Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

PILFERING MODERNISM’S IMAGE:
WOOLF AND THOSE OTHER LONDONERS
by Th aine Stearns
In November 1918, Woolf wrote to Roger Fry that they had had “that strange young
man Eliot to dinner,” with whom they discussed contemporary writers, including Ezra
Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce (L2 295). For the American T. S. Eliot
Woolf had already begun to form an attachment: “Eliot I liked on the strength of one
visit,” she says in a diary entry from about the same time (D1 235), but about Pound
her expressed view to Fry is quite diff erent: although Eliot thought Pound, Lewis, and
Joyce “great geniuses,” she thought that he was “stuck in this mud.” “Can’t his culture
carry him through,” she wonders about Eliot, “or does culture land one there?” (L2 296).
I shall return to this question because its ambiguity underlies one of my claims in this
essay, that Woolf’s engagement with Imagism and Vorticism, the literary and art movements
advanced by Pound, are subtly nuanced and complicated by her competition for
status with other modernist writers. She fi nishes this letter to Fry with an assurance about
her allegiance to him and to Post-Impressionism, which Pound and especially Lewis had
attacked: “not that I’ve read more than 10 words by Ezra Pound,” she avers, “my conviction
of his humbug is unalterable.” She continues by affi rming Fry’s signifi cance, closing
the letter by saying, “Yes, Roger, the more I think of it—and I often do—the more I am
convinced that you are of immense importance in the world” (L2 296).
Woolf’s assurances to Fry indicate her investment in status and her judgment about
Pound, who was already a signifi cant force in literary London. Yet her letter to Fry misrepresents
how much of Pound’s work she knew, erring perhaps on the side of protecting Fry’s
trust in her loyalty. A year earlier, in December 1917, she says in a diary entry that she
had spent the afternoon reading Pound’s memoir of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska,
who had been killed fi ghting for the French in June 1915 (D1 90). Pound’s 1916 book
contained, along with thirty-eight photographs of the sculptor’s work and of the sculptor,
the American poet’s introduction, numerous editorial comments on Gaudier-Brzeska’s
work, and the essay “Vorticism,” originally published by Pound in the Fortnightly Review
in September of 1914. His “memoir” of Gaudier-Brzeska is about Pound as much as it is
about the sculptor, and his essay “Vorticism” is particularly signifi cant for what I argue
here, that Woolf compared the importance of Pound’s work to Fry’s and that she reacted
to it in order to ground her own poetics. Her literary aesthetic, like the poetic movements
for which he was the leading spokesman, were based on visuality and visual culture. Th is
competitive exchange with Pound is largely unstated, and the evidence for it suggestive,
rather than conclusive; yet considering the case for Woolf’s use of Imagism’s image shifts
how we understand her work in modernism’s larger fi eld. In short, Woolf’s investment in
the role of the visual in writing, and in visual culture generally, underwrites her interest in
infl uencing modernist aesthetics and in the politics that surrounded those aesthetics.
Pound describes both Imagism and Vorticism in his essay, reiterating the famous
“Imagiste” tenets that called for “Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’” using “absolutely no