Giovanni Luciani

Giovanni Luciani

Modernism and the City: the Exception of London

At the end of November 1881 Henry James, who had been living in London already for five years, wrote in his notebooks: «For one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. I take it as an artist and a bachelor; as one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life. It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world» (James 1947, p. 28). Twenty years later, in the Preface to the New York Edition of his novel Princess Casamassima, James insists on the same concept with words that remind one of Baudelaire’s flậneur. He recollects «the habit and the interest of walking the streets» in Lon-don, «the assault made by the great city upon an imagination quick to react» and how «to a mind curious, before the human scene, of mean-ings and revelations, the great and grey Babylon easily becomes, on its face, a garden bristling with an immense illustrative flora» (James 1905, p. v).

Statistics easily explain why London was «the biggest aggregation of human life». In 1881, some five million people lived in London, twice as many as in Paris and four times more than in Berlin. Paris had the population of pre-Victorian London while Berlin could be compared to the London of the first half of the eighteenth century. We are used to think that all the three of them were and had always been megalopolis but the numbers tell a different story: as far as size is concerned, Berlin was at a relative early stage along the road to become a modern mega-lopolis and Paris was well behind London. In the following two or three decades the gap increased even more. In 1910, the year of Marinetti’s first visit to the city, London’s population rose to over seven million (a 40% increase in thirty years) while less than three million people lived in Paris and slightly more than two in Berlin (Lees 1985, p. 5). One can understand why James decided to live in London. He took the city «as

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an artist», yet he left Paris, where he was acquainted with the greatest writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, not so much for the richness of London’s cultural life but because it was the largest city in the world and the only truly cosmopolitan one.

In the three decades before the First World War, London attracted artists from the British Isles as well as from countries all over the world. The list is impressive: Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Louis Mac Niece, George Orwell– from 1880 to 1930 at one time or other they all moved to London (Baldick 2004, p. 42). Some were attracted by its cosmopolitan atmosphere – London was a global city, the centre of an empire that spread over five continents – and by its vitality. «Music halls – or ‘theatres of variety’ – invaded the West End, finer and larger in their baroque, well-lit splendour than most West End theatres or opera hous-es. By the 1890s many even included short films on the bill» (Brooker 2007, p. 29). Yet most of them had to move to London because the city had a virtual monopoly over the publishing industry since most publish-er’s headquarters were located there and it was by far their biggest con-sumer market, with its millions of potential readers.

London, however, kept being the «grey» Babylon, possibly the most polluted city in the world, grown out of proportions, with its anony-mous streets of small, identical semidetached houses. It is «immense without being immediately impressive», Ford Madox Ford wrote in The Soul of London (1905); it attracts «unceasingly specimen of the best of all earthly things without being susceptible of any perceptible im-provement» and has an «utter lack of unity, of plan, of the art of feeling» (Ford 1905, p. 13). Ford echoes similar comments made by James in his essay London almost twenty years earlier (1888).

The absence of style, or rather of the intention of style is certainly the most general characteristic of the face of London. To cross to Paris under this impression is to find one’s self surrounded with far other standards. There everything reminds you that the idea of beautiful and stately arrangement has never been out of fashion, that the art of com-position has always been at work or at play. Avenues and squares, gar-dens and quays, have been distributed for effect, and today the splendid city reaps the accumulation of all this ingenuity (James 1982, pp. 8-9).

Contrary to Paris, London is not, in Lewis Mumford’s terminology,

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a baroque city (Mumford 1987, p. 420). There are no signs of a rational planning, and few example of «theatrical» streets or squares: one can only think of Covent Gardens, designed by Inigo Jones in the early seventeenth century; the Mall, which was in fashion between the late seventeenth- and the early eighteenth- century; and Regent’s Street, completed in 1825. Indeed, London grew often against the will of Par-liament and the Crown: after the Great Fire of 1666, John Evelyn, Christopher Wren and others drew rational urban plans to rebuild the city, which, despite Royal support, were ignored. London has no city centre (unless we take as its city centre the Piccadilly Circus rounda-bout), no huge theatrical square like St. Peter’s in Rome, no regular and uniform avenue equivalent to Hausmann’s boulevards (with the excep-tion of Regent’s Street). When we think of nineteenth century London, Gustave Doré’s sketches of the poverty and the alienation of its popu-lation come to mind. But it is in Dickens’s Great Expectations that we find a more telling image. On his way home, in the outskirts of London, after having spent the day in his office in the City, one of its main char-acters – a clerk called Wemmick – does not meet anybody or notice anything interesting as though London consisted of two realities, office and home, a public sphere located in the City and a private one physi-cally and mentally miles away from it, with an immense no-man’s land in between. Wemmick starts living when he arrives at home: work, con-tacts with people, are indispensable in order to earn a salary but have nothing to do with his «real» personality, which expresses itself only in the protected environment of his house. It is then not surprising that London lacked a public cultural life comparable to Paris. «Where is your Montmartre, where is your Quartier Latin? ’Arthur Symons’s friends asked when they arrived in London. ‘We have none’, Symons answered, ‘because there is no instinct in the Englishman to be compan-ionable in public. Occasions are lacking for the café is responsible for a good part of the Bohemianism of Paris and we have no cafés’» (Brook-er 2007, p. 31).

The urban history of London features a tendency to withdraw from the public sphere, which can be taken as an indicator of the struggle to elaborate an answer at a cultural level to the development of the city into what, at any distinct age, was perceived as a reality whose size had no previous point of reference. In Elizabethan times, we had the tavern of Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth, a relatively open space where Prince

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Hal – the future Henry V – met daily with Falstaff, rascals and whores. In the early eighteenth century, when over 600.000 people lived in Lon-don, artists, politicians, businessmen gathered in coffee houses and chocolate houses: it was in that period, with Joseph Addison’s and Rich-ard Steele’s Spectator, that Jürgen Habermas locates the beginning of modern public opinion. Then in the Victorian age, we have the club open exclusively to its members – a privatized public place. All along, though, there have been other social spaces provided by private houses. The literature on London testifies of the importance of this space al-ready in Samuel Pepys’s Journal (1660-1669) and more conspicuously a century later in Boswell’s London Journal, where private houses seem to have absorbed the vitality that once (as in Defoe’s Moll Flanders) be-longed to London’s streets. Only once in its life was London a commu-nity with a recognizable collective identity – during the Middle Ages and that London disappeared in the Elizabethan Age, as John Stow lamented in his Survey of London (1598).

It was in private houses located in Holborn and Chelsea that the pre-Raphaelites met in the second half of the nineteenth century and again in a house they rented in Bloomsbury following the death of their father that the young Stephens (Thoby, Adrian, Vanessa and Virginia) invited Thoby’s Cambridge friends. Their informal meetings were also part of a rediscovery of intimacy against the pompousness of Victorian-ism, a revaluation of the private sphere as opposed to the public one: «In public», comments the narrator in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), «who shall express the unseen adequately? It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision» (Forster 1980: 91). Forster’s distrust of public spaces reflects a common attitude among English writers. They might be more or less critical of the city, but no-where in the literature on London is there anything similar to the bird’s eye view of Paris boulevards in Camille Pissarro’s paintings – to his confidence in the possibility of keeping the crowd under control despite Paris’s riots in 1848 and 1870. Significantly enough, the most important place where artists and intellectuals had a chance to know each other in the years before the Great War – from W. B. Yeats to Bertrand Russell, to D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley – was Philip and Ottoline Mor-rell’s country house at Garsington, near Oxford. Philip Morrell was a


liberal MP and a powerful politician of his time: an altogether different world from the bohemians of the Quartier Latin.

According to Malcolm Bradbury

in the history of Modernism, London has always had a somewhat ambiguous reputation. It is the obvious centre of English-language Modernist activity, and between 1880 and 1920 it sustained and generated a vital sequence of experimental movements and phases. Yet it is also in the record as one of the dullest and most deadening of capital cities, one with no real artistic community, no true centres, no coteries, no cafés, given to commerce and an insular middle-class life-style either indifferent or implacably hostile to the new arts (Bradbury 1976, p. 172).

His view of «a metropolis given to commerce» reminds one of Blake’s sonnet London (1794) with its «chartered Thames» (chartered here meaning privatized by business), while the derogatory adjective «insu-lar» takes us back to Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (1865) and his condemnation of the philistinism and provincialism of the British middle class. But he has a point. In December 1910 Roger Fry, a mem-ber of the Bloomsbury Group and possibly the most influential British art critic of the first half of the twentieth century, organized at the Grafton Galleries in London the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impres-sionists (he himself coined the term). The press, the public and the majority of art critics were outraged although it focused on works by Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne painted over twenty years before. Many scholars date the beginning of Modernism in Britain from this exhibition following a comment by Virginia Woolf who wrote that «in or about December 1910 human character changed» (Woolf 1967, vol. I, p. 320) but no cubist paintings or other more recent works were on display in that occasion.

It is a telling example of London’s indifference or hostility «to the new arts», considering that «the visual arts enjoyed particular promi-nence in modernist discourse and practice» (Adamson 2007, p. 2). However, it is arguable that the selection of painting was dictated only by Fry’s cautiousness. Two years later he organized another post-im-pressionist exhibition, this time showing some cubist works, but the fact is that he «had little sympathy with Cubism or the radical experiments that followed in its wake. Fry’s chief interest was Cezanne. [...] Fry’s

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taste for Cezanne and Matisse is reflected in his own paintings as well as in those of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and other artists of the Bloomsbury group with which Fry was associated» (MacLeod 1999, p. 82). Fry and the other painters of the Bloomsbury Group scandalized the London art world, yet they themselves were quite traditional com-pared to Dadaism and other early twentieth century movements in Eu-rope.

Paraphrasing Symons’s friends, one could ask: «Where are London’s avant-gardes»? Two British avant-garde personalities were Ford and T. E. Hulme, who died in the Great War. In the English Review and in The New Age respectively they objected to the tradition of late Victorian poetry. Ford «insisted that poetry should become less “poetical” in the accepted sense and emulate the clarity of good prose; Hulme longed for an end to gushing emotionalism and for a new poetry of clear, “hard” classical precision» (Baldick 2004, p. 94). Their positions, however, were original up to a point: Hardy’s poetry in his Wessex Poems (1897) and Yeats’s after his pre-raphaelite period and already in a poem like Adam’s Curse (1903) had moved in the same direction – earlier and with rather more convincing results than either Ford or Hulme.

Another avant-garde personality, Ezra Pound, came to London from America in 1908 looking for Yeats. He admired his «pre-raphaelite» poems – those Yeats published in his first two collections, The Wander-ings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) and The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892). In the first four years of his stay in London Pound was, «in his own words, “behind the times”; “out of key” and “out of date”» (Brooker 2007, p. 47). His approach to the city was the opposite to James’: for Pound «London was a literary before it was a social or physical place, a cultural rather than an imperial capital whose new buses and underground, suffrage demonstrations, crowded streets, office-workers and suburbs were a forgettable background» (Brooker 2004, p. 119).

The two most famous avant-garde movements in Britain, Imagism and Vorticism, had a short life. Pound founded Imagism in 1912. Large-ly as a reaction to Futurism, in 1914 he joined forces with Windham Lewis and his journal Blast to start Vorticism, which did not last much longer than Imagism. Futurism had a great influence on Pound for it «revealed the power of a new type of intellectual formation: a small collectivity, buttressed by publicity and spectacle, that could produce


cultural artefacts that spanned the spectrum of the arts and were con-structed in accordance with a coherent body of theoretical precepts grounded in not just arbitrary aesthetic preferences, but a systematic reading of contemporary society. Futurism has irreversibly forged that fateful link between a theory of modernity and the project of avant-gar-de, setting a precedent followed by all the avant-gardes to come» (Rainey 2009, p. 1). By 1920, however, Pound had moved to Paris on his way to Italy. Both Imagism and Vorticism had some influence on the visual arts in Britain but very little on its literature. Futurism too had no real im-pact on British literature, though Marinetti’s ideas had a greater reso-nance in Britain than Pound’s or Lewis’s. Harold Monro, who pub-lished Pound’s anthology of Imagist poets, wrote in a 1914 issue of Poetry and Drama that Futurism was fine for Italy but «it is essential for us to be allowed to solve our own problems in our own manner» (Ed-wards 2004, pp. 143-144). In his memoir Return to Yesterday, Ford re-calls Lewis, who was nine years younger than him, saying: «Finished! Exploded! Done for! Blasted in fact. Your generation has gone. [...] You stand for Impressionism. It is gone. [...] This is the day of Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism. What people want is me, not you». He was wrong, Ford continues, for «louder blasts soon drowned them out and put back the hands of the clock to somewhere a good deal the other side of mere Impressionism» (Ford 1999, p. 311). As Deborah Parsons notes, «with the onset of war Edwardian England was made acutely aware of the aggressive forces of modernity and had little sympathy for the vio-lent idiom of Futurist or Vorticist radicalism» (Parsons 2004, pp. 175-176). Continental Europe and Britain reacted in opposite directions to the death of millions of people in the First World War: «In continental Europe there was a feeling that a reformulation of contemporary culture was an imperative, but in Britain there was a strong desire to see conti-nuity with the past» (Ballantyne 2013, p. 50). It was a general trend involving artists and intellectuals: Alexandra Harris calls them «roman-tic moderns» and Michael Saler «medieval modernists» (Saler 1999, pp. 8-9). They were painters like John Piper and poets like John Betjeman or W. H. Auden (his Oxford Book of Light Verse), novelists like Woolf (her last novel Between the Acts), scholars and critics like Nikolaus Pe-vsner, David Cecil and F. R. Leavis, who shared a belief in the need to revaluate British cultural heritage (Harris 2010, pp. 133-145).

However, London’s «ambiguous reputation» is partly due to what

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Desmond Harding calls the «institutionalized assessment of Modern-ism», which he describes as «an art of despair and pain; a dissonant, fragmented art that confronts meaninglessness; bred by the city where the scale of life dwarfs the individual and where each isolated person lives in bewilderment» (Harding 2003, p. 13). The art historian David Cottington defines it «the dominant historical narrative of rupture», for «in all of the voluminous body of writing that [the historiography of modern art] comprises, both the concept of “modernity” and that of “avant-garde” have customarily been defined and deployed in terms of rupture, as marking a period or a dynamic grounded in a sense of a deep discontinuity separating the past from a present experienced as radical-ly distinct from earlier times» (Cottington 2009, p. 23). He fundamen-tally agrees with Ann Ardis, who believes that «literary scholars typical-ly have mapped late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history in terms of a neat, clean and emphatically teleological succession of literary movements, Decadence and then to Modernism. [...] Artists and liter-ary critics claiming Modernism to be the aesthetic of modernity first established its position front-and-centre in the cultural landscape by putting other aesthetic paradigms either ‘behind’ it or ‘below’ it (or both)» (Ardis 2002, pp. 61-62). Ardis mentions Raymond Williams who many years ago warned that «a highly selected version of the modern» ended up representing «the whole of modernity» (Williams 1989, p. 33). More recently the same preoccupation has been voiced by Chris Baldick. He believes that modernism is a useful term «for certain pur-poses, allowing us to indicate some common features of experimental work in several Western arts (and theories of art) in the first half of the twentieth century; but it also carries its own risks, the gravest of which is that a particular trend or movement comes to stand in for, and in ef-fect to occlude, a whole literary period» (Baldick 2004, p. 393).

One important consequence is that in this view of Modernism «it is Paris that has played the central role – as cradle of revolution, “capital of the nineteenth century” and crucible of artistic experimentation, Par-is was paradigmatic for an understanding of modernity – and by exten-sion of Modernism, its cultural expression – as founded on rupture» (Cottington 2009, pp. 23-24).The «belief that Paris was the true capital of the Modernist arts, and London an anti-capital, was familiar enough from the 1880s onward. In some ways the Paris in question was a fan-tasy city» (Bradbury 1976, p. 174). Yet, both in literary and urban stud-


ies there had been a tendency to «parisianize» London. Walter Benja-min’s «construction of the modern city as the Paris of Baudelaire [...] always and already includes London. For while the Benjaminian vector of urban modernity is worked through an archive of exemplary density, and of essentially Parisian texts, objects and images, it can be argued that it hangs together around a London motif – that of the “man in the crowd”. This transposition of Edgar Allan Poe’s imagined London into one of Baudelaire’s representations of the city joins the crazy, mannered figure of an English obsessionality, hardly able to cope with the flux and motion of street life in which it must exist, with that of the flâneur who above all deals with the shock aesthetically. In effect, London is parisi-anized by this gesture, processed into a protocol that brings it into the-ory through the borrowed clothing of Parisian modernity» (Rifkin 1999, p. 621). Thus London’s Modernism «should not be measured according to a Parisian model, as scholars have presumed to measure it up to now – to put it crudely, if little or no modernist art shows up in London through the Parisian template this is not because there was little, but because it is the wrong template» (Cottington 2009, p. 31).

Behind the view of Modernism as «the aesthetic of modernity» there is the assumption that it was essentially an urban movement, the prod-uct of a mass urbanization that happened in Europe between the second half of the nineteenth- and the early twentieth-century and had its epi-centre in Paris. One might expect London rather than Paris to be the epicentre of Modernism since urbanization in Britain dates back to the seventeenth century. «Towns grew rapidly in England during the early modern period» and in the seventeenth century «London became the largest city in Europe, having risen from about tenth place in 1500» (Wrigley 2004, p. 276). London was a «city where the scale of life dwarfs the individual» much earlier than in the rest of Europe. How can it be that London played a minor role in the Modernist movement consider-ing that it was the largest and the only cosmopolitan European city?

It is a paradox emphasized by David Peters Corbett in the relation-ship between Victorianism and Modernism:

It is not at all clear to art historians that Victorianism and Modernism should be sectioned off, taught separately, or imagined as distinct periods in culture in this way. [...] If an engagement with social modernity is the necessary characteristic of Modernism in the visual arts, then surely Britain must have

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had such an art? Given the leading role of Britain in the Industrial Revolu-tion and of British literary and intellectual culture in the expression of its consequences, ought it not to be the case that British art, too, can be rein-terpreted as modernist (Peters Corbett 2013, pp. 131-132).

In the past, English literature historians worked hard to backdate the beginning of Modernism by finding elements of rupture in every major author of the second half of the nineteenth century. Not just late Victo-rian novelists like Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: should we not consider at least pre-modernist Walter Pater’s Studies on the Renaissance (1873)? Or Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (1865)? A similar move to widen the time span of modernism happened in art history.

For the scholarship on Manet and French impressionism, still the most ex-tensive and influential body of writing on nineteenth century art, modernism begins in the mid-nineteenth century. In the work of T. J. Clark, whose The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1985) continues to serve as the interpretative touchstone, the standard of moder-nity in art is set by what was done in France from Courbet onwards (Peters Corbett 2013, p. 131).

A second assumption in the predominant view of Modernism is that novelty always calls for novelty: a radical break with tradition in art and literature as the only inevitable answer to another radical break – the industrial revolution and the emergence of cities of hundreds of thou-sands, or millions, of people. In the context of the literature on London such an assumption can hardly be only referred to the time frame of Modernism not even if we adopt a version of Modernism that includes much of the Victorian Age. Following Robert Manley’s seminal study Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, in the early seventeenth century with Ben Jonson the literature on London is already full of radical innovations as a way to cope with the new and unprecedented reality of a huge city. One implication, of course, is that in modernist literary works on London not all that appears to be new is always so: tradition, imitation, repetition have generally played a much bigger part in facing radical social and economic changes than the prevailing aes-thetic of Modernism would let us believe.

Eliot’s The Waste Land makes a fitting example in more ways than


one. The London of The Waste Land is a monumental city, a city pro-jected with nostalgia in a half-invented imperial past: it is the London («Augusta rose in gold») celebrated in 1713 as the Rome of modern times by Alexander Pope in his Windsor Forest poem. At the same time it is dirty, foggy and dangerous like the London of Victorian literature though deprived of its vitality. Compared, for instance, with James’s enthusiasm towards the many realities of London, Eliot’s view of the city as a hell on earth appears to be traditional and overdefensive. Consid-ering that it is a landmark of Modernist literature, The Waste Land has a strong anti-urban stance, which is all but new. The way Eliot depicts the crowd («Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.»; 60-65) reminds one of William Wordsworth’s Prelude, Book VII, written over a hundred years before («How often, in the overflowing streets, / Have I gone forwards with the crowd, and said / Unto myself, ‘The face of every one / That passes by is a mystery!’ / Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed / By thoughts of what and whither, when and how, / Until the shapes before my eyes became / A second-sight procession, such as glides / Over still mountains, or appears in dreams; / And all the ballast of fa-miliar life, / The present, and the past; hope, fear; all stays, / All laws of acting, thinking, speaking man / Went from me, neither knowing me, nor known; 593-615).

Both in The Waste Land and in the Prelude London is synonymous of crowd and alienation, a place lived in by beings who are barely hu-man; in both poems behind this criticism we can detect the poet’s fear to lose his own individuality, what makes him unique and better than the rest of mankind, ultimately his privilege as a poet. Both Eliot and Wordsworth have to condemn the crowd in the city as an attempt to restore confidence in themselves: for both, writing is what separates their fate from that of the rest of humanity.

Finally if Modernism is a movement «founded on rupture», in Britain «literary Modernism consists indeed of just a school of poets (Eliot, Pound, Edith Sitwell), novelists (Richardson, Ford, Joyce, Woolf), and polemical outriders (T.E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis)» (Baldick 2004, p. 399). In other words, if we identify modernity with Modernism and Modernism with the avant-gardes, many English writers of the early

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twentieth century are inevitably left out and remain unaccounted for: E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell – just to mention a few. Even Baldick’s list, however, is not entirely safe. In her essay, How It Strikes a Contempo-rary, Woolf explains that «a shift in the scale – the sudden slip of mass-es held in position for ages – has shaken the fabric from top to bottom», and that «every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers» (Woolf 1967, vol. II, p. 157). It fits well Cottington’s definition, except that the «we» of her quotation is too general to be compatible with a radical position like, say, Blast’s. It is the «we» of a conscious member of that British intel-lighenzia accused by Marinetti in the first conference he gave in London in 1910 of lacking «consuming intellectual passions, a sharp and adven-turous taste for ideas, an impulse toward the unknowns of the imagina-tion, a passion for the future, a thirst for revolution» (Rainey 1999, p. 72). In fact, Woolf had all of the qualities listed by Marinetti but one: a thirst for a revolution that in the rest of Europe would soon have cata-strophic consequences.

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Abstract: Modernism in London had a modest impact while the so called avant-gardes hardly existed at all. This might look like an anomaly, considering that Modernism is seen as an eminently urban movement and that at the begin-ning of the 20th century London was the only European megalopolis. Yet, rath-er than as a sign of cultural backwardness, we should understand this modest development of Modernism within the context of the transformation of Lon-don into a metropolis well ahead of its time, compared to other European capitals.

Keywords: London, Paris, Modernism, Bloomsbury, Fry, Pound, Woolf.

Giovanni luciani

Sapienza Università di [email protected]

Giovanni Luciani

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