text:
Audubon’s Haiti

By Christoph Irmscher
March 6, 2019

An entrepreneur, hunter, woodsman, scientist, and artist — John James Audubon, famous for his epic The Birds of America, is a figure intimately associated with a certain idea of what it means to be American. And like many of the country's icons, he was also an immigrant. Christoph Irmscher reflects on Audubon's complex relationship to his Haitian roots.

In the summer of last year major protests erupted in Haiti as the government announced a sharp increase in fuel prices, forced to do so by an agreement with the International Monetary Fund that ended costly subsidies for petroleum products. After the suspension of the price hike and the prime minister’s reluctant resignation, the country has returned to an uneasy calm, as if everyone were waiting for the next match that lights the fuse. For some US Americans, these events have confirmed their view of Haiti as a country engaged in a permanent struggle for survival, and remarks made in the Oval Office, not too long ago, have only exacerbated such generalizations. But, as Michael Harriot has pointed out, in a recent piece published in Root, every bit of the Haitian struggle is related to the legacy of slavery and capitalism, a legacy in the which the United States and its banks are deeply complicit.1  What happened in Haiti never stayed in Haiti.  As this island paradise continues to suffer from foreign exploitation, it is worth confronting the continuing cultural and moral debt we owe to Haiti.  And few other American cultural icons embody the complexity of that relationship more acutely than John James Audubon (1785-1851), perhaps the greatest American naturalist, brilliant chronicler of avian life in America, and creator of one of the most magnificent and expensive printed books ever made, The Birds of America (1827–1838).
Biographers have typically written about Audubon as if he had been — never mind the accident of his foreign birth — the archetypal American: keen-eyed, quick with his gun, a man at home equally in the forests of the American frontier and at his estate in New York, an efficient killer of birds as well as, when his art demanded it, their fervent advocate, a great artist as well as a canny entrepreneur. “The Making of an American” was the subtitle of the last popular recreation of Audubon’s life.2
John James Audubon was an immigrant, to be sure, but simplified accounts that refer to him merely as French omit a salient detail. Audubon was born Jean Rabin in 1785 in Les Cayes on the southern shore of Haiti, or Saint-Domingue, as that island’s French colony was then called.  He was the illegitimate son of the French sea captain and slave trader Jean Audubon and a French chambermaid who died within a year of his birth, Jeanne Rabin.  “My father had large properties in Santo Domingo” wrote Audubon later, even as he was trying his best to leave the precise circumstances of his birth unclear — by claiming, for example, that he was actually born during one of his father’s visits to Louisiana.3
Of course, Jean Audubon knew better. In his will, he called his son a “Créole de Saint-Domingue”. And John James himself knew better, too.  Earlier this year, I spent some time looking through Audubon’s books at the magnificent Audubon Museum in Henderson, Kentucky. In his personal copy of ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte’s American Ornithology, a supplement to Alexander Wilson’s pioneering work on American birds, I found a note scribbled in the margins of Bonaparte’s essay on the “Great Crow Blackbird” (now better known as the Boat-tailed Grackle).  “The very bout de Petun’s note”, Audubon exclaimed next to Bonaparte’s description of the grackle’s song.4  Audubon’s marginal comment refers to the Creole name for the Smooth-billed Ani, a black-plumed tropical bird that had captured the imagination of the early colonists, who thought that its song sounded as if it were saying un petit bout de petun, “a little roll of tobacco”.5  And Audubon was familiar with that name, because, as he stated proudly in the same note, he was “J.J.A. born in Santo Domingue”, with the latter part of the phrase underlined, for good measure.
It is not surprising that Audubon would have limited such a disclosure of his origins to the margin of one of his books.  The land of his birth was an unfathomably brutal place.  After the Spanish had systematically eradicated the last remaining members of the island’s original population, the French filled the island with slaves from West Africa. The “Pearl of the Antilles”, as Haiti was also called, became the world’s richest exporter of slave-grown goods.  An estimated one million slaves died there during French rule — beaten, whipped, burned, raped, mutilated into submission and death.  The air was thick with the suffering of people.  The planters treated their slaves so badly that a French family, the Vincendières, who relocated to Maryland after the rebellion, repeatedly got in trouble there with the local authorities.  Eye witnesses reported seeing, even from a distance, their various instruments of torture: stocks, whipping posts, and wooden horses or chevalets, as the Vincendières would have called them.6
An old French map made the year after the birth of Audubon shows his father’s estate about a half mile south of the southernmost tip of Étang Lachaux, or Lake Lachaux, about eight miles north of the harbor of Les Cayes, wedged in tightly between the parcels of land owned by other planters. The map gives us a depressing sense of what happened to the landscape after the colonists had taken hold of it — sliced by the greed of men into bizarre rectangles and superimposed with the names of slave-owners: a geography of fear and death. Not knowing what they were, the infant John James would have inhaled, with every breath he took, the dismal odors of slavery, the blood, sweat, tears, and fear mixed in with the sickly-sweet smell of sugar coming from the pots where it was boiled and from where clouds would have arisen blotting out whatever beauties the landscape had to offer.
We know that Audubon’s father, a tough man and eventually a very rich one, too, regularly traded fabrics, wine and other European luxury items for coffee, sugar, and cotton, which he transported back to Nantes.7  When exactly he added human beings to his line of goods is less clear, but at least two bills of sale have survived, sometimes listing the names of the people he sold, sometimes only the numbers.  Like many whites in Saint-Domingue, Jean Audubon took what he felt was rightfully his, among them the mixed-race woman who ran his household in Les Cayes, Catherine Bouffard, with whom he had several children.  It is likely that Audubon would have worried at least occasionally that, no matter what he had been told about his mother, he was “gens de couleur,” too, like his half-sister Rose, Catherine’s daughter, whom he obliterated from his autobiography.  At least while he was living in Kentucky, he kept slaves himself, visible proof that he could, after all, act the part of the master, too.8
The 1791 black rebellion against French rule had brought young Audubon’s tropical childhood to a sudden end.  His father made sure that he and Rose were whisked off to Nantes, a place that turned out to be hardly safer than Les Cayes. Between November 1793 and February 1794, Jean-Baptiste Carrier had thousands of suspected enemies of the Revolution drowned in the Loire river, the “national bathtub” (la baignoire nationale), as he jokingly called it.  Audubon was raised mostly in the countryside, his education overseen by an indulgent stepmother, the childless Anne Moynet.  His father wanted to make him a sailor, as he had been, but young Audubon, suffering from mal de mer, proved to be a dismal failure in the naval academy.  Birds became a distraction for him early on.  He admired, he said later, “the beauty and softness of their plumage”, the seasonal rhythms of their lives, some regularity in a life circumscribed by looming chaos around him.9  Only one drawing from those years in France has survived, a lonely European goldfinch, sitting on a dead branch, pushed all the way on the upper left corner of the sheet — “Le Chardonneret”, as Audubon notes below it.10
One of Audubon’s earliest memories, recorded in a brief autobiographical sketch, involved witnessing the “murder”, as he saw it, of a pet parrot named Polly by an ape the family kept.  The incident happened, presumably, at the family’s country estate near Nantes, La Gerbetière. Young Audubon went into hysterics, demanding that the “man of the woods”, as he referred to the ape, be punished, which the black servants, who he said had “followed his father from Santo Domingo”, refused to do.  The ape was chained, the parrot buried, and young Audubon had to be “tranquillized.”  Before we read this consciously crafted passage as an uncomplicated assertion of Audubon’s identification with birds and rejection of animalistic brutality, we also need to remember that he wrote it at the end of a career during which he, the self-styled American “woodsman,” himself had killed thousands of birds for his art.  In a revealing moment, Audubon once called himself a “two-legged monster, armed with a gun.”11 In a sense, Audubon was that ape, too, and if the servants in his memory prefer the ape to the parrot, this reminds us that Audubon—the son of a servant, if not of a black woman—himself struggled with his origins. In this complicated, racially inflected allegory, Audubon is both the fragile parrot (and a mourner of the bird’s demise) and her furry killer, both master and slave, black and white, New World and Old World: Haiti, France, and America all rolled into one.12
In a curious, free-flowing entry he left, even closer to the end of his life, in one of his business ledgers, Audubon imagined a childhood he never had. The note, likely composed in the early stages of the dementia that would eventually kill him, is virtually incomprehensible, a stream of words written down to ensure himself that he still was in command of the English language. But some phrases he repeats, allowing the contours of a story to emerge.  “Wipe thyself,” Audubon writes, and then repeats the word and its cognates a number of times: “wipe, wash, clean, bath, pure.”  There are corresponding images of contamination: maggots, mites in the cheese, a skull, a corpse, as well as the elements of a narrative that sounds as if it had been taken from a children’s book — references to a house with smoke coming out of a chimney, a silken dress, a high table, a kitchen, a brook, a beech tree, a willow. “Pilfer not,” don’t steal, an unknown voice says, as if a mother were admonishing a child, “that is not nice.  Wipe thyself.”  It is hard not to suspect a deeper personal significance behind Audubon’s dream of a childhood in which things don’t get stolen, in which the stains of one’s origins can just be washed off.
— Source.
When he was eighteen, Audubon fled once again.  Seeking to avoid service in Napoleon’s army, he took refuge at Mill Pond, a property his father had acquired in Pennsylvania. He became an American citizen in 1812, but his Caribbean beginnings stayed with him, the haunting beauty of the landscape as well as the unspeakable violence in which his father had been complicit.  Some of Audubon’s most enduring compositions seem infused with latent memories of where he had come from — the twisted bodies of his most magnificent birds, which seem so alive only because he had killed them first, as well as the lush, water-filled landscapes he or his assistants created as backgrounds.  In his bird essays, published as Ornithological Biography between 1831 and 1839, Audubon would often include the Creole names of birds he had studied — papebleu for the Indigo Bunting; ortolan for the Ground Dove; cache for the American Snipe; clou-clou for the Tell-tale Godwit; cap-cap for the Yellow-crowned Night-Heron.
His drawing of two yellow-crowns perched on a rotting tree entwined with smilax, done in 1831, is an especially vivid example of Audubon’s ability to make the dead come alive again.  The adult male, in full spring plumage, craning his neck toward the young bird levitating above, is the epitome of excessive avian splendor.  Its beak is open, as if it had just called out to its offspring.  In the original watercolor, the three white plumes of the adult are pieces of thin white paper Audubon pasted in separately — an extra effort that goes well with the bird’s penchant for showiness. But the world belongs to the young: the balletic pose of the immature bird on top signals almost royal indifference to the cares of those not just born yesterday.
The landscape added by Audubon’s printer Havell — a blue-gray ocean thinly streaked with white and the contours of an island in the back — serves as the appropriate backdrop for the young bird’s nonchalance: this is the larger, freer, boundless world into which he will soon escape.  Maria Martin, Audubon’s go-to artist for splendid botanicals, drew the plant wrapped around the dead branches, Smilax pseudochina, also known as False China Root or Bamboo vine, a coastal climber belonging to a large group of tropical and subtropical plants that is also well represented in Haiti — a genus Linnaeus had once named in honor of the nymph Smilax, who was turned into a brambly vine after falling in love with a mere mortal.13  Praised for its medicinal properties (among other things, the root of the Bamboo vine was supposed to cure syphilis) and its flavor, the smilax in Audubon’s composition, with its heart-shaped, inwardly curled leaves, winds its way only in the lower areas of the composition, precisely where the adult sits, leaving the young upstart rising high above the realm where things grow, bound for greater things.
If this plate tells a story about liberating oneself from one’s roots, in Audubon’s representation of another Caribbean bird we can perhaps read of a desire for a return to them.  It is yet another island fantasy, but here comedy has given way to wistfulness. The American Flamingo must have imprinted itself early on Audubon’s infant memory.  Ironically, it kept eluding his gun. Audubon drew his birds from specimens he had observed and then obtained himself, settling for skins procured by others only in emergencies. In the essay from Ornithological Biography accompanying the plate, Audubon speaks of his anxiety to procure flamingos and claims he saw a flock of them for the first time on May 7, 1832.  Note the precise date he provides — this was, we would say today, a red-letter day for Audubon. He is so affected by the sight that he gives us one of these passages of lyrical excess that led Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — no innocent in the purple poetry department either — to call him a “miserable writer”.14  But Audubon’s attempt at fine writing suggests how deeply these birds affected him, as dim memories of his island birth came flooding back:
It was on the afternoon of one of those sultry days, which, in that portion of the country, exhibit towards evening the most glorious effulgence that can be conceived.  The sun, now far advanced toward the horizon, still shone with full splendour, the ocean around glittered in its quiet beauty, and the light fleecy clouds that here and there spotted the heavens, seemed flakes of snow margined with gold.  Our bark was propelled almost as if by magic, for scarcely was a ripple raised by her bows as we moved in silence.
The radiant sun, the shimmering ocean, clouds like snowflakes — Audubon is pulling out all the stops. Overwritten as this passage may seem it serves a distinct purpose, which is to set the scene for the arrival of the flamingoes, who, when they do come, move with the coordination of robots: “Far away to seaward we spied a flock of Flamingoes advancing in ‘Indian line,’ with well-spread wings, outstretched necks, and long legs directed backwards.”  But if the reader expects that such precise observations might in turn set the scene for the successful capture of one of these birds, this is not what Audubon provides. “I followed them with my eyes, watching as it were every beat of their wings,” writes Audubon. “The birds were now, as I thought, within a hundred and fifty yards; when suddenly, to our extreme disappointment, their chief veered away, and was of course followed by the rest.”   Audubon and his men wait for the flamingoes to go around the Key and then circle back to them.  Again, they are frustrated:
alas! the Flamingoes were all, as I suppose, very old and experienced birds, . . . for on turning round the lower end of the Key, they spied our boat again, sailed away without flapping their wings, and alighted about four hundred yards from us, and upwards of one hundred from the shore, . . . where neither boat nor man could approach them. I however watched their motions until dusk, when we reluctantly left the spot. . . .15
Audubon’s intense desire for ownership over these birds (“Flamingoes in the flesh!” as he exclaimed longingly) as well as his abject frustration at failing to get them led to some irritable passages in his correspondence with his normally reliable supplier, Dr. John Bachman:  “Indeed it will prove a curiosity to the World of Science”, wrote Audubon,  “when that world will Know that John Bachman D D himself . . . and about one half of a hundred persons besides have not been able to send me even a Stuffed Specimen in time for my Publication — So it is however and I drop the subject.”16  Eventually, a correspondent in Cuba sent Audubon skins he was able to use. By that time, his engraver Havell was nearly done with the over four hundred plates that comprise The Birds of America.
The American Flamingo is a large bird — up to five feet tall — a fact not lost on Audubon, who was a tall man himself, at least by the standards of his time. He had wanted to portray all his American birds life-sized, but the flamingo is so huge that he had to portray it bending over so that it would fit the enormous, two-by-three feet sheets he used. In the plate made from Audubon’s drawing—one of the most coveted and expensive in the canon — he shows the central bird standing on what seems like a miniature island (likely a mudflat), complete with rugged little cliffs descending into a dark blue sea. The bird appears to be both solid and ethereal. Its feathers are packed so tight, the result of many layers of pink pigment, that its body seems resilient, sturdy, and strong, an effective contrast with the fragility of the long, spindly legs.
Audubon’s watercolor had featured only that one bird, against a white background, with merely a hint of a shadow drawn in to reflect the animal’s right leg. But when it came to engraving the plate, Audubon and Havell went to town, adding several other flamingoes in the background, feeding or lounging in exactly the kind of lagoon Audubon’s Cuban correspondent had described to him.17  Adding more birds to the plate made scientific sense, of course: social to a fault, flamingos live in flocks with dozens of other individuals, and their breeding colonies may number in the tens of thousands. But their inclusion — the way they recede into that indistinct, milky-white distance — perhaps also speaks of something more.
Audubon had come to Florida “in a great measure for the purpose of studying these lovely birds in their own beautiful islands”.18 His search took him to the southernmost tip of the Keys, where the air was, as he wrote in an ecstatic essay, “darkened by whistling wings”.19  In all that vast country where he had lived since the age of eighteen, whose birds he had devoted his life to recording, this was the place which lay closest to that first home he had ever known.  Les Cayes was a little more than 600 nautical miles away, both remote and achingly close — just like the flamingoes he had been able to catch only in his art and not with his gun. Despite the immediate pull of the resplendent bird in the foreground, painted from a skin obtained in the Caribbean, it is this distance that still resonates, the fading figures in the back leading our gaze over the flats and out, across the ocean to where it all began, Haiti.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Christoph Irmscher


text:
Woodblocks in Wonderland
The Japanese Fairy Tale Series
By Christopher DeCou
September 3, 2019

From gift-bestowing sparrows and peach-born heroes to goblin spiders and dancing phantom cats — in a series of beautifully illustrated books, the majority printed on an unusual cloth-like crepe paper, the publisher Takejiro Hasegawa introduced Japanese folk tales to the West. Christopher DeCou on how a pioneering cross-cultural endeavour gave rise to a magnificent chapter in the history of children’s publishing.

At the turn of the last century, the illustrated children’s books of the so-called “golden age” provided readers with many unforgettable images: think of John Tenniel’s blue-aproned Alice looking up at the sneaky grin of the Cheshire cat, or Walter Crane’s pink-dressed Belle falling in love with the boar-headed Beast. Such works are usually viewed as the exclusive realm of the great London and New York publishing houses. But on the other side of the globe, around the same time, Japan was opening its ports to the world, and in Tokyo the Kobunsha publishing company would put its own unique mark on illustrated books for children. Under the leadership of Takejiro Hasegawa, the Japanese Fairy Tale Series captured the imaginations of countless young readers with books that combined the work of western writers and translators with Japanese artists.
In twenty volumes, published between 1885 and 1922, the Fairy Tale series introduced traditional Japanese folk tales, first to readers of English and French, and later to readers of German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Russian. The tales themselves have diverse sources. Little Peachling, the first book in the series, recounts the centuries-old story of Momotaro. One day by the river, an old married couple see a giant peach. They bring it home and upon opening it are shocked to discover a little boy inside. This, of course, is Momotaro, who is raised by the old couple but later leaves them, sets off on a string of adventures, and returns a local hero.
Other books in the series adapt stories rooted in Buddhist traditions. The Silly Jelly-Fish — which tells how the jellyfish, tricked by a monkey and punished by the Dragon King, comes to lose its shell — is taken from a story in which the clever monkey is a Bodhisattva, on the path to enlightenment.1
The Boy Who Drew Cats — adapted for the series by Lafcadio Hearn — tells the tale of a daydreaming boy whose drawings of cats on a monastery wall magically rid the place of a goblin rat. In traditional versions, the boy goes on to become a pious monk. In Hearn’s, he goes on to become a famous artist.
Initially, Takejiro Hasegawa intended to market the Fairy Tale Series to the growing education industry in Meiji Japan. Hasegawa came from a merchant family who imported western textbooks, among other goods, and his parents sent him to English schools from an early age. This put him into contact with a number of foreigners living in Japan, such as the Carrothers — husband and wife Presbyterian missionaries who ran a private school at their home2 — and made him aware of the domestic demand for English-language textbooks. His plan was to produce new educational material which would not only be composed by talented writers and translators but also handsomely crafted by Japanese artisans.3
Hasegawa modeled the aesthetic of his volumes on traditional Japanese anthologies. Starting in the sixteenth century, publishers in Japan had developed illustrated books of folk tales for children and adults, such as the remarkably beautiful Otogi-zoshi series,4 which brought together folk tales and single-author prose narratives, and the Kinmou Zui and Akahon series, which collected fantastical stories of myths, monsters, and adventures. Because the literacy rate was still low during this period, these books relied heavily on popular art styles to illustrate the narrative for the reader, with often striking results.5
In order to reproduce the effect of these earlier volumes, Hasegawa engaged traditional Japanese woodblock printers and, for the first series, used traditional mitsumata paper. Woodblock printing — the earliest form of industrial printing — was brought to Japan from China during the tenth- to thirteenth-century Song Dynasty and would become the dominant printing technology in Japan until the late nineteenth century. While movable type employs individual letters, allowing the printer to reuse the same letters on different pages, woodblocks require the printer to carve the entire page onto a single plate. Mitsumata paper — the most common Japanese paper at the time — was made from the Edgeworthia plant, which had been imported to Japan during the Edo period specifically for its papermaking qualities. The plant was harvested for its woody stems which were then cleansed of impurities and pressed in vats to create huge sheets of paper. The resulting product is creamy white, sturdy, and of a noticeable weight.6
As to the texts, for the first series of fairy-tale readers Hasegawa commissioned translations from three of his friends in the missionary community: David Thomson, Basil H. Chamberlain, and Kate James. The Reverend Thomson had come to Japan in the 1860s, became fluent in Japanese, and worked with the Carrothers at their school. He was an influential figure in Japanese Bible translation and, perhaps not surprisingly, the stories he chose to translate emphasized moral lessons, in line with Victorian values regarding the education of children. Basil H. Chamberlain, a British diplomat born to an aristocratic family, had earned a reputation as a Japanologist, writing travel books, ethnographies, and other materials about Japan. More of a scholar than the other translators — he was a professor at the Imperial Tokyo University with a particular interest in folklore — Chamberlain was the most familiar name to be associated with the first series, and certainly contributed to its popularity. He even commissioned Hasegawa to publish a special set of Ainu fairy tales, because of his personal interest in the culture of the Ainu, the indigenous community in Hokkaido.7 Kate James translated the largest number of books, and, like the Reverend Thomson, focused on stories that promoted moral lessons. She is a somewhat mysterious figure, however. We know little about her, except that she came from a Scottish clergy family, met her husband, Thomas H. James, in Constantinople, and moved with him to Japan, where she befriended his Imperial Japanese Naval Academy colleague, Basil H. Chamberlain.8 The earliest volumes in the Japanese Fairy Tale Series really were very much a product of Tokyo’s close-knit expat community.
Following the success of the first series, which appeared in 1885, Hasewaga realized he could more lucratively market the Fairy Tale Series to foreigners than to teachers and students in Japan. The artists he had engaged to illustrate the tales — Kobyashi Eitaku, Suzuki Kason, Chikanobu — were already famous for their woodblock prints in ukiyo-e style, and western audiences were immediately taken by these illustrations. Moreover, as japonisme — the trend of collecting art, artwork, and crafts from Japan — continued to grow in popularity, these prints were becoming more and more desirable to western art enthusiasts.
Starting in 1895, perhaps with japonisme in mind, Hasegawa developed a special set of books that used a more decorative Japanese paper. Chirimen, or crepe paper, is fabric-like — produced by pressing the paper fibre repeatedly and slowly rotating it. The end result is a material soft to the touch, but with rough folds and a leathery texture which makes illustrations printed on it look instantly antique.9 In fact, part of Hasegawa’s new marketing strategy was to present the books themselves as art objects and souvenirs of Japan. The area around Yokohama Bay, where international neighbourhoods had developed around the port, was a mecca for visiting collectors seeking woodblock prints and the books that featured them. But it was Hasewaga’s wheeling and dealing at World’s Fairs — not only in Tokyo but in Chicago, London, Paris, St. Louis, and Turin — that brought his books to international attention. The contacts he made at these fairs, and the prizes his books won, helped keep them in demand for decades.10
With the ukiyo-e illustrations and the new crepe-paper editions, Hasegawa’s Fairy Tale Series attracted an even larger western audience throughout the 1890s and into the early twentieth century. Readers and reviewers alike delighted in the unfamiliar stories, which they found perfectly suited to children as well as adults. A reviewer in the Japan Weekly Mail, for example, praised Kate James’ language as being simple enough for youngsters but lacking the clichés that might prevent adults from also enjoying the books.11    In America, the stories were popular enough to be reprinted both in the widely distributed boys-and-girls’ magazine St. Nicholas12 and the Ladies Home Journal.13
Also essential to Hasegawa’s expansion into foreign markets was his choice to commission additional stories from one of the best-known figures then associated with Japan: Lafcadio Hearn. A Greek-British writer, Hearn had risen to prominence first by writing about New Orleans and then the French West Indies. He eventually moved to Japan, married a Japanese woman, and became a Japanese citizen. Because of his intimate connections, he became somewhat of an expert on the culture and literature of the country and published numerous books and stories about Japan for western audiences. Certainly, the several stories he composed for Hasegawa’s second series increased the project’s popularity.14
Although the Fairy Tale Series received many positive reviews, it was not universally acclaimed. One reviewer for the Japan Weekly Mail found that, while the writing was passable, the illustrations were too fantastic. He called the lithographer lazy, because he exchanged the “traditional green [eyes] of feline orthodoxy” with odd yellow eyes.15 Other reviewers also thought the drawings were not up to par. In the San Francisco Daily Bulletin, an especially prejudiced reviewer said the books were just too “Japanese”, “barbarous and ill-calculated”, adding that the crepe paper was impractical for reading and made for a “flimsy” book.16
The reviewer’s doubts about the advisability of printing on crepe paper were shared even by the unprejudiced. Lafcadio Hearn himself, in a letter to Hasegawa, argued against the crepe’s roughcast texture and the resultant loss of visual detail:
Indeed, I prefer the old sets of the Fairy Series on plain paper, — not only because the drawings come out better, but because the larger print is better for children’s eyes. (I want to buy a plain set at some future time.) In the case of my own story, I think that much of the delicate beauty of the charming drawings is lost in the crepe edition, -- especially the finely expressive lines of the old priest’s face, and the character-studies of the peasant oya in the opening pictures.17
Ironically, it was the crêpe books that continued to sell, as novelty items prized for their unique paper and illustrations, well into the twentieth century, even after Hasegawa’s series had begun to compete with other collections of Japanese fairy tales marketed to children. American and British textbook writers, too, started including Japanese stories among their educational materials, which reduced the novelty and uniqueness of the endeavor. The last volume in the series, Hearn’s version of a fairy tale called The Fountain of Youth, was published in 1922 (although the publishing company continued to reprint further editions until after World War II).
Looking back, we can see that the books in the Japanese Fairy Tale Series blended simple storytelling and striking images with an elegance comparable to any of the more widely known masterpieces of the golden age of children’s illustrations. At a time when publishing houses in London and New York dominated the market, Hasegawa’s press in Tokyo was producing equally beautiful volumes using traditional Japanese craftwork and broadcasting Japan’s culture to the world. Today, anime and manga represent flourishing new forms through which that culture is reaching global audiences, but, in the words of arts and crafts historian Ann Herring, “in the area of export in the form of translations for young readers, the record of the Meiji era remains unexcelled.”18
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 3, 2019

author: Christopher DeCou

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
H. G. Wells and the Uncertainties of Progress

By Peter J. Bowler
June 27, 2019

In addition to the numerous pioneering works of science fiction by which he made his name, H. G. Wells also published a steady stream of non-fiction meditations, mainly focused on themes salient to his stories: the effects of technology, human folly, and the idea of progress. As Peter J. Bowler explores, for Wells the notion of a better future was riddled with complexities.

H. G. Wells worried constantly about the future of humanity. While he hoped for progress in human affairs, he was only too well aware that it was not inevitable and might not be sustained. Throughout his career he celebrated the technological developments that were revolutionizing life but feared they might lead to eventual degeneration or, as came to pass in 1914, a catastrophic war. He was also aware that there were disagreements over what would actually count as progress. Providing everyone with the benefits of modern industry might not be enough, especially as continued technological innovation would require the constant remodeling of society. Progressive steps introducing entirely new functions were episodic, open-ended and unpredictable, in both biological and social evolution. These uncertainties were compounded by a realization that, where technological innovation was concerned, it was virtually impossible to predict future inventions or what their long-term consequences might be. Even if progress continued, it would be much more open-ended than advocates of the traditional idea of progress had imagined.1
For Wells the most basic level of uncertainty arose from the fear that the human race might not sustain its current rate of development. In his 1895 story “The Time Machine” he imagined his time traveler projected through eras of future progress: “I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist.”2 But the time traveler ends up in a world brought down by social division and degeneration. The brutal Morlocks are the descendants of the industrial workers, while the childlike Eloi are the remnants of the leisured upper classes. This prediction was based on his zoologist friend E. Ray Lankester’s extension of the Darwinian theory. Lankester argued that because evolution works by adapting populations to their environment, progress is not inevitable and any species that adapts itself to a less active and hence less challenging way of life will degenerate.3  Here was the model for a more complex vision of progress in which any advance would depend on the circumstances of the time and could not be predicted on the basis of previous trends.
The Darwinian viewpoint is more clearly visible in Wells’ hugely successful non-fiction work The Outline of History, originally published in fortnightly parts in 1920. The survey starts from the development of life on earth and the evolution of the human species. Progress had certainly happened both in evolution and in human history from the Stone Age onward, but Wells shows that there was no predetermined upward trend. His exposure to the Darwinian vision of biological evolution (which continued in his collaboration with Julian Huxley to produce The Science of Life some years later) showed him that there were multiple ways of achieving a more complex biological structure — or a more complex society. Truly progressive steps in both areas were sporadic, unpredictable, and open-ended. When progress did occur in human society, Wells was certain that the driving force was rational thinking, science, and technological innovation. Yet history showed how all too often the benefits of creativity had been undermined by conservatism and social tensions, culminating in the disaster of the Great War.4
Wells was elaborating a new and less deterministic version of the idea of progress. Nineteenth-century society’s faith in the inevitability of progress had been misplaced, not just because it underestimated obstacles, but because it had assumed an oversimplified model of how development must take place. Whatever their differing views of the goal to be achieved, the thinkers of the previous generation — including the Marxists, who Wells admired to some extent — had all visualized history as the ascent of a ladder of developmental stages leading to a final utopia. Darwinism showed that the history of life was best represented by a branching tree, not a ladder, and Wells now saw that human history too led to many differing forms of complex society. And, just as the great “breakthroughs” in animal evolution had often come from insignificant beginnings, the most important advances in human history were not best characterized as continuations of previous trends. Wells takes the modern synthesis of science and technology, which he sees as emerging primarily in Europe, as a case in point. For most of its history, Europe had not been at the forefront of progress, yet its development of modern science and industry had catapulted it into world dominance. Wells openly compared this to the evolution of the originally insignificant mammals during the age of the dinosaurs.5
This modern breakthrough had been achieved in only one branch of the divergent tree of cultural evolution, a branch that had not been in the mainstream and was by no means the most advanced at the time. Wells was not the only thinker at this time to argue that the emergence of science in Europe could not have been predicted on the basis of previous historical trends. Alfred North Whitehead made the same point, suggesting that without this unlikely breakthrough, humanity might have remained stagnant for untold ages to come.6 Whitehead saw the rise of modern science as a philosophical development that did not become associated with technological invention until the nineteenth century. Wells argued that the underlying cause of Europe’s rise to world dominance was its isolated geographical position, which had encouraged the age of maritime exploration. Unlike the great empires of the past, Europe faced the unusual challenge of a geography dictated not by the land but by the sea — it faced outward to the Atlantic and beyond. The result was a culture that eventually promoted not just an industrial revolution but what Wells called a “mechanical revolution” — especially the invention of new sources of power including steam and electricity. For Wells it heralded “a new thing in human experience . . . such a change in human life as to constitute a fresh phase of history.”7
This kind of development, however, brought problems with it. The outburst of scientific and technological innovation was taking place in a society that had still not transcended the limitations of traditional culture and politics. Technology was misused for military purposes, and the Great War illustrated its potentially catastrophic consequences. In the years before war broke out, Wells had been one of the first to realize that new technologies such as aviation would make future conflicts even more devastating. This was the theme of his novel The War in the Air of 1908, while The World Set Free of 1914 predicted not only a new source of power derived from the latest discoveries of atomic physics, but also an atomic bomb. In the post-war era Wells was one of many worrying that the next war might destroy civilization altogether. His futuristic 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come described the outbreak of a war that reduces most of the world to savagery. Yet Wells retained the hope that a small coterie of technocrats led by the aviation experts would survive and ultimately recreate society along more rational lines, ushering in the age of true progress. Humanity finally escapes the shackles imposed by the old cultural values.8
As to what form the hoped-for future society would take, Wells had very definite plans. The book promoted his long-standing campaign for a rationally ordered World State that would ensure the fruits of technological innovation were fairly distributed. He was no democrat, however, and saw this being driven by the activities of an elite group, the “scientific samurai”, who appear as the aviators who transform the world in The Shape of Things to Come. He appreciated that simply giving everyone material plenty might not be enough to satisfy their emotional needs. At first he seems to have thought along quasi-religious lines, imagining humanity achieving an almost spiritual unity. But in his screenplay for the Alexander Korda film Things to Come, based loosely on the book, he adds a concluding episode in which the prospect of spreading a transformed human race out into the cosmos by space travel offers a materialistic equivalent of religion, something that will give our lives an ultimate purpose. Even here, though, there is a threat that conservative thinkers will not approve of this disturbance to their predictable lives. In the final scenes a mob tries to destroy the giant gun that is about to fire the young cosmonauts into space (here Wells pays homage to Jules Verne). The leader of the “samurai” gestures to the heavens and offers us a choice: “All the universe or nothing . . . Which shall it be?” and the scene fades out to the caption “WHITHER MANKIND?”9
The suggestion that the World State will want to expand its activities into space points to another important component of Wells’ new vision of progress. He realized that once technological innovation becomes the driving force, there can be no static future utopia as previous manifestations of the idea of progress had imagined. Invention would continue and society would have to keep adjusting in response. Now that the genie of science-driven technology was out of the bottle, Wells became acutely aware that it would be hard to predict future inventions, and hard to foresee the consequences of those that succeeded. A truly rational society would need to take this into account and plan accordingly.
The element of unpredictability had become obvious in the early years of the century. Wells realised that the military applications of aviation might checkmate the hopes of optimists that rapid global transport would encourage world unity. This was in The War in the Air, which somewhat curiously opens with the depiction of a world in which surface transport has already been transformed by the gyroscopic monorail invented by Louis Brennan. The monorail can cross chasms and seas on a single cable. Wells predicted its success, but in the real world the invention, although tested, never came into use.
Wells was also confronted with the difficulty of predicting the effects of new technologies in other areas. In another novel, The Sleeper Awakes, he drew on the American experience with skyscrapers to imply that soon we would all be living in giant mega-cities roofed over against the elements.10 But only a year later his Anticipations, a more serious effort at prediction, suggested that the invention of the electric train and the automobile would allow for “The Diffusion of the Great Cities” as the population moves out into suburbs. For Wells, we cannot predict the new technologies that will emerge from scientific discoveries, and from the ever-widening plethora of new inventions we cannot be sure which will actually be successful in the marketplace. Rival technologies will pull society in different directions, and it is hard to be sure which will triumph in the industrial struggle for existence. The speed of change is also hard to predict. In a later edition of Anticipations, Wells confessed that his original suggestion that aviation would not become commonplace until 1950 had turned out to be hopelessly pessimistic.11
Even when a new technology starts to catch on, it may be hard to imagine what the consequences of its success will be. In a 1932 radio talk, Wells used the example of the growing chaos on the roads to point out how difficult it had been to foresee the consequences of making motor cars available to a wider public when they were first introduced. It was now obvious that the road network would have to be redesigned to cope with the increased traffic. He called for the universities to have “Professors of Foresight” to grapple with the unintended consequences posed by future inventions.12
The historian Philip Blom calls the early twentieth century the “vertigo years”, when everyday life was transformed by a bewildering array of new technologies.13 Wells realized that this state of uncertainty would continue indefinitely, making it virtually impossible even for the enthusiasts to predict what would emerge. The technophiles hail their innovations as the driving force of progress, but they do not always foresee what will be invented — or what the ultimate effects on society will be. This is a situation we are acutely aware of today: few, if any, could have anticipated the impact of computers and the digital revolution, and we are only gradually becoming aware that these innovations have not brought us unalloyed benefits. The range of technologies that have turned out to have harmful side effects is now legion, a situation that Wells himself anticipated.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Peter J. Bowler


text:
Walt Whitman in Russia
Three Love Affairs
By Nina Murray
May 29, 2019

Walt Whitman’s influence on the creative output of 20th-century Russia — particularly in the years surrounding the 1917 Revolution — was enormous. For the 200th anniversary of Whitman's birth, Nina Murray looks at the translators through which Russians experienced his work, not only in a literary sense — through the efforts of Konstantin Balmont and Kornei Chukovsky — but also artistic, in the avant-garde printmaking of Vera Ermolaeva.

At the core of any translation venture, at the nucleus that shapes all its qualities, lies an often random and routine event — an individual’s encounter with a text. Before a translator dons the mantle of a cultural ambassador, a conduit of knowledge, a missionary of art, or whatever other responsibility inevitably comes with taking a work of literature from one language to the other — before the translator steps into the very public space of cultural advocacy — he or she is merely a reader seduced by an imagined world.
If it weren’t for a handful of change in sixteen-year-old Kornei Chukovsky’s pocket one day in Odessa, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” may not have come to shatter and shape the Russian poetic imagination until a generation later. Chukovsky was a school student, teaching himself English from dictionaries, old newspapers, and whatever he could buy from sailors. What were the chances that on that particular day, for that particular school-kid, the sailor would bring Leaves of Grass? But that’s how it happens — somebody, somewhere, flips a book open, and it speaks to him, changes his way of seeing the world, and alters his soul.
Other great Russians had read Leaves of Grass. Tolstoy got a copy from one of his fans in England in June of 1889, read it, and wrote in his diary, “These are awkward verses”.1 He was surprised to learn from his friends abroad that in Europe his own work was often compared to Whitman’s and conceded to give the book a second chance. In October of the same year, Tolstoy noted, “There is much that is blown-up, empty, but I did find some good things this time.”2 Turgenev, while living in Paris in the 1880s, read Leaves of Grass too and penned down a draft translation of “Beat! Beat! Drums!” but that single sheet remained the full extent of his interest in Whitman.
Whitman needed not a mere celebrity endorsement, not just an appreciative aesthete, but a lover in Russia: a passionate, devoted reader who would accept him without judgment. Before Chukovsky could have the luxury of spending years on his eleven editions of Whitman’s poetry, somebody else had to discover Whitman. Chukovsky’s energetic verse would carry Whitman to the masses, but it would be feeding the hunger inspired by another translator who had given Whitman a divine aura in the Russian imagination. That person was Konstantin Balmont, bohemia incarnate, Symbolist luminary, globetrotter, poet.
When in the early 1900s Konstantin Balmont (1867–1942) set himself the task of bringing the work of Walt Whitman to a Russian audience, he did so with a very definite set of opinions on how and why this task ought to be pursued. “True poets”, he wrote about Whitman in 1920,
are always seers and prophets. They feel for many people, blend their souls with all creatures, make their minds present in the past, present, and future. If they are sensitive at all, the great epochs of change and reformation especially attract their imagination and having charmed them magnetically, such times send omens into the poets’ work, throw upon their writing flashes of their coming fires, the first blazes of their pearly and scarlet, tender, and ferocious dawn.3
Balmont introduced Whitman to the readers of the Symbolist journal Vesy as “a powerful dweller on earth . . a chaotic, young, unbridled and undisciplined soul”.4 In subsequent essays, Balmont developed a language of such reverence and grandeur as were rarely bestowed on poets even within Russia’s then indulgent artistic milieu: Whitman was an “ultimate”, an “inevitable”, “strong” poet, “as inescapable in the life of our souls as the first love, first grief, a moonlit night, or a sunny morning.”5 His poetry, then, could not be akin to anything before or contemporary to it. Writing in 1908, Balmont denied Whitman’s verse any “accessible consonance of rhyme”, “common ornamentation of poetry”, or any “correct measure”, seeing in it, instead, the “movement of waves”, “rustling of breezes”, and the “breath of the sea”.6 As if determined to make his words a self-fulfilling prophecy, Balmont enslaved himself to the original text, like a desperate lover. He crafted translations that were so accurate in their mimicry of Whitman’s sentence and line structure that they were faithful to a fault (the clumsiest examples include “The Bravest Soldiers” turned into bravye [dashing] soldiers and the “common prostitute” becoming obshchaya [shared], the first meaning of “common” in Russian). As desperate lovers are wont to do, Balmont also projected his own glorified vision of Whitman as an icon of a new world onto Whitman’s work. As Martin Bidney noted in his excellent essay “Leviathan, Yggdrasil, Earth Titan, Eagle: Balmont’s Reimagining of Walt Whitman”,
In presenting the American sage to the Russian public Balmont shaped both the Whitman persona and the form of its utterances according to his own style of writing, his own mode of vision, both in verse and prose. . . . Balmont’s reinterpretation of Whitman in his translations and criticism involved a full-scale reimagining of Whitman and his work in visionary terms, the terms of poetic myth.7
For Whitman to sound like a prophet, however, his had to be the language of revelation: biblically self-referential, intentionally vague yet containing enough clues to suggest a hidden grand scheme. Thus, Balmont felt compelled to infuse the language of his translations with coded significance, over-using repetition, narrowing synonymic rows to one or two “key” words — as if beyond Whitman’s catalogues there lay another reality, to be summoned by rites and incantations, by repeating lines until meaning peeled away and only the ritual remained. This Symbolist treatment was supported by Balmont’s main venue at the time — the influential literary almanac Vesy, which in 1909 proclaimed itself a magazine to support art’s “unbreakable connection to the spheres of mysticism, metaphysics, and religion.”8
Balmont’s position as an important Symbolist poet and translator had long been secure. His apologia for Whitman as a cosmic, universal prophet of a new order could not have reached a more grateful audience than that of Russian students and intellectuals who were being wooed by the ideas of a universal, sweeping revolution that would propel their country into the front ranks of the new century’s democracies. Not only would such revolution do away with Russia’s backward economic systems, but it would also create a new social mentality, a new way of being a Russian. With his translations of “The Song of the Broad-Axe”, “Salut au monde”, “O Star of France”, and “Beginners”, Balmont enabled his readers to conceive, with the blessing of Whitman’s vaguely embodied sense of phallic privilege, of how this new way of being in the world could be built, carpenter-like, with hand-held tools. In Balmont’s vision of Whitman’s world, anyone with a pair of strong hands and a tightly fitted pair of trousers was free to work, celebrate, grieve, and lust without the sanction of a higher authority. To the young and the romantic, that sure beat marble-hall theorzations under some wise academician’s ironic scrutiny.
To say, however, that the success of Whitman’s poems depended entirely on their appropriation by the purveyors of liberal propaganda is to ignore the poetry’s deeply spiritual resonance, without which the mysterious Russian soul simply would not be itself. Ilya Repin, a painter and a Christian philosopher, expressed this resonance well when he wrote:
It was an unexpected surprise for me to discover the meaning of this holy fool (yurodivyi) American, who rose suddenly in front of me as Christianity’s second sun. God’s child, Walt Whitman revealed in his simple heart anew the true meaning of God’s Word. Of course, I am unable to express the full importance of this raving apostle of the new democratic religion, but I believe this religion of fraternity, unity, and equality is not as new as it appears to Mr. Chukovsky [Whitman’s canonical Russian translator]: it had been announced to the world almost twenty centuries ago.9
This view of Whitman as the divinely inspired barefoot blabber sustained by charity, Christ-like in his innocence and indiscriminately kind, had to capture many an imagination brought up in the Russian Orthodox tradition. Liudmila Kiseliova provides excellent insight into this cultural environment in her essay “Poetic Dialogues of the Silver Age: K. D. Balmont and N. A. Klyuev”. In Russia at the time, Kiseliova writes, writers and philosophers
attempted to overcome the consequences of secularization, to return to the all-sacred word of the ancient Russian religiosity of knowledge. The concept of Word as Logos implied an intimate connection between man and the Divine truth through language.10
Return to such concepts of language brought about great interest in the folklore and the Old Believers, whose doctrine never abandoned linguistic mysticism and the zapovednoye (bequeathed) knowledge of the Divine contained in verbal expression.
To the more secular crowd, from which Kornei Chukovsky would come, this construction of Whitman’s love as Christ-like caring provided a convenient excuse for dealing with the poet’s sexuality: it was agape — not eros — that drove Whitman’s speaker to rhapsodize
O TAN-FACED prairie-boy, . . . You came, taciturn, with nothing to give—we but look’d on each other, When lo! more than all the gifts of the world you gave me.
Kornei Chukovsky (1882–1969) was the kind of translator who would ask his friends and colleagues to destroy his first rendering of Whitman’s poetry as unworthy and shameful to both Whitman and himself. Apparently the friends agreed, because the only surviving clue to this early translation is Chukovsky’s confession in the preface to the 1913 collection of translations from Whitman: “I published about Whitman a pamphlet about ten years ago and I am not at all pleased with it.”11 This 1913 edition did not survive either: the book’s entire run was censored and confiscated. Thus, we must take 1919 as the year of Chukovsky’s first book-length treatment of Whitman, the first in a series of ten more volumes published until 1969. Chukovsky’s own poetic sensibilities can best be characterized as avant-gardist; this is considered by biographers one of the reasons for which Chukovsky’s talent as a poet was conscribed to children’s verse in the Soviet era. Unlike Balmont, who had an intuitive — and brilliant — affinity for complexly metered, if not necessarily rhymed, verse, Chukovsky’s ear was more rhythmically tuned. Where Balmont highlighted and regularized Whitman’s dactyls, Chukovsky would pursue a more direct sonic reflection of content, often at the expense of strict verbal precision. It was precisely this choice, however, that enabled Chukovsky’s translations to reflect the diversity of Whitman’s expression and made his translations canonical. And yet Whitman was slipping through a translator’s fingers again.
Anyone attempting to translate Whitman into Russian must be prepared to resolve a number of issues on a regular basis. There is Whitman’s superficial plainness which can lull a translator into relying on close lexical equivalence alone. But then these words that slip and saunter easily into the reader’s mind turn out to be uncommon, culled from such a variety of dictions, registers, epochs, and contexts that stringing them into sentences becomes a titanic burden. On top of this, Russian grammar requires that pronouns, nouns, adjectives, and some verbs be gendered. The choice of gender demonstrates most clearly a translator’s ideological and/or moralistic concerns — and it is most central in “Children of Adam”.
In Whitman’s own language, the powerful “I” never ceases its hold on the gravitational center, the source of the gaze, the nucleus from which the speaker reaches out to consider the subject, be it the generic “women” or the intimate “you”. Pulled into this undiscriminating orbit, all things become depersonalized; they are first and foremost the objects of longing or desire, and their gender identification is often secondary. The Anglophone reader, if so inclined, is at liberty to assign hetero- or homo- vector to the sexuality expressed in “Children of Adam”, and specifically to the arc of desire narrated in "One Hour to Madness and Joy”.
Both Balmont and Kornei Chukovsky perceived this ambiguity and articulated its importance to Whitman’s world-view in their critical essays. For example, Balmont wrote in his foreword to Leaves of Grass (Pobiegi travy):
Through the continuous symbolization of everything that appears in the flowing course of life even for an instant, through the confluence of all individual streams into one cosmic Ocean, Whitman approaches the triumphant assertion of the I over and over again. This I has looked into the mirror, and walked away from its own image towards the Asserted Being — the state in which it constantly spends itself without losing a single drop, and if perhaps it loses some, it doesn’t regret the expense. 12
When one keeps in mind Whitman’s fixation on liquids, especially those of the impregnating variety, Balmont’s choice metaphor cannot be considered pure whimsy. Chukovsky also interprets the undiscriminating desire of “Children of Adam” as a religious, other-worldly, beyond-the-self experience. For Chukovsky, it is precisely this omnivorousness, this lust for earth, weather, emotion, for men and women that enables Whitman to advance to a new form of romance, one that will replace the medieval cult of the Fair Lady with “the cult of the Comrade, the cult of the democratic friendship, because people’s hearts fill more and more with this new tenderness, the fondness for the colleague, co-worker, fellow traveler, for the one who walks in step, shoulder to shoulder with us, who is a part of our common march”.13
But no amount of interpretation alleviates the challenge of choosing a gender for the object of the speaker’s desire in “Children of Adam”. “One Hour to Madness and Joy” must indeed have seemed maddening — no clear assignment in the title, no clarifying reference to the “work of fathering”, just the urge to be intimate with someone, despite the obstacles put forth by the social order.
Whitman provides but one line of apparently sure footing: “O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!” Both translators rendered “bashful” and “feminine” in feminine gender, i.e. as explicitly describing a woman. However, even a contemporary reader could have chosen to see these qualities applied to a man; Whitman’s adjectives, after all, never suffered from orthodox connotations. To add to the difficulty, this seemingly clear line comes after: “O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world!”14 This line presented a problem for Balmont with its non-committal “whoever you are”. In Russian, unfortunately, this phrase can hardly be rendered without a gendered verb, and Balmont chose the masculine ending. In the second part of the line, the choice of the feminine gender seemed just as natural, so that (in back-translation) the result is “O to give myself to you no matter what man you are, and to take you, the woman who gives herself despite the whole world!”15 Chukovsky is more thorough and eliminates any hint of ambiguity: “O to give myself to you no matter who you are, woman, and for you to give yourself to me / Despite the whole cosmos!”16
Whitman’s following stanza strongly suggests the forbidden nature of this desire:
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last? To be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and you from yours! . . . To have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth! To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.17
The last two lines especially invite a homoerotic reading. The speaker’s desire is not only unconventional but also unspeakable (the “gag”) and perhaps, according to one reading, even unwelcome. In the pursuit of cosmic exultation that he saw Whitman proclaiming, Balmont, who declared his translations to be as literal as his “aesthetic feeling” would allow, magnifies the speaker’s doubts into a whole history of self-loathing:
O, to escape to where there is finally enough space, enough air! To be free of old chains and conventions, I of mine, and you of yours! . . . To feel one’s mouth unlocked, the mouth that had been sealed! To feel clearly that now, and whenever I am happy with myself, I am happy!18
Instead of someone who wonders, perhaps, whether an amorous liaison is exactly the complication he needs in his life, here is a speaker plagued by self-doubt and whose doubt can only be assuaged by an act of prohibited love. Chukovsky’s version, on the other hand, offers a comfortably conventional romantic predicament:
O, to break free from the old chains and conventions — you from yours, and I of mine! To take off, finally, the padlock that was on my lips, To feel that finally, today I am completely content, and I do not want anything else.19
In this version, it is the speaker himself who has the power to remove the “lock” on his lips — this implies that his previous silence has also been at least partially a choice, a gesture of conformity. Compare this to the drama of the original — “to have the gag removed”, an image of being liberated, not being held hostage any longer — and to Balmont’s sensitivity to this issue of agency and will.
Once translated, literary works enter a new life, enmeshed in the new culture, its rhizomatic reach of echoes and imitations. Both Balmont and Chukovsky wrote extensively about Whitman in an effort to relate his poetry to the status awarded to him in the Anglophone world, notoriety included. Both translators performed the work of iconization: Balmont was deeply devoted to the vision of Whitman as an exalted prophet, and Chukovsky promoted him in a familial, somewhat bemused manner, akin to the one usually reserved for a gifted but definitely weird brother. Despite their rigor, both Balmont’s cosmic myth, in which the speaker, like some primal deity, is omnisexual and omni-fertile, and Chukovsky’s Whitman as an accessible, bare-chested “bro” who lusts for human contact and kindness are re-readings, hybrids of the Whitman genus. What is important to remember is that the Russian reading public, through the efforts of both translators, saw Whitman as the prophet of a new order — a phenomenologically different world in which emotions, identities, and the most basic desires are transformed by the power of a democratic egalitarian society. Young people in the 1920s banded into Whitman fan clubs — groups dedicated to discussing Whitman and his ideas. Chukovsky visited one such gathering in 1922 and wrote in his diary:
Whitman appeals to them as a prophet and a teacher. They wish to kiss, and work, and die — all according to Whitman . . . No, Russia is intact yet! I thought to myself when I left. It is strong because at its core it is so naïve, young, so “religious.” No irony, no skepticism, no humor — it takes everything seriously. They sat there — ground down with lack of bread, health, money — those young girls and teenage students and they thirsted — not for money, or firewood, or aesthetic pleasure — but for faith.
Whitman gave faith. And once this quality of his words was revealed, Russian artists felt the poetry deserved a grander stage than pages of a book. In 1918, a choral drama based on “Song of Myself” made its debut in theater. It was directed by Alexander Mgebrov and titled “An Evening of Walt Whitman”. The play traveled to great success; Mgebrov’s simple dramatization of titanic struggle in “Europe”, urban alienation in “The City Dead-House”, and the poet as the mouthpiece of a multi-faced mass in “Song of Myself” resonated with the audiences, whose members felt themselves to be forging a new future. This reception of Whitman found another dramatic and accessible expression at the intersection with another art — linoleum-cut printing.
Russia’s revolutionary ideology of equality, brotherhood, communal labor, and personal liberation would not have been possible without the easy accessibility of technology in the new industrialized era, and young artists at the time were as excited about Whitman’s ideas of camaraderie as they were about the staccato of telegraphed news reports or the quickness of linoleum-cut printing. In contrast to wood-cut printing, this technique is cheaper and less physically demanding: instead of carving a stamp of a page out of a block of wood, the artist works with pliable, easy-to-cut linoleum.
In 1918, one such artist was the twenty-five-year-old Vera Ermolaeva (1893–1937). Her group was called “Today”, and its goal — much like that of many chapbook presses today — was to produce short poetry and children’s books cheaply so they could be distributed in the trenches, hospitals, schools, orphanages, and in the streets. The co-op in which Ermolaeva worked did not see its goal of taking literature to the masses as being at odds with the aesthetic pursuit of synergy between the word and the picture; rather, Ermolaeva and her colleagues saw in their process an opportunity to improvise. They printed 100–150 copies at a time and often hand-colored illustrations after the pages were printed, so that the artist had the freedom to try out a number of color schemes and effects. Currently, copies of “Today” editions of works by Sergey Yesenin, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Yuri Annenkov, Natan Al’tman, and Whitman (illustrated by Ermolaeva) are found at international antique book auctions and in MOMA collections. The name of the translator of Ermolaeva’s edition of “Pioneers” is, unfortunately, unknown, as they are identified only by initials.
Ermolaeva’s work on Whitman’s “Pioneers” is characteristically bold, sharp, and dynamic. On the cover, two men embrace. Lightning-like lines surround them, suggesting wind, flight, or even the movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates that seem to echo the pioneers’ energy. Inside, four pages are framed with narrow bands of illustration, which, like ancient Greek friezes, summon a vision of procession, and again, movement. In these bands of action, Ermolaeva masterfully uses blocks of black to suggest dusk, night, or dawn. Figures are grouped around campfires, and women walk alongside men. In a piercing interpretive act, however, Ermolaeva puts guns into her pioneers’ hands — not hunting rifles but slim firearms with bayonets attached. On Russian soil, Whitman’s pioneers are not just breaking new ground; they are fighting for a new society. There is no violence, just a few figures resting, leaning on their rifles, but the dark backdrop is enough to suggest watchfulness, men who cannot let down their guard.
Ermolaeva’s vision for an eight-page chapbook has the power to crystallize for us the resonance of Whitman’s work in revolutionary Russian imagination. Reciprocally, Whitman’s poem, like the chime of a tuning fork, resonated in bold and sharp-elbowed prints from an artist who would become one of the most influential creators of children’s books.
Ermolaeva’s work in “Today” is but a small episode in a life of accomplishment, cut short by tragedy. At twenty-eight, she took Marc Chagall’s position as the Rector of the Vitebsk Applied Arts Institute and recruited Kazimir Malevich to the faculty there. Later on, she would become involved in theoretical studies of color and artistic form. During the Stalinist purges, her futuristic work contributed to the charge of anti-Soviet activities and efforts to organize anti-Soviet intelligentsia, and in 1937, Vera Ermolaeva was sentenced to death by a firing squad and executed.
The act of reading about this remarkable life, first in search of a connection to the topic of Whitman in Russia, and then for the pleasure of being captivated and inspired by it, becomes the origin of another act. The re-vision of Vera Ermolaeva’s life, with its rearranged emphases that put the inconsequential little chapbook in the limelight, brings out the supreme irony of her fate: the guns she put into the pioneers’ hands were turned upon her and fired.
Chukovsky’s translations of Whitman are still re-read and studied in Russia today. However, they now come to their readers trapped, like insects in amber, in the spirit of the time when they were made, dusted on top with the postmodern, post-Soviet backlash against that spirit. In other words, Whitman in Russian is a Russian Whitman, one whose work has yet to extricate itself from the ideology that it was once thought to purvey and to prove that its value was not merely manufactured by the hegemonic proletariat. A re-reading (and a Russian retranslation) will be an act of a new peace — with Whitman, and with Russia itself.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Nina Murra


text:
Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster
Pacifism and the Avant-Garde
By Amanda Gagel
March 20, 2019

Part essay collection, part shadow-play, part macabre ballet, Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy (1920) is one of Vernon Lee’s most political and experimental works. Amanda Gagel explores this modernist masterpiece which lays siege to the patriotism plaguing Europe and offers a vision for its possible pacifist future.

When all the nations shall welter in the pollution of warfare, this child’s eyes shall remain clear from its fratricide fumes; she shall drink deep of sorrow, but recognize and put away from her lips the sweetened and consecrated cup of hatred.1
So spoke a fairy bestowing a gift upon an infant Vernon Lee in a short story published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1915. The tale, resembling that of Sleeping Beauty, describes a group of fairies attending Lee’s christening. Each is the personification of a country from which Lee can trace her lineage and upbringing (England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Poland), and each gives her a gift from their culture. Although most are good fairies, one is evil (we are not told which country this fairy represents) and condemns Lee to a life in which she will never fully belong to one nation over another. However, one of the good fairies has yet to give her a gift; she lessens the severity of the curse by issuing the blessing above. In a neat nine paragraphs, Lee gives a synopsis of her multi-national identity and declares that this status keeps her free from being engulfed by the “fratricide fumes” of World War I.
Europeans succumbing to a war mentality and mutual animosity was due, Lee felt, to emotions associated with patriotism, nationalism, heroism, personal honour, and self-interest that made it impossible for them to see any way out of international conflicts short of armed warfare. Aside from the obvious causes of World War I (the armament build-up, secret diplomacy, disagreement over Alsace-Lorraine), Lee found that the monumental task for Europeans, if they wanted to avoid another world war, was to change not just policy but their way of thinking about the makeup of Europe, its citizenry, and their own national biases. These ideas found expression in two highly original works, Satan the Waster (1920) and its precursor The Ballet of Nations (1915). In these experimental dramas Lee demonstrates her distinct ability to bring together nineteenth-century philosophical trends, her own brand of aesthetic analyses, and her opinions on modern scientific innovation and religious ideology in order to promote pacifism.2
Lee was visiting England when war was declared and was unable to return to her home, Il Palmerino, a villa outside Florence, until 1919. During those years she tried to mitigate the pro-war sentiments of her fellow Brits, and her letters and articles show that she was unwilling to compromise her beliefs in order to maintain what were long-standing friendships with those supportive of the war. She produced a flurry of polemical writings, mostly as articles and letters-to-the-editor in the Nation and the Labour Leader and in pamphlets for the Union of Democratic Control, of which she was one of the earliest members. Satan the Waster is, however, the most comprehensive, creative, and compelling of all her wartime writing. It is a remarkable work and a truly modern amalgamation of texts: a shadow play in prose (intended to be read aloud and not performed), philosophical essays, and a personal memoir in which Lee investigates her innate psychology as a self-described “neutral”. Lee spends pages explaining how she has attempted to empathize (empathy and emotive understanding are central tenets in Lee’s analytical process) with her pro-war friends and insists that she understands why she disgusts them. Nevertheless, she holds fast that she is able to see what they cannot, and the writing of her play was her way of communicating her vision.
Lee wrote Satan the Waster over the course of six years, from 1914 to 1920. The central action, the “Ballet of Nations”, was published in 1915 with illustrations by painter, illustrator, and decorative artist Maxwell Armfield (1881-1972). One could consider this an early draft of Satan.3 Armfield and his wife and collaborator Constance Smedley had met Lee a number of times in Florence over the years and renewed their acquaintance with her in London in 1914.4 Armfield and Smedley were very much involved in avant-garde theatre productions in London. They were also dedicated pacifists, and they invited Lee to give a reading of the Ballet of Nations at their studio in 1915, one of the few “performances” of the piece. A second one occurred soon after at the Margaret Morris theatre and publishers attended. Upon hearing it, Chatto and Windus offered to publish it accompanied by Armfield’s “pictorial commentary”, as he termed it.
Lee and Armfield may have appeared to be ideal partners, as they held in common the idea of a unified synthesis of the arts, but Armfield’s aesthetic method in theatre production was a strict adherence to symbolism. “Art is only valuable as a symbolic language”, he’d write, “and the nearer it approaches nature, i.e., the imitation of life, the less vivid does it become as a language.”5 This argument against realism was a way to disassociate from the political and social chaos of the time, using a symbolic language that could be a unifying, idealistic artistic force. His illustrations, therefore, do not depict Lee’s play but provide symbolic renderings of some of the major players and archetypes. The result is Lee’s aggressive and, at points, violent text being paired with Armfield’s passive, static drawings. It is dissonant and distracts the reader from the main narrative. Here, for example, is Armfield’s illustration on pages 13 and 14, to one of the more bloody passages in the play, when the dancers are “dancing themselves to stumps”. Instead of a realistic rendering, he uses symbolic designs of the dancers performing what art historian Grace Brockington terms an “elaborate body-movement script” in which gestures are used as a universal mode of communication.6
Soon after this publication, Lee began revising the Ballet to enlarge its scope. It came to more closely resemble the form of a play when she reshaped it as the nucleus of Satan the Waster, to which she added a Prologue (sometime after 1915), an Epilogue (a series of drafts written between 1915 and 1918), an Introduction (1919), and Notes to the Prologue and the Ballet (written at various points in 1918 and 1919). This discontinuous composition in itself speaks to how Lee found it difficult to make sense of the war as it progressed year upon year. The Introduction and the Notes, in part, focus on the subjective opinions of Lee, her friends, and the pro-war movement. Lee held fast to the theory that one’s emotions create his or her individual reality, a reality which is more meaningful than the so-called world of facts: “the logic of emotions which is more cogent, more irrefutable, than the logic of facts, for the excellent reason that facts are outside us and can be overlooked or distorted, whereas feeling being in us, being the dominant part of us, cannot.”7 One’s emotive response to any one of a number of events forever frames their responses to successive ones, which feeds into “war delusion” and the one-dimensional perspective that plagues most of Europe. All the nations end up participating in a circular experience of war delusion, fed by propaganda and traditional mores of honour and patriotism. This preoccupation with passion, emotions, and the memories of emotions that define multidimensional realities is a thread found overtly and metaphorically throughout Satan the Waster.8
In its initial 1914 composition and even more so in the 1920 revision, the Ballet is written in imitation of a medieval masque, a dramatic form which Lee had studied since her early career when she traced the origins and dramatic conventions of the Italian commedia dell’arte in Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880) and in Euphorion (1884). Generic characteristics of a masque consist of the actors playing mythical or allegorical figures and the central action being a dance or ballet. The dialogue was usually sparse and always of secondary importance to the music, scenery, mechanical effects, and the dance. Her reimagining of it as an anti-war drama in prose is groundbreaking given her focus on the color, movement, sound, and shape of the primary players and the minimalist scenery. The twentieth-century reader could only imagine what a medieval masque looked like based on centuries’ old descriptions. Similarly, while reading (not viewing) Lee’s play, the reader is forced to imagine the drama, just as one would a medieval masque.
In the Ballet, the warring nations participate in a macabre death or battle performance to an orchestra comprised of the Human Passions. Lee describes a visually stimulating tableau, with some scenes purposefully evocative of fine works of art. The Prologue opens with a description of Satan awaiting the beginning of the Ballet. “He is seated at one end of a long Empire sofa, very much in the pose of one of Michelangelo’s Medici Dukes, resting one arm on his knee and his chin on his hand, deep in weary and mysterious meditation.”9 Lee uses color, sound, and light to describe the eerie luminescence and seductiveness of Satan and his nephew Ballet Master Death. As the Ballet is about to begin: “The place, which, with the earthquake, had become suddenly dark, is lit by the sinister luminousness emanating from Satan’s archangelic person, until the whole is suffused with a strange and ominous light as if in a fog, in which near objects are oddly visible and others shade away in nothingness.”10 These imagined, though nonetheless arresting, sets make for a highly evocative modernist work that encourages the reader to experience this war drama as a deeply emotional experience.
When the Prologue was added, so was the crucial character of Clio as interlocutor. Satan has invited her to be a kind of reporter and record the ballet performance for future generations. With Clio as a sounding board, Satan extemporizes on various theories of life, love, and war. Per the book’s title, Satan is the waster of human virtues, and he delights in spoiling the love that humans feel for each other, for art, for ideas, for all things. Lee frames the Ballet within a rhetorical framework of good vs evil, but not in a Judeo-Christian sense. War should not be understood under the traditional dichotomy of one righteous nation battling a degenerate opposing force. Rather, the evil is the impetus itself to go to war, and the good (a Platonic love for mankind, for beauty, and a decent moral life) is inherent in all the belligerents — they can resist the urge to engage in mass murder. Satan personifies evil, and he and Ballet Master Death use the players to demonstrate how easily people and nations can be misled by their virtues.
The Human Passions gather to form the orchestra before the performance. Satan points them out to Clio as they arrive: Vanity, Indignation, Hatred, Self-righteousness, Idealism, Adventure, Sin, Self-interest, Suspicion, and many more. Then, the new members, Science (a gramophone) and Organization (a miniature pianola), enter. They are Lee’s most overt indictment of the waste of human virtues, in that science and organization should be used toward universal peace and progress and not toward the manufacture of weapons and organized slaughter. The orchestra members come together to perform a symphony of Patriotism, the most essential participant being Heroism, “with limbs like a giant’s, blushes like a girl’s and eyes like a merry child’s, but which saw not” as he is blind.11 Lee intends that his voice is the only one to be heard if the play is ever recited: “ . . . none of the music must be audible, except the voice and drum of Heroism. Anything beyond this would necessarily be hideous, besides drowning or interrupting the dialogue.”12 Dancers moving to silence except for the sound of a monotonous drum and the lone high pitch of Heroism is indeed a terrifyingly eerie spectacle. Lee uses music, or in this case the idea of music, as a powerful tool of imagination and implication: this symbolic driving force of war is something that is so maddening that it cannot be heard. This aesthetic experience speaks to the power that Lee believed music holds. In her critical essays and especially in Music and Its Lovers (1933), Lee explains the acute responses that music effects in a listener, ones tied to our innermost psychology. Therefore, music as a force driving nations to war is one that necessarily cannot be heard by humanity, but only Satan. If humanity were exposed to the power of this music, the result would be utter chaos.
As the bleak dance progresses, the nations perform their own parts and are instructed to ignore the dissonance of the other parts. Some attempt variations of a pas de deux, but this cooperation never lasts. In all, the steps are increasingly imitative, then dissonant, improvised and then violent and aggressive, especially between the prominent protagonists in the war.
Yet dance they did, chopping and slashing, blinding each other with squirts of blood and pellets of human flesh. And as they appeared and disappeared in the moving wreaths of fiery smoke, they lost more and more of their original shape, becoming, in that fitful light, terrible uncertain forms, armless, legless, recognizable for human only by their irreproachable Heads . . . mere unspeakable hybrids between man and beast: they who had come on to that stage so erect and beautiful.13
The atmosphere of battle is mimicked on stage further by the addition of smoke and small explosions that the dancers must maneuver around. Lee describes the stage, as she did in earlier scenes, in terms of a painting, this time one that morphs in front of the viewer.
For whereas the Ballet had begun with the tender radiance of an August sunset above  half-harvested fields . . . the progress of the performance had seen the deep summer starlit vault flushed by the flare of distant burning farms, and its blue solemnity rent by the fitful track of rockets, and the luminous fans of searchlights and the Roman candles and Catherine-wheels of far-off explosions. Until, little by little, the heavens, painted such a peaceful blue, were blotted out by masses of flame-lit smoke and poisonous vapours, rising and sinking, coming forward and receding like a stifling fog, but ever growing denser and more rent by dreadful leaping fires, and swaying obedient to Death’s bâton no less than did the bleeding Nations of his Corps de Ballet. In and out of that lurid chasm they moved, by twos or threes; now lost to view in the billows of fiery darkness, now issuing thence toward the Ballet Master’s desk, or suddenly revealed, clasped in terrific embrace, by the leaping flame of an exploding magazine; while overhead fluttered and whirred great wings, which showered down bomb-lightnings.14
At last, the bloody scene seems to reach its culmination as the nations have “danced themselves to stumps”, but Pity and Indignation take up the charge and “thus the Ballet of Nations is still a-dancing”.15
The Epilogue, added when Lee began to expand the narrative after 1914, continues with the allegories in the play and the relationship between Satan and Clio. It opens with the conclusion of the performance and the players having fallen asleep with exhaustion. Clio congratulates Satan on the triumphant performance. He then teases her by offering to show her “the real Reality” of the Ballet of Nations — a glimpse behind the scenes, as it were. The reason he can do this after the fact is that he had everything recorded, by cinematograph and gramophone. Lee again plays on the idea of reality and how it shifts according to the knowledge at hand at any given time and place. Here only Satan can show the absolute reality of what brought about the Ballet of Nations.
What you are going to see and hear are indeed Supermen; say, rather, the mortal Gods in my little machine of myriad-fold death and ruin. In other words, the Heads of the Nations. For it can scarcely have escaped your acumen that what passed muster for such during my Ballet, and rolled about on the shoulders of the Dancing Nations, could be only cardboard masks. These are the Real Ones, the Masters of Men’s Destiny, even if not always of royal birth or Cabinet rank; sometimes mere humble specimens of the Investor, the Homo Œconomicus who sways the modern world.16
Lee uses the Epilogue to address what she could not in the Ballet. Using the devices of performance and mechanization (motion pictures and recording devices), she relates the causes of the war in truncated scenes that flicker across a screen. Her use of mechanization is twofold. First, she acknowledges it as a mark of human progress by way of inventions that benefit human health and understanding, but she then delves into the “mechanical” inter-workings of society. Satan uses the cinematograph to help Clio understand the “machinery” of society: each player individually contributes to bringing about a world war. In her notes to the Prologue, Lee stresses this point, that modern mechanistic living has stunted our spiritual growth while advancing the instruments of modern warfare. This is achieved through the invention of weapons and the manipulation of liberal capitalist practices that feed the greed of heads of state and industry. Then, inevitably, it is the working class man that fights the wars that capitalism produces. Lee anticipates the class warfare in Europe that follows strongly on the heels of World War I.
Some scenes Satan shows are ones contemporaneous to the war (cries for peace) and ones that show discussions of what is needed for a lasting peace when the war ends. Citizens argue and their voices merge into a kind of strange Greek chorus in which the combative European powers insist that peace can only last if each nation gets the territorial boundaries they ask for — ones dating back decades and centuries. As one actor explains with irony: “I repeat that none of us are out for aggrandisement, but for the future peace of the world. We must go on fighting to establish a really lasting peace, equally just towards friends and foes.”17
The Epilogue ends with Ballet Master Death waking from his drunken slumber and railing at Satan for taking all the credit for the success of the Ballet when it was Master Death who really “draws an audience”. With that, he implores blind Heroism to confirm this. Reaching out to touch him, Heroism finally “sees” how grotesque the reality of Death is with his tattered bones and deformed visage: “Where is the Death I loved and followed so faithfully — the true, pure, lovely Death? Oh, horror, horror, horror!”18 The success of war rests on Heroism continuing to believe in the illusion of a beautiful, moral, and necessary Death. Satan knows this, so he “cleans” Death up for another performance. “You vile, old-fashioned scarecrow, do you now understand that Heroism has almost found you out for the preposterous, indecent anachronism that you are? And if, by any chance, that Blind Boy should really be surgeoned into seeing . . . why, then, this will have been the last of our Ballet of Nations!”19
With more text than all the other components of Satan combined, the “Notes” to the Introduction, Prologue, and Ballet constitute the last, most substantial, third of the book. More than simply explanatory, the notes are philosophical musings and extended glosses which digress from the topics touched on in the main text to become essays on entirely different subjects. She writes on everything from the futility of finding one ultimate cause of the war, to the role that “Love” plays in her Ballet, to the need for England to fundamentally change its ideological and nationalistic outlook, to the role of art in deterring war. Though seemingly disparate, these essays in concert support a sustained argument: that there is an independent, ever changing, nebulous Reality working apart from our own individual realities.
Lee genuinely feared for the future of Europe, and when Satan the Waster is not explaining the political origins of warfare it is encouraging readers to discover within themselves why they would accept a modern way of life that threatens their ability to actively engage with beauty. In its religious and moral dimensions, this engagement with art and beauty is illustrative of Lee’s  “gardening of life” ethos she describes in many books, such as Hortus Vitae (1903). Other points addressed in Satan, however, such as the changing realities that we must come to terms with by utilizing our intellects and “protean” emotions (not religious superstition) is a point she revisits time and again in her works of the twentieth century: including Gospels of Anarchy (1908), Vital Lies (1912), and Proteus, or the Future of Intelligence (1926). Satan the Waster is perhaps her most avant-garde attempt to understand the quickly changing world around her, but definitely not the only one.
When Lee returned to Italy in 1919, what she found was a home quite destitute. Il Palmerino was in fairly good shape but the country was poor and hungry. Crops had failed or food had been taken for the war effort, and it took her some time to get things back to normal. As before, she continued with her interest in international politics and with her voluminous output of articles and books. At odds with many of her British friends, she understood that during the war she was in the unique position of being a British-born Italian expatriate living in London. At times, she rejoiced in her independence and isolation, and at others, craved intellectual companionship. Regardless, she was a woman who would never sacrifice her beliefs or censor her opinions in order to get along with others. The loss of friendships during the war was not as deplorable to her as the rejection of her principles. She knew without a doubt that her arguments in support of a pacifist Europe were correct. Her opponents had detestable “righteous indignation” on their side and she had incontrovertible reason. “While all this has been going on, never for a second have I repented or distrusted my own attitude; never for a second wished my attitude might be different. My position about the war seems as entirely natural and inevitable given me, as I recognize and feel theirs to be given them.”20
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Amanda Gagel