--witness, for instance, the interest in G. I. Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, a mystical group which interested Munson, Toomer, Crane, Frank, and Margaret Anderson in the mid-1920s. Parties at Lola Ridge's place succeeded Mabel Dodge's salon even before Ridge began working for Broom in 1922-1923: at one of them Thayer met Marianne Moore, and at another Williams and McAlmon hatched the idea for Contact (Williams, Autobiography 173). Alyce Gregory held many parties at her apartment on Patchin Place, too, and from December-April, 1923-1924 and 1924-25, Thayer held a series of spectacular dinners to encourage discussion on the modernist cause.

Weekend parties at Burke's farm at Andover were opportunities to continue the talk. Burke bought the place as a way to avoid escalating prices in New York and to steer himself and his family clear of urban pollution. Early in the spring of 1922 he purchased about 70 acres of land with a dilapidated house for about $1500, which he gradually fixed up and paid off with royalties from his writing and with his salary from The Dial. The farm offered a lifestyle not unlike the ones Burke had enjoyed in 1919, when the newly-wed and his wife spent the summer subsisting on the land near Candor, New York; or in 1920, when they spent the summer in rural North Carolina, with Lily's family; or in 1921, when the Burkes and Josephsons went to very rural Monson, Maine, for the summer rather than to Paris (Josephson, Life 67-72). For that matter, it was a life that Lily had come to appeciate in rural North Carolina, where her family gave her a love of the outdoors (Wheaton 166), and a life that Burke had enjoyed since his childhood, when he and Light and Cowley would retreat in the summer to the Cowley family farm in the village of Belsano, Pennsylvania, near Altoona (Cowley, Exiles, chapter 1). Nor was the notion unique to Burke, for his friends were retreating in analogous ways to Woodstock, New York, or Sherman, Connecticut, or Provincetown, Massachusetts, or Croton-on-Hudson, New York, all in an effort to correct the alienating aspects of urban life and to sustain creative vigor.87 But Andover was no hermitage, no quarantine. Burke commuted a great many days to his various jobs in New York, either to The Dial or to the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Trust (where in 1926 and 1927 he did research on drug addiction and ghostwriting for Colonel Arthur Woods) or to the Bureau of Social Hygiene (where in 1928 and 1929 he did research for Woods on criminology). Often he maintained a room in New York City so that he could stay in the city for days, commuting back to Andover on weekends. And of course he was constantly inviting friends to join him and Lily at Andover. By the end of 1928 they had bought additional land, dammed a creek to create a lake deep enough for swimming and diving, built a tennis court, expanded the house, and added some outbuildings, all enough to accommodate for the night or the weekend Williams, Brown, Cowley, Crane, Munson, Wheelwright, Josephson, Tate, or anyone else who might want to visit.88 The "agro-bohemian Burkes" (as Burke customarily called them) would share with their guests the simple but bountiful provisions of their extensive garden, provide rice wine or other spirits, and for hours enjoy conversing with and about the moderns. "By owning a roof over his head and planting a kitchen garden, [Burke] the penurious man of letters could render his life both more salutary and more dignified; the severe economies of the rustic life would also enable him to gain more time for the serious pursuit of his art," wrote Matthew Josephson. "[Burke's] reports fairly glowed with the joy of life in that season of pioneering; soon his friends came for weekends to the green hills of New Jersey to inspect his gardens, the new-sown lawns, and the siding of fresh shingles he and his wife had provided for their old house. . . . Kenneth, moreover, hoped that in time several of his friends would help colonize his corner of rural New Jersey, for he could not live without conversation" (Life, 301).

From the time that he took up re