Monday, May 25, 2009

REPETITION

In the 15 years of its existence THE LITTLE REVIEW edited by Margaret Anderson and Jean Heap with the help of Ezra Pound published among many others: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes, Evelyn Scott...
It serialized ULYSSES.

Of course the english departments, those depositories of stupidity, ignore this sort of achievement in their adamant hatred of literature as does the vast publishing industry, thankfully shrinking day by day as I am typing this.

In an anthology published many years after of the closing of THE LITTLE REVIEW Margaret Anderson wrote: In 1929, in Paris, I decided that the time had come to end the Little Review. Our mission was accomplished; contemporary art had "arrived"; and for a hundred years, perhaps, the literary world would produce only: repetition.

With 20 years to go it is probably possible to say that Anderson is absolutely correct. She missed out on publishing Finnegans Wake but it is known that Faulkner was reading The Little Review. She missed out on publishing Ernst Junger and E. M. Cioran

95 percent of writers write today as if the last hundred years did not happen.