THE LITTLE REVIEW

Imaginary Letters

(Six Letters of William Bland Burn to his Wife)

Wyndham Lewis

The Code of a Herdsman

(A set of rules sent by Benjamin Richard Wing to his young friend Philip Seddon enclosed with a letter. Under the above title now edited.)

(1) Never maltreat your own intelligence with parables. It is a method of herd-hypnotism. Do not send yourself to sleep with the rhythm of the passes that you make.=As an example of herd-hypnotism, German literature is so virulently allegorized that the German really never knows whether he is a Kangaroo, a Scythian, or his own sweet self.=You, however, are a Herdsman. That is surely Parable enough!

(2) Do not admit cleverness, in any form, into your life. Observe the accomplishment of some people’s signatures! It is the herd-touch.

(3) Exploit Stupidity.=Introduce a flatness, where it is required into your commerce. Dull your eye as you fix it on a dull face.=Why do you think George Borrow used such idiotic clichés as “The beams of the descending luminary—?” He was a great writer and knew what he was doing.=Mock the herd perpetually with the grimance of its own garrulity or deadness. If it gets out of hand and stampedes towards you, leap on to the sea of mangy backs until the sea is still. That is: cast your mask aside, and spring above them. They cannot see or touch anything above them: they have never realized that their backs—or rather their tops—exist! They will think that you have vanished into Heaven.

(4) As to language: eschew all clichés implying a herd personality. Never allow such terms as Top-Hole, Priceless, or Doggo to pass your lips. Go to the Dictionary if you want an epithet. If you feel eloquent, use that moment to produce a cliché of your own. Cherish your personal vocabulary, however small it is. Use your own epithet as though it were used by a whole nation, if people would have no good reason for otherwise accepting it.

Examples of personal epithets.

That man is abysmal.

That is an abysmal book.

He is a sinister card. (Combination of French and 1890 Slang.)

He has a great deal of sperm.

I like a fellow with as much sperm as that.

Borrow from all sides mannerisms of callings or classes to enrich your personal bastion of language. Borrow from the pulpit, from the clattering harangue of the auctioneer, the lawyer’s technicality, the pomposity of politicians.=Borrow grunts from the fisherman, solecisms from the inhabitant of Merioneth.=“He is a preux, ah, yes-a-preux!” You can say—“ah-yes-a-preux” as though it were one word, accent on the “yes.”

(5) In accusing yourself, stick to the Code of the Mountain. But crime is alien to a Herdsman’s nature.

(6) Yourself must be your Caste.

(7) Cherish and develop, side by side, your six most constant indications of different personalities. You will then acquire the potentiality of six men. Leave your front door one day as B.: The next march down the street as E. A variety of clothes, hats especially, are of help in this wider dramatisation of yourself. Never fall into the vulgarity of being or assuming yourself to be one ego. Each trench must have another one behind it. Each single self—that you manage to be at any given time—must have five at least indifferent to it. You must have a power of indifference of five to one. All the greatest actions in the world have been five parts out of six impersonal in the impulse of their origin. To follow this principle you need only cultivate your memory. You will avoid being the blind man of any moment. B will see what is hidden to D.=(Who were Turgenev’s “Six Unknown”? Himself.)

(8) Never lie. You cannot be too fastidious about the truth. If you must lie, at least see that you lie so badly that it would not deceive a pea-hen.—The world is, however, full of pea-hens.

(9) Spend some of your spare time every day in hunting your weaknesses, caught from commerce with the herd, as methodically, solemnly and vindictively as a monkey his fleas. You will find yourself swarming with them while you are surrounded by humanity. But you must not bring them up on the mountain.=If you can get another man to assist you—one, that is, honest enough not to pass his own on to you—that is a good arrangement.

(10) Do not play with political notions, aristocratisms or the reverse, for that is a compromise with the herd. Do not allow yourself to imagine “a fine herd though still a herd.” There is no fine herd. The cattle that call themselves “gentlemen” you will observe to be a little cleaner. It is merely cunning and produced with a product called soap. But you will find no serious difference between them and those vast dismal herds they avoid. Some of them are very dangerous and treacherous.=Be on your guard with the small herd of gentlemen!

(11) You will meet with this pitfall: at moments, surrounded by the multitude of unsatisfactory replicas, you will grow confused by a similarity bringing them so near to us.=You will reason, where, from some points of view, the difference is so slight, whether that delicate margin is of the immense importance that we hold it to be: the only thing of importance in fact.=That group of men talking by the fire in your club (you will still remain a member of your club), that party at the theatre, look good enough, you will say. Their skins are fresh, they are well-made, their manners are good. You must then consider what they really are. On closer inspection you know, from unpleasant experience, that they are nothing but limitations and vulgarities of the most irritating description. The devil Nature has painted these sepulchres pink, and covered them with a blasphemous Bond Street distinction. Matter that has not sufficient mind to permeate it grows, as you know, gangrenous and rotten. Animal high spirits, a little, but easily exhausted, goodness, is all that they can claim.

What seduced you from your severity for a moment was the same thing as a dull woman’s good-looks.=This is probably what you will have in front of you.=On the other hand, everywhere you will find a few people, who, although not a mountain people are not herd.=They may be herdsmen gone mad through contact with the herd, and strayed: or through inadequate energy for our task they may be found there: or they may be a hybrid, or they may even be herdsmen temporarily bored with the mountain. (I have a pipe below myself sometimes.)

There are numerous “other denominations.” Treat them as brothers. Employ them, as opportunity offers, as auxiliaries in your duties. Their society and help will render your task less arduous.

(12) As to women: wherever you can, substitute the society of men.=Treat them kindly, for they suffer from the herd, although of it, and have many of the same contempts as yourself. They are a sort of bastard mountain people.=There must be somewhere a female mountain, a sort of mirage-mountain. I should like to visit it.=But women, and the processes for which they exist, are the arch conjuring trick: and they have the cheap mystery and a good deal of the slipperiness, of the conjuror.=Sodomy should be avoided, as far as possible. It tends to add to the abominable confusion already existing.

(13) Wherever you meet a shyness that comes out of solitude, (although all solitude is not anti-herd) naiveness, and a patent absence of contamination, the sweetness of mountain water, any of the signs of goodness, you must treat that as sacred, as portions of the mountain.

However much you suffer for it, you must defend and exalt it. On the other hand, every child is not simple, and every woman is not weak.=In many cases to champion a female would be like springing to the rescue of a rhinoceros when you notice that it had been attacked by a flea. Chivalrous manners, again, with many women are like tiptoeing into a shed where an ox is sleeping.=Some children, too, rival in nastiness their parents. But you have your orders in this matter. Indifference where there should be nothing but the whole eagerness or compunction of your being, is the worst crime in the mountain’s eyes.

(14) Conquests have usually been divided from their antitheses, and defeats from conquests, by some casual event. Had Moscow not possessed a governor ready to burn the Kremlin and the hundreds of palaces accumulated there, peace would have been signed by the Czar at Bonaparte’s entrance.=Had the Llascans persevered for ten days against Cortés, the Aztecs would never have been troubled. Yet Montezuma was right to remain inactive, paralysed by prophecy. Napoleon was right when he felt that his star was at last a useless one. He had drained it of all its astonishing effulgence.=The hair’s breadth is only the virtuosity of Fate, guiding you along imaginary precipices.=And all the detail is make-believe, anyway. Watch your star soberly and without comment. Do not trouble about the paste-board cliffs!

(15) There are very stringent regulations about the herd keeping off the sides of the mountain. In fact your chief function is to prevent their encroaching. Some, in moments of boredom or vindictiveness, are apt to make rushes for the higher regions. Their instinct always fortunately keeps them in crowds or bands, and their trespassing is soon noticed. Those traps and numerous devices you have seen on the edge of the plain are for use, of course, in the last resort. Do not apply them prematurely.=Not very many herdsmen lose their lives in dealing with the herds.

(16) Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.

(17) The teacher does not have to be, although he has to know: He is the mind imagining, not the executant. The executant, the young, svelte, miraculous athlete, the strapping virtuoso, really has to give the illusion of a perfection.=Do not expect me to keep in sufficiently good training to perform the feats I recommend.=I usually remain up on the mountain.

(18) Above all this sad commerce with the herd, let something veritably remain “un peu sur la montagne.” Always come down with masks and thick clothing to the valley where we work.

Stagnant gasses from these Yahooesque and rotten herds are more dangerous often than the wandering cylinders that emit them. See you are not caught in them without your mask.=But once returned to our adorable height, forget your sallow task: with great freedom indulge your love.=The terrible processions beneath are not of our making, and are without our pity. Our sacred hill is a volcanic heaven. But the result of its violence is peace.=The unfortunate surge below, even, has moments of peace.

(Next letter will appear in August number.)

T. S. Eliot

The Hippopotamus

A. D. 1451

Ezra Pound

John Rodker

I

Toward eight o’clock I begin to feel my pulses accelerating quietly. A little after, my heart begins to thump against its walls. I tremble all over, and leaving the room rapidly go out on the terrace of the house and look over the weald.

There is a shadowiness of outline and the air is crisp. The sky in one corner is a pale nostalgic rose. The trees look like weeds and a bird flies up through them like a fish lazily rising. The hills really look like breasts: and each moment I look for the head of the Titan negress to rise with the moon in the lobe of her ear.

I think of my youth and the intolerable legacy it left me.

I think of the crazy scaffolding of my youth and wonder why I should be surprised that the superstructure should be crazy too, wavering to every breeze and threatening ever to come down about my ears. I think too of wrongs done to this one and that one, and.... “Oh, my God,” I cry, “I did not know, I did not know,” and my heart thumps louder in my breast and my pulses throb like a tide thundering and sucking at some crumbling jetty.

I gulp deep breaths of air to steady myself, but it is of no good. I think of her whom I love and futility overwhelms me: for this too will have its common end, and our orbits grow ever remoter. And putting my head on my breast, faint and reminiscent—the smell from my armpits rises to my brain, and she stands before me vividly and the same smell comes from her; but it is more heady and more musky and she looks at me with intolerable humility.

And a minute after there is only the dark; a hoot-owl’s terrifying call and the queer yap that comes in reply; the frogs that thud through the grass like uncertain feet; the trees that talk to each other.

And I would willingly let my life out gurgling and sticky, and sink without a bubble into its metallic opacity.

II

I had gone to bed quietly at my wife’s side, kissing her casually as was my custom. I awoke about two in the morning with a start so sudden that it seemed I had been shot by a cannon out of the obscurity of sleep into the light of waking; at one moment I had been, as it were, gagged and bound by sleep; and the next I was wide awake and could distinctly sense the demarking line between sleep and waking. And this demarking line was like a rope made of human hair such as one sees in exhibitions of indigenous Japanese products.

In my ears still rang the after-waves of the shriek which had awakened me. The nerves governing my skin were still out of control as a result of the sudden fright, and portions of it continued twitching for a long time after; my scalp grew cold in patches and my hair stood on end.... In the dark I found myself trembling all over and bathed in a cold sweat.... And it was impossible to collect myself. My wife, I felt, was sitting up in bed and a minute afterward she began to weep quietly.

I was still trembling and her quiet weeping made me more afraid. I was angry with her too, but could not talk to her, I was so afraid. My voice, I knew, would have issued thin and quavering, and I was afraid of its hollow reverberations losing themselves uncertainly in the darkness. By the little light I saw her put her hands up to her head in despair ... as though still half asleep; and before I could stop her again the same piercing, incredibly terrifying shriek burst from her. Again I trembled all over, involuntarily gnashing my teeth and feeling my skin ripple like loathsome worms.

“Stop,” I cried, seizing her by the arms, “Stop,” afraid to wake her, yet more afraid to hear again that appalling shriek—and in a moment she was awake ... looking wildly round her, and the quiet weeping gave way to a wild and tempestuous sobbing.

I was afraid of her, afraid to go on sleeping with her, lest she should again shriek in that wild and unearthly fashion; afraid to fall asleep again lest I should be awakened by that appalling shriek dinning in my ears and my body quivering vilely under the impossible sound. I clung to her: “What is it, tell me at least what it is,” I said.

For a time she would not tell me. Trembling all over with anguish and fear of I knew not what, I insisted. When at last she did tell me it was as though the world had suddenly been cut away from under my feet. Helplessly and weeping I clung to her, with cold at my heart. That any human being could accuse another of devilry so sinister, so cold, so incredible even in dream, I had not conceived of. Loathing her, I clung the closer in my anguish and despair.

III

One night at supper I had eaten cucumber. Soon after I went to bed and on the first strokes of ten fell asleep.

After sleeping for a long time I awoke into a dimly lit room. I still lay on the bed and after a moment a figure entered, and after a few moments more, another, until in this fashion there were half a dozen people in the room. I could not distinguish who they were, and quietly and obscurely they moved round my bed. Now and then there was a hiss out of the corners of the room, or a chuckle in reply to some unheard obscenity.

A heavy weight oppressed me as though I knew they menaced me in some obscure and dreadful way. I could not move.

I could not move, and always the same obscure and dreadful procession encircled me and shadowy bodies pressed a little closer, then drew back again to join the sinister group.

And though I saw nothing save their shadowy forms, I knew their eyes gleamed down at me: their faces were lecherous: their hands clawed; and forever and through long ages they went round me in sinister procession.

Suddenly ... and how I do not know, I had broken the bonds of sleep and lay trembling in a cold sweat. Through my protecting blankets the last strokes of ten were fading.

Louis Gilmore

I

II

III

Maxwell Bodenheim

Emanuel Morgan

Opus 96

“Hello Huck!”

Recall that golden day when you first read “Huck Finn”? How your mother said, “For goodness’ sake, stop laughing aloud over that book. You sound so silly.” But you couldn’t stop laughing.

Today when you read “Huckleberry Finn” you will not laugh so much. You will chuckle often, but you will also want to weep. The deep humanity of it—the pathos, that you never saw, as a boy, will appeal to you now. You were too busy laughing to notice the limpid purity of the master’s style.

MARK TWAIN

When Mark Twain first wrote “Huckleberry Finn” this land was swept with a gale of laughter. When he wrote “The Innocents Abroad” even Europe laughed at it itself.

But one day there appeared a new book from his pen, so spiritual, so true, so lofty that those who did not know him well were amazed. “Joan of Arc” was the work of a poet—a historian—a seer. Mark Twain was all of these. His was not the light laughter of a moment’s fun, but the whimsical humor that made the tragedy of life more bearable.

A Real American

Mark Twain was a steamboat pilot. He was a searcher for gold in the far West. He was a printer. He worked bitterly hard. All this without a glimmer of the great destiny that lay before him. Then, with the opening of the great wide West, his genius bloomed.

His fame spread through the nation. It flew to the ends of the earth, until his work was translated into strange tongues. From then on, the path of fame lay straight to the high places. At the height of his fame he lost all his money. He was heavily in debt, but though 60 years old, he started afresh and paid every cent. It was the last heroic touch that drew him close to the hearts of his countrymen.

The world has asked is there an American literature? Mark Twain is the answer. He is the heart, the spirit of America. From his poor and struggling boyhood to his glorious, splendid old age, he remained as simple, as democratic as the plainest of our forefathers.

He was, of all Americans, the most American. Free in soul, and dreaming of high things—brave in the face of trouble—and always ready to laugh. That was Mark Twain.

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